Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Petro-Despots

 This news is at least a little bit surprising. Generally speaking, Saudi Arabia has tried to stay on good terms with the United States. When we have an oil crunch, they have typically responded by boosting output. They aren't going to do that this time.

As Marshall notes, Crown Prince bin Salman is a bad guy who does bad things like murdering a US resident. He wants immunity for that and for his war crimes in Yemen. The UAE are on board with Saudi Arabia, and in fact, both countries have refused to take calls from the President of the United States. Both countries greatly preferred doing business with the Trump Administration, because of its cartoonish levels of corruption. 

One of the side effects of the Ukraine war has been to refocus energy policy as a national security issue. The US actually is a net exporter of oil at the moment. The problem is that oil is a fungible commodity and while we can probably be self-sufficient in the near run, over time prices will rise because market demand for oil from countries that DO import oil will spike.

The need to move off hydrocarbons is an environmental necessity. If America could also move more quickly towards electric vehicles - or at least hybrids - and wean itself off fossil fuels in electrical generation, then we are looking at a world where Putin, bin Salman, Khamenei and Maduro are much less powerful internationally and deprived of the money to prop up their autocratic rule at home.

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