The US has long since exhausted it's "easy" oil/gas reserves. Yes, there's tons more down there, but it's increasingly hard to get to. Lots of extraction methods only make sense when the price for oil is above some amount.

If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports.

And then we're worse off in several different ways.

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axpy906 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

This probably a stupid question but do solar and batteries depend on rare earth metals and their supply?

	▲	sroussey 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The quick answer is yes, today. But there are battery technologies that require less and less in development. Also, rare earth elements are not that rare. But they are not concentrated, and finding concentrations of them is kinda rare. Event then, you have to mine a lot of area to get them, which is not great for the environment. And since Americans (and everyone ex-China) has not been doing it for decades, only China has advanced the technology to extract and refine it for decades. This lack of refining is similar to our lack of working on solar which will but us behind potentially forever, or until there is a big enough disruption to overcome the decade of experience. You can look at chipmaking and see that such things are not easy.
	▲	ted_dunning 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The answer depends on the kind of battery chemistry and how literally you mean "rare earth". If you take some slack on the definition and just mean "metal stuff in limited supply", then many battery chemistries have limited supplies. There are, however, some chemistries with really nice supply chains. The Iron Redox Flow Battery (IRFB) really only needs iron and iron chloride as reactants. Those batteries are being commercialized, but they aren't common (yet?).

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Lonestar1440 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There are a great many assumptions in this argument, and I'm not sure they stand up well to examination.

1) "We're out of easily extractable oil" maybe, but I've heard it before and technology does have a way of marching forward.

2) "Rest of world's oil demand will drop" is possible but certainly not happening today and far from certain.

3) "Then Oil prices will plummet in the US Domestic market" is far from a sure thing even if 2) comes to pass. How do the other producers - who don't have large domestic markets! - react? What happens to global petrochemical demand? And what sort of Industrial policy could shield our markets, even if this happens globally?

At the end of the day, we have a continent full of oil (and Uranium! which I prefer!) and an energy-hungry population.

	▲	margalabargala 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 1) "We're out of easily extractable oil" maybe, but I've heard it before and technology does have a way of marching forward. You've heard it before because it's been true for a long time. Technology marches forwards, yes, but technology is expensive, and like I said, a lot of domestic production has fairly high price levels below which they will not operate. > 2) "Rest of world's oil demand will drop" is possible but certainly not happening today and far from certain. That's totally fair. > 3) "Then Oil prices will plummet in the US Domestic market" is far from a sure thing even if 2) comes to pass. How do the other producers - who don't have large domestic markets! - react? What happens to global petrochemical demand? And what sort of Industrial policy could shield our markets, even if this happens globally? Assuming (2) does happen, then I think this follows naturally. The cost to produce a barrel of oil varies wildly by country. If global demand drops, then the cheapest producers eat the market that they currently cannot fully supply. Could industrial policy shield this? Sure, but at great cost to the US; that would have the side effect of pushing down energy prices for the rest of the world even more, making it even harder for us to keep up. Uranium absolutely could save us, but I think we're a couple decades out from the political will being there to really get a lot of nuclear online.
	▲	h3lp 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Fracking was a brilliant invention, but may be reaching inherent limits---there are lawsuits between oil companies about fracking fluids from one well flooding and disabling other wells.