> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must

So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with: a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.

Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.

The funny thing is the US doesn’t really consume much Saudi Oil. The US is a net exporter of oil, though they do import some specific types of oils and export more of others.

The US’s interest in the Middle East oil is a lot about stabilizing oil prices. At least it used to be when there was a rational policy and competent executors.

Transitioning to renewables makes economic sense for the Saudis because they make more money selling a barrel of oil for transportation fuel and generating power with wind and solar.

The US has vast reserves of coal and natural gas. We generally don't use oil to generate power either -- oil is something like 0.4% of the total power generated, because we have vast amounts of natural gas and coal to use instead.

The situation isn't the result of some crafty master plan on the part of the Saudis. It's jusut what makes sense.

The oil market is global and the US is a big part of that but it’s not the only one. You can always make changes to energy sources later and as new technologies are unlocked perhaps we can even skip some headaches now. Obviously there’s the geostrategic angle now which you see play out in Iran and Venezuela.

As other countries move to reliance on Chinese rare earth processing for renewable technology, it drives their oil and gas consumption down which means more oil and gas for those who are still using it.

If you really want to look at this analogy about drug dealers then really what you see is that America is the big boss here and an energy and military super power, and Saudi Arabia is just another dealer under American protection and if they don’t do what we tell them to do they’ll get the boot.

Like the drug dealers where I grew up they are making the neighborhood a really terrible place to live. They might have a nice house right now, but the homes around them are burning.

The electrical system is unrelated to oil for transportation.

The US is moving the grid renewable. The guys at top might not think so and yell loudly not to, but they can't stop things, only put the brakes on a little.

Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much.

Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.

Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.

Only if Norway's lack of internal consumption must be met with equal and similarly destructive consumption elsewhere.

Consider if others followed their lead. Then oil would be used less for transportation, one of its most destructive and singular uses, and more for manufacturing or medical or less wasteful uses.

The Danish numbers normally exclude PHEVs. Not that it matters, since PHEVs are almost dead as a segment here. Over the past two years 310k BEVs were sold here, but only 6k PHEVs. The situation in Norway is very similar.

And across Europe BEVs are also about twice as popular as PHEVs. In 2025 2.6 million BEVs were sold in Europe compared to 1.3 million PHEVs. It seems the biggest deciding factor is how good the public charging network is.

Sources:

https://bilmagasinet.dk/bil-nyheder/hvor-mange-elbiler-er-de... (Danish)

https://bilmagasinet.dk/bil-nyheder/saa-meget-steg-salget-af... (Danish)

https://www.tradingpedia.com/forex-brokers/global-demand-for...

In many countries, it will be PHEV for a long time because the electricity capacity and grid is just not there. India for example.

My Phev is about 80% ev. It uses a tank of gas a month, replacing a nearly identical vehicle (similar body and same engine - though other things have changed) that needed one or two tanks a week.

It's actually not clear to me in what sense "banned" is used here. The UK never formally "banned" leaded petrol. They banned sales of new cars which need it, and then later told places which sell petrol that they can only have a small portion of their fuel as leaded, and then (as anticipated) market forces did the rest.

AFAICT it would still be legal for the place on the bypass near me to sell leaded fuel but they don't because (a) the market is too small, not worth it and (b) as a result wholesalers don't offer the product, so if they wanted to sell it they can't get it anyway.

You can try to bike behind a hybrid during a cold winter morning.

In the US, near a major roadway on a cold morning, the fumes are strong. Not every car or truck is maintained properly and running in cold weather really magnifies that effect.

You might have very good smog checks. Here in NZ I've recently replaced my Tesla's HEPA air filters which includes carbon filter which. I've got them slightly cheaper from somewhat ok supplier. Turns out there's ton of fake filters out there (i.e. vacuum filters).

I was suffering every day I was driving it. Smog is insane everywhere.

Are you doing the maintenance yourself? I guess at some point the yearly maintenance costs exceed the value of the car itself.

damn it missed the whole suicidal airbag scandal too!

I’m what part of the world do you live to have a carbureted car from the late 90s?