Any country that keeps gold in US or dollar reserves may end up looking very foolish. Sanctions and asset (financial and real) forfeitures coming soon to a country near you.

The simplest and easiest geopolitical strategy that is available to any country: switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind), EVs, green hydrogen/ammonia and synthetic fuels. Keep out of oil and natural gas. Keep out of dollar system. Any country can be immune to geopolitical drama, dollar shenanigans. Remember China has export restrictions on oil. When things get tough, most of the oil countries (with refining capacity to export) are going to have export restrictions. Thats the only way to deal with the mobs in their own country.

From: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KPq7jyQcemA

Richard Campbell: Politicians aren’t going to do things that aren’t popular, so we have to make these solutions popular for there to be a chance to build political will.

Richard Campbell: Corporations are inherently conservative, and power companies doubly so. Until there is a public groundswell demanding these changes, they won’t act. It’s up to us to make enough noise and show that these are good solutions worth pushing forward.

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jacklbk 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind), EVs, green hydrogen/ammonia and synthetic fuels

You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.

By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale. Maybe just your house or some districts. You still need coal/gas/nuclear to maintain the power grid.

Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned. Oil is a must in military. If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.

Everything has tradeoffs. Diversify it.

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matkoniecz 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Any country can be immune to geopolitical drama

that is sadly not true, if you have a powerful or determined neighbor they can invade you which definitely qualifies as geopolitical drama

and moving country to get far away from say China or Russia is far from trivial

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hurril 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Easiest. If that is the easiest way you see I am afraid to ask what the harder alternatives would be.

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XorNot 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How is it hard? It's difficult to build electrical generation these days and not go renewables because they're so cheap and fast to deploy.

It's not a total solution, but market forces wise everything says "build solar and batteries with your money". Governments practically don't need to do anything for this to be the default.

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ifwinterco an hour ago | parent [-]

Batteries don't solve the storage problem, but surely you know this.

China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.

Solar and wind can be part of that strategy but it's not so simple, otherwise people would do it

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watwut 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Bateries do solve storage problems. And yes, china energy strategy is based on wind and solar - their portion of China energy production is massively growing.

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locknitpicker 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.

This opinion is rather simplistic. China is reported to have 60% of it's energy needs already supplied by renewable sources, but this transition creates different types of challenges such as preserving the power grid's inertia. Otherwise you might see yourself in a scenario such as the Spanish blackout. This means having in place strategies for fast response (gas) and baseline (hydro storage, nuclear) to prevent the scenario.

	▲	dv_dt 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		batteries are the fastest response power. gas is high maintenance, & bad capex as an intermittent source.