Fossil fuels are like NFTs. Hear me out.

NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.

For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].

So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.

Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.

So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.

Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.

[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

Im really not seeing the comparison.

nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme

the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.

the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.

if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits