Petro is pretty much upstream of everything: plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, cooking oils, lubricants, cosmetics. Dow chemical just doubled the cost of polyethylene as of April 1st. Taiwan relies on LNG for 40% of its energy production and has 11 days of LNG storage--meaning it may have to consider limiting industrial electricity use if things persist. I will clarify based on a reply, this doesn't mean they'll run out in that time, but that they have limited runway that will have deleterious effects as time goes on:
> Yeh Tsung-kuang, a professor in the Department of Engineering and System Science at National Tsing Hua University, said Taiwan's maximum LNG inventory is only 11 days but that does not mean the island will run out of fuel or face outages within that time period.
Even if the Strait saw normal traffic today (and Iran is incentivized and well-positioned to keep it closed for a while), it would take quite a while to recover lost supply. Iran continues to employ a tit-for-tat strategy and Israel just targeted steel industry in the country -- I'm not even taking into account more deliberate damage to energy infrastructure in the Mid east.
This is a scary crisis wherein the most movable actor (the US) is not going to accept Iran's terms. It could collapse the global economy, and that crucially includes the AI industry this forum loves to focus on almost exclusively. The US and the majority of the west has essentially no fiscal room compared to the comparably lesser 1970s crises either. This could easily spiral out of control and cause a level of suffering across the world (esp the global south) most of us on this forum have not lived to see.
Before calling it "the worst", I'd like more detail on how to do the comparison with the oil crises of the 1970's. My guess is that modern economies might be somewhat less oil-dependent than they were then, because the alternatives are more developed.
They are more developed, sure, and the US (from a US centric view) is producing a lot of oil now. However, consider that pretty much all of the goods you see in the supermarket got there via diesel (trains, semi-trucks). The percentage of semi-trucks operating on electricity is still miniscule at this point. Air transport? All petroleum. Consider also other things like fertilizers - we're heavily dependent on nitrogen fertilizers derived from petroleum and planting season in the northern hemisphere is starting right about now. Yes we're producing a lot more electricity with renewables, but demand is also up.
During the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo, the disruption removed approximately 4.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) from the market, which constituted about
7% of the global oil supply at the time. This disruption significantly impacted global supplies.
20% is a lot more than 7%. This could be worse than 1973-74.
As a 10year-old in 1973 I remember spending a lot of time in the backseat of the station wagon as we were waiting line line for gas.
For context, during the first COVID spring (March-June 2020) oil demand fell by 20%. Because nobody was driving or flying anywhere. That's what it took to cut 20%.
Yes, couldn't make either face masks or toilet paper during covid. Most people will find out how fragile everything is with idiot MBAs optimizing just-in-time for better quarterly reports!
That’s a pretty amazing definition of upstream. I imagine you probably understand that plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizers are made out of petroleum derivatives, right?
Since you seem pretty smart: are there petroleum based cooking oils?
The machinery to make them, the fertilisers to grow them, the plastic to package them, the transport to deliver them. It ain’t just cooking oils that will be massively impacted. The entire food chain in the western world is reliant on petrochemicals. The only question is the lag between now and when those impacts start being felt and this translates into bumped prices and/or shortages.
Yes: the time. It's spring time, when most crops are being sowed, of have been sowed and started growing actively. They won't wait several months until the production of fertilizers switches to electrically produced hydrogen, and tractors are upgraded to run off electric power. As the crops ripen, they won't wait until combine harvesters and trucks are converted to run off electric power. Nobody in the agricultural world has a few billions lying around to build massive solar capacity, battery capacity, and redesign the agricultural machinery, all at impossibly breakneck pace.
Instead I suggest that they will buy the fuel at higher prices, and sell less produce, and also milk and meat which are downstream from feed crops, at higher prices. More than that, in a bout of bitter irony, the West might need to lift sanctions from Russian oil, and maybe ask Russia to drill and sell more.
This, or the US should somehow defeat IRGC and defeat / appease the Iranian Army, and unblock the strait. I wonder if it's going to cost less even along the monetary dimension.
Here's my definition of upstream: If the petroleum stops, the cooking oil stops, even though the cooking oil is 100% plant-based.
Given that what we're talking about is disruptions caused by a shortage of petroleum, is there any other definition of "upstream" that is meaningful for the conversation?
I have 30 days of food in my house and I have maintained that since probably 2021. It doesn't mean I will run out in 30 days, since I can still buy food although at higher prices lately. I personally never let it dip below 20 probably.
Oh I'm sorry, that was actually my mistake, I should have been much more specific, and I will update the comment if I still can. My intention was to emphasize that Taiwan may have to start limiting electricity to its industrial sector based on its current runway. Per the article you listed:
> Yeh Tsung-kuang, a professor in the Department of Engineering and System Science at National Tsing Hua University, said Taiwan's maximum LNG inventory is only 11 days but that does not mean the island will run out of fuel or face outages within that time period
> Yeh Tsung-kuang, a professor in the Department of Engineering and System Science at National Tsing Hua University, said Taiwan's maximum LNG inventory is only 11 days but that does not mean the island will run out of fuel or face outages within that time period
So he's saying they've got an 11 day supply and that they won't face any shortages during that 11 days... but what about after 11 days? I guess I'm not sure how that's different, how it's a hoax?
11 days of supply in the system. If they can afford it they can add to that with new shipments. It is not like Taiwan is blockaded. Just that global supply from single region is limited.
This might be lot bigger issue if China managed blockaded Taiwan during an invasion. Or destroy port facilities sufficiently.
Not blockaded, sure, but how long would it take for these new shipments to arrive? If these are shipments they hope can come through the SoH even if they got through tomorrow it would take ~10 days to arrive in Taiwan. They can also get LNG from Australia, but a typhoon has shut down some of Australia's LNG terminals today.
>This could easily spiral out of control and cause a level of suffering across the world (esp the global south) most of us on this forum have not lived to see.
Daily anxiety attack thanks. As a european I think we are way too vulnerable. Countries divided, rich getting richer, more and more poor people who can barely afford food, and that's in Europe let alone talk about what happens with the poor in Africa and Asia.
Sooner or later we will need a global reset but that sounds worse than everything else
It's an apocalyptical mind-bug. All times have an eschatology - ours seems to be climate collapse. It used to be nuclear war.
The media is selling a story. In reality everything is still getting better. People are healthier, richer, and better off in almost every measurable way, all over the world, including Africa and Asia.
Yes, there are some dark clouds. A long list. But the problems - even a long war in the middle east, are bumps in the road, not a cliff. If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.
Go watch a big chimney stack being demolished. It hangs around in the air for a long time, before it is suddenly gone. But it’s definitely collapsing the whole time.
> You’re getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You’re really overreacting.
> Trust me, it’s all going to work out perfect. Nothing bad is going to happen. It’s all under control.
> Why do you keep saying these things? I can tell when there’s trouble looming, and I really don’t sense that right now. We’re in control of this situation, and we know what we’re doing. So stop being so pessimistic.
> Look, you’ve been proven wrong, so stop talking. You’ve had your say already. Be quiet, okay? Everything’s fine.
> If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.
That'd be cool if it were true, but it isn't. The people with the economic and political power to do anything about it are massively profiting off the storm and care more about that than the damage the storm will do.
Why do you think they are all literally building end-times style bunkers these days?
Is global economic collapse not an eschatological scenario?
When you say "everything is still getting better", what do you mean? Because the price of fuel and food, isn't getting better. It seems to be getting worse. Your version of "reality" doesn't seem to reflect the experience of a lot of people.
> people will buckle down and sort it.
It's an interesting series of words that don't say a lot. There is much to wonder about.
> Is global economic collapse not an eschatological scenario?
Not really, no. In this case 20-25% of the world's oil disappearing doesn't sound like it should be an 'everything collapses' scenario, we still have >75% of the oil around and oil isn't the only energy source. Everyone has always seen a "worst economic collapse of my lifetime" and although this one looks like it is going to be unusually horrific it isn't going to cause the end of anything structural unless there are other causes already in place. For example in theory this might be the end of the US military's ability to maintain global order in the same way as the Suiz Crisis humiliated the British empire - it'd be a recognition of realities on the ground rather than the current crisis changing anything.
The other thing is that it is WAY too easy to distract yourself from your solvable problems by focusing on the big ones - you have to fight that with ferocity.
Why get out of debt? The country is a brazillian trillion in debt we’re doomed.
Why invest for retirement or save? The market is fraud anyway.
Why exercise and lose weight? The planet is doomed anyway.
Missing in discussion is that the loss of mideastern oil is being offset by releases from strategic reserves.
But those will end, creating even more shortages.
> Petro is pretty much upstream of everything: plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, cooking oils, lubricants, cosmetics. Dow chemical just doubled the cost of polyethylene as of April 1st. Taiwan relies on LNG for 40% of its energy production and has like 10 days of fuel left--semis are implicated.
This is, on the high end, 20% of the use of fossil fuels. We overwhelmingly burn oil and gas. If we displaced the burning, Hormuz would not matter (or would minimally matter for a few molecules) and the world would be awash in abundant supplies.
Renewable investment would solve/would have prevented this crisis.
You could visit an alternate timeline where you have as much renewable investment into energy as you'd like going back decades and while it would help with the fertiliser situation massively it wouldn't solve the problem of needing a supply of carbon atoms to make the carbon-based substances in the list.
You can't make insulin, brake fluid or PVC out of electricity alone.
> it wouldn't solve the problem of needing a supply of carbon atoms to make the carbon-based substances in the list.
How many of that could be substituted with biomass? We're already making natural gas replacements using feces, food and agricultural waste, and we're making diesel fuel replacements - in case of doubt, at least older diesel engines can burn straight olive, sunflower or rapeseed oil, just modern ones will possibly incur expensive damage in the high-pressure fuel distribution section.
> You can't make insulin, brake fluid or PVC out of electricity alone.
Insulin is made with GMO bacteria these days, so all we need is something to feed the bacteria with, IIRC it's glucose which you can easily create from any sort of starch-containing plant.
> Millions of factories, farmers, and households have switched to cheap solar panels from China, driving a 40% drop in Pakistan’s fossil fuel imports between 2022 and 2024, the researchers found. Additionally, the country is estimated to have saved $12 billion through reduced LNG imports in the past five years as cumulative imports of Chinese photovoltaics soared past 50 gigawatts, the report said.
> The policy paper Electrons In, Hydrocarbons Out: Pakistan’s Quest for Economic and Resource Efficiency found that up to $120 billion in future fuel imports could be avoided over the lifetime of the 48 GW of solar modules Pakistan had imported as of June 2025. The study’s co-author, Nabiya Imran, told pv magazine that with solar module imports into Pakistan now totaling 51.5 GW, around $180 billion in fossil fuel imports could be avoided. Imran added these solar imports could generate a total 1,730 TWh over their lifetime.
The West is doing everything it can to limit solar from China. Which is idiotic, we should be trading anything and everything for those low cost panels from China.
You don't have to get carbon from oil extracted from underground and you don't have to get oil from the middle east. That's merely where the bulk of it happens to come from at present for price and historical reasons.
Hormuz might not matter that much in the future since Saudi and the other countries will build even more pipelines and ports which are on the other side. Short-term is dire though.
That would require some super effective anti air. Otherwise such a pipeline is an easy target.
And even the most anti air protected place on earth - Negev plant near Dimona city got hit with a warning shot. And they have 3 or 4 layers of anti air, most of them doubled (both US and Isreaeli). It's impossible to protect multiple pipelines to that extent.
And Isreal just said that they will keep attacking Iran no matter any peace deals or armistice.
The only logical course of action for Iran is to go down swinging, taking the rest of the world with them.
You’re choosing willful ignorance if you think petrochemicals will be replaced by renewables in your lifetime.
It isn’t going to happen. Planes don’t run on solar. Boats don’t run on renewables. The lubricant needed for wind turbines comes out of the earth. Dams need the same lubricant. Building roads, oil. Installing renewable infrastructure, oil. Running combines to harvest vegetation, oil. Building renewables requires massive amounts of oil.
Renewables are amazing and I’m all for them. Let’s keep that train rolling.
Oil isn’t going away, pretending otherwise is willful ignorance.
Oil isn't magic, you can just make it, and the reason we don't is merely that it's expensive to do that, whereas it's just there under the ground - as a fossil fuel.
But because you can just make it from ingredients everybody already has, this puts a ceiling on its actual price if you have energy independence. If you need to burn oil, you can't make oil because that's a vicious circle which would need even more oil. But so long as the only you want oil is for its other properties that's fine.
Hydrocarbons are incredibly simple, the clue is in their name, a bunch of Hydrogen (literally the most common element in the whole universe) and Carbon (also extremely common). The only reason not to make any particular hydrocarbons you need (e.g. to make JetA for a airliner) is it'd be very energy intensive and instead you can just distil some crude oil to get the hydrocarbons you want...
Strictly speaking, the oil in the Earth's crust is both finite and more than 50% already extracted.
However, a closed cycle of renewable-powered vehicles and processing sites growing crops for biorefineries which are then hydrocracked into the various petrochemical additives to maintain the infrastructure with surplus left over for the rest of society has been proven to be viable going back to the early 2010s.
Leong et al has a great survey of how the entire market of irreplaceable petrochemical uses (e.g. medical grade plastic) and their upstream steps (e.g. metal smelting for making agricultural vehicles) can theoretically be made to work from wind alone, with total immunity to peak oil when it does eventually happen. Although the carbon molecules are essential, having a no-oil well industrial civilization is just a matter of long and arduous implementation and negotiation with vested interests.
> This is, on the high end, 20% of the use of fossil fuels. We overwhelmingly burn oil and gas. If we displaced the burning, Hormuz would not matter (or would minimally matter for a few molecules) and the world would be awash in abundant supplies.
> It isn’t going to happen. Planes don’t run on solar. Boats don’t run on renewables. The lubricant needed for wind turbines comes out of the earth. Dams need the same lubricant. Building roads, oil. Installing renewable infrastructure, oil. Running combines to harvest vegetation, oil. Building renewables requires massive amounts of oil.
All of this? About 30% of oil usage on the high end. You are listing the small uses for oil.
May some oil always be needed? Yes. But nowhere near as much as we produce today.
On the low end, we will still synthesize what we need from whatever feed stock is available. Lots of pure industrial intermediate chemicals are synthesized out of natural gas.
Oil will not be viable for transportation and heating very soon due to market pressure alone.
You can, and should, over the entirety of europe apart from the northern parts of the nordic countries electric heat pumps are now simply more efficient than gas powered furnaces. This is true even if powered by gas based electricity - but obviously makes it possible to power them via renewables as well.
People in Quebec (Canada), which is colder than just about all of Europe, have been providing heating in winter using renewables for decades (thanks to an excess of renewables).
There are a gazillion battery techs being developed right now (regular lithium ion - with variations like NMC, LFP, ...), solid state lithion ion, sodium ion.
You can over provision solar as someone said.
There's geothermal, tidal, etc.
Long distance high voltage electricity transmission at scale.
Electricity is a marvel and we're just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with it. Betting against it is like betting against electronics, a risky proposition.
For sure. Heat pumps aren't the best option everywhere (though modern heat pumps probably function acceptably at lower temperatures than most people realize), but if you need to do electric heating, they are the best option most places.
For "human" temperatures don't they just degrade back to the efficiency of resistive heating? Or are some places actually cold enough to push the factor below 1?
There's no reason to assume it won't. It might not voluntarily but it looks a lot like it's either going to be forced to accept them, or it's going to become an irrelevant actor one way or another leaving Iran to set terms by default.
Other countries are switching to the yuan global reserve currency and petrocurrency in order to be allowed passage through Hormuz. The US has no counter to this (besides ending the war, which it won't) and with how much the US relies on these two things to be globally relevant, if this continues then oil prices will return to normal, will be traded in yuan, and there will no longer be a US. A complete own goal and possibly the fastest self destruction by unforced error in all of human history.
Europe will lag behind the trend because of its alliance with the US but it will turn eventually in order to get low oil prices. When the US attempted to force Europe to sanction Iran several years ago, Europe invented a system to evade them (INSTEX).
US bond markets have just locked up this week. The US found itself unable to borrow more money at any price - nobody wants to lend it. Banks turned off their automated trading systems because they can't work in this environment. This is a symptom of global dedollarization. While this shock may only last a few days the frequency of this sort of this sort of thing is rapidly increasing, and when a government can't borrow money any more it has no choice but to print it to pay its debts, and we know where that leads: Weimar-style hyperinflation.
Most people just don't understand what a monumental rewrite of global politics this is and (IMHO) it will go down as the worst foreign policy mistake in US history and it's not even close. Some might say "what about Vietnam?" No, this is worse, geopolitically. WhY/ Because there was never any possibility of success. The US simply doesn't have the military capability to depose the regime or open the Strait and Pentagon military planners all knew this beforehand.
The big winners are:
- China. They're already going renewable at a rapid pace. They have a massive stockpile of oil (~1.4B barrels) and they're still receiving oil from Iran. This diminishes US influence in the the world and increases China's influence;
- Russia: this crisis will probably force the West to make peace with Russia and they'll retain any current Ukrainian territory just to secure Russian energy exports, particularly natural gas;
- Iran: the sanctions are over. Prior to all this Iran was selling oil to China for below market rate, less than $50/barrel. Now? They're legally able to sell it and get market rates, which are more like ~$120/barrel. Iran may well still get a regime of charging ships to traverse the Strait after the war is over;
Who are the losers?
- Europe: this is going to massively increase energy costs for years;
- Ukraine: see above (Russia);
- The US: massively decreased influence, particularly in the Middle East;
- Israel: there will be no regime change in Iran, Iran will come out in a better position and this may well be the first crack in the US-Israel relationship because Israel dog-walked the US into this war. The Iron Dome has shown to be not as impenetrable as once thought;
- The Gulf states: they face a tough choice between remaining US client states or breaking free. Breaking free probably means their monarchies and despotic regimes will fall. The myth of the US security guarantee has been broken. These regimes will probably stick with the US for their own survival and we may see some of them fall anyway (eg Bahrain).
I agree with your main point: "just go renewable" is both naive and utterly useless advice. That's a decades-long project. Also, who makes all the solar panels (and probably windmills)? China.
It is a little different because the US is a net energy exporter now and definitely wasn't in the 1970s. Still, there will be higher prices for everything and the US can't realistically block exports to keep prices low because other countries will stop sending us stuff.
Were the president anyone else, they would be impeached and removed from office. That's how bad this is. But we live in a post-truth world the the president is the leader of a cult.
> I agree with your main point: "just go renewable" is both naive and utterly useless advice. That's a decades-long project. Also, who makes all the solar panels (and probably windmills)? China.
This is the key point a lot of people miss, the vast majority of equipment needed to actually use renewables requires Chinese products. If you go 100% renewables, you're only replacing one form of dependence (oil) for another,
Once you get NREs set up you don't need a constant uninterrupted supply of replacements as fossil fuels do (we burn them after all).
We'd need replacements as old infrastructure ages out but it seems much easier to wait out a supply disruption compared to oil since this just means using old equipment while the supply is cut; sure some might break after a while but electricity production wouldn't fall immediately.
I can't believe they made an account for that comment. Like each action carries the same weight. Renewables, esp solar are super low maintenance. When you buy panels, barring some manufacturing defect, you buy them for the life of the project, not the panel.
Yes, but is it a mistake or deliberate? The Iran war has been planned since GW Bush.
Now we have a president who hates the EU and Ukraine more than he hates Russia and China and he has Greenland ambitions.
He is currently dragging out the war and Rubio was in the EU to string people along yet again.
If he drags out the war long enough, the EU might need to make concessions on certain issues.
What the EU should do but is too stupid to do: It should immediately negotiate with China and Russia to create jealousy (that is what Trump does, he understands that) and say: While you are doing your extended Iran adventure, we'll drop sanctions on Russian gas and import LNG.
That is literally the only language Trump understands and then the deep state will put him on a leash. Trump would hate nothing more than EU overtures to Putin while he is left out of the negotiations.
Sometimes you have to use all options to get things done.
> Russia: this crisis will probably force the West to make peace with Russia and they'll retain any current Ukrainian territory just to secure Russian energy exports, particularly natural gas;
The West is not the only party in this war and Ukraine has shown many times that it can do its own thing. Ukraine was supposed to roll over and die in 3 days and it has just managed to liberate about 500sqkm of territory, 4 years after the start of the war. Plus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22xoretdhbm
Ukraine is completely dependent on arms from the US and Europe to sustain the war effort. Ukraine is running out of men to serve in the Army. Ukraine has no path to reclaim the territory it's lost.
I'm not making a judgment about whether or not this is right. This is just a sober analysis of the situation. And that is that the war is stalemated and the only way this gets resolved is to declare peace at the current borders. This grand misadventure by the US and Israel in Iran just made that more likely.
Your sober analysis of the situation overlooks what many respectable analysts are saying.
Ukraine has become probably the de facto #1 drone based military in the world right now.
It's made the first production use drone type that uses practically 0 Chinese manufactured components. It's making more types that use off the shelf components but are otherwise 100% Ukrainian made. Its drone types are getting more and more sophisticated and larger, with the biggest having a 3000km, 1 ton payload. That's besides the ground or sea drones.
Watch the video I linked (and several more from the same channel if you have time).
Also Russia's army is being attrited faster than reconstituted, at the moment. That's a long way to say that the Russian army in Ukraine is shrinking.
Ukraine is dependent on European finances. And the EU has guaranteed funding for at least 2 more years. The US isn't helping with any equipment, weapons. Every US weapons Ukraine uses is paid for, by Ukraine and its allies.
The real danger is if Europe flinches, which would be a monumentally bad decision as Ukraine is finally winning the war of attrition.
The world is way too stable for a real crisis. The west is much more resilient than a lot of people think. Nothing will really change. Life will go on.
It is asymmetrical warfare. A hundred plus ships went through the straight daily. Attackers only need to occasionally damage a ship to make the crossing look deeply unappealing. No military intervention can promise 100% defense to passing vessels.
As the value of the oil goes up it becomes worth it to risk the ship. Even if you're paying to insure it there's an equilibrium point between odds and value.
Obviously 50-50 doesn't pencil out at $100 or even $200 a barrel. But 1:50 might at $2xx. IDK I'm not a shipping expert.
Technically true, but ship + cargo are going to be worth over a billion dollars. Any ship carrying petroleum products is going up be a juicy target for the Iranians looking to flex their muscles.
Someone could say the risk is financially worth it, but you are not going to have many takers. Also might find few crew who want to sign onto your vessels.
There are a lot of human beings on those ships. It strikes me as awful that their lives would be risked under these circumstances, and that happening wouldn't really be a proper solution to the overarching problem. It would be something of a tragedy if things got so severe that the risk was assumed worthwhile and presumably, people on board were exposed to it outside of their will or control. I suspect many of them don't have a lot of options.
100 people will die on American roads today, and another tomorrow. Most of them die because they commute to work because a lower paying job closer, or a smaller dwelling near their job, isn't that appealing. Another portion will die because driving aggressively and fast seemed fun. Another portion will die because they like alcohol more than safety.
Yes, but I don't think we should accept these deaths either, and I see them as worth preventing and avoiding as well.
I also see false equivalence here in that the risk of death doesn't seem fungible. You're taking an aggregate death toll distributed across hundreds of millions of people, involving totally different voluntariness and causal structures.
People kept sailing past the Houthis even though some ships got attacked. They sailed past Somali pirates too. So ships obviously tolerate some level of risk from violence.
The problem is that Iran can defend the strait against the world's most advanced military with drones built with commercial hardware for 30-50K per drone. And that doesn't even take into account escalation, as if the US escalates then Iran will likely start targeting critical infrastructure in the region, making the crisis worse.
The US and Israel are rapidly running out of munitions, while Iran is being resupplied by Russia (https://www.ft.com/content/d5d7291b-8a53-42cd-b10a-4e02fbcf9...) which is much more tooled out for munition production compared to NATO. The US also relies on both rare earths and Chinese supply chain for a lot of its munitions (which it is running low on).
IMO the best option is for Trump to TACO, take the major L, and cede Iran its demands, but this would partially mean an alignment shift from Israel which still feels unthinkable based on the US political realities.
Can I just state the horrible reality: Only as long as we accept that islamists get to attack civilians directly and other armies don't. If we fight with the same rules, this stops being a problem.
There comes a point where there is only one decision left.
> the price to secure the straight military might look comparatively lower.
The price to secure the straight militarily is a full ground invasion of Iran.
This would be done against a country four times bigger (in population and size) than Iraq, with the kind of terrain that makes Afghanistan look easily accessible, done without the help of a coalition of fools, because this isn't 2003, and nobody in Europe is very eager to send their kids to die for a war that Trump's ego started. His 2025 attempts to 'ingrate' himself with Europe are paying dividends now.
Also, if you think the war is unpopular now (nobody but the 40% of the country that's MAGA-brained supports it - and those guys will support anything), imagine what the popularity would be like with a full mobilization and invasion.
The GOPniks aren't that eager to become a 31-seat party this November.
... and if Iran keeps raising it will eventually become the only choice available, at which point we'll do it (and can I just say the truly horrible part: ... which was going to happen at some point anyway with the islamists in power)
So... why is fuel 25% cheaper in Slovenia than in the neighbouring country while Solvenia is simultaneously having issues with running out of fuel?
Seems like the obvious solution is to raise prices so people stop driving to your country (wasting fuel, ironically) to take your cheap fuel instead of just paying for the fuel in their own country. More than that it's a solution the free market would actually find on its own...
It's not a free market. Off-highway prices are regulated and were adjusted by the executive govt branch on biweekly basis, now switched to weekly. Slovenia is small and "gas tourism" is common since fossil juices in neighboring countries are priced higher.
Why not raise the prices? Sure, but then don't complain about the inflation, revolt, and stoning of elected representatives.
We can barely afford it at the current price. The solution would be charging foreign transit the non-regulated price but that would be considered discriminatory.
Price increases tend to be regressive—the poor person who needs a little fuel to get to their job is hurt more than the large business that uses a lot more fuel but has much, much more money overall.
There are things you can do to try and even things out. Etherium has been considering “quadratic voting” to solve a similar problem (in this case, that would look like tracking consumption and increasing the unit price of fuel as you consume more fuel, so that cost goes up quadratically with consumption). That seems hard to enforce, though, and doesn’t help with foreign opportunists.
I'm totally ignorant as to Slovenia, but as a general comment on taxation regressive price increases/externality taxes/sin taxes are easily made up for by simply giving everyone a fixed sum of money (that can either be gathered specifically through the regressive tax or just through the normal non-regressive tax pool).
Ethereum has the weird issue where "votes" and "money" are different things and they only want to redistribute votes and not money, but that's not a problem here...
This BBC article does a really poor job of explaining the context of this situation or why fuel would be so much cheaper in Slovenia, so I had to look around. Slovenia apparently introduced fuel price regulations last year (for motorway service stations; off-motorway stations have been regulated for longer), as a means of reducing costs for consumers[0]. These price caps were, in fact, removed a week ago[1], and prices at some stations rose considerably in the aftermath, closer to the Austrian prices across the border.[2] I won't speak to the wisdom of the Slovenian government in trying to cap fuel prices, but however well-intentioned the policy was, it didn't last long in the face of a global energy crunch.
[0] https://sloveniatimes.com/43824/fuel-price-regulation-expand...
[1] https://www.brusselstimes.com/2037901/slovenia-imposes-fuel-...
[2] https://sloveniatimes.com/47009/prices-at-the-pump-up-substa...
One thing you have to keep in mind is that in Slovenia, your employer is required to cover your commuting expenses. If there’s no viable public transit option (which is the case for most of Slovenia outside of bigger cities), they have to pay you for gas per km.
So if the regulations were to suddenly be lifted, this would have a domino effect on not only truckers but also regular commuters, which would then mean companies would have to compensate for the increased labour costs by raising the prices of their products/services even more.
Which is adjusted to compensate for inflation of fuel prices every few years, so they would eventually have to raise that to cover the increased prices.
In Slovenia, fuel prices have been regulated since, like, forever.
A few years ago (or last year? not sure) they were deregulated on the highways (i.e. to make tourists pay more) but then the government changed their mind (several times, IIRC).
They were deregulated on highway for a very long time. Deregulation came to off-highway in 2020 as the loss of demand due to covid made the prices drop. Rusian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent price hikes made the govt regulate the prices again.
Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.
Fuel prices are regulated here, and we had an election right now and a huge gas price hike would be bad for the current government (not decided yet if they stay or go). The government basically lowered the gas tax for a bit to keep prices stable (they also raised the gas taxes during covid to keep the prices "stable").
The prices will go up soon, that's why everyone is panicking and filling up canisters of gas.
If you want to see the end state of lack of oil, look no further than Cuba's current state of affairs. It's dire.
Also for the naive people in the comments who say "invest in renewables" it's not that simple. You can buy electric cars but the car's whole manufacturing process had multiple steps that required oil. The same applies to everything, it's not a single layer issues, it's a multi-layer issue that needs addressing from the ground and takes years and years with full investment. The boats, the planes require fuel. The industrial machinery requires fuel. We need to address it from the ground up and it's not an easy feat.
We should 100% invest and diversify energy production, but the reality is that even if we had a surplus of renewable energy on the grid, that wouldn't save a country because there are too many cogs that need oil right now that need replacing.
It’s not 100% of oil production capacity that is lost, but 20%. You need to cut demand by that, so electric cars can help extremely, because most oil is consumed during car use, not production.
50L/day - with no other limits - sounds like a lot. Are there really fuel tourists coming in en masse and taking more than this? With zero tracking of enforcement whatsoever, people will just hit up a few different nearby gas stations instead of one anyways and that's it.
That was me today, Thursday, Monday and last Friday though I suppose a couple of them were "only" 300 miles. I'm not normal though.
And if I gave a crap about western white collar standards for acceptable vehicle loading I'd have had to do it all twice or take a vehicle that uses twice the fuel lol.
Im with you, I tow some goofy things with a sedan and a custom tow hitch I welded and installed. But in general terms, limiting people to top 1% of travel distances daily in an emergency is pretty mild.
Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.
"As a direct result of the 1973 oil crisis, on 6 March 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced what became known as the 'Messmer Plan', a hugely ambitious nuclear power program aimed at generating most of France's electricity from nuclear power. At the time of the oil crisis most of France's electricity came from foreign oil. "
"Work on the first three plants, at Tricastin, Gravelines, and Dampierre, started the same year and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years."
The way the EU forces the electricity market to operate makes them completely unprofitable. Renewables are always given priority in the market, which results in other power plants operating at a capacity factor of 30-40%. Since nuclear power plants are mostly capital expenditure-intensive, this makes the electricity they produce absurdly expensive.
Because the way how the EU electricity market operates first to supply electric power are the power plants with the lowest operating costs. This are usually renewables and nuclear power plants. Both are capital expensive and cheap in operating costs.
Usually the capacity factor of European nuclear reactors is higher than 60%.
> Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.
This is 2026. Doing things in 1974 isn't an option because time's arrow points the wrong way.
If you want Europe to do things now that it should have done in 1974 you'd need to explain how it'll stall on all the consequences for years. France, which you held up as a model says it can build a nuclear generator in about 5-6 years, but none of these optimistic projections came true this century, more typically the plant takes 10-15 years and it can be more.
So, suppose they start today likely they'll say the generator goes online in 2032. How does that help with the crisis Trump caused this month ? Worse, come 2032 the date is likely to be 2040 instead.
Now, renewables go a lot faster. For solar it's genuinely possible to get paperwork done in January and be selling electricity made with those panels by summer. It's not easy, plenty of projects will be delayed out a 1-2 years, particularly if local government don't want the project, but with a following wind it can really be the same year. Wind is slower, but still you will almost certainly build it and switch it on in five years, the optimistic guess France never hits for its nuclear plants.
Define affordable. A €40k Seal is anything but affordable. Eastern Europe (and I don't put Slovenia in this case here, they are much closer to Western Europe in every sense) will not mass change to EVs suddenly when everyone is shopping for 10 years old diesels from Western Europe for maximum €10k
New cars have questionable affordability for most people. Particularly when you factor in dubious design choices and expensive marketing. Cars and driving are expensive. If that was a barrier there wouldn't be many people on the road.
Also, the Electric polo is supposed to be released at around 25k Euros. Given the lower running costs that seems like a good deal relative to legacy designs. For all those people will to spend 40k on a car you could put the money into solar panels instead.
Europe simply does not have enough known oil reserves to put a dent in current prices even if it exploited them all.
There may still be good arguments to do so anyway, such as it being less carbon intensive than importing oil, but there is absolutely no magic lever we can pull that would fix this problem that we're just not pulling due to renewables legislation.
Britain could start extracting oil from its European fields instead of just buying the same oil and gas from Denmark. Sanctions could be lifted on Russian oil. Duties could be dropped. There are levers.
Hasn't Germany and the UK been investing in renewables for years now? They must be feeling pretty happy about that decision right now unlike oil obsessed countries like the US.
A quarter of a century ago, the first quarter of 2001, Britain used 39 TWh of coal electrical generation, 36 TWh of gas and 21 TWh of nuclear.
Today we're lot more energy efficient†, and the renewables made more than 25 TWh, but nuclear is now less than 10 TWh, we of course no longer burn coal, which leaves 30 TWh of gas still and we have a lot more imports (because we have a lot more interconnect, which is also a form of energy security)
† For example back then we mostly used incandescent light bulbs! And a lot of people still used CRT televisions back then!
For electricity generation, the UK is currently generating 50% via renewables. It goes up and down each day of course, storage is not a solved problem yet.
Yes, but it is not enough. It helps a lot when sunny, and weekend mid-day gross market prices for electricity hover just above zero, but there's not enough batteries, flexibility, and other renewables to avoid price spikes in the morning and evening peak, when hydro and gas plants are still covering a lot.
Europe has massive lithium reserves in Germany, Serbia, Portugal and ukraine but perhaps more importantly it also has friendly relations with other countries with reserves
Economic viability depends on many things, lithium prices have been pretty volatile in the past, battery production in Europe as customers are just scaling up.
This week, the first spodumene vein was blasted from the rock at the open-pit mine in western Finland, marking the occasion with a ceremonial event attended by invited guests and media.
Eh, the war in Ukraine has kind of proven that the Europeans are not all that capable of action. There has been an enormous incentive to have been getting rid of oil dependency for 4 years now.
That America is incredibly generous with resources in a conflict has no possible bearing on the security of their continent?
I don't see Europe sending billions of its taxpayer dollars to resolve conflicts in Africa and Asia. (It barely manages to do so for a conflict right next door!)
There was a delegation of Asian (I think?) leaders in Europe a few years ago, and when Europe pressured them to take action re Ukraine-Russia, they politely pointed out that when a war breaks out in Europe they are told it's an existential global crisis, and when a conflict breaks out in Asia or Africa, Europe just sort of yawns and issues a sleepy statement calling for international law to be respected (which is European for 'thoughts and prayers').
Personally, I care about Ukraine and want them to prevail. But the myopia and arrogance of Europeans on this is astonishing. If this were a conflict in Asia or Africa, Europe would never have given even a fraction of the support that America has given Ukraine. Not a million years. And then, having failed to provide for their own security, having profiteered from Russian oil and gas for decades, and having secured vast amounts of support from the rest of the world when faced with the consequences of their own failures, European leaders have the audacity to suggest they're not getting enough? That the rest of the world is failing them? How much money, exactly, is the average rice farmer in Asia supposed to owe for Europe's security? And why do much wealthier Europeans never seem to owe him back anything in return?
Do they, though? They seem to very consistently vote against foreign entanglements, before their own leaders betray them, pressed into action by foreign allies advocating their own narrow regional interests (Europe on Russia, Israel on Iran, etc).
Not clear to me why some working mum in Idaho is obliged to pay for Hungary's security when even the Hungarians refuse to do so, but hey, enjoy this meme while it lasts. The US won't remain the world's policeman for too much longer, and we're all in for a much darker world without them.
You do realize that Russia is and will continue being an enemy of the US, right? Even now it's providing Iran with intel to kill US soldiers.
Russia is primarily a threat to Europe, but not only.
And what do you imagine will happen if Russia gets the gang back together? Ukraine, Belarus, Baltics, most of Eastern Europe. Do you think Soviet Union 2.0, now with more fascism, will be friendlier to the US?
I know Americans love to pretend they live on another planet, but now we have global trade, ICBMs and many more interesting ways to hurt humans on the other side of the world. We're no longer living in the 1800s.
The US is a net exporter of crude oil and is positioned to meet an oil crisis better than nearly anyone else. What do you think the US government expected from this?
Being positioned to eat shit better than anyone else is still eating shit. Our economy isn't independent of the rest of the world.
Datacenter investment is currently a noticable fraction of US GDP. That's as globalized as it gets, we aren't even remotely self sufficient on that front. What happens to our economy if that segment crumbles overnight?
The problem with getting rid of oil is that cars currently in use will be usable even when over 20 years old, replacing them with EVs is expensive, and the good enough and economically accessible EVs are only now starting to get to market.
It's really hard to quickly replace millions of vehicles.
In California my electricity to drive my Chevy Volt is more expensive than gasoline, if gasoline is less than $5 a gallon.
So for basically the last 100k miles I've owned it, electricity was more expensive.
The same goes for many plugin hybrids. Luxury EVs still win out because luxury sedans usually only get 25 mpg mixed max.
$0.44
A first gen Volt takes 10.3kwh. It also uses electricity to cool the batteries while charging. If you leave it plugged in one a hot day it will cool the battery just for health overall but I'll ignore that. Then, add in the losses on the charge conversions.
It easily takes 11kwh to charge a Volt. It'll go about 35 miles in the summer on that charge, and more like 28 in the winter.
It also gets 35 mpg on gasoline, while providing free heat in the winter from the gas engine heat, and for most of the last few years was doing this for $3.50-$4 a gallon.
There are people on Southern California/San Diego that pay more. Over there people say the Prius Prime is WAY cheaper to operate on gas because it gets 50mpg gasoline.
I've even heard people running their home off gasoline because it's cheaper but that would require an impressive gas generator to do long term.
That won't "solve" anything. Car prices will rise, many people can't afford the switch regardless, too much new EV demand could destabilize the grid in population centers, and throwing away vehicles that are already on the road by replacing them with newly manufactured ones is terrible from an emissions perspective.
Germany has switched from one gas supplier to different gas suppliers.
The past Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck famously once sad:
“Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all,” “We have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem – at least not generally throughout the country.”
Well if you have regulated fuel prices, and free trade and travel with neighboring countries (the whole point of the EU), you're gonna see arbitrage if those countries aren't regulating fuel prices.
Options are to either un-regulate the prices, or ration the fuel sales.
Those limits also do exists somehow in other countries. In France for example it's been a very long time some petrol station say "150 EUR maximum". People are going to say it's not a "real" limit but I did hit it once or twice while going on vacation: 80 liters tank, near empty / car only taking 98 octane fuel (more expensive than 95) / ultra-pricey fuel at petrol stations on the highway (so pricey it's usually cheaper to just get off the highway, fill the tank in a village, and go back to the highway).
At 2.2 EUR / liter, 75 liters is 165 EUR so I was blocked at 150 EUR.
50 liters I definitely cannot fill my car entirely.
The 150€ is a reservation on your debit card before filling up, since the banks or the station doesn't want the credit risk. It's released when the actual sum is booked.
I think it's just what a reasonable "full tank" was a while back.
They're blaming the lack of cisterns to transport gas from storage to individual gas stations, because everyone went to get gas, and some hoarded a lot of it
I mean... we also have a huge factory making toilet paper here, and we had the same toilet paper crisis during covid... everyone suddenly needed 10 packs of toilet paper for some reason.
Yes. When people saw that some stations were out of it everyone and their mom brought out their old beaters and canisters and refilled those too, just in case.
Slovenia is a small country with 2 million people, bordering countries with a total of over 82 million people. The neighbors are also relatively rich countries, such as Austria and Italy
Yes and if (1) gas in Canada were cheaper than in the US, and (2) the border between the countries was completely open, then you’d indeed see people going to Canada to buy gas.
I'm sure there's plenty of border crossings for cheaper goods.
I'm skeptical this happens in such numbers as to strain national infrastructure.
Tellingly, the ration put in place applies to Slovenian citizens, not just foreigners. Which should tell you something about "who is being blamed" vs "what solves the problem".
Did you travel in Europe? Even without crisis, gas stations are often way busier on the cheaper country's border than more expensive.
My friends living in Switzerland (near the border) always go to Germany to fuel up. And, even without a crisis, gas stations on the cheaper sides of borders are often way more crowded than on the other side.
Also, keep in mind that Slovenia is roughly the size of Los Angeles. Or not much wider than Long Island. If there fuel was 30% cheaper on one side of Long Island, than on the other, I'm sure plenty of people wouldn't think twice about that.
My family with 3 people, two dirt bikes, and a gas generator for camping owns four 5 gallon gas cans.
So I alone without trying can fit 80L without even filling up my car.
>In Slovenia, this has resulted in so-called "fuel tourism", as drivers from neighbouring countries, particularly Austria, take advantage of the lower, regulated prices here.
Well, Slovenia is a small country and has land borders with many others. Imagine that gas in New Jersey was $1 per gallon cheaper than in New York and Pennsylvania. I guess a lot of people would drive to NJ gas stations.
And i'm saying that as a guy who drives to italy to buy pasta, booze and parmesan cheese. Two bottles of jack daniels and the cost of gas is covered by the price difference (well... not anymore).
Say I live in Austria and it is a short ride to a Slovenia Station. Can buy as much gas as I want, but citizens in Slovenia are limited ? That does not seem right.
Scanning some of the early comments here, and acting as-if the oil and LNG disruptions is just a question of renewable investment is naive.
This is the worst energy crisis in modern history, and little of the western world has really started feeling the effects yet:
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-energy/iran-war-...
Petro is pretty much upstream of everything: plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, cooking oils, lubricants, cosmetics. Dow chemical just doubled the cost of polyethylene as of April 1st. Taiwan relies on LNG for 40% of its energy production and has 11 days of LNG storage--meaning it may have to consider limiting industrial electricity use if things persist. I will clarify based on a reply, this doesn't mean they'll run out in that time, but that they have limited runway that will have deleterious effects as time goes on:
> Yeh Tsung-kuang, a professor in the Department of Engineering and System Science at National Tsing Hua University, said Taiwan's maximum LNG inventory is only 11 days but that does not mean the island will run out of fuel or face outages within that time period.
Even if the Strait saw normal traffic today (and Iran is incentivized and well-positioned to keep it closed for a while), it would take quite a while to recover lost supply. Iran continues to employ a tit-for-tat strategy and Israel just targeted steel industry in the country -- I'm not even taking into account more deliberate damage to energy infrastructure in the Mid east.
This is a scary crisis wherein the most movable actor (the US) is not going to accept Iran's terms. It could collapse the global economy, and that crucially includes the AI industry this forum loves to focus on almost exclusively. The US and the majority of the west has essentially no fiscal room compared to the comparably lesser 1970s crises either. This could easily spiral out of control and cause a level of suffering across the world (esp the global south) most of us on this forum have not lived to see.
Before calling it "the worst", I'd like more detail on how to do the comparison with the oil crises of the 1970's. My guess is that modern economies might be somewhat less oil-dependent than they were then, because the alternatives are more developed.
They are more developed, sure, and the US (from a US centric view) is producing a lot of oil now. However, consider that pretty much all of the goods you see in the supermarket got there via diesel (trains, semi-trucks). The percentage of semi-trucks operating on electricity is still miniscule at this point. Air transport? All petroleum. Consider also other things like fertilizers - we're heavily dependent on nitrogen fertilizers derived from petroleum and planting season in the northern hemisphere is starting right about now. Yes we're producing a lot more electricity with renewables, but demand is also up.
Oil going through Hormuz is 20%, not 80% of global supply. It's true that demand is pretty inelastic, but it's not like it can't be cut at all.
Who mentioned 80%?
During the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo, the disruption removed approximately 4.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) from the market, which constituted about 7% of the global oil supply at the time. This disruption significantly impacted global supplies.
20% is a lot more than 7%. This could be worse than 1973-74. As a 10year-old in 1973 I remember spending a lot of time in the backseat of the station wagon as we were waiting line line for gas.
For context, during the first COVID spring (March-June 2020) oil demand fell by 20%. Because nobody was driving or flying anywhere. That's what it took to cut 20%.
And yet we are a lot more globalized than in the 1970s. Ressources can be diverted at a much quicker rate with a lot more agility.
Yes, couldn't make either face masks or toilet paper during covid. Most people will find out how fragile everything is with idiot MBAs optimizing just-in-time for better quarterly reports!
We're going to find out how much agility exists in the system (under perturbation). In the meantime countries in Asia are scrambling for supply.
Globalization can run both ways. It can also create much more sensitivity to disruption as bets are placed in a system with a lot more moving parts.
> Petro is pretty much upstream of everything: plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, cooking oils,
Really! What petroleum-based oil do you cook with?
Electric range
Plant-based ones that were harvested by machines that burn petroleum.
That’s a pretty amazing definition of upstream. I imagine you probably understand that plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizers are made out of petroleum derivatives, right?
Since you seem pretty smart: are there petroleum based cooking oils?
The machinery to make them, the fertilisers to grow them, the plastic to package them, the transport to deliver them. It ain’t just cooking oils that will be massively impacted. The entire food chain in the western world is reliant on petrochemicals. The only question is the lag between now and when those impacts start being felt and this translates into bumped prices and/or shortages.
EDIT: corrected an autocorrection.
Is there anything in that chain that actually requires petroleum and couldn't be replaced with alternative with similar properties and prices?
Yes: the time. It's spring time, when most crops are being sowed, of have been sowed and started growing actively. They won't wait several months until the production of fertilizers switches to electrically produced hydrogen, and tractors are upgraded to run off electric power. As the crops ripen, they won't wait until combine harvesters and trucks are converted to run off electric power. Nobody in the agricultural world has a few billions lying around to build massive solar capacity, battery capacity, and redesign the agricultural machinery, all at impossibly breakneck pace.
Instead I suggest that they will buy the fuel at higher prices, and sell less produce, and also milk and meat which are downstream from feed crops, at higher prices. More than that, in a bout of bitter irony, the West might need to lift sanctions from Russian oil, and maybe ask Russia to drill and sell more.
This, or the US should somehow defeat IRGC and defeat / appease the Iranian Army, and unblock the strait. I wonder if it's going to cost less even along the monetary dimension.
> More than that, in a bout of bitter irony, the West might need to lift sanctions from Russian oil,
The US has already done this!
Here's my definition of upstream: If the petroleum stops, the cooking oil stops, even though the cooking oil is 100% plant-based.
Given that what we're talking about is disruptions caused by a shortage of petroleum, is there any other definition of "upstream" that is meaningful for the conversation?
> Taiwan relies on LNG for 40% of its energy production and has like 10 days of fuel left--semis are implicated.
The "10 days left" thing seems to be a hoax(?)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/international-relations/m...
https://www.malaymail.com/news/world/2026/03/26/is-taiwan-ru...
I have 30 days of food in my house and I have maintained that since probably 2021. It doesn't mean I will run out in 30 days, since I can still buy food although at higher prices lately. I personally never let it dip below 20 probably.
Oh I'm sorry, that was actually my mistake, I should have been much more specific, and I will update the comment if I still can. My intention was to emphasize that Taiwan may have to start limiting electricity to its industrial sector based on its current runway. Per the article you listed:
> Yeh Tsung-kuang, a professor in the Department of Engineering and System Science at National Tsing Hua University, said Taiwan's maximum LNG inventory is only 11 days but that does not mean the island will run out of fuel or face outages within that time period
EDIT: updated comment to be more specific.
> said Taiwan's maximum LNG inventory is only 11 days but that does not mean the island will run out of fuel or face outages within that time period
I guess I read that as "we've got 11 days supply of LNG and we won't face any shortages during that 11 days" - how is that a better situation?
> Yeh Tsung-kuang, a professor in the Department of Engineering and System Science at National Tsing Hua University, said Taiwan's maximum LNG inventory is only 11 days but that does not mean the island will run out of fuel or face outages within that time period
So he's saying they've got an 11 day supply and that they won't face any shortages during that 11 days... but what about after 11 days? I guess I'm not sure how that's different, how it's a hoax?
11 days of supply in the system. If they can afford it they can add to that with new shipments. It is not like Taiwan is blockaded. Just that global supply from single region is limited.
This might be lot bigger issue if China managed blockaded Taiwan during an invasion. Or destroy port facilities sufficiently.
Not blockaded, sure, but how long would it take for these new shipments to arrive? If these are shipments they hope can come through the SoH even if they got through tomorrow it would take ~10 days to arrive in Taiwan. They can also get LNG from Australia, but a typhoon has shut down some of Australia's LNG terminals today.
You need metrics to compare it over time; I only have a weeks worth of food in the house but I shop weekly kind of thing.
>This could easily spiral out of control and cause a level of suffering across the world (esp the global south) most of us on this forum have not lived to see.
Daily anxiety attack thanks. As a european I think we are way too vulnerable. Countries divided, rich getting richer, more and more poor people who can barely afford food, and that's in Europe let alone talk about what happens with the poor in Africa and Asia.
Sooner or later we will need a global reset but that sounds worse than everything else
We don't "need a global reset"
It's an apocalyptical mind-bug. All times have an eschatology - ours seems to be climate collapse. It used to be nuclear war.
The media is selling a story. In reality everything is still getting better. People are healthier, richer, and better off in almost every measurable way, all over the world, including Africa and Asia.
Yes, there are some dark clouds. A long list. But the problems - even a long war in the middle east, are bumps in the road, not a cliff. If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.
Buckle down and sort it = wars around the world and mass (and I mean mass) migration
> ours seems to be climate collapse. It used to be nuclear war
Except climate collapse is actually happening already, gradually.
There were escalating tensions during the Cold War, but it wasn’t like there were actual nukes being dropped in slow motion
Collapse by definition is not gradual
Go watch a big chimney stack being demolished. It hangs around in the air for a long time, before it is suddenly gone. But it’s definitely collapsing the whole time.
> You’re getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You’re really overreacting.
> Trust me, it’s all going to work out perfect. Nothing bad is going to happen. It’s all under control.
> Why do you keep saying these things? I can tell when there’s trouble looming, and I really don’t sense that right now. We’re in control of this situation, and we know what we’re doing. So stop being so pessimistic.
> Look, you’ve been proven wrong, so stop talking. You’ve had your say already. Be quiet, okay? Everything’s fine.
https://theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mi...
> If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.
That'd be cool if it were true, but it isn't. The people with the economic and political power to do anything about it are massively profiting off the storm and care more about that than the damage the storm will do.
Why do you think they are all literally building end-times style bunkers these days?
Is global economic collapse not an eschatological scenario?
When you say "everything is still getting better", what do you mean? Because the price of fuel and food, isn't getting better. It seems to be getting worse. Your version of "reality" doesn't seem to reflect the experience of a lot of people.
> people will buckle down and sort it. It's an interesting series of words that don't say a lot. There is much to wonder about.
> Is global economic collapse not an eschatological scenario?
Not really, no. In this case 20-25% of the world's oil disappearing doesn't sound like it should be an 'everything collapses' scenario, we still have >75% of the oil around and oil isn't the only energy source. Everyone has always seen a "worst economic collapse of my lifetime" and although this one looks like it is going to be unusually horrific it isn't going to cause the end of anything structural unless there are other causes already in place. For example in theory this might be the end of the US military's ability to maintain global order in the same way as the Suiz Crisis humiliated the British empire - it'd be a recognition of realities on the ground rather than the current crisis changing anything.
> If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.
100% this. People need to understand this.
The other thing is that it is WAY too easy to distract yourself from your solvable problems by focusing on the big ones - you have to fight that with ferocity.
Why get out of debt? The country is a brazillian trillion in debt we’re doomed.
Why invest for retirement or save? The market is fraud anyway.
Why exercise and lose weight? The planet is doomed anyway.
Missing in discussion is that the loss of mideastern oil is being offset by releases from strategic reserves. But those will end, creating even more shortages.
Just Stop Oil got their wish! Now everyone else gets to suffer the effects.
Could you be any more bad faith?
What is "bad faith" here? I'd love to see an explanation.
How many days' fuel does Taiwan keep in reserve outside of this type of situation?
> Petro is pretty much upstream of everything: plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, cooking oils, lubricants, cosmetics. Dow chemical just doubled the cost of polyethylene as of April 1st. Taiwan relies on LNG for 40% of its energy production and has like 10 days of fuel left--semis are implicated.
This is, on the high end, 20% of the use of fossil fuels. We overwhelmingly burn oil and gas. If we displaced the burning, Hormuz would not matter (or would minimally matter for a few molecules) and the world would be awash in abundant supplies.
Renewable investment would solve/would have prevented this crisis.
You could visit an alternate timeline where you have as much renewable investment into energy as you'd like going back decades and while it would help with the fertiliser situation massively it wouldn't solve the problem of needing a supply of carbon atoms to make the carbon-based substances in the list.
You can't make insulin, brake fluid or PVC out of electricity alone.
> it wouldn't solve the problem of needing a supply of carbon atoms to make the carbon-based substances in the list.
How many of that could be substituted with biomass? We're already making natural gas replacements using feces, food and agricultural waste, and we're making diesel fuel replacements - in case of doubt, at least older diesel engines can burn straight olive, sunflower or rapeseed oil, just modern ones will possibly incur expensive damage in the high-pressure fuel distribution section.
> You can't make insulin, brake fluid or PVC out of electricity alone.
Insulin is made with GMO bacteria these days, so all we need is something to feed the bacteria with, IIRC it's glucose which you can easily create from any sort of starch-containing plant.
I think the point is that a world with renewable electricity wouldn't need as much oil, thereby making smaller sources of carbon sufficient.
Pakistan saves $6B/year on fossil fuel imports with their recent surge in solar, for example.
Surprise Solar Uptake in Pakistan Cushions Mideast Energy Shock - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-17/surprise-... | https://archive.today/QdgdQ - March 17th, 2026
> Millions of factories, farmers, and households have switched to cheap solar panels from China, driving a 40% drop in Pakistan’s fossil fuel imports between 2022 and 2024, the researchers found. Additionally, the country is estimated to have saved $12 billion through reduced LNG imports in the past five years as cumulative imports of Chinese photovoltaics soared past 50 gigawatts, the report said.
Pakistan’s solar boom is bigger than official data shows - https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/03/19/pakistans-solar-boom-... - March 19th, 2026
> The policy paper Electrons In, Hydrocarbons Out: Pakistan’s Quest for Economic and Resource Efficiency found that up to $120 billion in future fuel imports could be avoided over the lifetime of the 48 GW of solar modules Pakistan had imported as of June 2025. The study’s co-author, Nabiya Imran, told pv magazine that with solar module imports into Pakistan now totaling 51.5 GW, around $180 billion in fossil fuel imports could be avoided. Imran added these solar imports could generate a total 1,730 TWh over their lifetime.
Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915 - November 2025 (254 comments)
Pakistan's 22 GW Solar Shock: How a Fragile State Went Full Clean Energy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43620309 - April 2025 (35 comments)
The West is doing everything it can to limit solar from China. Which is idiotic, we should be trading anything and everything for those low cost panels from China.
You don't have to get carbon from oil extracted from underground and you don't have to get oil from the middle east. That's merely where the bulk of it happens to come from at present for price and historical reasons.
Yes, but all those things, combined, are 20% of the usage. I'd say if you remove about the 50 % used for cars, that's a pretty large improvement.
Hormuz might not matter that much in the future since Saudi and the other countries will build even more pipelines and ports which are on the other side. Short-term is dire though.
That would require some super effective anti air. Otherwise such a pipeline is an easy target.
And even the most anti air protected place on earth - Negev plant near Dimona city got hit with a warning shot. And they have 3 or 4 layers of anti air, most of them doubled (both US and Isreaeli). It's impossible to protect multiple pipelines to that extent.
And Isreal just said that they will keep attacking Iran no matter any peace deals or armistice.
The only logical course of action for Iran is to go down swinging, taking the rest of the world with them.
It did not. Dimona city got hit. https://t.me/QudsNen/215116
Plant is far away from there.
As if those can’t be blown up with $300 FPVs or $10k Shahids…
You’re choosing willful ignorance if you think petrochemicals will be replaced by renewables in your lifetime.
It isn’t going to happen. Planes don’t run on solar. Boats don’t run on renewables. The lubricant needed for wind turbines comes out of the earth. Dams need the same lubricant. Building roads, oil. Installing renewable infrastructure, oil. Running combines to harvest vegetation, oil. Building renewables requires massive amounts of oil.
Renewables are amazing and I’m all for them. Let’s keep that train rolling.
Oil isn’t going away, pretending otherwise is willful ignorance.
Oil isn't magic, you can just make it, and the reason we don't is merely that it's expensive to do that, whereas it's just there under the ground - as a fossil fuel.
But because you can just make it from ingredients everybody already has, this puts a ceiling on its actual price if you have energy independence. If you need to burn oil, you can't make oil because that's a vicious circle which would need even more oil. But so long as the only you want oil is for its other properties that's fine.
Hydrocarbons are incredibly simple, the clue is in their name, a bunch of Hydrogen (literally the most common element in the whole universe) and Carbon (also extremely common). The only reason not to make any particular hydrocarbons you need (e.g. to make JetA for a airliner) is it'd be very energy intensive and instead you can just distil some crude oil to get the hydrocarbons you want...
Strictly speaking, the oil in the Earth's crust is both finite and more than 50% already extracted.
However, a closed cycle of renewable-powered vehicles and processing sites growing crops for biorefineries which are then hydrocracked into the various petrochemical additives to maintain the infrastructure with surplus left over for the rest of society has been proven to be viable going back to the early 2010s.
Leong et al has a great survey of how the entire market of irreplaceable petrochemical uses (e.g. medical grade plastic) and their upstream steps (e.g. metal smelting for making agricultural vehicles) can theoretically be made to work from wind alone, with total immunity to peak oil when it does eventually happen. Although the carbon molecules are essential, having a no-oil well industrial civilization is just a matter of long and arduous implementation and negotiation with vested interests.
Don't forget that we need cadmium for batteries, asbestos for brake pads, and mercury for lightbulbs.
Did you read the comment you replied to?
> This is, on the high end, 20% of the use of fossil fuels. We overwhelmingly burn oil and gas. If we displaced the burning, Hormuz would not matter (or would minimally matter for a few molecules) and the world would be awash in abundant supplies.
You missed the point of my comment.
> It isn’t going to happen. Planes don’t run on solar. Boats don’t run on renewables. The lubricant needed for wind turbines comes out of the earth. Dams need the same lubricant. Building roads, oil. Installing renewable infrastructure, oil. Running combines to harvest vegetation, oil. Building renewables requires massive amounts of oil.
All of this? About 30% of oil usage on the high end. You are listing the small uses for oil.
May some oil always be needed? Yes. But nowhere near as much as we produce today.
On the low end, we will still synthesize what we need from whatever feed stock is available. Lots of pure industrial intermediate chemicals are synthesized out of natural gas.
Oil will not be viable for transportation and heating very soon due to market pressure alone.
Ships are starting to become electrified. Currently for fixed routes.
You can't provide heating in winter using renewables.
You can, and should, over the entirety of europe apart from the northern parts of the nordic countries electric heat pumps are now simply more efficient than gas powered furnaces. This is true even if powered by gas based electricity - but obviously makes it possible to power them via renewables as well.
People in Quebec (Canada), which is colder than just about all of Europe, have been providing heating in winter using renewables for decades (thanks to an excess of renewables).
most of the countries don't have enough hydro to make it feasible
Yeah, but now wind and solar have made it feasible just about everywhere.
There's little sunshine in winter. Wind is better but it's still intermittent.
Panels are cheap enough that you can overprovision for winter sun.
There are a gazillion battery techs being developed right now (regular lithium ion - with variations like NMC, LFP, ...), solid state lithion ion, sodium ion.
You can over provision solar as someone said.
There's geothermal, tidal, etc.
Long distance high voltage electricity transmission at scale.
Electricity is a marvel and we're just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with it. Betting against it is like betting against electronics, a risky proposition.
And geothermal, biogas and tidal.
Wot?
Solar makes a fair bit where I am. Hydro works fine. Geothermal works fine. Wind works fine. Aircon is very efficient.
This is harder in plenty of regions but a blanket ‘can’t be done’ is way off the mark.
My wood pellet stove begs to differ.
...you can? Electric heaters exist?
Always worth mentioning we should be using heat pumps, not straight resistive heating.
For sure. Heat pumps aren't the best option everywhere (though modern heat pumps probably function acceptably at lower temperatures than most people realize), but if you need to do electric heating, they are the best option most places.
For "human" temperatures don't they just degrade back to the efficiency of resistive heating? Or are some places actually cold enough to push the factor below 1?
On the plus side, Trump is helping Europe and Asia meet their climate goals.
<ducks for cover>
I hear diesel is running out in NSW and Queensland Australia. Good thing you don't need diesel to run mining operations. Oh wait..
I was just talking to a kiwi yesterday about diesel. The price has more than doubled already there. So there goes large chunk of the US beef supply.
According to Unusual Whales on Twitter, Australia just ordered an emergency fuel shipment from the US: https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/2037650368390144243
> the US is not going to accept Iran's terms
There's no reason to assume it won't. It might not voluntarily but it looks a lot like it's either going to be forced to accept them, or it's going to become an irrelevant actor one way or another leaving Iran to set terms by default.
Other countries are switching to the yuan global reserve currency and petrocurrency in order to be allowed passage through Hormuz. The US has no counter to this (besides ending the war, which it won't) and with how much the US relies on these two things to be globally relevant, if this continues then oil prices will return to normal, will be traded in yuan, and there will no longer be a US. A complete own goal and possibly the fastest self destruction by unforced error in all of human history.
Europe will lag behind the trend because of its alliance with the US but it will turn eventually in order to get low oil prices. When the US attempted to force Europe to sanction Iran several years ago, Europe invented a system to evade them (INSTEX).
US bond markets have just locked up this week. The US found itself unable to borrow more money at any price - nobody wants to lend it. Banks turned off their automated trading systems because they can't work in this environment. This is a symptom of global dedollarization. While this shock may only last a few days the frequency of this sort of this sort of thing is rapidly increasing, and when a government can't borrow money any more it has no choice but to print it to pay its debts, and we know where that leads: Weimar-style hyperinflation.
Clearly the US needs to start bombing ships that switch to the yuan.
Yes, it seems like the next logical move would be for the US to blockade the strait. Ironic.
Most people just don't understand what a monumental rewrite of global politics this is and (IMHO) it will go down as the worst foreign policy mistake in US history and it's not even close. Some might say "what about Vietnam?" No, this is worse, geopolitically. WhY/ Because there was never any possibility of success. The US simply doesn't have the military capability to depose the regime or open the Strait and Pentagon military planners all knew this beforehand.
The big winners are:
- China. They're already going renewable at a rapid pace. They have a massive stockpile of oil (~1.4B barrels) and they're still receiving oil from Iran. This diminishes US influence in the the world and increases China's influence;
- Russia: this crisis will probably force the West to make peace with Russia and they'll retain any current Ukrainian territory just to secure Russian energy exports, particularly natural gas;
- Iran: the sanctions are over. Prior to all this Iran was selling oil to China for below market rate, less than $50/barrel. Now? They're legally able to sell it and get market rates, which are more like ~$120/barrel. Iran may well still get a regime of charging ships to traverse the Strait after the war is over;
Who are the losers?
- Europe: this is going to massively increase energy costs for years;
- Ukraine: see above (Russia);
- The US: massively decreased influence, particularly in the Middle East;
- Israel: there will be no regime change in Iran, Iran will come out in a better position and this may well be the first crack in the US-Israel relationship because Israel dog-walked the US into this war. The Iron Dome has shown to be not as impenetrable as once thought;
- The Gulf states: they face a tough choice between remaining US client states or breaking free. Breaking free probably means their monarchies and despotic regimes will fall. The myth of the US security guarantee has been broken. These regimes will probably stick with the US for their own survival and we may see some of them fall anyway (eg Bahrain).
I agree with your main point: "just go renewable" is both naive and utterly useless advice. That's a decades-long project. Also, who makes all the solar panels (and probably windmills)? China.
It is a little different because the US is a net energy exporter now and definitely wasn't in the 1970s. Still, there will be higher prices for everything and the US can't realistically block exports to keep prices low because other countries will stop sending us stuff.
Were the president anyone else, they would be impeached and removed from office. That's how bad this is. But we live in a post-truth world the the president is the leader of a cult.
> I agree with your main point: "just go renewable" is both naive and utterly useless advice. That's a decades-long project. Also, who makes all the solar panels (and probably windmills)? China.
This is the key point a lot of people miss, the vast majority of equipment needed to actually use renewables requires Chinese products. If you go 100% renewables, you're only replacing one form of dependence (oil) for another,
Once you get NREs set up you don't need a constant uninterrupted supply of replacements as fossil fuels do (we burn them after all).
We'd need replacements as old infrastructure ages out but it seems much easier to wait out a supply disruption compared to oil since this just means using old equipment while the supply is cut; sure some might break after a while but electricity production wouldn't fall immediately.
I can't believe they made an account for that comment. Like each action carries the same weight. Renewables, esp solar are super low maintenance. When you buy panels, barring some manufacturing defect, you buy them for the life of the project, not the panel.
Solar lasts so long, it is a one time purchase.
Yes, but is it a mistake or deliberate? The Iran war has been planned since GW Bush.
Now we have a president who hates the EU and Ukraine more than he hates Russia and China and he has Greenland ambitions.
He is currently dragging out the war and Rubio was in the EU to string people along yet again.
If he drags out the war long enough, the EU might need to make concessions on certain issues.
What the EU should do but is too stupid to do: It should immediately negotiate with China and Russia to create jealousy (that is what Trump does, he understands that) and say: While you are doing your extended Iran adventure, we'll drop sanctions on Russian gas and import LNG.
That is literally the only language Trump understands and then the deep state will put him on a leash. Trump would hate nothing more than EU overtures to Putin while he is left out of the negotiations.
Sometimes you have to use all options to get things done.
> Russia: this crisis will probably force the West to make peace with Russia and they'll retain any current Ukrainian territory just to secure Russian energy exports, particularly natural gas;
The West is not the only party in this war and Ukraine has shown many times that it can do its own thing. Ukraine was supposed to roll over and die in 3 days and it has just managed to liberate about 500sqkm of territory, 4 years after the start of the war. Plus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22xoretdhbm
Ukraine is completely dependent on arms from the US and Europe to sustain the war effort. Ukraine is running out of men to serve in the Army. Ukraine has no path to reclaim the territory it's lost.
I'm not making a judgment about whether or not this is right. This is just a sober analysis of the situation. And that is that the war is stalemated and the only way this gets resolved is to declare peace at the current borders. This grand misadventure by the US and Israel in Iran just made that more likely.
>Ukraine is running out of men to serve in the Army.
Ukraine has made some remarkable achievements lately in doing more with less while Russia seems to be perfecting how to do less with more.
Your sober analysis of the situation overlooks what many respectable analysts are saying.
Ukraine has become probably the de facto #1 drone based military in the world right now.
It's made the first production use drone type that uses practically 0 Chinese manufactured components. It's making more types that use off the shelf components but are otherwise 100% Ukrainian made. Its drone types are getting more and more sophisticated and larger, with the biggest having a 3000km, 1 ton payload. That's besides the ground or sea drones.
Watch the video I linked (and several more from the same channel if you have time).
Also Russia's army is being attrited faster than reconstituted, at the moment. That's a long way to say that the Russian army in Ukraine is shrinking.
Ukraine is dependent on European finances. And the EU has guaranteed funding for at least 2 more years. The US isn't helping with any equipment, weapons. Every US weapons Ukraine uses is paid for, by Ukraine and its allies.
The real danger is if Europe flinches, which would be a monumentally bad decision as Ukraine is finally winning the war of attrition.
The world is way too stable for a real crisis. The west is much more resilient than a lot of people think. Nothing will really change. Life will go on.
If the price of the blockade is as high as you outline, the price to secure the strait military might look comparatively lower.
And, looking at the scenario you’re describing, it could be the most sane thing to do at this point.
It is asymmetrical warfare. A hundred plus ships went through the straight daily. Attackers only need to occasionally damage a ship to make the crossing look deeply unappealing. No military intervention can promise 100% defense to passing vessels.
Whatever Iran wants is the cheapest course to resolution.
We could achieve "peace for our time"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time
All peace is transient, the question is for how long per unit of investment of blood, treasure, and time. Invest efficiently.
As the value of the oil goes up it becomes worth it to risk the ship. Even if you're paying to insure it there's an equilibrium point between odds and value.
Obviously 50-50 doesn't pencil out at $100 or even $200 a barrel. But 1:50 might at $2xx. IDK I'm not a shipping expert.
Technically true, but ship + cargo are going to be worth over a billion dollars. Any ship carrying petroleum products is going up be a juicy target for the Iranians looking to flex their muscles.
Someone could say the risk is financially worth it, but you are not going to have many takers. Also might find few crew who want to sign onto your vessels.
I wonder what's the EROI on building a tanker with 2% chance of being hit each time. They hold a lot fuel, but making them can't be light on energy.
> becomes worth it to risk the ship
There are a lot of human beings on those ships. It strikes me as awful that their lives would be risked under these circumstances, and that happening wouldn't really be a proper solution to the overarching problem. It would be something of a tragedy if things got so severe that the risk was assumed worthwhile and presumably, people on board were exposed to it outside of their will or control. I suspect many of them don't have a lot of options.
100 people will die on American roads today, and another tomorrow. Most of them die because they commute to work because a lower paying job closer, or a smaller dwelling near their job, isn't that appealing. Another portion will die because driving aggressively and fast seemed fun. Another portion will die because they like alcohol more than safety.
Yes, but I don't think we should accept these deaths either, and I see them as worth preventing and avoiding as well.
I also see false equivalence here in that the risk of death doesn't seem fungible. You're taking an aggregate death toll distributed across hundreds of millions of people, involving totally different voluntariness and causal structures.
Thank you for your service. I mean it.
People kept sailing past the Houthis even though some ships got attacked. They sailed past Somali pirates too. So ships obviously tolerate some level of risk from violence.
Yeah, Ansar Allah were quite nice even when attacking the civilian ships. Not a lot of victims.
Iran is not very nice to the ships, judging from videos and results of attacks.
There's a very noticeable difference. There are no parties, music videos, ship tours to abducted ships... with Iran, etc.
With Iran, the ships end up like this https://t.me/QudsNen/216170 or this https://t.me/presstv/179430
The problem is that Iran can defend the strait against the world's most advanced military with drones built with commercial hardware for 30-50K per drone. And that doesn't even take into account escalation, as if the US escalates then Iran will likely start targeting critical infrastructure in the region, making the crisis worse.
The US and Israel are rapidly running out of munitions, while Iran is being resupplied by Russia (https://www.ft.com/content/d5d7291b-8a53-42cd-b10a-4e02fbcf9...) which is much more tooled out for munition production compared to NATO. The US also relies on both rare earths and Chinese supply chain for a lot of its munitions (which it is running low on).
IMO the best option is for Trump to TACO, take the major L, and cede Iran its demands, but this would partially mean an alignment shift from Israel which still feels unthinkable based on the US political realities.
Can I just state the horrible reality: Only as long as we accept that islamists get to attack civilians directly and other armies don't. If we fight with the same rules, this stops being a problem.
There comes a point where there is only one decision left.
So let's just fully descend to barbarism too, because petrol is a touch on the pricey side and I wanted to go on vacation to Spain this year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
> the price to secure the straight military might look comparatively lower.
The price to secure the straight militarily is a full ground invasion of Iran.
This would be done against a country four times bigger (in population and size) than Iraq, with the kind of terrain that makes Afghanistan look easily accessible, done without the help of a coalition of fools, because this isn't 2003, and nobody in Europe is very eager to send their kids to die for a war that Trump's ego started. His 2025 attempts to 'ingrate' himself with Europe are paying dividends now.
Also, if you think the war is unpopular now (nobody but the 40% of the country that's MAGA-brained supports it - and those guys will support anything), imagine what the popularity would be like with a full mobilization and invasion.
The GOPniks aren't that eager to become a 31-seat party this November.
... and if Iran keeps raising it will eventually become the only choice available, at which point we'll do it (and can I just say the truly horrible part: ... which was going to happen at some point anyway with the islamists in power)
How did you read the previous comment and decide that "insanity is the only option"?
The sane option would be to back down.
And no, not every adversarial regime can be taken down. The Soviet Union had to fall, nobody was going to invade it.
So... why is fuel 25% cheaper in Slovenia than in the neighbouring country while Solvenia is simultaneously having issues with running out of fuel?
Seems like the obvious solution is to raise prices so people stop driving to your country (wasting fuel, ironically) to take your cheap fuel instead of just paying for the fuel in their own country. More than that it's a solution the free market would actually find on its own...
It's not a free market. Off-highway prices are regulated and were adjusted by the executive govt branch on biweekly basis, now switched to weekly. Slovenia is small and "gas tourism" is common since fossil juices in neighboring countries are priced higher.
Why not raise the prices? Sure, but then don't complain about the inflation, revolt, and stoning of elected representatives.
We can barely afford it at the current price. The solution would be charging foreign transit the non-regulated price but that would be considered discriminatory.
Price increases tend to be regressive—the poor person who needs a little fuel to get to their job is hurt more than the large business that uses a lot more fuel but has much, much more money overall.
There are things you can do to try and even things out. Etherium has been considering “quadratic voting” to solve a similar problem (in this case, that would look like tracking consumption and increasing the unit price of fuel as you consume more fuel, so that cost goes up quadratically with consumption). That seems hard to enforce, though, and doesn’t help with foreign opportunists.
I'm totally ignorant as to Slovenia, but as a general comment on taxation regressive price increases/externality taxes/sin taxes are easily made up for by simply giving everyone a fixed sum of money (that can either be gathered specifically through the regressive tax or just through the normal non-regressive tax pool).
Ethereum has the weird issue where "votes" and "money" are different things and they only want to redistribute votes and not money, but that's not a problem here...
There was an election recently and it’s possible there will soon be another… That’s why the fuel is so cheap.
its usually differences in taxation, they vary a lot across europe
This BBC article does a really poor job of explaining the context of this situation or why fuel would be so much cheaper in Slovenia, so I had to look around. Slovenia apparently introduced fuel price regulations last year (for motorway service stations; off-motorway stations have been regulated for longer), as a means of reducing costs for consumers[0]. These price caps were, in fact, removed a week ago[1], and prices at some stations rose considerably in the aftermath, closer to the Austrian prices across the border.[2] I won't speak to the wisdom of the Slovenian government in trying to cap fuel prices, but however well-intentioned the policy was, it didn't last long in the face of a global energy crunch. [0] https://sloveniatimes.com/43824/fuel-price-regulation-expand... [1] https://www.brusselstimes.com/2037901/slovenia-imposes-fuel-... [2] https://sloveniatimes.com/47009/prices-at-the-pump-up-substa...
One thing you have to keep in mind is that in Slovenia, your employer is required to cover your commuting expenses. If there’s no viable public transit option (which is the case for most of Slovenia outside of bigger cities), they have to pay you for gas per km.
So if the regulations were to suddenly be lifted, this would have a domino effect on not only truckers but also regular commuters, which would then mean companies would have to compensate for the increased labour costs by raising the prices of their products/services even more.
I'm not sure about that. AFAIK it's just per km and not impacted by gas price.
https://www.racunovodja.com/clanki.asp?clanek=232/kilometrin...
Which is adjusted to compensate for inflation of fuel prices every few years, so they would eventually have to raise that to cover the increased prices.
In Slovenia, fuel prices have been regulated since, like, forever.
A few years ago (or last year? not sure) they were deregulated on the highways (i.e. to make tourists pay more) but then the government changed their mind (several times, IIRC).
They were deregulated on highway for a very long time. Deregulation came to off-highway in 2020 as the loss of demand due to covid made the prices drop. Rusian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent price hikes made the govt regulate the prices again.
Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.
Fuel prices are regulated here, and we had an election right now and a huge gas price hike would be bad for the current government (not decided yet if they stay or go). The government basically lowered the gas tax for a bit to keep prices stable (they also raised the gas taxes during covid to keep the prices "stable").
The prices will go up soon, that's why everyone is panicking and filling up canisters of gas.
If you want to see the end state of lack of oil, look no further than Cuba's current state of affairs. It's dire.
Also for the naive people in the comments who say "invest in renewables" it's not that simple. You can buy electric cars but the car's whole manufacturing process had multiple steps that required oil. The same applies to everything, it's not a single layer issues, it's a multi-layer issue that needs addressing from the ground and takes years and years with full investment. The boats, the planes require fuel. The industrial machinery requires fuel. We need to address it from the ground up and it's not an easy feat.
We should 100% invest and diversify energy production, but the reality is that even if we had a surplus of renewable energy on the grid, that wouldn't save a country because there are too many cogs that need oil right now that need replacing.
It’s not 100% of oil production capacity that is lost, but 20%. You need to cut demand by that, so electric cars can help extremely, because most oil is consumed during car use, not production.
50L/day - with no other limits - sounds like a lot. Are there really fuel tourists coming in en masse and taking more than this? With zero tracking of enforcement whatsoever, people will just hit up a few different nearby gas stations instead of one anyways and that's it.
Hey man,sometimes you just have to drive 400 miles a day, everyday.
That was me today, Thursday, Monday and last Friday though I suppose a couple of them were "only" 300 miles. I'm not normal though.
And if I gave a crap about western white collar standards for acceptable vehicle loading I'd have had to do it all twice or take a vehicle that uses twice the fuel lol.
Im with you, I tow some goofy things with a sedan and a custom tow hitch I welded and installed. But in general terms, limiting people to top 1% of travel distances daily in an emergency is pretty mild.
Hope that gets Europe to invest in renewables and leave oil behind.
Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.
"As a direct result of the 1973 oil crisis, on 6 March 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced what became known as the 'Messmer Plan', a hugely ambitious nuclear power program aimed at generating most of France's electricity from nuclear power. At the time of the oil crisis most of France's electricity came from foreign oil. "
"Work on the first three plants, at Tricastin, Gravelines, and Dampierre, started the same year and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
Sounds like a good plan unless we've invented 2 much cheaper and faster to deploy methods to generate electricity.
You probably mean 3 much cheaper and faster to deploy methods to generate electricity. In Germany, Poland, Balkans it's solar, wind, coal.
Coal is generally more expensive than nuclear if you factor in health and carbon, which you should.
The way the EU forces the electricity market to operate makes them completely unprofitable. Renewables are always given priority in the market, which results in other power plants operating at a capacity factor of 30-40%. Since nuclear power plants are mostly capital expenditure-intensive, this makes the electricity they produce absurdly expensive.
Because the way how the EU electricity market operates first to supply electric power are the power plants with the lowest operating costs. This are usually renewables and nuclear power plants. Both are capital expensive and cheap in operating costs.
Usually the capacity factor of European nuclear reactors is higher than 60%.
olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor, had capacity factor 70% in the year 2024: https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/o...
Mochovce-3 had capacity factor 74% in the year 2024: https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/M...
In the U.S. they really try to get maximum from nuclear reactors. https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/W...
> Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.
This is 2026. Doing things in 1974 isn't an option because time's arrow points the wrong way.
If you want Europe to do things now that it should have done in 1974 you'd need to explain how it'll stall on all the consequences for years. France, which you held up as a model says it can build a nuclear generator in about 5-6 years, but none of these optimistic projections came true this century, more typically the plant takes 10-15 years and it can be more.
So, suppose they start today likely they'll say the generator goes online in 2032. How does that help with the crisis Trump caused this month ? Worse, come 2032 the date is likely to be 2040 instead.
Now, renewables go a lot faster. For solar it's genuinely possible to get paperwork done in January and be selling electricity made with those panels by summer. It's not easy, plenty of projects will be delayed out a 1-2 years, particularly if local government don't want the project, but with a following wind it can really be the same year. Wind is slower, but still you will almost certainly build it and switch it on in five years, the optimistic guess France never hits for its nuclear plants.
In 20 years we’ll have one plant for $20 billion that generates electricity that is vastly more expensive than solar.
No, that is a terrible idea.
I agree. Ironically ones complaining the loudest about fuel prices are be far-right populists, who tend to be against renewables.
Electric cars aren't cheap, and electricity prices are very high in Europe.
Not true. No new car is cheap, and electricity is now cheaper than gas or diesel.
My parents just bought a new BYD Dolphin, and it cost 3 EUR to go 150 km, whereas my diesel car costs 15 EUR for the same route.
I don't know how people can say electric cars aren't cheaper. It's a 5x difference!
I’m sure your specific circumstances apply to everyone else equally
Oh you're right, these cars and this fuel pump are made exclusively for me.
BYD EVs are affordable. Electricity will get cheaper with more renewables, oil will not.
Define affordable. A €40k Seal is anything but affordable. Eastern Europe (and I don't put Slovenia in this case here, they are much closer to Western Europe in every sense) will not mass change to EVs suddenly when everyone is shopping for 10 years old diesels from Western Europe for maximum €10k
New cars have questionable affordability for most people. Particularly when you factor in dubious design choices and expensive marketing. Cars and driving are expensive. If that was a barrier there wouldn't be many people on the road.
Also, the Electric polo is supposed to be released at around 25k Euros. Given the lower running costs that seems like a good deal relative to legacy designs. For all those people will to spend 40k on a car you could put the money into solar panels instead.
If you think the Seal isn't affordable then don't buy one.
You can buy a brand new Dacia Spring for only £12,240. Personally I don't think it's a great car but it's certainly doesn't cost 40K.
If it were my money I'd spend a bit more on either a used Jag ePace or a Renault 5 but some people prefer new cars I guess.
> Define affordable.
Cheaper than the total cost of ownership of a combustion vehicle at $150-$200/barrel for prolonged periods of time.
Are We Approaching an Unprecedented Energy Crisis? - https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-energy/iran-war-... - March 26th, 2026
France confirms oil crisis, says 30-40 percent of Gulf energy infrastructure destroyed - https://www.france24.com/en/france-confirms-oil-crisis-says-... - March 25th, 2026
Even the best-case scenario for energy markets is disastrous - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/03/22/e... | https://archive.today/5OhRI - March 22nd, 2026
Yeah as if Europe doesn't have Oil it isn't exploiting because of renewable legislation..
Europe simply does not have enough known oil reserves to put a dent in current prices even if it exploited them all.
There may still be good arguments to do so anyway, such as it being less carbon intensive than importing oil, but there is absolutely no magic lever we can pull that would fix this problem that we're just not pulling due to renewables legislation.
Britain could start extracting oil from its European fields instead of just buying the same oil and gas from Denmark. Sanctions could be lifted on Russian oil. Duties could be dropped. There are levers.
Sure just send the continental german army straight for the oil fields, worked out great last time.
Hasn't Germany and the UK been investing in renewables for years now? They must be feeling pretty happy about that decision right now unlike oil obsessed countries like the US.
A quarter of a century ago, the first quarter of 2001, Britain used 39 TWh of coal electrical generation, 36 TWh of gas and 21 TWh of nuclear.
Today we're lot more energy efficient†, and the renewables made more than 25 TWh, but nuclear is now less than 10 TWh, we of course no longer burn coal, which leaves 30 TWh of gas still and we have a lot more imports (because we have a lot more interconnect, which is also a form of energy security)
† For example back then we mostly used incandescent light bulbs! And a lot of people still used CRT televisions back then!
For electricity generation, the UK is currently generating 50% via renewables. It goes up and down each day of course, storage is not a solved problem yet.
Nice visualisations of the current status: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Electricity is only a part of the whole energy sector, but it's relevant to this thread about EVs.
Yes, but it is not enough. It helps a lot when sunny, and weekend mid-day gross market prices for electricity hover just above zero, but there's not enough batteries, flexibility, and other renewables to avoid price spikes in the morning and evening peak, when hydro and gas plants are still covering a lot.
Partly, though both have had periods of right wing governments trying to make this problem worse to benefit their oil and gas industry backers.
And now the same people are saying that the answer is more oil and gas.
Europe has no (meaningful amounts of economically viable to extract) lithium either.
Europe has massive lithium reserves in Germany, Serbia, Portugal and ukraine but perhaps more importantly it also has friendly relations with other countries with reserves
if those reserves were economically viable to extract, they would be already being extracted.
Like this? https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/vulcan-energy-achieves-drilli...
Economic viability depends on many things, lithium prices have been pretty volatile in the past, battery production in Europe as customers are just scaling up.
Prices change.
"Lithium mining commences in Finland"
https://www.electrive.com/2026/02/12/lithium-mining-commence...
This week, the first spodumene vein was blasted from the rock at the open-pit mine in western Finland, marking the occasion with a ceremonial event attended by invited guests and media.
Eh, the war in Ukraine has kind of proven that the Europeans are not all that capable of action. There has been an enormous incentive to have been getting rid of oil dependency for 4 years now.
> the war in Ukraine has kind of proven that the Europeans are not all that capable of action.
It’s revealed a fair bit about America too. And this oil crisis is a fairly incredible screw up too. What did the US think would happen?
> It’s revealed a fair bit about America too.
That America is incredibly generous with resources in a conflict has no possible bearing on the security of their continent?
I don't see Europe sending billions of its taxpayer dollars to resolve conflicts in Africa and Asia. (It barely manages to do so for a conflict right next door!)
There was a delegation of Asian (I think?) leaders in Europe a few years ago, and when Europe pressured them to take action re Ukraine-Russia, they politely pointed out that when a war breaks out in Europe they are told it's an existential global crisis, and when a conflict breaks out in Asia or Africa, Europe just sort of yawns and issues a sleepy statement calling for international law to be respected (which is European for 'thoughts and prayers').
Personally, I care about Ukraine and want them to prevail. But the myopia and arrogance of Europeans on this is astonishing. If this were a conflict in Asia or Africa, Europe would never have given even a fraction of the support that America has given Ukraine. Not a million years. And then, having failed to provide for their own security, having profiteered from Russian oil and gas for decades, and having secured vast amounts of support from the rest of the world when faced with the consequences of their own failures, European leaders have the audacity to suggest they're not getting enough? That the rest of the world is failing them? How much money, exactly, is the average rice farmer in Asia supposed to owe for Europe's security? And why do much wealthier Europeans never seem to owe him back anything in return?
Americans want to be the world's police until it's time to do something righteous.
Do they, though? They seem to very consistently vote against foreign entanglements, before their own leaders betray them, pressed into action by foreign allies advocating their own narrow regional interests (Europe on Russia, Israel on Iran, etc).
Not clear to me why some working mum in Idaho is obliged to pay for Hungary's security when even the Hungarians refuse to do so, but hey, enjoy this meme while it lasts. The US won't remain the world's policeman for too much longer, and we're all in for a much darker world without them.
You do realize that Russia is and will continue being an enemy of the US, right? Even now it's providing Iran with intel to kill US soldiers.
Russia is primarily a threat to Europe, but not only.
And what do you imagine will happen if Russia gets the gang back together? Ukraine, Belarus, Baltics, most of Eastern Europe. Do you think Soviet Union 2.0, now with more fascism, will be friendlier to the US?
I know Americans love to pretend they live on another planet, but now we have global trade, ICBMs and many more interesting ways to hurt humans on the other side of the world. We're no longer living in the 1800s.
The US is a net exporter of crude oil and is positioned to meet an oil crisis better than nearly anyone else. What do you think the US government expected from this?
> What do you think the US government expected from this?
That they’d beat Iran and have some friendly dictator installed in short order.
Are you arguing that this is going how the US planned?
When was the last time the US had this much trouble getting its allies to follow it into war?
Being positioned to eat shit better than anyone else is still eating shit. Our economy isn't independent of the rest of the world.
Datacenter investment is currently a noticable fraction of US GDP. That's as globalized as it gets, we aren't even remotely self sufficient on that front. What happens to our economy if that segment crumbles overnight?
The problem with getting rid of oil is that cars currently in use will be usable even when over 20 years old, replacing them with EVs is expensive, and the good enough and economically accessible EVs are only now starting to get to market.
It's really hard to quickly replace millions of vehicles.
Raising the price of fuel will do wonders for solving that.
In California my electricity to drive my Chevy Volt is more expensive than gasoline, if gasoline is less than $5 a gallon. So for basically the last 100k miles I've owned it, electricity was more expensive. The same goes for many plugin hybrids. Luxury EVs still win out because luxury sedans usually only get 25 mpg mixed max.
US fuel is so cheap compared to the rest of the world.
If my maths is correct, we are paying US$6.10 a gallon here in NZ.
In the UK the average price is (by my math) ~US$7.50
I knew the CA grid was in a bad place but wow. What are you paying per kWh?
$0.44 A first gen Volt takes 10.3kwh. It also uses electricity to cool the batteries while charging. If you leave it plugged in one a hot day it will cool the battery just for health overall but I'll ignore that. Then, add in the losses on the charge conversions.
It easily takes 11kwh to charge a Volt. It'll go about 35 miles in the summer on that charge, and more like 28 in the winter.
It also gets 35 mpg on gasoline, while providing free heat in the winter from the gas engine heat, and for most of the last few years was doing this for $3.50-$4 a gallon.
There are people on Southern California/San Diego that pay more. Over there people say the Prius Prime is WAY cheaper to operate on gas because it gets 50mpg gasoline.
I've even heard people running their home off gasoline because it's cheaper but that would require an impressive gas generator to do long term.
That won't "solve" anything. Car prices will rise, many people can't afford the switch regardless, too much new EV demand could destabilize the grid in population centers, and throwing away vehicles that are already on the road by replacing them with newly manufactured ones is terrible from an emissions perspective.
Germany has switched from one gas supplier to different gas suppliers.
The past Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck famously once sad: “Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all,” “We have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem – at least not generally throughout the country.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/12/german-says-nuclear...
How do you put renewables into the petrol tank?
Well if you have regulated fuel prices, and free trade and travel with neighboring countries (the whole point of the EU), you're gonna see arbitrage if those countries aren't regulating fuel prices.
Options are to either un-regulate the prices, or ration the fuel sales.
Bulgaria.. today.. 95 gasoline , on nearest OMV station = ~~ 1.42E/liter (more prices at [0] : 1.26-2.15E)
https://fuelo.net/cheap/where?lang=bg&order=cheap&fuel_type=...
come here, the water is fine :)
Also
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/slovakia-die...
Note that this looks to have been a few days ago:
> 23 March 2026
50 liters per day...
Those limits also do exists somehow in other countries. In France for example it's been a very long time some petrol station say "150 EUR maximum". People are going to say it's not a "real" limit but I did hit it once or twice while going on vacation: 80 liters tank, near empty / car only taking 98 octane fuel (more expensive than 95) / ultra-pricey fuel at petrol stations on the highway (so pricey it's usually cheaper to just get off the highway, fill the tank in a village, and go back to the highway).
At 2.2 EUR / liter, 75 liters is 165 EUR so I was blocked at 150 EUR.
50 liters I definitely cannot fill my car entirely.
The 150€ is a reservation on your debit card before filling up, since the banks or the station doesn't want the credit risk. It's released when the actual sum is booked.
I think it's just what a reasonable "full tank" was a while back.
You can just restart if you need more.
The local farmers came with 1000l+ tanks for diesel, foreigners with multiple gas cans, etc., and the local logistics couldn't handle the pressure.
Could also be that they didn't have sufficient reserve and would rather blame hijackers?
They're blaming the lack of cisterns to transport gas from storage to individual gas stations, because everyone went to get gas, and some hoarded a lot of it
example: https://www.zurnal24.si/slovenija/bralec-v-soku-mirne-vesti-...
I mean... we also have a huge factory making toilet paper here, and we had the same toilet paper crisis during covid... everyone suddenly needed 10 packs of toilet paper for some reason.
Yes. When people saw that some stations were out of it everyone and their mom brought out their old beaters and canisters and refilled those too, just in case.
Rest assured the toilet papers fiasco didn't only affect this corner of the world.
Did they not have rationing based on odd/even number plates in 1980s?
Foreigners were coming to Slovenia just to buy gas? In such quantities that it strained infrastructure?
That definitely sounds like something that happened.
As if "multiple gas cans" wouldn't still be well under the 50 liter/day limit.
Slovenia is a small country with 2 million people, bordering countries with a total of over 82 million people. The neighbors are also relatively rich countries, such as Austria and Italy
Those are just statistics and don't have anything to do with gas.
Canada is a country of 35 million bordering a rich country of 350 million.
Driving over a border in Europe happens without you necessarily noticing.
That isn’t true of US borders.
Yes and if (1) gas in Canada were cheaper than in the US, and (2) the border between the countries was completely open, then you’d indeed see people going to Canada to buy gas.
I'm sure there's plenty of border crossings for cheaper goods.
I'm skeptical this happens in such numbers as to strain national infrastructure.
Tellingly, the ration put in place applies to Slovenian citizens, not just foreigners. Which should tell you something about "who is being blamed" vs "what solves the problem".
Did you travel in Europe? Even without crisis, gas stations are often way busier on the cheaper country's border than more expensive.
My friends living in Switzerland (near the border) always go to Germany to fuel up. And, even without a crisis, gas stations on the cheaper sides of borders are often way more crowded than on the other side.
Also, keep in mind that Slovenia is roughly the size of Los Angeles. Or not much wider than Long Island. If there fuel was 30% cheaper on one side of Long Island, than on the other, I'm sure plenty of people wouldn't think twice about that.
It would probably be illegal under EU law to discriminate between residents and non residents of Slovenia
My family with 3 people, two dirt bikes, and a gas generator for camping owns four 5 gallon gas cans. So I alone without trying can fit 80L without even filling up my car.
No numbers provided, but from TFA:
>In Slovenia, this has resulted in so-called "fuel tourism", as drivers from neighbouring countries, particularly Austria, take advantage of the lower, regulated prices here.
"Drivers" doing this isn't solved by a 50 liter limit.
Well, Slovenia is a small country and has land borders with many others. Imagine that gas in New Jersey was $1 per gallon cheaper than in New York and Pennsylvania. I guess a lot of people would drive to NJ gas stations.
Yep
And i'm saying that as a guy who drives to italy to buy pasta, booze and parmesan cheese. Two bottles of jack daniels and the cost of gas is covered by the price difference (well... not anymore).
A European buying American booze? I thought that had stopped?
Yes, mostly italians and austrians
https://svet24.si/novice/slovenija/gorivo-dizel-bencinski-se...
https://sobotainfo.com/novica/lokalno/foto-video-neverjetna-...
https://sobotainfo.com/novica/globalno/video-avstrijci-k-nam...
https://www.prlekija-on.net/lokalno/40253/ponekod-zmanjkalo-...
And it's not the first time:
https://vecer.com/slovenija/izredne-razmere-zaradi-navala-na...
I do not understand this rationing scheme.
Say I live in Austria and it is a short ride to a Slovenia Station. Can buy as much gas as I want, but citizens in Slovenia are limited ? That does not seem right.
No, as of now, you can’t pump more than 50L. Doesn’t matter whether you’re a citizen or not.
No, the rules have to be the same for all EU citizens.
I bet everyone around the world is glad that Canada decided virtue signalling is more important than exporting LNG and oil.
Ah yes, shared fuel resources controlled by the government. Sociafluel