Hopefully a push further into renewable energy will be a silver lining to come from all this.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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You're not thinking like a bully with a $900 billion / year military!
Exactly, you cannot really affect a distributed source of energy the same way as oil.
In a way it already has been. China has invested so heavily into solar for two reasons: one was the crippling air pollution they were suffering but the other is that they rely almost entirely on foreign oil, and the Strait has long been a strategic weakness for them.
Their huge push into solar has driven down prices and improved efficiency for panels around the world, helping renewables actually become cheaper than coal, and a larger share of our energy generation than coal.
So to quote AI “you’re absolutely right!” And I think just the risk of what we’re now seeing has already driven this.
True, there are other compelling reasons some countries have leaned heavily into renewables. China, like you say. Also Spain and a few other European countries. Probably other ones around the world too.
I just wish that movement had more momentum to it. A massive factor in why it hasn't taken hold more is because of lobbyists, corporate power, fear of change, and general inertia. Hopefully this situation with Iran is a fucking huge wakeup call to many with influence on this topic. Though I'm not going to hold my breath on that.
I think people don’t know just how successful renewables are. Taken together, they are now the single largest global source of energy, having displaced coal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2rz08en2po
Of course, we want to see even more momentum, because while renewables have surged, so has energy demand, so fossil fuel consumption isn’t quite falling yet.
But I think you may have more reason for optimism than your comment suggests. Conservative lobbyists are not succeeding in killing renewables, except perhaps in shithole countries like Texas.
They'll still use it to make tons of plastic though.
When oil is 200/barrel industry will switch out of simple necessity.
The switch won't be instant though. There will be a lot more suffering from this kind of unplanned shift than there would have been from the kind of planned one environmentalists have been advocating for
We're way past a smooth transition. War is never something that should be cheered on, but if this if the kick in the pants humanity needs to break free from oil, that would be quite the silver lining
When it’s that high for years their hand may be forced. It’s a very slow ship to try to turn around.
It's not the Strait of Hormuz crisis, it's Trump's Epstein war
Yeah, I hate the word "crisis" here.
Yeah wow isn’t it crazy how the terminology just drifts… news outlets feel an obligation to be objective but in the face of pure stupid evil, that neutrality makes them an enabler.
We essentally eat fossil fuels (fertilizer, mechanized tilling and harvesting, transformation, packaging, transportation), right? That's how bad this is. But green/regenerative/low-processing/local can mitigate the risk of these disruptions.
We don't have to use as much. Manure still works its more work though and farmers love to optimize.
But for manure you need the animals in first place, which we should also be trying to reduce, unless you mean goats 🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐
With how the title is phrased, I'm tickled by the implication that we should eat sunlight and air instead.
We essentially already do, there are just a whole bunch of steps in between
Sure but that's all transformative in nature. Unlike rocks which we do just eat outright.
Four billion people are fed by fossil fuels
Society has been built upon a house of cards. When a basic requirement of life (i.e. food) is dependent on a non-renewable resource, we set ourselves up for an inevitable breakdown unless we change course.
TBH I thought it was closer to 9 billion but that could be a rounding error.
It's probably that in some areas, they need to use fertiliser that's based on biproducts of fossil fuel production, or that's the electricity the farms use.
Though honestly pretty much every farm uses tractors and stuff that runs on fossil fuels too
I thought the Covid pandemic taught us that shorter, local supply chains were more robust and reliable in times of crisis. Have we forgotten that already?
didn't forget. you have to learn something in order to forget it.
the fact that as soon as there was a vaccine all corporate interests aligned and forced a return to office mandate should be enough to show that nothing was learned...well...at least nothing that valuable.
however, those of us who were paying attention learned something just as valuable.
you don't matter.
it's freeing frankly. I stopped putting in 16-20 hour days. now I only put in 2-3 hours of actual work and fill the rest with hobby projects.
Fuck me, I wish I still had the capacity to put in 16-20 hour days, just for a year, hell, half a year. I'd have all my debt paid off that my ex got into.
Instead I've been working 10 hour weeks. It's been helping me recover, but no progress on getting out of debt.
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Supply chains exist so first world country can subsidize an industry they excel in and then export their manufacturng to emerging markets.
And we were going to produce green hydrogen so we could produce the ammonia we need for fertiliser without fossil fuels. What ever happens from now on, the price of methane gas will be a lot higher, at least for a while.
We don’t learn very well. If we did, we wouldn’t be in 90% of the messes we’re currently in. Human beings are largely very stupid, and I say that confidently because there are many of us who seem to be able to at least mostly handle this crazy, high-tech world, with our monket brains and all, just fine, so the rest of these idiots can absolutely go fuck themselves.
I hope this pushes the world towards alternative fuel sources
If that could work, why did it take fossil fuels to reach 8 billion in the first place?
I don't mean this in the "I'm just hurling an insult" way, but that is a genuinely stupid question.
It's stupid in the "if we evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys" way.
Yeah between fossil fuels, plastics, and petroleum based fertilizers, sometimes it seems like our entire world is made of oil.
Don't worry! Trump will freshly tar the strait of Hormus and solve the problem that way. /s
This sounds like exaggeration or media hype to me, just because the cheapest producer of the material has been knocked out doesn't mean the capacity for other countries to make more isn't there
Markets are elastic, that's part of how capitalism works, we compete against each other to sell a product and if the cheapest producer of goods in the market is out and prices go up then that gives others an incentive to come in and compete
In particular it would be good to see green ammonia expanded and higher prices may be just the incentive needed to push it along
I also highly doubt there will be any major famines out of this
Factories aren’t built overnight. Chemical processing equipment needs to be designed, ordered, built, and shipped. Capitalists need to be assured their return on capital, and this is still viewed as a temporary setback. Why spend a few billion to build a factory that might not be needed by the time it’s finished?
Production capacity of 1/4 of the world’s fertilizer is not something we just keep turned off. I expect there will be a lot of extra shifts but the price, make no mistake, will be significantly higher. Farmers won’t plant certain crops, market prices will go up, and some people will go hungry.
I just keep thinking of how Stalin and Mao were stupid and violent and killed tens of millions of their countrymen with famine through ignorant farming policies.
What!? I thought we can feed ourselves with renewable electricity and wind power??
We can, but we actually have to use renewable energy for that to happen.
we could use the magats as fertilizer but they would make everything taste like shit.
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Who said we have fully extracted ourselves, worldwide, from fossil fuels...?
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