i can't find it, but i read some article like 8 years ago about the "looming carbon bubble". it talked about a multinational capital formation of various powers that might jockey with each other for geographic supremacy, but were ultimately a singular, politically-distributed entity. it included the dominant political projects of the Russia and the US, as well the those of UK, the Gulf Monarchies, and some others i can't remember.
it talked about how this formation, in desperation, would likely spur extreme measures to maintain its supremacy over any ascendant alternatives as its various administers tried to take control. late 2000s climate science denial and 2010s post-truth counter-factuals were only the beginning. ultimately, the shift to alternatives was inevitable and the carbon bubble would collapse with an immediacy expected to shock energy markets and systems, especially those with high valuations of fossil fuel assets. like basically, at a certain point, the trillions of dollars of paper claiming ownership of unexploited fossil carbon would be worth cents on the dollar. they would be "toxic" assets, and no people with the power to exploit them would want them. supposedly the amount of institutional exposure (in these nations with these active political projects) to unexploited fossil fuel assets is extremely high.
it seemed like some pie in the sky shit, because fossil fuels are admittedly crazy for EROEI and the US alone has like 16 trillion in fossil fuel infrastructure. basically, the thesis hinged on the notion that, if complex civilization is to survive, it will have to reckon with the basic physics problem that a shitload of what's in the ground can't be burned, and that claims to ownership of these assets will be de facto worthless well before the date claimholders admit it.
i kinda wonder though. if gas/diesel/LNG go up something truly wild, like 300-1000% (basically vanishing from the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the US alone), our national system would implode and demand would collapse, as immediate local focus would be on communal efforts to feed, shelter, and organize whoever is around to start cobbling together everything that was powered some other way. as that slowly bore fruit and the old infrastructure decayed from lack of maintenance, who in their right mind would really want to switch back assuming the prices came down? like maybe, the shocks of supply constraints, if they go high enough and long enough, could structurally tank demand.
i don't think we're there yet, but who even knows wtf this is going to look like in 6 months. like say some brainrotted freak lobs a nuke into the mix... that's not exactly going to restore supply either.
