• HomelyBodySallowThigh@anarchist.nexus
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        Jblog didn’t provide any sources, can I ask outside of the quips the counter critique to this line? You don’t have to explain anything, just some links, articles, etc

    • folaht@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      1 day ago

      No, it showed how important fossil fuels, especially oil, were in the 20th century.
      That’s gone now.

        • folaht@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          10
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          12 hours ago

          No. You need lots of energy/electricity to economically grow and the US has fossil fuels in abundance,
          especially coal, but it’s very high in the other two sectors as well.
          Despite that, the Soviet Union managed to grow much faster with much less, same with China.
          But the Soviet Union doesn’t have much coal and natural gas didn’t become big and cheap
          until the turn of the millennium.
          And coal has been very important in the 20th century as that provides cheap electricity, while oil mainly provides cheap transportation. The problem with oil is that it’s also easy to transport itself, so as a country like Saudi Arabia which has no coal and only oil, there’s a large chance that it will get stolen from any countries with massive coal deposits and even a larger chance for the oil to be sold by a tiny group of elites of that country to countries with massive coal deposits.

          The US, despite its absolutely massive fossil fuel deposits compared to the rest of the world,
          started to falter in the early 1970s as they had an internal oil peak, crashing their economy.
          The Soviet Union was thriving, but still had a long way to catch up as it had been a monarchy up until the early 20th century,
          plus setbacks from invasions by Germany who put all their weight on the Soviet Union and still lost.
          The US then blackmailed Saudi Arabia just in time and was able to prop up their system and even thrive
          by forcing Saudi Arabia to invest into the US or be invaded. It allowed the US to go into massive debts without worry.
          The same happened to other oil producing nations.

          It’s the US whose underlying institutional failures are showing right now.
          China has risen in the 20th century because it’s expensive coal became cheap enough over time, as all the cheaper coal had been used up. Russia managed to regain some of its power with natural gas.

          But since the early 2020s solar power has become the energy/electricity rising star and solar power is far more evenly distributed than fossil fuels.
          There’s no blackmail scheme stopping this and we’re already seeing China haven taken a giant lead in solar power, wind power and battery storage, while the US is trying to instigate a civil war while trying to ban wind power and attempting to go from blackmail to direct oil theft.