It's not so much a tactic as a technologically-enabled event. The US is not about to "crush" Saudi Arabia, it's actively fighting along side them in Yemen.

UK petrol prices have been close to equivalent of $6/USgal for a while - currently about £1.20 per liter, £4.50/USgal = $5.67, and electric cars are still pretty scarce. Hybrid taxis have been popular for a while though.

The falling cost of EV's and renewable energy is a relatively recent phenomenon too, though. Even 5 years ago vs. now, the choice to buy EV has gotten easier.

If I were in the market for a new car, I'd be looking at EV's. I drive about 5-6000 miles a year and can't really justify the money, though (and tbh 6,000 miles a year at 50+mpg means driving is a relatively small part of my carbon footprint. Really, I need to fly less)

Gas isn't the only tipping point for EV's, it's just a single long-term savings factor. EVs also would do well with cheaper batteries, more EV options at lower cost, and local/national policy changes. I'd also expect EVs and autonomy to be synergistic, as autonomous driving systems require a lot of electrical power.

>The transformation of the US for largest importer to largest exporter

Largest producer, not largest exporter. It consumes about 20M barrels a day so it is still a net oil importer, although it is forecast to become a net exporter in 2022 [1]. The combination of the US and Canada OTOH is a net exporter, and has been for a few years, which means the US has been functionally independent from OPEC for a few years.

The US imports more heavy crude than it needs because it has a competitive advantage in refining it and in turn exports a lot of easier-to-refine light crude (the product of fracking). This this "swapping" of light crude for heavy could be discontinued with little disruption to the US economy. I.e., it does not mean much. I'm mentioning it only because someone who doesn't know about it might be misled by export statistics.

Also, calling the shale-oil boom a geopolitical tactic gives the impression that the boom was somehow planned or at least incentivized by the US government, which George Friedman says was not what happened. (Friedman used the shale boom in a talk to help make the point that many important developments occur in the US without significant involvement by the government.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...

“but most of that is taxes these days. ”

I just looked this up and so far I found in CA is 69 cents per gallon. Am I missing something?

Partially taxes, but mostly unique regulations and lack of pipelines:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenrwald/2018/09/28/californi...

Saudi production costs are like 2-3 a barrel, us fracking is somewhere in the 30s. Saudis can outlast any fracker

Article below says Aramaco's bond offering indicated they were near break at $45/barrel, vs the $10 often repeated. Their production seems to include a ton of waste. Beyond that, Saudi Arabia is estimated to need $70-85/barrel to balance their budget (though they can borrow if need be).

In the past the consensus was they could outlast frackers, but I think that's changed in the past several years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/04/01/saudi-aramco...