Re:The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production?
by BlueTemplar on Thursday September 26, 2019 @05:52AM
(#21079559)
Ah, but we don't really have "Market-driven investors and rational governments" in the West anymore, not since the 80's :
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-private-equity-should...
And Macron was really an idiot when he thought that asking the poorest people to pay the most for the ecological transition was going to fly...
But isn't this also a symptom of an energy trap - the government itself not having any slack left for long-term planning ?
http://www.lecourrierdesstrateges.fr/2018/11/04/augmentation... (fr)
(Note that, in the end, the above seems to be very similar to issues in Egypt - government balance taking a hit due to less income from fossil fuels - well except that the Egypt issues are more dramatic, being caused by the country becoming a gas importer instead of exporter...)
It's only people pushed toward bad decisions by short-term desperation (weak government leaders facing rioting, individuals too poor to steer market investment decisions) whose behaviors would set up this "energy trap." Market-driven investors and rational governments alike will invest resources into reducing future consumption of an increasingly expensive fuel even if it somewhat exacerbates the immediate problems caused by higher fuel prices.
[1] Building nuclear reactors as a reaction to high oil prices made more sense than may be obvious now. At the time, France actually did produce a lot of electricity by burning oil. Oil-fueled electricity became much less popular after the 1970s except in petro-states and in isolated locations. Surprisingly, Pakistan managed to make the same mistake in the 1990s of building oil-fired electricity plants, which became very expensive to operate less than a decade later.