In Colorado the incumbent Democrat legislature effectively banned most new oil drilling projects even after a plebiscite on that question failed to pass.

The US supply dropped precipitously because the price was too low for fracing to be consistently profitable. Letting the price rise would help US-based producers invest in more production.

When I look at the SPR weekly levels at https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W... it doesn't show an increase of 77M barrels. During President Trump's term it fell from 695,118,000 (Jan 22 2016) barrels to 638,085,000 barrels (Jan 15th 2021)

In March of 2020 it went from 634,967,000 to a peak of 656,147,000 in July of 2020, to then fall back.

Unless I did my math incorrectly, where can we find the information about the 77M?

The drop in Jan 2017 was due to Hurricane Harvey which disrupted foreign crude deliveries. https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/31/us-taps-strategic-oil...

You are right that it wasn't 77M barrels in 2020 - my bad. I didn't realise that Democrats had blocked funding for that proposed initiative of SPR increase. The Trump administration worked around this by reducing this to ~30 million barrels and awarding storage contracts. This appears to match your figures.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-25/trump-s-t...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-25/funding-t...

If you want civil violence, looting and anarchy on a large scale, your approach is definitely the way to go. It will also likely result in civil war since folks will take up arms to change your preferred policies. The folks with arms and who know how to use them will also likely be the folks who win.

Not that it matters - any administration that lets the economy crash will not stay in power. They will be kicked out .

Oh my, how scary! I guess we just have no choice but to let the earth burn then.

No, none of the things you mentioned would occur if inequality were addressed and the newly scaled-down economy were appropriately retargeted to meet peoples’ basic needs first and foremost.

It’s called degrowth.

I wish you the best of luck on your socialist utopia of de-growth.

It’s only a matter of time—-humanity has the choice to accept degrowth voluntarily now, at a time when it can be safely managed, or have it be forced by the circumstances of our natural world a few decades from now.

Or are you one of those who believe that economic laws will somehow override physical laws? Because physical limits exist, and we are hitting them.

Seems to me that economic inequality would be the best facilitator of de-growth. If you could send the entire middle class into poverty ASAP, you could maximize de-growth overnight. Add a few draconian rules here and there, re-introduce good old rule of man principles, along with public executions to keep the upstarts in check, and you can have yourself a semi-permanent utopia of de-growth.

Take for example North Korea (among the most advanced places in the world right now, in terms of comprehensive de-growth policies): with their ~540 kWh electricity consumption and just .71t CO2 per capita emission (compared to USA: 11.8 MWh and 15.12t CO2), they are experts in the field of de-growth that all other modern societies should endeavor to emulate.

The goal is to decrease the size of the economy while simultaneously increasing the quality of life for the majority of people on the planet. Most people already work in useless jobs (e.g., marketing, administration, etc.), and a shutdown of most extractive industries would give people substantially more free time. We can thank capitalism and technology for today’s high productivity level, but we need a properly functioning welfare/UBI system to take actually advantage of it, and so the global distribution of wealth will will need to change to ensure peoples’ basic needs are met.

Addressing inequality is similarly important for halting the rise of political authoritarianism (as it grows in reaction to the former), which is an obstacle to all these changes.

What are you basing this on? The most dire (serious, i.e. IPCC) forecasts I've seen so far are a few percent of global GDP lost due to climate change. Global GDP grows by 3-4% in normal years recently, so the "forced degrowth" would be an equivalent of just 2-4 years of stagnation.

This would be an interesting discussion, especially with space exploration and recycling tech fitted into the future picture, but not appropriate for the current topic.

Oil prices are still too cheap. Using oil has huge externalities, it's time consumers paid them. Good luck to the idiots who try to shoot the government.