Daniel Yergin is an energy analyst who has written several good books on oil and energy, The Prize and The Quest. The Prize is a history explaning how to got to 1990. And The Quest explains how we got to 2011. By the end of The Quest, you will understand how we got to here. Why Russia is a major natural gas provider to Europe. Why Venezuela's economy is collapsing. Why Saudi Arabia may follow. And mostly importantly, why the US is now one of the top energy exporters in the world (TL;DR we have tons of resources and the capital and business structures to exploit them).
Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries, rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I also think that some methods aren't long-term a good idea.
Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries, rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I also think that some methods aren't long-term a good idea.
I will second the book recommendations and I will also note that by far the best thing the U.S. can do in the short term is switch to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. (And I mean "vehicles" in the broadest sense, including but not limited to cars: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/10/17631318/electric-sc...). That will cut the influence of bad political actors considerably. And almost everyone can, as individuals, take important steps in that direction.
That was my conclusion, too. The personal economics and the carbon footprint correlate surprisingly strongly. The CO2 costs of hybrids look attractive on a 5-6 year timescale, but it gets bad when the environmental costs of a new set of batteries get factored in. People underestimate the various costs of the vehicle itself, and how they look over a longer haul.
I just threw in the towel on my 20 year old vehicle for a new small gasoline engine car. I figure my odds of getting >12 years out of this vehicle are quite high.
Maybe the picture will be very different in 10 years, with improvements to battery technology. But today I stayed away from the hybrids and electric vehicles, for both fiscal and environmental reasons.
Electric vehicles are only a minor improvement and a large tradeoff (producing batteries is a nasty business). EVs still need power production, which throughout the US uses either coal or natural gas with some solar, nuclear, and wind. I think what we really need is better energy storage so we can store solar energy during the day and release it at night while reducing oil and gas use as small as possible, or exporting it to other countries which haven't got the resources to convert their economies.
I second the Yergin recommendation but don't understand this:
> Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries, rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I also think that some methods aren't long-term a good idea.
The US is still a net importer. It exports some because its refineries are more setup for heavy grade imports. The light, sweet crude from its newer shale efforts command a premium price on the world market from those refineries that are less able to handle heavy crude, so are exported.
Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries, rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I also think that some methods aren't long-term a good idea.