I don’t understand why there’s no secondary option if Strait of Hormuz goes down. Obviously there are alternative routes out there but why big gas companies even governments did not see this coming. Are they okay losing billions? Or do they actually have a plan that ordinary people don’t know about?
Don’t you remember the pandemic? It was something more or less predictable for which no government had anything like a plan, everyone panicked and started improvising like crazy.
The explanation is very simple, we are idiots and we elected the most idiots among us to rule us
We elect charisma but eschew intelligence and wisdom
They’re not losing billions. They’re just selling less for more.
The price increase is working for them, because it’s pretty certain that oil consumption is already decreasing with more cars and industries turning to electricity in the future anyway and supply is going to decrease as well. So this way, they already have customers accustomed to higher prices. Isn’t that neat…
The backup plan is switching to solar. Which JD Vance called a scam. But China’s about to make absolute bank selling solar panels to the rest of the world.
You know Vance, he’s just backing up his boss
Because being prepared for something that might happen isn’t profitable in the short term
Another way of saying it is that some things are so expensive you don’t do them even if they could be useful one day. Do you have a second house? Your first one could burn down. You don’t? I guess you must be a greedy capitalist thinking only about short term money.
Yep.
If capitalism is calling the shots, then no one plans more than a fiscal quarter ahead of time.
You can’t compete against someone that just ignores all risks, because if nothing goes wrong they put you out of business.
And by the time something goes wrong, they have enough wealth and connections to get bailed out by governments.
Because of that, every society that places capitalism above all else, will eventually implode. One day there just won’t be anything to bail them out with.
It make sense for the oligarchs to keep making bets they can’t lose, but it means everyone else is forced to take bets we cant win.
Because of that, every society that places capitalism above all else, will eventually implode.
This is just religious nut end-times doomerism.
Also, your explaination literally doesn’t apply in this situation, since the people most impacted by the blockade are the petro-states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Iraq. With the exception of Iraq, all of these countries are monarchies, with the royal families having significant control over oil production and benefitting from its profits. These are not publicly traded corporations with CEOs only concerned about next quarter’s bonus. They aren’t even socialist technocrats given a mandate to do what is best for the good of the people now and in the future. They are individuals who will be directly impacted by this blockade, who are looking not only to the benefit of oil weath in their own lives, but in the lives of their families far into the future. If anyone would have an incentive to take the long view, it would be petro-state monarchs who are, I must point out, not capitalists.
So, no, this is not an example of the failures of capitalism. The far more obvious rationale is that (1) the future is hard to predict and (2) people are bad at planning.
Well this is rich people being unaccountable to anything but foreign military realities. This is the union of corporate capitalism and a two tiered justice system which are both things that go hand in hand.
When rich people feel invincible they do stupid shit. This is just human psychology.
don’t blame capitalism. People are that shortsighted about everything. In your own niche you are not but I don’t have to know anything about you to state with 100% confidence that you have already been shortsited about something in your life.
On the other hand you can’t do everything correctly - you don’t have enough time. You have to make hard choices about where you place the redundancey. Aften people focus an the last crisis and so they over invest in fire protection in the next house after a house burns - but the odds of a house fire are still low and they are likely putting less into the real next problem - whatever it will be.
…
Preparing for worst case scenario is literally the only reason humans managed to make it thru 17 different ice ages chief…
In times of plenty people who will take any risk do well, but winter always comes and those dumb fucks get killed off.
It’s human variation.
The problem is we’re letting people incapable of evaluating risk drive a globally connected society.
Next time shit gets bad, there’s a real chance instead of a kingdom dissolving, virtually every living human dies, despite how personally risk averse they are.
The problem is ultra capitalists being in charge of everything, not just that they exist on a fringe
But this isn’t worst case. Its something like 20% supply so things are more expensive for a while and for as long as people see this as a risk people will work to improve other transport options
Also, here is a simple alternative view:
You have a water tank that you share with a neighbour and a pipe you share to your house.
A storm hits and the pipe is damaged.
You both could have buried the pipe deeper, or made a backup pipe but you chose not to. Not a great capitalist failure: it’s thinking the risk wasn’t high so not spending your time on something you think you don’t need. You’re also not dying of thirst, you can still walk out and bucket water, it’s just slower and more problematic.
Not a perfect analogy bit wow on parts of this thread
And in this case, I’m not convinced that the government setting prices and supplies, like in communism, would have helped since most people seemed to not think this was not a huge risk and really didn’t expect the US to ignore simulations and blaze ahead quite this unconcerned for negative outcomes.
Renewable energy would remedy much of this situation, but some CEOs somewhere might not be able to afford a fifth superyacht
these corps are run by humans who have sold out. they only care about the next quarter… the next bonus check.
the world is far more fragile than those in nice comfy cities could ever imagine
to mitigate real disaster on a global scale would take solving for human greed. good luck.
The petro-states most impacted by the blockade are all monarchies. The idea that the problem is that this blockade wasn’t planned for by short sighted CEOs is fucking stupid.
The impact on most of the world is slightly increased oil prices. A sudden decrease in oil supply is exactly the sort of problem that markets are good at solving - the main result is that companies will search for cheaper ways to get their products to market and will shunt resources to less oil-dependent products, while individuals drive personal motor vehicles less and switch to walking, cycling, transit, carpooling, or staying close to home. Ie, we already have a backup plan in place. Every somewhat-competently-run nation will simply tighten its belt a little, maybe increase investment in renewables, and soldier on like they have through every other economic downturn. There will, of course, be impacts on people - but the country will not collapse, governments will not be overthrown, food and water and shelter will still be widely available and easily accessible to almost everyone.
Of course, in response to this you may say that the impacts will be severe, especially on working people in places like the United States where greedy corporate interests tore up the street car lines, forced everyone into auto-dependent suburbs, and lobbied the government for pro-oil-dependency legislation - which is all true. But which is also a project that took decades. Which is a weird thing if your thesis is that corporations only make actions with the next quarter’s profits in mind. I’m not saying corporations aren’t evil - I’m just saying, if they spent all that time and money influencing elections and building coalitions and passing laws, then they are clearly capable of long term planning - like telling the politicians they have in their pockets to ensure political stability in the Straight of Hormuz region.
Meanwhile, the blockade is having a direct, immediate impact on petro-state monarchs, who are not going to ditch their companies with a golden parachute the moment things get hard. If anyone would have an interest in looking ahead and planning for contingencies if the Straight would be blockaded, it would be these people - fabulously wealthy and powerful, with the export of oil directly flowing to them and their families. If the problem you have with capitalism is that it doesn’t look ahead enough, then monarchs who pass laws and whose genetic lineages directly benefit from those laws should be your prime example of governments that take the long view. And yet, they don’t seem to have a great plan either, other than “pay the toll and hope Israel genocides the Iranians next.”
So is this because the evil capitalists don’t think far enough ahead? No! Not everything is because capitalism is evil. Sometimes stupid bullshit just happens, because that’s life.
pulease. long term plannig my asshole.
the modern world is littered with the failures to ‘long term plan’. i remeber thinking the world would be run by sears, ibm and xerox
the world has shifted to ‘just in time’ supply chains… warehousing is considered liability. the wealthy people youre referring to have globally diversified… it would take actual catastrophe to affect them because when youre that rich even a recession is opportunity.
the modern world is littered with the failures to ‘long term plan’.
SO IS THE ANCIENT WORLD. That’s my point. People, in general, are bad at long term planning, and we should not have so much hubris as to believe we have improved on this state of affairs. The old yiddish proverb “Man plans, god laughs” is as poignant today as it was in the past.
The null hypothesis here should be “this happened because people are dumb and the world is chaotic”. The world today is significantly less dumb and chaotic than it was in the past, and that’s great! But it is rather entitled to think that we should expect the world to be orderly and prosperous as a rule. Shit happens. Assholes gain power and start wars. Sometimes things that were abundant become scarcer. This isn’t a capitalism thing - this shit has been going on since the dawn of civilization.
The Thing is that a very big Part of the damage could have been at least weakened if the renewables wouldve been expanded upon at the time people sounded the Alarm.
But for some mysterious and definitely not evil, meaning short sighted, profit driven reason renewables werent build in a capacity that was necessary.
The knowledge that oil could become a liability is, depending who you ask,already about 50 years old.
What could that be called If there is Problem in the Future that is definitely coming but acting would cost Money that is not immediatly coming in again…?
Short something… Maybe Profit something…
Ah! Betting the foundation of human civilization that some magical technology will surely be developed in time and If we dont get it in time we deserve the apocalypse as species, since we dissapointed the invisible Hand of the Market.
I feel like sometimes you are capitalizing your words to make a point, and sometimes just because your fingers slipped, and it’s giving me a headache…
Anyway, consistently pushing pro-fossil-fuel legislation through goverments around the world clearly shows, imo, that corporations are not entirely driven by quarterly profits. They can plan to be evil on longer time horizons than that.
But the quarterly earnings cycle is what makes this a specifically capitalist phenomenon. Of course, corporations are greedy and will try to make a buck at everyone else’s expense. That’s sort of their thing. But other forms of power are hardly immune from poor descision-making. Count the monarchs and despots who have started wars or enacted sweeping agricultural reforms only to result in the deaths of millions, just because they felt like it or were born inbred and insane. Or count the number of times a politician has let debt balloon or delayed maintenance on critical infrastructure, because an election was coming up and they didn’t want to become unpopular.
Are you saying socialism would solve this problem? Because Venezuela was socialist for a while, and they continued being one of the top oil producers in the world. And then their economy collapsed.
Or perhaps Venezuela is too authoritarian for you??? Okay, then let’s consider autonomous Catalonia. This source notes that Catalonia generates 22% of its electricity via renewables. But compare that to Europe, where the economic zone average is 47%, or Spain as a whole, where renewables are nearly 60%. Shouldn’t we expect all these forward-thinking Catalonians to be voluntarily cooperating in order to move to renewable sources faster than the rest of Europe?
My First language is German and i have resigned in the war against autocorrect. Only manually correcting the egrigious mistakes.
Regarding catalonia: we see that catalonia is still very much a Market Economy, since they are reliant on firms to Take Profit oriented interest in the Change. Furthermore their dependence is mostly on nuclear energy, so their Problem is the atomic garbage. Additionally their legal framework wasnt optimized and their populous is not convinced of the necessity. But they tried to develop a legal Framework for Solar and especially Wind Parks, despite having no real incentive because of their nuclear energy, at least on the governmental layer.
Regarding Venezuela: they are already heavily in Green Energy, what are you talking about?
If they Energy is water or solar or Wind doesnt Matter.
And why was this war started, again?
Because Netanyahu needs a perpetual escalating state of war in order to maintain power, and Trump is a petulant man-child who is easily manipulated.
manipulated or blackmailed (if this is true but makes sense) - https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/tucker-carlson-escalates-attack-trump-210815399.html
We need a viruss ,a killer
I don’t think Israeli government cares about this as long as they can bomb more children.
I mean, we do. The world isn’t experiencing blackouts as a whole. We have alternative energy, generators, contingency plans, other oil suppliers, reserves, etc. It’s just that the largest trading route by far is currently not an option, so we’re feeling the squeeze from that.
Renewable energy sources are purposefully unsubsidized to keep the world dependent on coal, oil, and fossil gas (they market it as natural gas) If they allowed for alternative energies, they’d lose footing as part of the interconnected system of ruling families known as the oligarchy. No progress will be made in the current system. Even climate change won’t be reversible until we’ve been heat-blasted for decades. It’s shameful and infuriating.
In the Netherlands people who use solar have to PAY to feed power to the network. It’s bat shit crazy.
Pay to share? The excess energy? Why punish those people? Ridiculous.
It’s kind of stupid, on the one hand they’ll pay you for the energy, on the other hand you have to pay for the grid load. Depending on your supplier and contract you could get a net price of 1 cent per kWh or more.
The government gets backhanders from the fossil fuel industry.
The crazy thing is, the government doesn’t outlaw this.
The government introduced it.
There is no entity called “the world” that can flick through contingency plans. You can bet those who benefit from oil that would have sailed through the strait with no problem hadn’t the orange toddler started a war have a plan B. Whether that’s reactivating a few old pipelines or just sending ships the long way around, fuck knows. I’m not swimming in petrodollars. None of these plans will cost the same. All contingency plans cost more money. They might be raising fuel prices too much but they couldn’t not raise them at all.
No one foresaw this development because it is - and that’s the diplomatic term for it: fucking stupid. And that’s why there isn’t a plan B in place that can be used in the same way right away.
If you look at a map, that’s the most convenient and direct way for the oil to get out of that area. That whole region is mountainous. There are plenty of other ways to get oil, but it would take more than a few months to increase their supply.
It’s like, imagine your local grocery store burnt down, and everyone in your neighborhood had to go to the next grocery store over. That grocery store would sell out of goods almost immediately, and you would just have to wait until they adjusted to increase their supply.
There’s no plan. Most states have strategic reserves of oil and gas, but that’s about it.
Thankfully world shifts to renewables organically year by year.
What most people aren’t aware of, is that those reserves are enough to keep the military running for like 3 days.
Oil crisis IS the plan.
shipping is way cheaper by ship. You can’t create new shipping lanes. rail and such would increase costs as is and no one would be using it when the straight is open. It would be unused infratstucture until this happens and then due to disuse it would not work.
There are backup plans, they are just more costly. Big Gas companies will just pass that cost down the line. Trust me, those companies were never in danger of losing money.
