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?
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.
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