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 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
Its not a backup plan. Its the new plan and the current situation is only going to accelerate it. You will know its won when the oil companies convert to wind and solar.
Renewable energy would remedy much of this situation, but some CEOs somewhere might not be able to afford a fifth superyacht
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.
Because being prepared for something that might happen isn’t profitable in the short term
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
We need a viruss ,a killer
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.
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.
The government gets backhanders from the fossil fuel industry.
The crazy thing is, the government doesn’t outlaw this.
The government introduced it.
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.
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.
The US declared every country where a pipeline could pass from there to any large consumer as an enemy and has been trying for half a century to destroy them.
Oil crisis IS the plan.
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.
The oil companies made a backup plan, patented the hell out of everything and then shelved it. Source: I used to work for one.
A patent means that a design is publicly published. If it was patented there would be designs that anyone could read and build for personal research. There would be YouTubers showing off their work. This happened 15 years ago when 3d printing was still under patent protection.
China in general doesn’t care about US patents until they’re big enough to be sued. It would be on Aliexpress next to the retro game consoles that include hundreds of stolen roms.
And Patents are only good for 20 years.
So yeah, quit the bullshit. I’ve heard stories about miraculous inventions being patented and sat on by oil companies for 50 years. There’s no car that can run on water. They’re all scams that became urban legends.
Gee, I wonder who’s right, the person who literally worked for one of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world or the random Internet stranger 🤔
If your claim is true then you could show the patents. They’re public. You’d know that if you actually worked for an oil company in the capacity to know anything about patents.
I taught a TCPIP class a few times to Chevron in Houston so technically I worked for one of the largest oil companies in the world too.
