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I love this. Our decades of oil wars still don't seem to be common knowledge. All of the wars have of course been sold to the public as something else and it's a pretty important thing to understand about modern western power.

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> Our decades of oil wars still don't seem to be common knowledge.

Nor are common knowledge the names of the oil company executives and shareholders who benefited from these wars, while dumping the expense and blame on their host countries.

Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power is a pretty good start, there's a TV series. Current to 1990s or so.

Much is clarified once it is understood that Germany lost WWII due to lack of oil:

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/How-Oil-Defeated-The-N...

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/oil-denial-p...

It lost due to a lot more than that. Britain and her colonies (excluding India) out produced the Germany economy. Once you add in the US and USSR it’s more a question of how Germany lasted so long.

This book covers the illusion of ‘the plucky underdog’ who stood ‘alone’ quite nicely. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2011/...

It's an oversimplification for sure, but there was definitely no way Germany was going to win without oil and explains why (the one sane reason) they invaded the Soviet Union.

https://www.joelhayward.org/Too-Little-Too-Late.2.pdf

I agree, adding that the beginning of the war also had something to do with (ersatz) oil.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23612474

It’s possibly the only advantage they gained by having a mostly horse powered military.

There's more than enough oil in the US, Canada, and Mexico to support not only US military needs but the entire North American civilian economy indefinitely. There is no risk of the US ever losing a war due to an oil shortage.

When the US 'goes to war for oil' in the Middle East, it's going to war not to protect its oil supply but rather to make sure the profits of oil accrue to US companies and to ensure that oil remains priced in US dollars, which is vital for the US Dollar to continue to be the world's reserve currency.

You can't value oil under your own soil the same as imported oil, and it has nothing to do with profit.

Oil demand is never going away (we need it for plastic, lubricants for wind turbines, etc) but the supply is. When you are talking about macroeconomic nation state scales of oil, the only logical decision is to acquire foreign oil. Not only are you helping to speed the depletion of their reservers, you are holding yours.

The last barrel of oil on earth will be worth more than all the barrels that came before it.

Edit: I did some math. As of 2018 there were 43.8 billion discovered barrels of oil in the US, in 2019 we consumed 20.46 million barrels a day domestically. So we are self sufficient for a little less than 6 years.

This assumes you don't discover alternatives to fossil fuels before running out of them. Historically this is a bad bet. As the price increases people search harder and harder for alternatives. It seems impossible now because cheap oil means there's no demand for alternatives, but people are clever and if there's demand they'll usually find a solution.

To understand the economics of oil you have to think of it as a raw ingredient rather than a fuel source.

Even if you stop burning it (which I think is a terrible idea), you can't live without oil. Antiseptics, rubbing alcohol, paint, aspirin, toothpaste, shoes, pens, bike tires, computers, etc. require it for modern production.

Heck, a standard solar panel plopped on top of your home requires just shy of a full barrel of oil to produce.

> Even if you stop burning it (which I think is a terrible idea)

It's possible to interpret this sentence to mean two opposite things.

According to [1], non-fuel use of petroleum is 16%. Of those 16%, I'd guess most uses have an alternative, even if less convenient. Most of the things you listed don't specifically require oil, just hydrocarbons transformed in series of steps.

Oil is a strategic resource for energy and not much else important. There is short term manufacturing dependence, but most countries should have sufficient reserve capacity, currently for fuel use.

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/39/

The last barrel is going to be worth next to nothing because new infrastructure will have to up and migrated to before the last barrel gets used.

What's a "discovered barrel"? Most barrel counts depend on the current price, and grows as more oil is economical to mine

While factually correct, I think both articles fail to paint the broader picture. Which began earlier with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin%E2%80%93Baghdad_railway and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman%E2%80%93German_allianc... threatening the interests of "ze British" :)

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