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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Oil leads to geopolitical destabilization since where it is found just happens to be a very volatile region. Even if the Americans somehow detached from the world market for oil (considering they have enough their own), the Chinese definitely aren't willing to forgo energy security by stopping their much more aggressive EV development programs.

Gasoline got us this far for a hundred years, now we can pursue a different path?

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I'd argue that these regions only became politically volatile because oil was found there.

Than we can rephrase original claim to: "oil leads to geopolitical instability because it's only found in economically viable deposits in very specific areas of the planet."

This create strong asymmetries and strong incentives to project power.

It's not though, not in terms of oil production or reserves. Extractable resources can exacerbate instability by providing funding to warring groups and giving a reason for outside entities to interfere but none of this is even remotely set in stone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oi...

Yes, I mean, just look at Norway! Or the USA! Or Saudi Arabia! All constantly on the brink of political collapse!

Saudi Arabia had to crank up the execution rate quite a bit to keep opposition in check recently. That only can work so long.

"Owning the wrong books, posting a critical tweet, speaking to a journalist or disagreeing with the Crown Prince can earn you a death sentence." (https://reprieve.org/uk/2024/01/02/saudi-arabia-executed-at-...)

Gasoline can be made in a chemical plant from bio-organic feedstock. With sufficient energy input, anything is possible.

Not economically. Oil is still the best way to get gasoline, and using other processes and inputs makes EVs even more attractive.

One datapoint supporting “not economically”:

There was a plant in Missouri to convert turkey offal into crude oil using leftovers from a Butterball plant. It’s been shuttered and the parent company filed for chapter 11.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_World_Technologies

I think it’s important to remember (and buttresses the upthread points)—the volatility isn’t a coincidence—it’s a direct result of the discovery of the oil and the crucial role it played for imperialism and capitalist expansion.

Before oil was even a thing that region was incredibly volatile. It is the cradle of civilization after all, so I guess it was always bound to be a powder keg.

Cradle of religion you mean

Writing first shows up there, the first cities do as well.

US oil production alone is close to the total output of "that region".

Oil funds the volatility.

It has only become volatile after the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Was quite stable and safe before. It's just they didn't have nations before, were colonised and controlled by Ottomans while in Europe we had nation-states and nationalism since ~17 century and had enough time for cleansing to organise mono-ethnic, cohesive states. While even that, was only finished decisively by post-WWII "population transfers" (which was nothing but ethnic cleansing sold as a good thing).

They are still just starting on it.

Ethnic states are a things, albeit quite debatable since ethnicity is an entirely contingent and subjective construct. Monoethnic states are the dream of genocides, not ever a reality on the ground (doesn't matter how you define ethnicity).

Well where in a state there's no word in a language to differentiate between a citizen and someone of a title ethnicity, i can call it an ethnostate. Say Armenian or Polish: there's no 2nd word in their languages for that. Because there are so few citizens who aren't of title ethnicity, and they are so marginalised and subject to such a quick assimilation, there isn't even a need to bother inventing a word.

If there is such a word say, "Kazakh" vs "Kazakhstani" or "Russkiye" vs "Rossiyane", existence of such a word shows that this state is an empire.

Sometimes the "ethnic" word simply doesn't exist, say in "Canadian" or "American" for U.S.: it's only citizenship, there's no ethnicity at all - neither the word nor substance - showing a "melting pot" country.

You're resting an awful lot of political and sociological thinking on a very superficial bit of very arbitrary linguistics.

I mean, concluding that Kazakhstan is an empire while the US is not pretty much discredits the whole thing.

That's as simple as having vs not having a title ethnicity in the country. If there's no title ethnicity it means there's just citizenship, no one subjugates another: it's a melting pot. Kazakhstan in particular, in any case, is moving towards an ethnic state, as every other ethnicity except Kazakh has very low birth rate there so in a few generations it will become homogenous.

> If there's no title ethnicity it means there's just citizenship, no one subjugates another

That's a wild, unwarranted and patently wrong statement.

It has also been incredibly stable for incredibly long periods of time.

This couldn't be more wrong

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