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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that wind turbine + PV + battery storage has a cycle where you buy once every twenty years, or more. So you buy once, and have twenty years to figure out the next buy cycle, geopolitical cycles and all.

On the fossil fuel side, you need to buy many times per year, every year. Each one of those buy events is an opportunity for an external party for stop your economy.

The renewable buy cycle is harder for an external party to interrupt.

edit: This is vastly over-simplified, but I hope my understanding reflects reality at least somewhat.

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I also worry about the "stop the economy" problem. To me, it's analogous to the AI employment problem. If you cannibalize how a country makes money and generates tax revenue, what do you do instead? For example, Nigeria makes a lot of money from oil sales. Take away the oil industry and how do they make money? Nobody can pretend to be a Nigerian prince or a businessman trying to reclaim millions of dollars.

Now that I think of it, maybe the economic fallout from AI and the oil economic devastation will be widespread fraud, just so people can survive.

Yeah. I've been wondering to what extent this is keeping the global geopolitics stable. Rich countries are keeping many other countries stable-ish that would otherwise rapidly devolve into disaster (obviously the middle east being the huge example). Even going so far as keeping countries stable-ish at the request of those countries (Egypt and Jordan being examples) despite those countries not really being oil countries.

When that incentive disappears, as it will, what then? There is no way in hell the middle east can defend against Iranian aggression without other people doing it for them. And it's not just the middle east. The consequences of isolationism will lower enormously. Why won't rich countries just lock the border and dig in?

We're not even that far removed from finding out what will happen, it's only about 7 years away. I'd love some early warning though.

I think you have it a bit backwards.

The reason we have Iran with an insane government and all the princes and total lack of democracy is BECAUSE of all the interference due to oil.

America and before it Britain and the colonial powers just walked in there and stole everything and so now the region is divided into countries that were soccuessfully captured (Qatar etc) and countries that threw us out (Iran).

If oil wasn’t as important it might be chaos for a while though because this dictatorships are propped up expressly so they can sell us cheap oil.

No. Iraq did not attack Iran due to oil. Iran did not counterattack Iraq because of oil. It was merely dictatorships wanting to conquer and seeing a chance to do so. Sorry.

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