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Comment by spwa4 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what political and trade consequences can be expected when oil actually does start seeing real decreased usage.

I mean one obvious thing has already started: governments taxing the sun (well, solar panels) pretty heavily (meaning above VAT), which I imagine will increase, and what the result will be. It's weird to say this, but solar panel smuggling is actually already a thing now. I used to have a Louis XIV painting somewhere ...

Oil appears to be 33% of total energy usage, and if you count all fossil fuels (oil, coal, nat. gas) it's 81%. What happens when that starts dropping.

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Just to add to your point; The final energy demand is much less than the primary energy we produce due to the energy costs of extraction, refining, transportation, and inefficient end use.

According to Kingsmill Bond (great name btw) on Dave Roberts' Volts podcast if we magically could replace all fossil energy with renewables today the final energy use would only be ~30% of today's final energy use.

"We’re pouring, from our calculations, two thirds of the primary energy into the air and wasting it." - Kingsmill Bond

https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable

See also Kingsmill Bond's slidedeck at https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-rev...

A pretty big one is the hollowing out of the international power oil producers have over the life of fossil importers; the middle east becomes pretty irrelevant for Latin America if you don't need their oil, and maybe Lebanon will avoid an US invasion if the newly discovered gas cannot find buyers anyway.

I'd argue that the decreased usage of oil has -to some degree- already started, e.g. Chinas crude imports have dropped the last two years in a row and yet they're still adding ever more EVs at a spectacular rate. There's practically no way but down for those numbers. It's mostly similar for the EU, though they're not as aggressive re EVs.

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