Oil Crisis? How about we Reduce Demand? Here's How

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

With Trump Administration missteps allowing Iran to control the strait of Hormuz—the globe’s fossil-fuel superhighway—the world may be looking at medium or long-term interruption of oil supplies. Energy hysteria is rising along with prices at the pump. We went through this when Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions scrambled the oil and gas supply chain. Trump illegally took over Venezuela’s oil infrastructure pursuant to his inexplicable and irrational embrace of empire. What does he have to show for it? Certainly nothing of help in this rapidly developing quagmire

Trump has taken Iran’s support of bad actors around the world and turned it into a bombing campaign justified to allow the U.S. to “take” Iran’s oil, while somehow inducing a popular uprising and destroying its nuclear capacity. Thus military adventurism has rapidly turned into a fiasco that has unnecessarily but perhaps inevitably (given who is in charge) turned into a global oil crisis, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1970s.

The emergency Trump created demands the pumping of more oil, he and the fossil-fuel apologists say, whatever the effect on the oceans and Alaska’s wildernesses. And switch on those costly, smoke-billowing coal plants!

Trump’s choices (and urging from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu) have induced Asian countries starved of Middle Eastern oil to restart obsolete coal plants—but also induced them to take immediate efficiency steps like shortening showers, restricting driving, supporting greater work from home, shifting appliance use to off hours, and setting air conditioners at warmer settings. It is notable that China suffers little in the current crisis because it has doubled down on efficiency, solar, and electric cars.

https://www.postalley.org/2026/05/05/oil-crisis-how-about-we-reduce-demand-heres-how/

[NNadir]

1. We probably shouldn't bring Amory Lovins back from the intellectually dead.

"Conservation" works well if you're rich - Amory lives in a swell aerie just outside of Aspen in Snowmass (which you can tour for a fee) - not so well when you're poor, since you have little to conserve.

I'm an old school Democrat. Poverty means something to me. Raising the price of energy can do two things; lead to further deprivation of those who can least afford it, and/or place higher burdens of exposure on those who suffer to provide things like coal, and in the so called "renewable energy" space, metals.

Relevant to the second case:

Elements of Power, A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth

My son spent a summer in China two years ago. It's battery heaven, which is why the Chinese presence in Katanga is so prominent. The miners in Katanga are not living it up; their suffering is epic.

This is a rather glib posting; the operative point is restarting coal plants, which is what Germany did and is doing after their 20 year history of funding Putin backfired.

War is not a good thing for inspiring people toward "conservation" and embracing popular fantasies about what is and what is not "green." War is a tragedy in which people are murdered for manufactured and dishonest reasons.