[adventured]

Oil isn't a serious problem, neither is gasoline. The West can safely maintain the situation with Russia indefinitely.

Brent has been in the $90s for a while now. That's equivalent to $65-$70 from ten years ago, which also wasn't a problem then. It's very modestly elevated at present.

Natural gas may be a different matter, although the Europeans look like they can have that permanently solved over the next few years through diversification and greater energy conservation.

[medvezhenok]

You can't mention oil prices without mentioning the U.S. SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve) releases (around ~250M barrels released this year, around 1/3 of the total reserve):

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

Without those, the price of crude oil would likely be higher than it is at the moment (although hard to say how much higher). The fact that China is still pursuing a COVID-0 policy has also helped keep global demand depressed - but we can't rely on that indefinitely.

[nine_zeros]

> Oil isn't a serious problem, neither is gasoline.

Isn't a serious problem, yet. That's because China is offline and EU is still purchasing oil from Russia.

[Sin2x]

If it wasn't a problem, Biden wouldn't tour Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to get their oil and wouldn't open the national reserve. Nations literally live and die by the oil.