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by tuatoru 456 days ago
Security is not provided by having stuff, it's provided by having the capacity to make stuff.

Importing now does not increase security.

Edit: one thing the Trump-Vance administration has done is tear through the tissue-paper screen of "rules based international order" rhetoric, exposing to plain view that we live in a world of great powers and international anarchy. As we have always done, but somehow allowed ourselves to believe naive falsehoods.
1 comments
kragen 456 days ago
You know what you need to make stuff? Energy. You need energy. And that's what the US government's fossil-fuel-subsidizing bullshit is denying you.

Importing oil and gas now does not increase security, but importing PV modules does, because it gives you the capacity to produce energy from them for 20 years (module warranty period) or more likely 100 years (how long they'll actually work, though below the 80% of original capacity the warranty guarantees). Moreover, distributed generation with PV panels is enormously more resilient to being blown up by Chinese nukes or Russian, Ukrainian, or Chinese drone swarms than a few big coal power stations and oil refineries. (To say nothing of global warming.)

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_bin_ 456 days ago
If you're under the impression we are highly dependent on foreign producers for petroleum energy, you are mistaken. The import numbers are skewed by the fact that we directly import a lot of heavy sour stuff from canada, mexico, venezuela, etc. because we're one of the few nations that can refine it. In turn, we export a big chunk of light sweet, as it's much easier to refine elsewhere. In a pinch, refineries can switch to processing light sweet pretty easily. It's much easier than going the other way. We'd have a short-term moderate capacity shortfall but more than enough to run most of society, especially manufacturing and defense.
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JumpCrisscross 456 days ago
> Importing oil and gas now does not increase security, but importing PV modules does

We aren't importing much oil and gas. Importing PVs is nice. Increasing domestic PV production is better. And in any case, we're installing record amounts of PV already [1]--the limiting factor is installation, not production.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-industry-u...

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