[bryanlarsen]

Even 10% is a massive number. Most oil demand is fairly inelastic. You have to get to work no matter the price of gasoline. You might turn your furnastat down a degree, but that's about it. Groceries need to get delivered no matter the price of diesel. Farmers need to fill their tractors no matter the cost. Plastic and industrial demand is fairly inelastic. The price doesn't need to go up by much to reduce demand by 1%. But to reduce demand by 10% involves massive price increases. Only a fraction of gasoline demand is truly elastic. So that 10% reduction in supply might require halving the elastic demand for oil.

[spwa4]

Yes but the point was that supply is very elastic since what happens to old fields is that they get priced out. When an oilfield gets older it's production cost creeps up, slowly. Since most of the oilfields that can produce at $current_price + 5$ aren't even properly shutdown yet, they can be rapidly brought online if prices rise, and there's a large supply of such fields. A very large supply of them.

Nobody's going without oil, it's just pushing up inflation. Not saying that's not a problem, but the problem isn't that people are being forced to go without.

Of course EU countries are complaining to high heaven since increased inflation will push their borrowing cost up further, and given the state of their public finances this means more sacrifices. If I lived in Paris, I'd park my car indoors for a month or two. Or 100km outside of Paris.

[bryanlarsen]

That's basically only true in OPEC countries, and OPEC countries are generally affected by the Hormuz closure.

Outside of OPEC marginal production is basically tar sands and fracking, which cannot be ramped up quickly.