Quote:
Originally Posted by popcorninthesofa
We're sitting on that oil there and we're not going anywhere. Why? Because of the power of fear at what could happen if we did'nt have it. A shortage of fuel eventually stopped the Germans and Japanese. Everyone needs oil to defend their countries, until Science can develop new innovative technologies we need. If oil were gone, our American spirit of pride in innovation leadership would be gone and we would need to devolve into relying upon more primitive techniques once again to get what we want. Until then ,we need our brains are so battered in by war and world devastation that every country in the world will fall upon an aggressor.
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Imagine that oil could not get out of the Persian Gulf starting today. What would be the consequences? The first is that the non-gulf oil producers would be on their way to becoming fantastically rich because the price of oil would shoot up like the space shuttle. The second thing that would happen is that the price of food would rocket up in a desperate attempt to catch up to the price of oil. The third thing that would happen is that agriculture would grind to a halt. We use oil to make fertilizer (I won't get into the process here because it's not germane) so suddenly we would be doing agriculture as it was done in the early part of the 19th century before we could make nitrogen fertilizers. The fourth thing that would happen is that industry would grind to a halt as other fuel couldn’t' get from A to B, materials couldn't get from A to B, and some things couldn't be manufactured at all.
So now we have six billion people many of them hungry and living in gigantic monkey-hives called cities which are going to go dark as soon as the sun sets. Hellish nightmare straight out of Dante doesn't even *begin* to touch how horrible this gets. I'm not talking about what would happen just to the U.S. but this would be global.
It is simply a fact that we cannot feed 6 billion people on pre-20th century agricultural techniques. Not possible. It is simply a fact that modern medicine relies heavily on plastics which are made from, you guessed it, oil. It is simply a fact that it takes oil to get coal or wood or anything else you might use for fuel from here to there. World civilization would collapse. That's not trading in fear, that's trading in cold-eyed reality.
Yes, a shortage of fuel sort-of stopped the Germans (although I would argue that Germany was just battered into submission). The Japanese probably could have kept fighting--had two atomic bombs not been dropped on their cities. Recognizing that the Americans had a weapon they could not counter and which would visit unspeakable horror upon their people if they kept on, they surrendered. But your point demonstrates just how important oil is to modern society. I don't know about you but I am profoundly grateful I wasn't born in the dark ages and I would like very much for human civilization to avoid a repeat performance of them.