The worst and most stupid bit is this:
Speaking to crowds on Wednesday, vice president JD Vance said US allies are “suffering from this, frankly, more than we are.”
He claimed this was because they had “focused on a lot of green energy scams and they’re hurting a lot more than we are.”
Vance continued:"As much as we’ve got to focus on getting these gas prices down, the reality is overseas they’re feeling it far worse than we did because we’ve taken the steps to protect our energy economy.
We have tons of untapped oil fields easier to drill in the US that oil companies are sitting on, and we already get something like 1/3 of Venezuelan oil as is
But we still need the oil from the middle east, we mix our heavier oil with theirs in the refining process. We’re draining our reserves to keep the price low domestically, that and the statements that the strait will be reopened imminently is keeping the price relatively low… For now. Our economy is all speculation after all.
But that is likely irrelevant for the timescale of this conflict, right? Surely the lead time for bringing new oil fields online is measured in years.
Nah, like a couple weeks. They ship in a team along with the equipment and then they go to town
Something like deep water rigs can take years to build, but actually tapping a well is pretty quick. But then you can’t just seal it back up - or at least humanity has never bothered to learn how to do so. So companies will sit on them for years to keep production steady, if the cost of oil falls they might move it to a sacrificial shell company and leave it leaking for tax payers to eventually clean up