Isn't that always the case though? No country is ever completely independent.

That is true, but I would say that transnational units of, say, 1 billion people and more, should at least strive to be as resilient to blackmail as possible.

The current situation is such that if China and the US decide to sanction any third party at the same time (be it India or the EU or Russia or Saudi or whoever), the targeted party will suffer like hell.

Sure, as of 2026, this sort of coordinated action between current Chinese and American leaders seems unlikely. But leaders change. Sometimes in the most unlikely way.

That’s majorly moving the goalposts. Other than Saudi Arabia, I can’t think of any country in the world today that has more energy independence that you would get if you ran on renewables + battery + nuclear. You’d have years and years of buffer, compared to the US strategic oil reserve which has maybe a few months of buffer.

Czechia is quite nuclear-friendly and yet we ran into a problem with nuclear fuel supply; you don't feed raw uranium into the reactor, you need specially designed fuel rods. Switching from Russian to American ones for our nuclear power plants took several years. We just finished doing so, and now there is a conflict between the US and the rest of the world as well. Lovely.

All solvable, all better than just running out of oil, but I wouldn't call the situation "independence", just "having a better buffer".

Didn't framatome started producing vver fuel elements?

The US is currently a net oil exporter, and has been for a few years.

Now of course that's not the whole picture, but if push came to shove, the US could achieve energy independence (at least technologically, if not poitically).

True, the US could supply all of its energy needs through great effort and by making its population pay much higher energy prices. In contrast, if a country were to build around e.g. solar, and then all countries that made the panels embargoed them, the price of electricity would merely stop falling.

Why would it necessarily be more expensive?

The oil can be sold today profitably at today’s market rate.

If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?

> If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?

In the short run, yes. In the long run you’d fuck up the economies of scale and profit incentives.

I think whether the economies of scale and profit incentives get fucked up depends on the size of the before and after markets we are talking about.

For these to collapse, I believe we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil. Is that true?

> we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil

You just need U.S. producers to be insulated from international competition.

That reasoning from your parent was like the child logic of "we don't need to kill animals for food, we can just buy chicken at the supermarket".