It's going to be a wild ride for sure. But outside of planes I don't think that fossil fuels in general have much future.

Ships can be moved by some combination of wind power (turbines, not sails for large container ships), batteries or "green" hydrogen (which makes such hydrogen effectively a kind of fluid battery).

Large, long range planes are the one exception where a solution isn't available or easily foreseeable for the near (decade or 2) future, because of particular volume and weight restrictions.

The price of gasoline won't matter much when gas stations close. And gas stations will close when a sizable percentage of the customer base switched to BEVs.

Also, depending on regional market a more or less relevant percentage of the gas price is not just the cost of gas production and distribution but also taxes. And those taxes can easily get raised further to discourage gasoline. Which is likely to happen.

Diesel will quickly die alongside gasoline, except for a niche of construction vehicles, etc..

Diesel/gas won't make a difference when it comes to getting replaced by BEVs for regular cars. In a decade it might well be easier to find a charger than a gas station.

:-)

And I will agree that there is a lot to improve around resource extraction and use.

I just don't like batteries being singled out at a time when humanity needs to get out of burning dead dinosaur soup.

I cancelled Spotify because they give tons of money to Joe Rogan.

EVs vs ICE is uplifting because it's an improvement. It doesn't have to be perfect, because nothing ever is anyway. It just needs to be better.

Ok. Sure. But is there a point to what you said?

We agree on the physics, which of course change nothing with regard to "solar panels steal sunshine" would be stupid propaganda by the fossil fuel industry.

Also, again, technically correct that the solar fusion by the sun is not renewable on cosmic multi-billion to trillion year time scales, but that has NOTHING to do with the definition of renewable within human discussion time scales.

Oil is going to run out in decades or a century or whatever, if we kept using it like the recent past it's gone in n generations and n is likely a single digit.

Solar OTOH is not going to run out before we

A) go extinct anyway

B) figured out practical fusion

C) spread out over half the galaxy.

It's renewable within any relevant time scales.

More than we'll ever use is what renewable means.

Did you just try to support your point with a Joe Rogan video on TikTok?

I can't even watch that video because I block TikTok and really have 0 interest in listening to Joe Rogan.

Assuming this is about abusive working conditions - again - that's not about extracting a particular resource, but about abusive working conditions. This needs to get regulated and improved regardless of resource or what it is used for.

What about iron, copper, nickel, gold and platinum? Oh and let's not forget the goddamn oil that gets extracted, processed, transported and burned to drive ICE cars.

That stupid talking point again.

Bad working conditions around cobalt extraction need to be fixed, regardless of EV production.

Every kind of product uses resources. The materials used in ICE cars, buses or even trains don't fall from trees.

We should use less cars overall, move more people in more efficient vehicles, avoid needles business trips by moving meetings online. But the vehicles that eventually remain will be electric. ICE needs to die.

The "think of the cobalt" argument is probably from the same fossil think tank that gave us such classics as "wind turbines are killing all the birds" (a tiny fraction compared to the genocidal numbers cats murder each year).

I'm waiting for "solar panels steal sunshine" or whatever.

All babies are ugly. Parents are just corrupted by hormones to not notice. And everybody around them is just being nice. :-)

What people also tend to forget is that Russia is a huge country with some potentially scary neighbors and regions that might take advantage of the situation if local army presence goes down. So while Russia has more population it also has a lot of border area and regions where they need to keep a strong military presence.

Ukraine OTOH has only 1 country to worry about (plus possibly Belarus, but the Belarusian army is tiny and needed to keep its dictator in power.

Thus in practice the size and population difference is much less relevant than it looks at first sight.

Of course there are special interests in the EU. They just haven't been as successful dismantling regulations to regulate them - yet.

Also, political bribery is still illegal in European countries and campaign contributions are often publicly funded - thus not coming from particular people/corporations who expect the quid-pro-quo that came with the "contribution" (aka bribe).

It's not like we don't have greedy bastards in the EU (often the very same as the US), nor is the EU free of corruption.

The US legalized political bribery (through a number of braindead SC decisions like Citizens United). As a result Congress has been bought. Legally. The bribe just has to be called a campaign contribution and a lobbyist delivers pre-written laws - how convenient.

What Americans want, if you go by polls (e.g. universal healthcare) and what they get from their politicians (laws that favor the biggest corporations) has been disconnected for many years.

Glass-Stegal Act gets cancelled - hello 2008 crash. Now there's more Too-Big-To-Fail banks playing casino games than ever.

Anti-trust laws are almost defunct, because there's hardly any enforcement. MS was found guilty of criminal anti-competitive activities - the verdict got watered down into irrelevance.