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There's also a lot of countries having a much less laissez-faire attitude regarding energy - I'd even say that the USA is more of an exception...

For instance, in Europe road transportation fuels tend to be heavily taxed - so they have the option of lowering those taxes to amortize any potential oil shocks (but not too long, and at the cost of taking the budget hit - a bit like India/Egypt in the end...)



Even a more centrally coordinated approach is likely to end up in roughly the same place as a laissez-faire market approach: building replacement energy infrastructure faster rather than slower as a reaction to a persistently declining petroleum supply. As long as that happens, the "energy trap" described by Murphy doesn't materialize. A major French response to the first oil crisis in the early 1970s was a government coordinated plan to build nuclear reactors [1].

It's only people pushed toward bad decisions by short-term desperation (weak government leaders facing rioting, individuals too poor to steer market investment decisions) whose behaviors would set up this "energy trap." Market-driven investors and rational governments alike will invest resources into reducing future consumption of an increasingly expensive fuel even if it somewhat exacerbates the immediate problems caused by higher fuel prices.

[1] Building nuclear reactors as a reaction to high oil prices made more sense than may be obvious now. At the time, France actually did produce a lot of electricity by burning oil. Oil-fueled electricity became much less popular after the 1970s except in petro-states and in isolated locations. Surprisingly, Pakistan managed to make the same mistake in the 1990s of building oil-fired electricity plants, which became very expensive to operate less than a decade later.


Ah, but we don't really have "Market-driven investors and rational governments" in the West anymore, not since the 80's :

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-private-equity-should...

And Macron was really an idiot when he thought that asking the poorest people to pay the most for the ecological transition was going to fly...

But isn't this also a symptom of an energy trap - the government itself not having any slack left for long-term planning ?

http://www.lecourrierdesstrateges.fr/2018/11/04/augmentation... (fr)

(Note that, in the end, the above seems to be very similar to issues in Egypt - government balance taking a hit due to less income from fossil fuels - well except that the Egypt issues are more dramatic, being caused by the country becoming a gas importer instead of exporter...)




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