Oil is definitely important. It's the only good that behaves macroeconomically as if it were essential to everybody, and you're right that organic chemistry, plastics, etc. are not just part of daily life, but irreplaceably so.
That said, half of oil usage in the USA is for gasoline and diesel [0]; another 15% is natural gas produced as a byproduct of extraction. As we drive and fly less, we'll need less fuel. Oil demand collapsed earlier this year [1], and it could collapse over and over again until the industry shrinks to the right size.
I don't think that taxation on oil imports is the right move, because it doesn't limit the USA's oil exports. Instead, we ought to tax oil products, specifically gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel; and use the funds to plan for when oil is no longer as important to us.
I suppose I’m very naive, but I’m under the impression that they’re the same in the way that that they’re both meant to provide necessary fuel oils to local markets in an efficient way.
And that maybe it would be good to have redundancy, which requires allowing new pipelines to be built. It’s not my fault that that’s somehow a “political issue,” which as far as I can tell means something that your preferred propaganda sources have conditioned you to have an emotional response to that overwhelms any hope of reasoning.
This article is wrong not because as some point out oil is still more valuable commodity, but because it targets the wrong product. The most valuable resource is knowledge not data. I can sell you trillions of data points from many different devices and sensors, but in itself they are worthless. However, if you can get any insights, any knowledge from these data point the situation will change. It it's not the data that's important but the resulting knowledge.
It's like iron ore (in this case data) - in itself it's pretty much just a rock, but if you can extract the iron (knowledge) the resulting product is much more valuable.
Some companies are waking up to this fact, but the knowledge as a resource is still underutilized..
Even if you think politicians will make wise decisions with it, it’s not useful or necessary. We have hundreds of times more oil in the ground waiting for higher prices, no need to spend taxpayer money to force prices higher just to pump some into another hole.
Its important to realise that oil is not just for energy but for the 95% of products, machinery and materials that make modern life possible. Roughly 50% is for other things than energy and without oil most of us would either not live today And live much poorer lives.
But oil is not uniformly distributed, if it is a marginal decision (probably unlikely in this case) then those are jobs not needed, and taxes forgone, the logic is sound on truly marginal cases, but it’s probably some fraction of that that is truly marginal
I want to add that even if the US produced more oil, we currently don't have enough industrial refining capacity for the type of crude that we produce to meet our demand, so we would still need to rely on foreign imports.
It’s not really a big deal because we have renewables that can fund the extraction. Oil isn’t useful for its contribution to global energy, it’s useful because it’s portable.
~90% of government revenue that has no substitute?
Or ~10% of oil imports for which there are a plethora of alternatives?
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