What if every country on Earth suddenly refused to sell the U.S. any oil what so ever. What would happen? How much would gas prices go up. How long could we survive on our own. How bad would things get?
President select Shrub and his big oil buddies would merely rape the rest of the United States’ economy just like they’ve been reaming California in the not-so recent past.
We’ll try to disregard the fact that our fabulous industrial base would be able to start supplying hydrogen gas (and the requisite minor automobile engine readjustments) in record time, so as to outmode an entire segment of the petrochemical industry that has thoroughly bought off the current executive administration.
Conflict of interest???
Nah! <insert roll-eyes smilie here>
Zenster, you’re missing the obvious – there is no need for the Resident to be bought off by the oil industry. He’s already bought in, y’see.
What would happen is that we’d start up all the dormant pumps in Texas and the adjacent states, and supply ourselves with that yummy non-renewable resource. Money for them, gasoline for us, and alternative energy sources still get ignored.
If everyone else refused to sell the U.S. oil, there would be a lot of problems all over the world because the world’s most widely traded commodity would lose its largest consumer.
The economy of the OPEC countries would go right down the toilet.
The oil producing countries would not do so. First of all, there’s plenty of oil producing industrial nations, like Norway or the UK, whose economic interests are industry, not selling petrol, and if the US economy crashed, theirs would too, so they will carefully avoid that.
The OPEC countries, whose economy is almost entirely based on oil, would not do so either; they would lose their only source of income. Besides, a big multinational OPEC boycott against America would require co-operation and obedience towards the common cartel policy; in the past, the resulting prisoners’ dilemma broke up every major agreements among OPEC countries, so the boycott would certainly fail.
Finally, the US do still hold huge amounts of oil under their soil reserved for times of crisis. In the hypotghetical case of a big boycott, George W. or whoever will be resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. at that time would give order to start exploiting those resources.
Cut off our oil? This means war! (Ask Imperial Japan, 12/7/1941.)
An excuse would be created to go to war with one of the ring leader countries. E.g., we send a warship on a friendly visit to one of it’s ports, it gets blown up, we blame the other guys, cruise missles start a’landing. Other countries suddenly recognize that they had been “duped” by the smoking cinder ringleader country, apologize and send oil.
Presumably, these countries know this is likely and just jack up the price when they get the chance instead. The Gulf War was an semi-effective message in this regard.
“Remember the Maine!”
FtG
There’s also, “Yeah Sheik, this tanker’s going to Tokyo. Yeah that’s the ticket.”
Ain’t gonna happen.
A lot of people like to try and believe some truly funny stuff…
But the fact of the matter is nobody controls the price or distribution of oil. Many entities with competing interests occupy positions of varying weight in the market, and most of them appreciate that they have some shared interest in having all markets continue to function. Some entities (such as OPEC) can influence the oil market, but they can’t control it. OPEC has always been a leaky cartel at best. And they control, as well as they can, only a portion of the world’s reserves. There are literally thousands of oil producers, and while none of them can control the price, almost all of them realize that it is in nobody’s interest for the price to climb to levels that put it out of reach of consumers.
As Californians have recently discovered, not even a state government can control the price.
What if everyone refused to sell us oil?
Simple. We’d go anukin’!
First, the US would get pissed off. That’s undeniable.
Electricity production would probably be unaffected, as oil only represents between 2 and 3% of US electricity generation, according to Anthracite, who knows whereof she speaks.
Most likely, domestic oil production would become much more profitable. So would conservation.
At some point, another oil producing country would find it worthwhile to sell us oil. We can afford it, and no agreement will convince every oil-producing country to continue to act against its own interests.
while electricity production may not require oil directly, fuel oil supplies are linked to absolutely everything we do - supplies delivered by trucks, employees arriving by car and bus etc. So I doubt there would be any particular industry that would be unaffected by a sudden lack of foreign fuel oil sources (assuming that we don’t currently have the supply on hand to meet our current level of use).