But, the problem here isn’t just a lack of speed. A reasonable transition from fossil fuels to renewables+storage takes time. We still need to accomplish this as much as possible as quickly as we can, but it doesn’t have to happen overnight to happen at all. We can do it a little at a time, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. But, in recent times, we’ve started running into a snag that threatens to derail the energy transition entirely: investment in fossil fuels is going away too fast.
But, things shifted faster than predicted, at least when it comes to diesel refining. While there’s still plenty of refining going on,has oil companies shutting down their unprofitable and low profit refining operations. If the normal boom-bust cycle could be relied on for the future, they’d have kept those refineries open so they’d be ready to cash in later, but now all of that is in the air.
After all, we still need food, water, medicine, and fake rubber dog poop. Most of the goods and services even EV owners buy have at least one diesel truck somewhere in the supply chain moving critical things around just in time.If that wasn’t bad enough, now the US has to share diesel with our European brothers and sisters. The war in Ukraine has been bad for Putin’s Russia, but they’re still a major supplier of oil products to Europe.