the fact that developing countries will industrialize in the same way western countries have and will start to produce similar environmental emissions

That's not a fact. It makes more sense for developing countries to skip directly to renewable energy sources.

I'm constantly thinking of seamen

it's also to do with prices. There is a certain amount of this that is true, but the primary reason is oil prices.

No, there's a significant amount of oil infrastructure locally. They've even got a colonialist extension with Canada: crude oil crosses over to be refined and sold back to Canada

The lack of investment in the types of oil refineries to refine US oil domestically isn't as much for optics purposes. But that relative to the amount of investment required to build new refineries to compete with the current foreign ones isn't a good return on investment relative to the up front cost and the existing profits of the current arrangement.

Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

And destroyed the Baltimore bridge because their backup engines were split between legal fuel and international-waters fuel.

We aren’t consuming batteries anywhere near the rate we consume oil and coal. Hydrogen even less than batteries.

So the amount of ships needed would still be a fraction of what we use now.

the argument for renewable energy isnt that we should stop using oil, its that we shouldnt burn it. why turn our limited supply of oil into CO2 and water when we can turn it into plastics, medicine, solvents, etc? around 3/4 of crude oil is used as fuel, but if renewable energy was used, the number of oil tankers would decrease by more than 75% bc local supplies would generally be sufficient for industrial, non-fuel uses

yeah, free market economies baby, making everything more efficient!

actually, it's already happening, why do you think LNG is such a massive export from the US right now?

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