Maybe we'll be stronger in the long run?

Can't we just run up our trade deficits and give all our money to other countries? Americans are so evil and they all owned slaves and stole land from nations that said no one owns the land....

do you have any data that shows US oil is cheaper or are you guessing? there are a couple of problems with increasing domestic production. one, it's only profitable if it's a long-term investment, and the oil companies know that their days are numbered. two, in the short term, even if they ramp up production, that cost will be passed along to you, the dear consumer.

i think your idea about running trade deficits has two big problems. one, we're getting deeper in debt every year, nationally and personally. the credit will run out eventually. two, other countries don't want our goods as much as we want theirs. tariffs aren't going to fix that problem for anyone. if you want America to be less dependent on other countries, or at least more productively collaborative, we'll have to create more or better goods that the world wants.

I worked in oil and gas for 35 years, highly aware of drilling and production costs, so no I am not guessing. Why have you bought these lies about domestic production and numbered days, I don't think you understand that depending on markets only 35-45% of production goes to transportation. Electric generation is only 40% efficiency with line losses- electric vehicles will never replace oil. Trade deficits were reduced under Trump 1 because we were net exporters, something we can do for a very long time. Peak oil was "invented" in the 1850s- whoops missed that guess by about a trillion barrels.

well it's good to talk to someone who has experience, but still i don't simply agree 100% with your position. oil's days *are* numbered. they have to be. no matter how much oil there is, it's a finite amount and it will run out eventually. that's not a problem for the energy industry since there are alternatives. it *is* a problem for the specialty chemicals industry since we don't have alternatives for that at present. so we can't just keep using oil until it's gone.

i'm willing to believe that domestic is cheaper than import, but i didn't find any data sources taking that position.

electric vehicles will never replace oil? never's a word that's rarely true. solar energy's getting more efficient every year, thanks to inventive people. solar = electric, and if it can be created very locally or personally, line losses go away. i wouldn't rule out nuclear as a major competitor, either, although i'm not crazy about the idea.

There were electric vehicles in the early 1900s. They got beat out by the internal combustion engine.
A 15-year-old car with 200,000 miles on it will still get +300 miles per tank of gas. A 15-year-old EV with 200,000 miles on it will soon need a third battery that will cost more than the value of the used vehicle.

imagine that technology will improve

Wishful thinking is not a substitute for reality.
That big solar-thermal electric generating plant in the Mojave desert of California that was supposed to be the Green savior of the world didn’t pan out and is being shut down.

most experiments fail. saying that tech will improve is not wishful thinking. it *is* the reality.

I live off the grid. We bought the latest lithium ion batteries, compared to 5 to 7 year life for lead acid, we're hoping for 20 years. Then they're hazardous waste. No doubt there will be improvements, but the reality of physics controls what is ultimately possible. So much technological advancement comes from cross discipline improvements. Efficiency gained in coal can be applied to oil and gas, oil and gas advances make it possible to extract uranium more safely with wells bringing uranium ore up in solution (technically a type of bleach). No mines, no tailings, no radiation hazards of the past. Technolgy is so interwoven, it's a mistake to shut down one, oil and gas for example and try to move forward with might eventually be a collasal failure.
A physics prof I had in college said it best, all energy production has environmental consequences. Hydropower, solar, coal, uranium, wind- they all have a cost.

but they don't all have the same cost. we should be trying to move back toward an equilibrium, natural or otherwise. at least not moving away from it. population would help. making renewability and sustainability integral parts of the energy industry would be wise.

What is renewable about wind turbine blades filling landfills? Like any airframe, they have a limited number of flight hours, they don't last forever. They are not recyclable, and guess where the raw materials they are made of come from. They are literally being cut into shorter sections and crushed with bulldozers before being buried in massive pits where they don't decompose. How sustainable is that? I haven't even gotten into the useful life of turbine generators and the massive concrete bases they require. Even concrete has a useful life under these stresses.
Solar panels have a useful life of about 25 years and then they are depleted and unrenewable, another massive waste stream. In order for NYC to have 100% of it's electrical needs met, solar panels would have to cover Connecticut, Rhode Island and part of Massachusetts. That's with leading edge tech panels. Where will we bury those? How is that sustainable?
Waste products from natural gas? CO2 and water vapor from 96% efficient appliances. Don't buy it that CO2 is a pollutant. Of the so called "average" global CO2 level 400 parts per million, 50 parts per million of so called manmade CO2 is "destroying" the planet, yet OSHA permits workers to work 8 hrs. a day in 10,000 ppm before they get worried. And if water vapor is a pollutant, then we better do something about humidity. I drilled natural gas wells over 35 years ago that are still producing gas, and with improved technology are projected to be producing gas for another 25 years. One well produces the natural gas needs for around 10,000 people.
And population control is all based on the Malthusian myth. The entire human population of earth can fit into the state of Texas in what is classified as a comfortable urban density. It's simple math, square feet per person.
And as RunawayTrain mentions below, there are not enough economically recoverable rare earth minerals to sustain a 20% buildout of so called sustainable energy. Rare earth minerals are actually the most common materials on earth. but they are so dispersed in minute quantities that we would have to mine the entire surface of the earth to recover enough for 60% of the materials needed for "sustainable" energy.
Don't get me wrong, build a passive solar house using the materials already needed in an efficient design, but don't neglect backup heat, because the sun doesn't shine all the time (based on personal experience). Natural cooling is also possible, but not entirely free.

*population control*

There’s not enough rare earth metals to make enough batteries. Nor is there enough copper being mined to support the infrastructure necessary to make everything battery powered. On top of it, batteries are not suitable for extreme weather environments, nor long distance driving.

think non-metal or more renewable batteries (of the future). think: what if we were down to our last 20 years of oil and we HAD to move to something else, or we HAD to ration oil, or we HAD to prioritize its uses. think: lots fewer personal vehicles and other cultural changes. we should be conserving oil instead of trying to pump it out faster.

Thorium nuclear reactors and horses.

Right now, in proven reserves the world has over a 400 year supply of coal, which can be refined into liquid with oil like qualities. We have 170 years of proven reserves in oil and natural gas- both factor population growth in the equation. Proven reserves do not include known resources, which aren't proven, which means scientifically measured and mapped and proven to produce with current technology. It's actually a Wall Street definition for investors.
There are specific laws of physics regarding battery storage and what can store energy. We don't have that many resources or proven reserves. Carbon based energy, coal, oil and natural gas are nature's perfect storehouse of solar energy. Plants and algae processed CO2 and sunlight into carbon based tissue (sugars) and released oxygen into the atmosphere, settled on the earth and ocean floors to become the stored solar energy we are using now.

C'mon, just one stick and one whale, PLEEEEEASE>

It comes down to technolgy. We knew of the Bakken formation in North Dakota in the 1950s, and developed the technology to econmically produce it 50 years later. We have major formations underneath major formations and the technology to access it gets better every year. We drill more now with fewer rigs every year. You're a very intelligent person, what has caused a lot of confusion is the classification of resource, known reserves, proven reserves, etc. It's all based on estimated production based on current technolgy for the next 25 years. Developments in oil and gas at times hit monthly. It's like shooting at a moving target, very dynamic. 70% of the earth is ocean, and we've only explored about 5% of that. Since our oil and gas is essentially organic material that settled on ancient ocean floors, covered with sediments and heated by Earth's core, we have a lot of resources for a very long time and ingenuity to come up with more solutions.

plenty of resources and plenty of tech improvements to come, ok. but all of those resources will eventually be a lot of CO2, and we're not storing it anywhere except in the air. there was a kind of natural equilibrium there between trees, CO2, and oil before we started burning the oil. we're not gaining trees or "new" oil, and where else can you store that much CO2? i think the sooner we decide to go solar, the less of a problem our grandkids will have.

CO2. Can I ask you to do a visual representation of all that transparent, clear gas? This would be like a 1 100th scale model. You can generate a 10,000 dot grid online- that's 1% of 1 million. Color 3 and 1/2 of those dots a lovely green (1% of the so called level of "natural" CO2), that's the so called "normal" level of CO2 within the 10,000 dots, or a representation of 1% of the atmosphere. Now color that 1/2 dot violent red to represent 50 parts per million of deadly, climate changing manmade CO2. It becomes painfully obvious that 50 parts per one million parts is insignificant, and then ask, how does a transparent molecule reflect anything only one direction, back to earth. Physics demands that it would also reflect an equivalent amount of heat back into space, so it's self balancing.
Now if you can still find it on NASA.gov, look for satellite imagery of CO2 concentrations. Downwind of the Amazon rainforest, where large volumes of organic material are decomposing and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, CO2 levels are measured in the 3000 to 4500 ppm range. Meanwhile on the poles, where there is no organic decomposition, CO2 levels read near zero. There is no such thing as an average CO2 level because it is dynamic, seasons are in opposition in the northern and southern hemispheres. The concept of an average world temperature is in the scientific definition of the word, absurd. Doing a simple average of the highest recorded temperature on earth in Death Valley, and the lowest recorded temperature recorded at the South Pole would suggest the average temperature of earth is ZERO degrees, again, absurd. On my property I have a swale on the west side of the property that descends from a 10,000 foot mountain. 300 feet to the west it is about 15 ft. higher in elevation and relatively flat. At 6:00 am, I measure a 10 degree difference from one side to the other as cold air settles. At noon there is a 2 degree difference, in late afternoon, warm air is rising up the swale and it is 9-11 degrees warmer than the flat side. If I were to state an average temperature for my 10 acres, it would be meaningless, since it all depends on location. TO try to estimate an average temperature on earth would require over a trillion data points, and the result would be useless. What difference would an average temperature of +55 degree mean in Antarctica where it never gets over 60 below zero?