my bet is: as long as we need to completely transition to renewable transport, because everything we eat, build and wear needs to be transported and most of us don’t work from home or study from home:
oil prices are high because that’s what putin can use as leverage against the developed world after his failed annexation of Ukraine and it’s clear he’d rather die than accept Ukraine is an independent country. Global warming makes a transition to renewable energy inescapable and even if putin died today and Russia opened the taps again, it would only slow down the transition.
But holy shit, it’s gonna be hard and expensive, it’s going to take decades and every populist politician of both left and right is going to fight it. My bet is 2 decades.
What do you think?
Unless things change, it looks like it’s already over. Oil prices aren’t really that high right now, US production is setting records so that’s really offset the supply issues from other producers. Gas prices at the pump are about as low as they’ve been since the bottom during lockdown, at least in the US. I agree the transition away from oil is going to likely increase energy costs to some extent but the recent inflationary period is unrelated to that I think.
Now we all just have to recalibrate our price expectations to 2020 prices x 1.5 or whatever it settled out as. Oh, and we’ve all gotta go find new jobs at the higher rates or we’re all poorer.