Water world at least had some tanker to explain where all the gasoline were coming from.

Mad Max was a dystopian movie in a dysfunctional state. I don't know how the exaggerated view of it became the franchise.

> Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries.

The majority of the content I see in this space is overwhelmingly supportive of rolling your own grid. The point isn’t to reject electrification as a technology, but to reduce or eliminate reliance upon the electrical grid. A lot of homesteaders operate wood boilers for heat simply because it’s cheaper, but the truck-driving redneck you’re envisioning lost faith in industrial society a long time ago.

The gas was being refined from crude oil in Gas Town. This was explained explicitly in both modern Mad Max movies, but in fairness I haven’t seen the old ones.

You can't believe they just had a large amount of oil left over from the apocalypse that could sustain a few hundred thousand people? It's just a matter of cartelling it and controlling the supply.

If an apocalypse happened, believe it or not, the few remnants of Earth would have all the world's knowledge via an LLM. How could that be? Wasn't everything destroyed? Nope.

The Miocene Arrow is an interesting post apocalyptic novel that takes this problem seriously. In it a neofeudal society is oriented around producing surplus grain and processing it into alcohol for small diesel-powered airplanes, maintained in small numbers at vast expense by an aristocratic class as both symbol and means of enforcing their dominance. Entire hereditary craft guilds for all the support and subskills necessary to keep them running etc. Sort of analogous to warhorses in premodern europe I guess. Solid book, the first one in the series is interesting too but based in a different setting.

Sure making high quality gasoline is difficult, but making shitty gasoline or fuels that can take the place of gasoline with a bit less power is not some crazy technology. Gasoline engines, if tuned to do so, will run off naptha and ethanol mixtures. And if you are creating it fresh, like from the existence of a place called gas town, it will allow you to use more volatile but higher octane fuels mixed to make decent octane gasoline, it just won't last sitting around for very long. And methanol is fairly easy to produce from heating up nearly any organic matter up in a dry still. Diesel engines will run off nearly any oil that will burn.

I mean sure, fuel refining knowledge isn't super common, but plenty of people still know enough about it and chemistry to less efficiently produce fuels as long as they have a source material, be it an actual oil well or enough organic materials, with some basic tooling. Tooling which we would already know exists by the fact that people are maintaining a fleet of vehicles. And you also have to remember that Max himself was alive and working in world pre-collapse, it isn't a world 10+ generations into an apocalypse, only like 2 maybe bordering on 3 generations of apocalypse with some people still remembering the old world, albeit in a decaying state.

There are hippies that process wood into usable liquid fuels you can find on youtube. If we wanted to be more realistic, they would be driving less, and have a far higher percentage of diesel vehicles because diesel is so much easier to make and the engines are easier to run on even garbage fuels. But Mad Max isn't like 200 years post-apocalypse.

Thanks for that recommendation. Though on a different topic, I found the following post particularly interesting:

"Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – an Army’s Role"

https://angrystaffofficer.com/2025/03/02/failure-mechanisms-...

I submitted it now for discussion on its own:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44084653