You are correct that such people exist in the EU and UK and indeed, other parts of the world too, and that they frequent this forum. At the appropriate local times of day.
And when they are here, they discuss a range of issues inside and outside of tech. Including geo-political issues.
The more motivated will also find more narrowly focused forums, but general forums remain popular. In general.
A meta-moderation system (allowing moderators up/down votes to be randomly audited) would help stop this happening.
Those who remember the old Slashdot meta-moderation system will know how this works.... it did a decent enough job.
Not if most of the necessary resources are mined elsewhere and most of the actual devices (such as solar panels) are manufactured elsewhere too.
The best you can say is that in such situation, no one can cause you a problem overnight, but on a longer time horizon, they absolutely can.
All solvable, all better than just running out of oil, but I wouldn't call the situation "independence", just "having a better buffer".
Now of course that's not the whole picture, but if push came to shove, the US could achieve energy independence (at least technologically, if not poitically).
The oil can be sold today profitably at today’s market rate.
If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?
The current situation is such that if China and the US decide to sanction any third party at the same time (be it India or the EU or Russia or Saudi or whoever), the targeted party will suffer like hell.
Sure, as of 2026, this sort of coordinated action between current Chinese and American leaders seems unlikely. But leaders change. Sometimes in the most unlikely way.
I will concede your point on heavier aircraft, though.
Imagine a world where the railroad, for some reason, is still stuck with steam engines and black coal. Everything else moved on, but they cannot, thus keeping the mines open etc. Very uncomfortable and far from optimal.
I kinda wonder if that's temporary, until defensive countermeasures catch up (like something like a CIWS for a tank, but smaller and with a shotgun).
Or rather, was. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians, operating diverse tanks on the bases of different doctrines, managed to do much breaking with them. The battlefield of today is just too different and much more hostile to anything that moves in the open and is big and slow enough to get hit.
It's been an issue since WW2 that there's very little oil on the European continent. That's why Germany planned to seize Azerbaijan in the first place.
It turns out that if you aren't deluded by culture war superficialities, energy efficiency is an advantage on the battlefield. Presumably this Prius on treads is confusing to chickenhawks who conflate "Likes" on Facebook and Instagram with military supremacy.
On the fossil fuel side, you need to buy many times per year, every year. Each one of those buy events is an opportunity for an external party for stop your economy.
The renewable buy cycle is harder for an external party to interrupt.
When that incentive disappears, as it will, what then? There is no way in hell the middle east can defend against Iranian aggression without other people doing it for them. And it's not just the middle east. The consequences of isolationism will lower enormously. Why won't rich countries just lock the border and dig in?
We're not even that far removed from finding out what will happen, it's only about 7 years away. I'd love some early warning though.
So they won't be made in the EU, since nobody wants to make concessions here. Solar panels have the same problem as oil and mining: they will destroy nature somewhere, otherwise it doesn't work.
(as posted elsewhere, this was a critical problem for Nazi Germany!)
Not to mention that such an investment is wasted capital. Change is accelerating and that energy infrastructure would need to be realistically dismantled in fairly short order.
And in the short term they will seem to be right - after all "Liberation Day" tariffs were supposed to destroy the economy and everything is fine! It was just a bunch of boys crying wolf. But the reality is that it took decades to get to this level of integration and it's hard and slow to turn the ship of state around. But people outside the US are very motivated and getting increasingly motivated to turn things around and it'll be essentially a generation-long project to disengage from the US. At some point the US will try to squeeze someone and find out they simply don't have what they once had.
In the aftermath of the Carney speech in Davos and similar talk around the world, there seems to be a corresponding desire to bring China to the same realization. These are generational hopes, mind you, not knee-jerk, rapidly invoked changes being planned.
Different Trump supports will have different parts of the status quo that they personally despise. The abstraction is universally true, however.
In other words, new wind farms will need subsidies, an those will have to be payed for by the populace. This isn't necessarily something specific to wind power, nuclear needs subsidies as well.
As always, "subsidize the losses, privatize the profits".
About as big as tensions get.
Particularly concerning was the focus on Greenland’s efforts to extract mineral
wealth or create defence positions, said Obed. “That’s the scariest part of the
rhetoric that has been circulating,” he said. “I did believe we were beyond this
central premise that if Indigenous peoples do not improve our land based on the
criteria of imperialist actors, that somehow we do not have self-determination.
The decisions that are made about our land and what we want for it are ours
alone.”https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/02/indigenous-vie...
ndr42•1h ago