Until you can buy oil without dollars. This was an explicit agreement called the Petrodollar system, which was premised on the US navy securing international trade. If the US navy proves unable to do that (and exhausts its arms and demonstrates unpreparedness for future conflicts) then the whole premise falls apart.
You might also stop buying real estate if the government seems unstable and economy is poised to collapse. Good soybeans also depend on fuel prices and the continued flow of fertilizer...
To nitpick, much of that is probably due to halting refining for export and drawing down reserves. But of course the point stands that they are rapidly electrifying and expanding renewable generation.
Oil will only become more and more volatile. The supply chain is both complex and fragile to geopolitical nonsense. China is betting on stability and reliability, environmental concerns is just a bonus.
China has large coal reserves, enough for many decades.
"China, the world’s largest coal consumer, has domestic reserves of coal to last the next 50 years, according to annual reserves data from the Ministry of Natural Resources cited by Bloomberg.
At current rates of domestic production, China also has crude oil reserves that could last for at least 18 more years, according to the ministry"
Wow. Only enough reserves to be measured in decades? Once it's gone it's gone. Genuine Carboniferous coal, one day a thousand years from now, might be a rare museum item!
I have a habit of thinking about history in very long terms, and that just does not sit right with me. That kind of thinking (oh we have enough for decades, let it rip!) happens, and the decades pass, and time inevitably is less kind to the descendants of such decision makers.
Also, this means that if we let MBAs destroy this civilization, there won’t be any future advanced civilizations as we will have consumed all the easily usable resources they will need to jumpstart their technology tree from zero again. Even if the knowledge survives it could be useless
growing up (in the 70s/80s), the first time I was shocked at the exponential destructiveness of human civilisation was when I learnt that we had polluted the oceans. the second was when I found out that ubiquitous natural resources like oil could be completely consumed. I feel like either one would have been unthinkable even as late as 1900.
(incidentally the latest such shock was sometime this decade when I learnt that an aquifer could not only be depleted, but that that depletion would compact the soil so that it would thereafter be unable to hold water, and thus never (at least on our timescales) be able to be replenished. I think I'm still not over that!)
There is an interesting passage in Moby Dick where they talk about whether whaling could make whales go extinct, but the concern is brushed away as human hubris. How could humans completely destroy something that God created?
From the point of view of energy. The conversion of solar energy into coal is very inefficient, tree need energy to reproduce, only a part of plant is converted into coal, other organisms consuming plant matter, etc.
Until you find a more thrustworthy stewart of the international order. Everyone yells loudly about how bad the us is, but then you realize that the whole world voted with there feet that every other alternative is worse. The russians tried for years to write some replacement fiction into reality (BRICS) even though they would be the first to get shanked if the old great game returned. Its a absurd situation where empire cosplayers long for the times of "greatness" while struggling on even small "to real" acts ..
China's government is "very stable" until it's not. As a society, China has a long history but the central government has essentially collapsed or experienced violent revolution in 1976, 1969, 1949, 1927, 1911, 1850, 1796, 1644, etc. Perhaps we have reached "the end of history" and the Chinese Communist Party will now maintain stable control forever. Or maybe it will all fall apart again in a few decades due to resource shortages or factional power struggles or a foreign war.
That seems to be a recurring theme regardless of the country's economic system. We're two months away from seeing if the US still has a working succession strategy.
> Everyone yells loudly about how bad the us is, but then you realize that the whole world voted with there feet that every other alternative is worse.
The main problem right now is that the US are not the US for which we voted with our feet. They are a worse alternative to the US that created the status quo (to their advantage obviously, but much of the world also benefitted from free trade and the lack of other world wars).
You might also stop buying real estate if the government seems unstable and economy is poised to collapse. Good soybeans also depend on fuel prices and the continued flow of fertilizer...