collapse

This is already true today with 5% of cars but only 1% of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles being replaced with their fully electric variants. This creates a structural imbalance in fuel demand: lowering gasoline consumption far faster and to a much greater degree than the demand for diesel fuel.

I recommend you reread that blog post. It's arguing something else than you perhaps think it's arguing.

No tractors. No industrial agriculture. No heavy trucks. No mining, so no EVs or renewable energy infrastructure. No shipping. No airfreight. No paved streets. No water, no canalization. No modern medicine. And so on. End of modernity, in other words.

So less than a billion people on the planet, long-term. Perhaps as low as 100 million.

It will happen, eventually. But you don't want it to happen fast.

I read it. I’m not convinced. There’s a whole section about trucks needing diesel while completely ignoring how delivery vans are being electrified. Companies like Amazon, WalMart, and Frito Lay are replacing their delivery vehicles, freeing up diesel elsewhere.

There was also this: “Since passenger vehicles are in use for 15+ years, there is still a massive fleet of gas-guzzlers out there—and will be for a long time to come” This seems to completely ignore the used EV vehicle market. Evidently only combustion vehicles last? Also most passenger vehicles don’t use diesel, so what does this have to do with the thesis about electrification setting up a ”feedback loop” in the diesel market?

The whole piece is a bizarre construct with some whining about how if people don’t continue to buy diesel in large quantities, the refineries will somehow get completely confused and go belly up.

Random online communities don't do well with more complex topics. It's usually better with topical blog comments, but not going to go down that route.