An article on the front page of the New York Times is titled “Oil Recovers, but Not Its Jobs. Automation Reduces Need for Blue-collar Workers.” Those who insist on doubting that whole professions are being automated away should feel free to Google it.
This will not have any sort of an adverse effect on drilling, of course. The importance of oil was never about jobs but about the enormous geopolitical influence it gives. The workers, in the meanwhile, will go on GBI and will be happy and grateful as long as they can watch illegal Mexicans bein hunted down by raids.
Clarissa's Blog 
The importance of oil was never about jobs but about the enormous geopolitical influence it gives.
I’m not even sure it was about energy. Otherwise you’d have a significant contingent of quasi isolationist foreign policy leaders advocating for alternative energy sources that aren’t dependent on where tribolites died en masse aeons ago in places that aren’t “friendly”.
Shrub & Cheney never made the case “The world is going to run out of oil, we use a plurality of it, that’s why we have to go invade [oil rich countries] because cutting energy consumption drastically isn’t going to be pretty, and you’re all going to suffer, so we need it as a buffer” and they could’ve with just as much approval at the time.
I seem to remember an article in The Atlantic saying the Saudis were investing in solar energy as a hedge for their economy when the oil ran out.
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