Jacob Reed Davis

This needs to change

@nickofnz Sadly geography won’t allow every local to use solar and wind, also let’s don’t forget that petrochemicals are required to make or transport that solar and wind infrastructure. We’ll never fully be able to get away from petrochemicals.

There’s a limited supply of oil & gas. They’re controlled by billionaires. Wars are fought for them. They’re very expensive. There is an endless supply of wind and sunlight, and nobody can control them. No wars are fought for them. They’re free. How should we power the world?

@garyonthenet @flak_henry @_10delta_ Sure, sailboats work, but not at the size or scale or speed or reliability of a super tanker.

@JacobReedDavis @flak_henry @_10delta_ wind powered ships?

3 weeks ago I argued the US goal in Iran is to seize the global oil spigot. Venezuela in January -> Iran in February. Neutralize every supply channel outside the dollar system within 90 days. Achieve a compliant successor government and complete energy dominance. The oil thesis was the obvious layer. However, when you zoom out & view the last four years as a single sequence rather than isolated geopolitical events, the architecture of the grander US plan becomes visible. 1st was Europe, which laid the groundwork. The Ukraine conflict provided the justification for sanctions that collapsed Russian pipeline gas from 150 billion cubic meters to 40. Then Nordstream was destroyed, which rewired the entire European energy system permanently. The US went from supplying 28% of Europe's LNG in 2021 to 58% by 2025, exporting a record 111 million MTs, the 1st country in history to break 100 MT. Europe was transformed from a customer with options into a captive market now purchasing its survival in USD. 2nd was Syria. The fall of Assad severed the critical node connecting China's Belt & Road Initiative to the Mediterranean. The trilateral railway linking Iran, Iraq & Syria, designed to bypass Western maritime chokepoints, was completely destroyed. This isolated Iran geographically & cleared the path for what came next. 3rd was Venezuela. In January the US effectively took control of the world's largest heavy crude reserves. The US Gulf Coast has the most advanced refining complex on earth, specifically built for heavy sour crude. Phillips 66, Valero & the rest are now positioned to process hundreds of thousands of barrels of Venezuelan crude daily. The US captured a massive strategic reserve & solidified its position as the dominant exporter of refined petroleum products, an industry worth $110 billion in 2025 alone. Venezuela & Iran were the two major oil supply channels that existed outside the dollar system. Both produce heavy crude sold primarily to China & evaded US financial supervision. Both now being neutralized within 90 days, which leads us to.. 4th is Iran & the Middle East energy shock. Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field, the world's largest natural gas reservoir. Iran retaliated against Qatar's Ras Laffan, the single largest LNG facility on earth, responsible for a fifth of global supply. QatarEnergy's own assessment is that 17% of export capacity is gone and recovery will take up to 5 years. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. European gas prices spiked 70%. Asian spot prices doubled. The only remaining scaled supplier? The United States. If Iran falls & a successor government is installed that the US controls or influences (the Delcy model described weeks ago) then roughly 40 to 45 million barrels per day of global production out of 103 million is effectively under US control. OPEC becomes irrelevant because the US coalition is now the marginal producer. Now add the gas dimension & it goes beyond oil. This war is solidifying the petrodollar system as it evolves into a hybrid petro/LNG-dollar. The old system was built on Saudi crude priced in USD. The new system is built on American crude plus American gas from the Gulf Coast, with no alternative supplier of comparable scale. The dependency is deeper because LNG infrastructure requires long term contracts & regasification terminals that lock buyers into supply relationships for decades. Europe & the Pacific allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) cannot pivot away as there is nowhere left to pivot to. They're now locked into the US energy system. The market confirms this. DXY went from 96 to 101. Gold down ~20% from its January all time high. Bitcoin down 20% on the year. Brent above $100. European & Asian institutions are liquidating precious metals and crypto to buy dollars because they need dollars to buy the only remaining scaled energy supply. The world is selling its gold to buy American energy in American currency. The dollar is now being weaponized through energy dependency. The structural repricing is happening regardless of how the conflict resolves. But the US grand strategy goes deeper.. Artificial intelligence is a physical industry. It runs on power and chips. Data centers require massive uninterrupted baseload electricity, primarily provided by natural gas. Semiconductor fabrication requires helium & rare earths. By choking the Strait of Hormuz & crippling Middle Eastern LNG & helium production, the US is systematically degrading China's ability to power its data centers & fabricate semiconductors at scale. The US is energy self sufficient, especially with newly captured Venezuelan reserves & expanding Gulf Coast capacity running on domestic gas. On the other hand, China is import dependent & every joule it imports effectively now transits chokepoints the US Navy controls.. Iran was the Belt & Road's overland energy bypass, the corridor that allowed China to mitigate the Malacca Trap. With Iran neutralized that corridor is severed. China faces a world where its compute infrastructure competes for scraps on a depleted global LNG market, while American data centers run at full capacity on domestic energy. Russia is next in the sequence. A post-war Iran reopening under US influence competes directly with Russia for the same refineries in China & India at lower cost. Iran's production costs are lower. Russia loses its last structural advantage in heavy crude & its economic lifeline. Additionally, under the Iran war cover, Ukraine has been opportunistically destroying Russian energy infrastructure & all signs point towards Russia being at the end of the line. The message from Washington becomes very simple: we dismantled two regimes in three months, your economy is about to get crushed, sign the Ukraine deal. Then Trump sits down with Xi holding every card. Complete energy dominance. The hybrid petro/LNG-dollar fortified, Iran cleared, Russia cornered, & China facing the Malacca Trap fully closed with no remaining energy bypass. Israel & the GCC are absorbing the kinetic cost of a conflict whose primary beneficiary, counter to the mainstream narrative, is actually America (First). Qatar offline for 5 years reprices the entire global gas market in favor of US exporters for the remainder of the decade. The Gulf states face years of rebuilding. Europe faces its 2nd energy crisis in four years. Sure, the average American might face temporary moderate inflation & higher gas prices. But if you are the architect of the US empire & you view the rise of China & Chinese ASI as an existential winner takes all scenario, the collateral damage is acceptable cost. Whoever controls the energy corridors controls the monetary system. Whoever controls the monetary system & the energy supply simultaneously controls the compute infrastructure that determines which civilization builds ASI first. The US is seizing all 3.

@flak_henry @JessieIsHereNow @_10delta_ That will work once a charging infrastructure is developed for them. Trucks on a road and ships on the sea are two very different problem sets. A truck can pull over every couple hundred miles and charge for an hour. An ocean going ship can not.

@JessieIsHereNow @JacobReedDavis @_10delta_ What about MAGA Musk's Tesla Semi?

Jensen Huang just gutted the AI job panic with one profession. Radiology. The field AI was supposed to kill first. Jensen Huang: “Computer vision was superhuman in 2019. And yet, the number of radiologists grew.” Not competitive. Not close. Superhuman. Every forecast said radiologists were finished. Every forecast was wrong. Not slightly wrong. Directionally wrong. There are now fewer radiologists than the world needs. A global shortage. In the exact specialty AI was supposed to erase. Why? Because the task was never the job. Huang: “The purpose of your job and the tasks and the tools that you use to do your job are related. Not the same.” Reading a scan is a task. Diagnosing disease is a purpose. AI handled the task. The purpose didn’t shrink. It compounded. Faster reads meant more patients seen. More patients seen meant more disease caught. More disease caught meant more demand for the people who decide what to do about it. The tool did not kill the job. It fed it. Then the fear did what the technology never could. Huang: “The alarmist warning went too far and it scared people from doing this profession that is so important to society. It did harm.” People heard radiologists were finished and walked away from the field. Medicine bled talent it could not afford to lose. Not because the work vanished. Because the panic said it would. The prediction was wrong. The damage was real. Huang: “The number of software engineers at Nvidia is going to grow, not decline.” Not hold steady. Grow. The company building the infrastructure that automates code is hiring more of the people who write it. Huang: “I wanted my software engineers to solve problems. I didn’t care how many lines of code they wrote.” Nobody ever hired an engineer to type. They hired them to think. When the machine handles syntax, the engineer does not become obsolete. The bottleneck just moves upstream. To architecture. To edge cases. To the kind of reasoning no model handles alone. The world was never short on unsolved problems. It was short on people free to chase them. That is the part the fear narrative misses every single time. 340,000 women once worked as telephone switchboard operators. That job is gone. Nobody mourns it. What replaced it created millions of roles that nobody in 1920 had the vocabulary to describe. The losses are always visible. The gains are always invisible until they arrive. That pattern has survived every technological shift in history. It is surviving this one. The people forecasting mass displacement are making the same mistake as the people who forecasted the end of radiology. They can see the task being automated. They cannot see the purpose expanding underneath it. That blindness is not just wrong. It is expensive. Every person scared out of a career that AI will actually make more valuable is a cost the economy absorbs for nothing. Not because of the technology. Because of the story told about it.

It never ceases to amaze me that so many of these people that think we should electrify everything do not understand physics. I just got into an argument with someone that said they should just put solar panels on cargo ships. A supertanker (VLCC/ULCC) at its most efficient speed (~12-14 knots) needs roughly 10-20 MW of continuous propulsion power. That’s hundreds of MWh per day. Even if you cover every usable square meter of deck with high-efficiency marine solar panels, you’re lucky to generate 8-18 MWh per day on average (accounting for weather, angle, shading, and ocean conditions). That’s maybe 2-5% of what’s required. Batteries for nighttime? You’d need 100-250+ MWh of storage — hundreds to thousands of tonnes of batteries. Add the fire risks near oil cargo, stability issues, and lost cargo space… it’s a non-starter for ocean crossings. Solar + batteries can help with lights, pumps, and small auxiliaries (some ships already trial it for minor savings). But full electric propulsion on a supertanker? Physics says no — not without frequent shore charging or a massive backup. I love clean tech, but ignoring scale and energy density doesn’t get us there. Better paths exist than deck solar fantasies.

@KelleyGwen98778 @flak_henry @_10delta_ @grok how much energy is used to push a super tanked at 12 knots? How much energy could be captured from Solar panels covering that same super tanker?

@JacobReedDavis @flak_henry @_10delta_ Solar panels on top and windmills on the decks?

@flak_henry @_10delta_ The shipping industry will never be able to use renewables. A giant container ship won’t be able to be electrified. The physics just don’t work out.

A lot of words to say that the US hopes to secure the global supply of oil at a time when the rest of the world (led by China) is moving to renewables. The US will spend trillions rebuilding oil infrastructure and defending it with a stretched army against a world full enemies. Every great empire has fallen the same way. Arrogance, religious fanaticism, debt & war. 6D

@stepsenmccool @NXT4EU That’s some really bad cause-and-effect. I think what he means is energy is required for industry. If you don’t have the energy, the industry won’t grow. It’s like field of dreams if you build it, they will come, but if you don’t have it, they can’t.

@NXT4EU So you suggest France industry is rapidly growing because of lots of nuclear power?

Germany was a large energy exporter until they disabled their nuclear power plants. They had room for industrial expansion, but instead destroyed their own growth.

@alex_avoigt Perhaps it’s time to look at the regulatory environment and see why Nuclear costs so much. It shouldn’t cost that much, and yet it does…why?

For anyone who still hasn't grasped why nuclear power plants are the stupidest idea imaginable: New nuclear power plants cost up to 49 cents per kilowatt-hour in Europe. Solar power costs between 3 and 6 cents. Thats 16 times more expensive electricity For those now dreaming of small power plants (SMR): SMRs produce five to 30 times more nuclear waste than large reactors, and nuclear waste is a massive cost driver. Professor Dr. Lesch calls the idea of ​​using old nuclear waste as fuel "a wonderful fairy tale that has yet to come true anywhere in the world." For all now claiming storage is no cost driver take a look what Germany had to pay and all other countries with nuclear energy generation must pay for decommissioning and storing nuclear facilities and waste in the future:

In Canada those panels only generate 1.1 TWh of electricity. It would require approximately 40 square kilometers of panel covered land, and it would only power a small fraction of the power required by a large city like Toronto, and it would only do so during the hours when the sun is shining. I’m a fan of solar for certain applications, but it’s not great at generating grid scale power.

If you treat intermittent solar and wind as if they were reliable generators, they can appear cheaper than natural gas. If you recognize that intermittent solar and wind are fuel savers for reliable generators, not themselves reliable generators, it becomes clear that trying to power a modern society with them is prohibitively expensive. It would require so much expensive storage and so much overbuilding that the cost would be on the order of 10 to 20x higher than natural gas!

@ValerieAnne1970 @DowdEdward

🚨Study involving 1.7 million children has found that Myocarditis & Pericarditis only appeared in children who had received COVID mRNA vaccines. Not a single unvaccinated child in the group suffered from these heart-related problems.

@ChGefaell @TomANelson Too much evidence the clot shots caused cancer. We can’t have that.

How strange – Our World in Data has changed the source for this chart today, and the conclusion is completely different. My post above was a copy-and-paste from a screenshot taken on 16 March 2026 at 23:50 CET. But just a few hours later, on 17 March 2026 at 12:30 CET, this is the screenshot you can now see.

What happened in 2021?

@charliesmirkley The fraud that must be occurring. Wow.

NYC spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns. $81,705 per person in FY2025. And $81,705 is a floor. It excludes supportive housing (~$500M/yr), mental health response teams, and NYPD encampment costs. The city projects ~$97K per person in FY2026.

@mohitlaws Those are like the last five on a list of hundreds or options.

Trump has only five options: • Accept defeat and leave Iran. • Launch a ground invasion & watch Iran slaughter US troops like chickens. • Use nukes which will trigger a world war and kill billions. • Share the coordinates of Netanyahu with Iran. • Resign or Impeached

The world will continue to need hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future. Most places don’t have the geography for solar or wind. Plus, they only work when the sun I shining or the wind is blowing. Creating battery backups will be time, resource and labor intensive and will take decades. Not to mention all the plastics we use that require hydrocarbons.

If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.

Germany is not ideally situated for solar. Too far north, plus the sun only shines during the day, and the batteries required to back up the solar are too many. There’s no way they can generate the power they need only with solar and batteries. They could generate everything they need with well placed nukes though, and they run day and night producing clean energy.

@DVATW Now put solar on the same chart. You’re missing the big story, that nuclear is irrelevant now.

This is what economic suicide looks like;

@DVATW @Lukewearechange Ther German government is incompetent. Nuclear power is hands down the best low carbon source of energy.

Hopefully the Supreme Court takes this one on. No one wants to see a swinging duck where it wasn’t expected. Especially when you’re vulnerable in a Spa.

Woke Ninth Circuit decides Korean spas have to let biological men swing their gear in front of women and children. The dissent is pure gold: