Dwarkesh Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…You would have needed to get to a scale that they could never get to. Synthetic fuel meant making oil out of coal using a chemical process. The other thing is that the Allies bombed the plants as well. When I wrote The Prize, I intended to write one chapter on World War II. I ended up writing five because it was just so amazing. World War II was not an oil war, but there was an oil war within World War II. When Hitler invaded Russia, he was not only going for Moscow, he was also going for the oil fields of Baku. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz, who was the naval commander, said if they'd come back a third time and hit the oil tanks, World War II in the Pacific would have taken another two years. General Rommel in North Africa runs out of oil. He writes his wife, "Shortage of oil, it's enough to make one weep." General Patton's lunge in 1944 for Germany is held back by oil. The US is going after the oil lines that are supplying the Japanese, attacking them to basically drain the oil out of the Japanese war machine. There’s one big thing that was a real eye-opener for me. People have heard of kamikaze pilots who would fly their planes into aircraft carriers. One big reason they were doing that was to save fuel so they wouldn't have to fly back. I don’t know if “instigated” is the right word, but the Pacific War was instigated because the Japanese needed more oil because of the war in Manchuria. But precisely because of that war, we’d put an embargo on oil. The US put an embargo on them. One of the Japanese admirals said, "Without the oil, our fleet will become scarecrows."…

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