James Stout

It hits both rural and urban economies because they both are heavily oil dependent.

This is something that the New York Times mentions when they're talking about like rice problems in Vietnam, right?

Part of the other thing that's been making rice like harder to farm is that their irrigation system is powered by like diesel engines, right?

It's pump-dredging diesel stuff.

And so because of that, you know, there's sort of like broad-scale shortages in Vietnam, and you have to choose whether you're, you know, using the limited amount of diesel that you have in cities or in rural areas.

And so these things are just kind of rapidly becoming a nightmare.

Now, you know what isn't a nightmare?

It's the products and services that support this podcast.

And we are back.

So I want to talk a bit about why the system is structured like this and why, you know, on the one hand, like we are starting to see things that are very incredibly alarming in East and Southeast Asia on varying levels that, and I guess I should be really clear about this, right?

Yeah.

The actual economics impacts of this are really dispersed.

It depends a lot on how wealthy of a country you are in and then also like how reliant on oil your economy is.

So the Chinese economy, for example, is not been that badly affected because they have large oil supplies.

The Taiwanese economy, you know, like there's kind of plastic bag shortages.

And that's been another element of all of this is like people panicking about are there going to be enough trash bags?

Because

For reasons that I will get into in a second, it's like plastic is made of oil, right?

Everything around you that is plastic is just oil.

And it does turn out that you do need crude oil in order to produce plastics.