Imported oil is not your enemy it’s your friend. Every barrel that you use up that comes from somebody else is (one less) barrel of your precious oil which you’re going to need to feed your people and maintain your civilization.
And what responsible people do with a Confucius ethos is they suffer now to benefit themselves, their families, and their countrymen later. And the way to do that is to go very slow on producing your own (domestic) oil. You want to produce just enough so that you keep up on all of the technology. And don’t mind at all paying prices that look ruinous for foreign oil. It’s going to get way worse later. Every barrel of foreign oil that you use up instead of using up your own — you’re going to eventually realize you were doing the right thing.
Why are the policy makers in both countries so stupid on this single issue because they are not stupid generally? I think that it’s partly the economists who have caused the problem. Because they have this theory that if people react in a free market that it’s much better than any type of government planning but there is a small class of problems where it’s better to think the things through in terms of the basic science and ignore these signals from the market…
Charlie Munger on “Energy Independence” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDDPtJzGyEg&t=2240s