Hypothetically, what would this graphic look like if the US had stayed on the gold standard and not blocked the world from adopting nuclear energy in the 1970s? 
Discussion
Good question....
I can't answer cause we have bitcoin now
My great hope for Bitcoin (outside of the pure monetary fidelity it can provide) is that it leads to a revolution in nuclear technology adoption.
You could have a sovereign city with nuclear reactors and baseline Bitcoin mining on it - nation states won’t make much sense in that world which goes hand-in-hand with killing off fiat.
This should/would have been the natural course had we not gone so far off track in the 1970s. Think about the lost time / production. Where we could be now.
Hard to say. I don't think nuclear would have made a big difference bc we didn't really use refined petroleum products as fuel for power generation that much too begin with.
True it’s not used for power generation, but the largest use of oil is for fuelling transportation.
You don’t think we’d have developed/advanced technologies to make use of abundant electrical energy in that area if we’d had nuclear everywhere for the past 5 decades?
As in better energy storage capabilities? Like better batteries for example?
Yes that’s one example; with an abundance of electricity much more R&D would have gone into both storage and transmission. And these things tend to have a compounding effect, the scientists working on this in the 70s would have taught those in the 80s who would have worked on improvements and taught those in the 90s etc - the improvements would have compounded over time instead we had very little R&D in that space, the same as there’s been very little in nuclear as there has been a dearth of expertise.
So better battery tech would have been expected, but likely also better ways of transmitting that electricity (I’m thinking of things like Tesla built way back when) such that it wouldn’t have had to be limited to wired.
But also, it’s possible they’d have been able to use that abundant electricity for other fuel sources ala hydrogen which is today very inefficient, but possibly with 5 decades of development behind it could have been drastically improved if it could have been easily made all along.
These are the tradeoffs people don’t seem to think much about - the opportunity costs of 50 years of the petrodollar and restricting nuclear power.
We’ve had carbon neutral anhydrous ammonia for centuries. Only when starved for fuel did the German army start developing it. Every fuel aside from fission is just hydrogen working. Why not let compounds assist with the storage? Nothing better than synthetic hydrocarbons. Existing infrastructure. Carbon neutral if you care about that.
It's possible but we'll never know!
United States of America? Nah. American Oil Cartel & its associated protection racket.