Gasoline prices in the US seem to be spiking at the moment, but the public is not yet connecting this with Trump's boneheaded meddling in longstanding foreign policies. Since the price of transporting goods will inevitably rise, so will prices generally.
With a good reason. The current increase in oil prices started in January 2016. It is normal cyclic price oscillation that is due to low prices discouraging investments which restrict supplies in the future.
Or perhaps you just didn't bother reading the links that koy posted:
Trump Iran sanctions just gave Saudi Arabia and Russia more clout in the oil market, so watch for higher prices
Trump’s Iran Policy Is Blowing Up His Energy Agenda
When you reduce the supply of Iranian crude, that makes the price of oil go up in the world market. Markets react. Gasoline prices go up. So does the price of delivering products to your local grocery store. Putin smiles. That would not be a "normal cyclic oscillation".
Next will be something to do with shale. Either he’ll use this “crisis” as a reason to dump our own oil reserves into the market (thereby depleting them), or he’ll come up with some other way—buried deep most likely—to fuck up our oil reserves so that we too become dependent on Russian oil.
And by “he’ll” I, of course mean, Putin through Trump.
The key is in these two paragraphs from the
Foreign Policy piece:
What’s notable about the Trump administration’s outreach, however, is that it remains necessary even in the face of surging U.S. oil production that has put the country on course to soon be oil independent (on a net basis). The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that U.S. net oil imports in 2019 will be their lowest in more than 60 years. Such forecasts undergird the administration’s calls for U.S. “energy dominance,” which administration officials have defined as “a self-reliant and secure nation, free from the geopolitical turmoil of other nations that seek to use energy as an economic weapon.”
The need to call on the Saudis to stabilize oil markets in the wake of the Iran announcement, however, lays bare why increased oil production alone does not make the U.S. immune to the realities of the global oil market. As oil can be freely traded, there is, broadly speaking, one world oil price. A disruption to supply somewhere in the world will thus cause oil prices, and consequently pump prices, to rise in the United States, even if it imports no oil at all.
Perhaps the gambit is to foster isolationism in order to burn off our reserves, but my money is still going to be on something more direct and catastrophic (at least in application), so that we are somehow either prevented from extracting sufficient quantities on our own or the access is somehow sabotaged.
We have
80% of the world’s shale oil resources, but somehow Trump is going to fuck with that or make some sort of deal that puts us on the losing end in regard to it. Words marked.
ETA: It has something to do with this:
Trump Administration Rescinds Fracking Rule For Public Lands.
Keep in mind that Trump’s business model was never about building shit; it was about getting loans to build shit so that he could then profit off of their demise. The cover—the front—was the building, but the way he made his money was off of the fire sales once they went belly-up.
The point being, you can’t ever look at Trump dangling his shiny keys; that’s the distraction so that you don’t see what he’s really up to. A trick he learned from his corrupt father; even more corrupt mentor (Roy Cohn); equally corrupt advisors (Stone, Bannon, Priebus etal); and long time groomer and current puppeteer, Putin.
Somehow, our shale resources will get fucked, I guarantee it and
this may be it:
As one of the few federal actions that have been taken to address the risks associated with unconventional oil and gas development, the 2015 BLM fracking rule was an important step in protecting people and enhancing disclosure around hydraulic fracturing. Without such a rule in place, fracking on federal lands has less oversight and transparency, putting the public at risk.
And the operations themselves.
Or, there’s
this route (sending the industry into never ending regulatory deadlock:
The industry and the Trump administration would increase national and local acceptance of fracking if strong federal regulations were in place. Instead, the industry argues that states are already doing an adequate job of regulating fracking, so the behemoth federal government need not slow the drilling approval process with yet more red tape. Yet even if most states have model fracking regulations, that does not obviate the need for a federal backstop guaranteeing a minimum level of regulation across the country. The Obama rules would have deferred to local regulations when states had regulations as strong or stronger than the federal ones.
If Trump administration officials were worried about regulatory redundancy, they should have ensured that the federal authorities were deferring to states when they could. Instead, they quashed a sensible set of rules that would have discouraged accidents and encouraged public confidence in the industry.
My money is on a predictable, catastrophic accident due to rescinding Obama’s regulations (and/or sabotage resulting in the same thing) and that accident being so devastating that everyone—Trump included—has no choice but to ban fracking. And the basis for that bet is the simple fact that there was no need to rescind the regs. The industry was, in fact, just fine with them and agreed to them as being necessary to help prevent catastrophic accidents.
