Comment by AnthonyMouse
4 days ago
Whether it's a net importer or net exporter is a red herring. If something unsavory happens in Iran, the price of gas is going to move.
National security arguments also don't work in cases like this, because "national security" isn't the real reason the government does a thing, it's the excuse given to the public when Republicans want an unconstitutional boondoggle. But fossil fuel companies are a Republican constituency so it would typically be the Democrats advocating for something like that and their excuse calendar uses different phrases.
If you want to get Republicans to support it you either need to bring it within their cultural norms to want it, e.g. American-made Cybertruck can stomp their old truck in a drag race and the Tesla guy is their friend now, or it just needs to be more profitable so they want solar on their roof to save on electricity.
You can also use different methods when appealing to people with different values. Typical plan from the left is to subsidize it with tax dollars, but you can also ask things like, what makes solar installations expensive? Are there ways to make it easier for homeowners to do it themselves to avoid costly professional installation? Is there some kind of regulatory capture causing things like inverters and transfer switches to cost two orders of magnitude more than the price of their raw materials? Try thinking like the people you're trying to convince if you want to get them on your side.
The USA used to prohibit crude oil exports and only lifted the ban in 2015. If there was a major international supply disruption then we could temporarily reimpose an export ban to essentially turn our country into an oil "island" and shield customers from the impact of higher external market prices.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-118
Crude oil is the stuff that comes directly out of the ground. That wasn't an export ban on refined oil. The rule was a protectionist measure at the behest of US refineries. This is the money quote:
> We found that repealing the ban was associated with:
> ...
> Decreasing profit margins for petroleum refiners as they paid more for domestic crude oil relative to international prices
The US is a net exporter of oil. That doesn't mean they're not importing a ton of it and then exporting even more, e.g. because the Northeast is closer to Canada than Texas so New York uses a lot of oil from Canada and then the gulf states export to other countries.
Changing that in the long-term would raise prices (higher transportation costs, less competition) and changing it in the short-term (i.e. in immediate response to a foreign supply shock) would raise prices significantly because of short-term logistical issues. Also, to the extent that it lowered relative prices, the difference would come out of the profits of US oil companies and increase the profits of their foreign competitors as customers in the EU and other places experience even more of a shortage. "Piss off your allies and domestic industry to the benefit of foreign adversaries" is usually not a winning strategy.
Meanwhile those sorts of export bans will leak like a sieve anyway. Even without formally violating them, you'll see things like energy-intensive industries moving production to the place with cheaper energy until the cross-border price stabilizes, which means higher prices outside the US would lead to higher demand (and thus higher prices) within the US.
It's a global commodity market and you don't even want it to be otherwise.