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Comment by spiderice

18 hours ago

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Oil is a globally traded commodity so the US definitely does care. The US also does consume oil from the gulf.

That said this term is not going to be acceptable to anyone so it's likely not going to happen. It remains to be seen where we'll be after the two week ceasefire that Iran declared it would never accept (no ceasefire, only end of war). Iran certainly has some leverage but so does the US.

I don't think you understand how commodity markets work, in particular oil, which is easy to ship relative to extraction costs.

It literally doesn't matter where the oil comes from, it only matters how much gets shipped! Only an utter fool could say something like "closing off the strait of Hormuz doesn't matter because our oil doesn't come from there." One merely has to look at current US gas prices to see how utterly silly that notion is!

  • > One merely has to look at current US gas prices to see how utterly silly that notion is!

    We could probably slash gas prices by banning oil exports, thus removing domestic oil supply from global market pricing (barring smuggling). The oil industry would probably hate that, though, for obvious reasons.

    Ultimately, though, this is yet another wakeup call for why an economy and society built around lighting a finite resource on fire is a bad idea, and hopefully this time around that wakeup call sticks.

    • > We could probably slash gas prices by banning oil exports, thus removing domestic oil supply from global market pricing (barring smuggling).

      To my understanding, you couldn't do this, no. The US is a net oil exporter, but many of its refineries are tuned for processing oil with a chemical composition that isn't found in the US, or not found in sufficient quantity. So the US has to both import and export oil, it can't just replace imports with exports.

California is more reliant on foreign oil. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

And seems about 23% comes from the Middle East. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

  • Gas prices going up across the country shows that all of the US is reliant on foreign oil, even if none of it ever touches the state.

    The idea of counting "reliance" based on the exact shipping route that serves you today is nonsense.

    • All oil is global commodity and the US refineries can’t take the oil that the US produces. So they mix it with heavy sours from Canada so the refineries can handle them. So a lot of the oil in the US is dependent on foreign oil as you said.

Funny how the only people who believe that are the people who have been wearing the red hats for years now

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    • Uh no. It is empirically not egg on the face of the people who believed it was not possible to improve the Iran situation militarily. The US's failure just proved them correct.

      Yes, I agree this is bad. In fact it's worse than it was a few weeks ago.

      6 replies →

yeah, that's why the biggest single problem facing Trump right now is the price of gas at US pumps, which is weird because based on your understanding of global trade it hasn't gone up at all...