Comment by epistasis
18 hours ago
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.