I saw the number hit $5.79 this morning—up thirty cents in a week, give or take a dime’s memory—when I pulled the shop truck up to the Co-op tank in Friendship. Jerry behind the counter had yesterday’s Times-Reporter open to the energy wire, and the headline was what you’d expect: Strait of Hormuz still blocked, Houthis threatening anything carrying oil toward Israel, Brent crude pushing past ninety-four dollars. Jerry and I have been having the same conversation for two years now. The names of the straits and the belligerents change, but the conversation doesn’t.
The White House is keeping the strait closed to force a peace deal. President Trump’s morning post said negotiations are “proceeding” and the blockade will stay in place until a “Final Deal” is reached. The administration is treating the narrowest chokepoint on earth as a bargaining chip, and the cost of that posture arrives at the terminal gate long before it shows up on the highway signs in Friendship. When the most vital oil artery in the world is treated as leverage, the leverage is paid for by the small operators whose livelihood depends on predictable input costs.
My county, Adams, Wisconsin, is built around distances that would look insane on a London map—fifty miles to a hospital, thirty to a grocery store that isn’t a Dollar General, sixty to a sale barn in Mauston. When the cost of pushing a diesel engine down County Z goes up by a quarter a gallon, the margins that keep small operations alive disappear. I don’t need a commodities analyst to tell me that. I can read the numbers on my own fuel receipts, and I can see the same number on the receipts of every farmer and trucker who comes through my shop.
There is a bad-faith rhetorical technique the publication I write for catalogs as T1—“Selective energy independence framing.” The scholars who study this stuff trace it back to the 1973 embargo, when “energy independence” entered the American political vocabulary as a security argument. The contemporary deployment is much simpler: whenever a president needs to look like he’s doing something about fuel prices, he says “America is energy independent,” as though the crude we pump out of the Permian Basin is sold at a discount to Americans rather than priced on a global exchange. Both parties have run this play. U.S. crude output hit a record 13.3 million barrels a day in late 2023, and has since pushed higher under the current administration. The price at my Co-op didn’t budge independent of Riyadh and Tehran and the Houthi spokesman who wakes up one morning and decides whether a tanker rounding Yemen is “Israeli.” The Secretary of Energy can say whatever he wants about “energy dominance.” Saudi Aramco and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard still name the number on the receipt.
Daniel Yergin’s The Prize tells you the whole twentieth-century arc in about eight hundred pages; the short version, the version that fits on a shop bench at nine at night with a parts catalog open next to it, is that the diesel I buy in Friendship, Wisconsin is wired by pipeline and tanker to a fight that has been going on since Ibn Saud. Every new crisis in the Persian Gulf—1973, the Tanker War, the 2020 Saudi-Russia price war that, together with a storage crunch at Cushing, Oklahoma, briefly sent West Texas Intermediate into negative territory, and now a reopened Israel-Iran front and a Houthi blockade in the Red Sea—pads the bill for people who have no say in the fight. The Carter Doctrine, the forty-year U.S. military commitment to keeping the Gulf open, morphed somewhere along the line into a guarantee that the oil would keep flowing at whatever price the cartel decided. The warships are there to protect the supply. Nobody sent warships to protect my county’s budget.
Brett Christophers wrote in The Price Is Wrong that investment follows profit. But in a geopolitical standoff, the penalty follows the policy. When the President decides that a blockade is an acceptable negotiating posture, the cost of that posture arrives at the terminal gate long before it shows up on the highway signs. Tracy Shuchart at NinjaTrader Group flagged that northern hemisphere demand is already picking up; Barclays analyst Lydia Rainforth noted that BP’s restructuring into upstream and downstream divisions is supposed to simplify operations. The simplification is useful for the corporate ledger. It doesn’t move the crude. When Saudi barrels cannot clear the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea simultaneously, the freight rates on the tankers that reroute around the Cape of Good Hope compound the terminal price, a compounding squeeze already showing up in transport-sector analyst notes. The downstream division doesn’t get to negotiate with the geography; it just buys what it can and passes the invoice down to the pump.
Wendell Berry, in an essay I’ve loaned out more times than I can count, wrote that the extractive economy treats land and people as expendable inputs. The oil economy runs on the same logic, and it doesn’t distinguish between a farmer in the Central Sands of Wisconsin and a refinery worker in Jubail. When BP’s new CEO announced she’s splitting the company to “accelerate the strategy,” the corporate simplification will only deepen the pricing opacity for end buyers; the line item that won’t appear in the investor call is the thirty‑cent spread between what the crack spread model says a gallon of diesel should cost and what my neighbor Dave, who still runs six milkers and a hay baler, actually pays. The restructuring will make the shareholders happy. The pump doesn’t care.
The co-op I belong to, Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, was built by a New Deal‑era federal statute that recognized something the investor-owned utilities couldn’t be bothered to see: that rural Americans were not profitable enough to plug in, so the federal government and the member-owners did it themselves. I think about that when I look at the diesel receipt. The line from the 1930s to 2026 is straight, and it’s not just about electricity. When the market says a service is too expensive or too risky to provide to people who live at the end of a gravel road, the people who live there either build their own or they pay whatever the market demands. We built the electric co-op. We can’t build a refinery. So we pay, and the co-op’s fuel‑adjustment line on the monthly bill has crept up three months running, a quiet tax on the dairy barns and grain dryers. The people who operate the tractors and the trucks in this county do not care about the strategic rationale. They care that their operating costs are rising in the high-demand summer season.
My father used to say that the price of gas in the 1970s taught a generation of farmers how to read a world map. He’d point to the Persian Gulf on the atlas in the shop and say, “That’s where your tractor money goes.” The atlas is still there, and the money still goes there, and the only thing that’s changed is that the people collecting the rent have gotten better at pretending they’re not. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, U.S.-Iran talks are stalled, and the Red Sea is still contested. My Silverado takes the same diesel it always did, and I fill it at the same Co-op, and the money goes farther away every year.
I am not a policy analyst, and I don’t have a ten-point plan for fixing the global oil market. What I have is a county that is slowly being starved by a fuel price set in rooms my neighbors will never enter, and a political class that has spent four decades telling us we’re “energy independent” while the pump says the opposite. The pump is an honest instrument. The politicians aren’t. The petrostates aren’t. Berry says an honest economy is one in which the people who make the decisions bear the consequences. In the global oil economy, the people who bear the consequences are 7,500 miles and a world away from the decisions, and the gap is filled with our money. The “Final Deal” will eventually land, the Strait will reopen, and the risk premium will evaporate back to baseline. Until then, the administration gets its negotiating leverage, and the shop gets the higher invoice. The long arc of energy history shows that geopolitical leverage is expensive, and it is always the downstream operator who fronts the bill.