I filled the shop truck at the co-op in Friendship this morning and diesel was $5.19 a gallon, roughly tracking the regional average. That’s a lot more than I paid a year ago, and I can tell you where that extra money went: it went to the same oil companies that have been buying back their own stock while I’ve been buying parts for a 2014 Silverado with 187,000 miles on it. A naval blockade is a tax. It’s just collected at the pump instead of at the courthouse.
The Strait of Hormuz is an ocean away. The diesel tank at the equipment supply yard off Highway 13 isn’t. When the administration posts on Truth Social that it will seize Iran’s Kharg Island, crude oil jumps three percent before noon. When the post gets pulled and a naval blockade stays on instead, crude drops four percent. The price on the sign out front doesn’t jump down and up on the hour. The wholesale margin does.
The market data from Tuesday tracked a single barrel of oil swinging between $86.75 and $91 in eight hours, driven entirely by whether a threat against Iran was solid enough to trade on or hollow enough to sell off. Yesterday’s energy roundup showed the market pricing on the escalation; today showed it pricing on the cancellation. UBS analysts warn that American refineries are already prioritizing jet fuel and diesel over gasoline, setting up a summer where localized supply shortfalls drive pump prices higher. BP executives are moving up their debt-paydown targets by a full year to 2026, counting on this exact macro environment to clear their balance sheets. The people paying for that clearance are the ones filling up the Silverado or running the bush hog in July.
The business press this morning is full of analysts talking about “downward sloping channels” and “the net effect of the conflict” as if the war in the Gulf were a spreadsheet. What they’re describing is a President who threatens to bomb Iranian oil terminals, calls off the strikes at the last minute, and then keeps a naval cordon in place anyway—all to make sure that crude never falls far enough for a working man to catch a break at the pump. The same paper that reported the blockade’s effect on prices this morning also carries the analyst notes that treat the war as a buy signal. That is the shell game. The flag goes up, the bombs don’t fall, but the price stays high.
I don’t pretend to understand the diplomacy. I do understand what it costs me to fill a five‑gallon can for the generator. I understand what it costs my neighbor to run his tractor. I understand that the co‑op’s diesel price is set by a global market that is, right now, being held in place by the U.S. Navy. The administration says it is fighting for American energy dominance. What it is actually doing is fighting to keep the price of crude from falling to where the market would naturally take it if the shooting stopped.
The oil companies don’t need a war. They just need the price to stay high enough to make their quarterlies. The blockade is the tool. It doesn’t matter whether the President orders a strike tonight or cancels it. What matters is that the threat of force is on the table, and that threat tightens the market. The market prices the risk, not the ordinance. The administration is supplying the risk.
If a real naval blockade closes the Strait of Hormuz—it carries roughly twenty percent of the world’s oil—the diesel we buy in Adams County runs out. That is the physical floor. But when a threat is floated to spike futures and canceled when the trade settles, the physical floor becomes a casino.
The same industry that spent forty years telling us that “energy independence” meant drilling more now tells us that a naval standoff in the Gulf is just the price of doing business. It is not just the price of doing business. It is a transfer of wealth from the people who turn wrenches to the people who own the wells.
I don’t have a position on the negotiations. I have a position on the price of diesel.
An economy is a membership. The membership here is the small shop owners, the farmers, the truck drivers who pay this blockade tax while the oil companies use the same crisis to justify their stock buybacks. The administration is not protecting American energy. It is protecting the oil industry’s balance sheet. The two things are not the same. They have never been the same. The people who run the co‑op in Friendship know it. The people who fill their trucks at the pump know it. The President, apparently, does not.
There is a way out of this. It involves a deal. The market thinks a deal is coming. The President says the deal is approved at the highest level of the Iranian leadership. I will believe a deal is real when the price at the co‑op’s diesel pump drops below four dollars a gallon again. Until then, what we have is a war tax dressed up as foreign policy, and the people paying it are the same people who have been paying it for fifty years.