I filled the Silverado at the Co-op in Friendship yesterday — $4.47 a gallon, just under the national average that market reporting put out this morning. That’s a dollar more than we were paying before the shooting started in the Strait of Hormuz, and the interim deal the administration is calling a win has brought it down maybe a nickel. A nickel. You can feel the pause at the pump when the digital readout hits three digits. That pause is the sound of a working county doing the math on a tank of gas that now costs north of a hundred dollars for a pickup that needs to get to the job site, the feed store, the school pickup, the deer stand in the fall.
The fossil-fuel industry lied to America about energy independence. A war in the Persian Gulf just proved it at every pump in the country, including this one.
The president looked at numbers like these last week and said $4.16 wasn’t “very high.” That was a statement from someone whose motorcade doesn’t stop at the Co-op. It was a statement from the same political coalition that spent a decade telling rural America that fracking would make us energy-independent, that the shale revolution meant we’d never again pay a war premium at the pump for a conflict in a desert seven thousand miles away. The war came anyway. The war premium came with it. And the oil companies, which booked record profits the last time gasoline crossed four dollars, are doing just fine.
The lie is called “energy independence.” It goes like this: if we drill enough oil here in America — frack the shale basins, open the federal lands, run the pipelines — what happens in the Persian Gulf will not matter to the person filling a tank in Wisconsin. The oil lobby has been selling this since at least 1973. Every president since has run on some version of it. Drill baby drill. An all-of-the-above strategy. Energy dominance. Different slogans, the same promise, the same failure.
The promise fails because oil is a global commodity. The price is set on a world market, and no amount of domestic drilling changes that. The well in West Texas does not have a spigot labeled “for Americans only.” When a war in the Persian Gulf takes a fifth of global supply off the market — as it did this spring when the Iran war strained the Strait of Hormuz — the price goes up at the pump in Adams County just as it does in Riyadh. The bad-faith-techniques catalog calls this T1 — selective “energy independence” framing: the term is deployed to mean “produce more domestic oil,” ignoring that the United States has been a net petroleum exporter since 2019 and crude remains fungible globally. Domestic production does not insulate consumers from price shocks. The framing exists to prevent you from seeing the structure.
Chapter 16 of We Too has a name for this — the Nationalist Shell Game. Nationalist rhetoric deployed while multinational corporations and global commodity markets name the actual policy. The promise of sovereignty at the pump is the cover for a market structure that guarantees dependence on a body of water most Americans could not find on a map.
Daniel Yergin’s The Prize tells the story of the whole twentieth century as a fight over oil, and the twenty-first hasn’t changed the plot. The Carter Doctrine — President Carter’s 1980 declaration that the United States would repel any outside attempt to control the Persian Gulf “by any means necessary, including military force” — is still in force forty-six years later. The Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force Carter created became CENTCOM. American troops are in the Gulf right now. We have been committed to defending that waterway for nearly half a century. The “energy independence” that was supposed to make that commitment unnecessary never came. What came was record domestic production and a gas price that still goes up when somebody starts shooting at Hormuz.
Under Biden, U.S. oil production hit record highs — 13.2 million barrels a day in 2024. Under Trump, it kept climbing. Both administrations took credit. But crude crossed $120 during the Hormuz shutdown. Neither administration could do a thing about the price when the Gulf caught fire. The long story — the story the “energy independence” framing is designed to obscure — is that the President is in the story, but he is not the whole story. The whole story is a tanker stranded in the Strait of Hormuz and a global benchmark price that does not read the White House press release.
Bethany McLean, who broke the Enron story and later wrote about the shale industry’s finances, saw it clearly: the shale revolution was a financial event as much as a geological one — a decade of zero interest rates pushing pension money into junk-rated energy debt. The grit is real. So is the debt. The same global market that priced crude above $120 during the Hormuz shutdown did not care that U.S. drillers had loaded up on debt to get the oil out of the Permian. It did not sever the connection between the pump in Friendship and the war in the Gulf. Nothing that produces a fungible commodity on a world market ever could.
Rural America burns more gasoline per household than urban America — longer distances, heavier vehicles, no public transit, no walkable errands. When gas goes up a dollar, a working family in Adams County takes a bigger hit than a family in Madison or Milwaukee, and it comes out of the same paycheck that already covers fewer things than it used to. The mechanic at my shop who drives in from Wautoma is spending an extra forty dollars a week just getting to work and back. The farmer running a diesel tractor to cut hay is paying a fuel bill that eats the margin he was hoping to carry into winter. The single mother working the cash register at the Family Dollar and commuting from Grand Marsh is making choices about which tank of gas lasts until payday.
Wendell Berry wrote in The Unsettling of America about the “extractive mind” — the mentality that treats land, people, and communities as expendable inputs to be consumed and moved on. The oil market is the purest expression of that logic. The costs of keeping the Strait of Hormuz open have been borne by the sailors who patrol it and the families who write letters to them. The costs of the price spike have been borne by the people who have no choice but to fill the tank and swallow the difference. The profits have been booked by the same handful of vertically integrated oil majors that have been cashing in on global instability since the first oil shock in 1973. That is not an accident. It is the design.
The interim deal may hold, or it may not. The price of crude may settle back toward eighty dollars, or it may spike again the next time a mine hits a tanker or a missile battery lights up a shipping lane. The point is not the day-to-day price. The point is the structure. The structure says that a county like Adams — a county that produces nothing the global oil market cares about except demand — will always be the last to be protected and the first to pay.
The answer from the oil lobby and both parties is always more drilling. It has been more drilling since 1973. But the answer was never more drilling. The answer involves burning less of the stuff — building the vehicles and the infrastructure that reduce the stranglehold a body of water eight thousand miles away has on what it costs to get to work in Adams County. Nobody in Washington, regardless of party, has had the nerve to say so.
The dollar more a gallon in Friendship is the price of that silence. It is the price of a lie the fossil-fuel industry has been telling for half a century. And it is the price the pump charges whether the well in Texas is producing or not, because the market does not care about the promise, and the Gulf does not care about the slogan, and the pump does not care who is President. That is what energy independence looks like from the driver’s seat of a fourteen-year-old pickup in Adams County, Wisconsin. It looks a lot like dependence. It always did.