Trump’s Iran war is stealing a dollar a gallon from American families.
I filled the Silverado at the Cenex south of Adams last Friday for $4.27 on the marquee — the same price it’s been running most of August. The Friendship pump was the same on Tuesday. Forty miles south to Wisconsin Dells it’s been a dime to a quarter higher, depending on the station. The thirteen-cent spread used to be the difference between a town with a grocery store and one without. Today it’s the difference between two grades of war.
The national average for regular gasoline hit $4.14 a gallon over the Labor Day weekend, according to the AAA motor club — the highest price ever recorded for the holiday. The previous Labor Day record was $3.82 a gallon, set in 2012. Today’s driver is paying thirty-two cents a gallon above that record, and close to a dollar more than a year ago, when the national average was just over $3.20.
For Nicole Collins, a Philadelphia woman planning a Labor Day drive to South Carolina, the math at the pump has already reshaped her family’s summer. Outside a station in Claymont, Delaware, where regular was selling for $4.199 a gallon, she told a reporter what most American families have figured out by Labor Day. “Gas is pretty high right now,” she said. “It doesn’t help that we also have a baby, so we also have to pay for that.” Her family stayed close to home most of the summer.
The Adams County Times-Reporter ran the AAA number on its front page Wednesday with the local pump prices in a sidebar. The paper has been doing that all summer — national number, local number, the gap between them laid out for the reader to do the math on. The math this week, for Adams County families driving the average twenty-four miles each way to Wisconsin Rapids for work or the average thirty-five miles to the Dells for groceries, is that a dollar a gallon extra is two hundred dollars a month extra for a household with two vehicles. Two hundred dollars a month is a car payment. It is a quarter of the rent on the small apartment Sara’s sister keeps in Stevens Point. It is the difference between putting new tires on before the snow flies and waiting until the tread is showing wire.
It didn’t have to be this way. Gas fell briefly below four dollars a gallon in June after a deal the administration signed. By August it was past $4.06 as a sixty-day deadline expired. Now it is at a Labor Day record. The administration has the choice. The price has the answer.
The reason the price is what it is starts in February. The United States and Israel struck Iran in February, and Iran has refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz since. Crude oil traffic through the waterway has plunged. A fifth of the world’s oil moves through that strait every day, and most of the world’s tanker insurance and refueling infrastructure is calibrated to that route. Close it, and the price goes up everywhere — in Tehran and in Friendship alike. The strike didn’t just hit Iranian oil. It hit every barrel of oil that competes with Iranian oil for the same shipping slots, the same refineries, the same retail market.
This is what Wendell Berry, in The Unsettling of America, named the total cost of energy: not the price of the fuel, but the price of the system that delivers it — the wars that secure the routes, the interest rates that finance the drilling, and the health costs of the refining, all of it bundled into the number on the marquee. We pay only the front of the bill. The back of the bill is what the wars cost, in soldiers and treasury and credibility, and now in the price Nicole Collins’ family is paying for staying home this summer.
The political story here is the nationalist shell game the administration has been running since well before the strike. “American energy independence” is the phrase. The drill rigs are supposed to be running, the refineries supposed to be humming, the country supposed to be insulated from the kind of price spike that comes from a closed waterway. The price is spiking anyway. Independence from imported crude does not insulate American families from a war that closes the route for every barrel — Iranian, Saudi, Emirati, Iraqi, Kuwaiti — that competes with American crude in the global market.
A truck in Adams County runs on world oil. The world is at war. The truck pays the war.
A different policy is available, and Adams County has lived inside the shape of it for ninety years. In 1936, when the rural electric cooperatives were organized under the Rural Electrification Act, the argument against running wire out to farms like mine was that the density wasn’t there to justify the cost. The co-ops were organized anyway. The Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered here in Friendship, is still operating under the structure Congress wrote that year. The energy policy that would actually deliver American families lower bills is the policy that statute imagined, extended to this century: distributed generation owned by the members who use it, financed the way the co-ops were financed, built to the standard Berry named — solving for pattern, not generating new dependencies.
The Trump administration chose war. American families are paying for it at the pump, and they will keep paying for it as long as the strait stays shut. The price is what it is because somebody chose it. The choice has a name. The families paying the price have names too, and most of them will never make the news.