and I'm not sure how much they need to do to drive up costs. During Covid the economy has started showing signs that the incentives are wrong and Trump 2 showed you can just buy government favours and tilt the field to your advantage.

Even if they don't say that, it is the obvious thing to do. Elections are coming up in a few months. Already because of midterm elections the democrats were expected to gain seats (this is something you could predict the day after the 2024 elections before Trump took office again). The democrats are not so stupid as to not yell about gasoline prices in their advertisements - this is a big deal to a lot of people. Iran has a lot of power to affect gas prices (something they have long known) and so their best chance to harm Trump is to ensure the democrats win as many seats as possible.

The real question is what happens after the elections. There is a lot happening in Iran and nobody can figure out which factions really are gaining power (we know who is the public voice of power, but not if they have real power)

> This was the desired effect though

Honestly, I think you're giving far too much credit to the current US government.

Refineries in US are making even bigger profits. They even skip on maintenance running at 95% capacity non-stop.

Yes its a rule in hell situation. Some folks are getting a larger share of a shrinking pie.

I am unsure its by design or just idiocy. (Probably a mix of both).

>This was the desired effect though, as higher oil prices means more profit for US based oil producers. I'm sure that will trickle down any time now.

That's giving the Trump administration too much credit. Before the war there were pieces about how oil companies were doing worse under Trump than under Biden[1]. Of course, you could argue that the Iran war is Trump finally responding to oil companies, but given that it only started more than a year after he took power, it really makes you wonder whether Trump is bumbling along, or playing some 5d chess with the global oil market. On the flip side there's plenty of evidence that he doesn't want high oil prices, for instance lifting sanctions on Iranian and Russian oil.

[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2025/02/06/donald-trump-l...

Non-US based producers too, I can already see the difference in my country's economic position.

Huh, how does having options of ICE or EV cars mean high oil prices won't mean people try to use less oil?

If gas prices go up, expensive public EV chargers will be more appealing. I hope you get better infrastructure re: charging soon; here in California (not known for low energy prices nor for infrastructure-building capacity) most fast chargers are between US$0.50 and US$0.70 (£0.37-£0.52) per kWh, so it is definitely possible. (You also need non-fossil-based electricity generation to truly decouple from oil/gas prices.)

I share your worries about industry, though — although trucks, earth-movers, etc could theoretically run on batteries or hydrogen or something, industrial processes using petroleum and natural gas may be around for a lot longer.

Individuals can do some things but not everything. I live in a place without reasonable public transportation but I've replaced 90% or more of my car trips with cycling, including for large grocery runs. I'll acknowledge not everyone is as fit as I am or as willing to put up with bad weather (I ride in snow for months out of the year).

Pivoting agriculture from feed grains supporting the livestock industry to crops that humans directly consume would also improve the fuel consumption picture, but people are reluctant to reduce or eliminate meats from their diets.

I've just bought my first electric car. It's a 3 year old Skoda Enyaq Sportline Plus.

It's lost 60% of its value, has only done 57k miles and has a battery state of health of 97.4%. I paid £22k.

I still maintain that new cars, especially new electric cars, are not worth the money but secondhand ones are a bargain now... relatively speaking.

Last I checked, depending on one’s needs, used EVs are among some of the best values in the US used car market. Their prices are closer to what prices on used gas cars would’ve been had the market not been turned on its head during the pandemic.

The main caveat is that available models are heavily weighted towards “compact” (RAV4 sized) SUVs and larger. There aren’t many little Prius/Fit/Soul type town car models around which is a bit paradoxical with that being the use case that EVs have been well suited to for the longest time.

You can't trade in for a used EV that likely wouldn't cost you anything and would save you money?

Just swap it for a more efficient smaller 11yo car?

Same here. Too bad they got rid of the rebates.

I'd go electric if they were just cars and not shit android tablets with wheels stuck on them.

I don't get your point. The planet will not realistically run out of either. The water price goes up, then soler + desal becomes more cost effective, then people get to use the material that covers 75% of the planet's surface a bit more. Similarly, when oil gets more limited the price goes up and the planet gets to keep its oil while people stop being able to afford burning more of it. Or perhaps this was exactly your point.

How does the planet run out of water?

The planet will never run out of oil, because people will always run out of money for it first.

Refinery capacity is the bottleneck, there are only ~420 of them that remain [1] globally. We won't run out of oil, we will run out of refineries as they slowly close over the next 10-15 years. No new ones will be built, out of stranded asset risk. The more painful oil is now, the faster permanent changes occur to destroy the future demand curve [2] [3]. An EV deployed today will last long into the future, while ICE combustion sales continue to decline.

China has destroyed oil import demand the equivalent of annual UK oil imports in the last six months, for example. Push those oil and diesel prices up, hold them up as long as possible. Several countries have banned internal combustion vehicle imports to push the needle on the EV trajectory (Ethiopia, Laos) because they are fossil fuel poor. Global EV sales have spiked, and already exceed 25% of total annual vehicles sales (~90M units/year) [4] [5]. We're just discussing how long until we reach tipping points that further accelerate the transition.

How much fossil supply chain infra must be impaired to further move the needle? Hard to say, excited to find out. Electrify or get wrecked. To not to is a choice.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479229 (citations)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647405 (citations)

[3] Gas car sales fell 40% in August in China [Charts] - https://carnewschina.com/2026/09/08/gas-car-sales-fell-40-in... - September 8th, 2026

[4] Global sales of combustion engine cars peaked in 2017 - https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-sales-of-com... - May 21st, 2026

[5] https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

(as of this comment, China has enough EV manufacturing capacity to satisfy global demand; they are currently export constrained and cannot ship fast enough to meet demand)

> A lying politician is nothing new

I think saying he's lying is too generous. It implies intent. I think he's just not capable of separating truth from fiction anymore.

That sounds like a great theory but is not consistent with the observation that until not too long ago, diesel used to be cheaper. How do you explain that?

That's the problem with hindsight theories, especially if only using a limit horizon into the past.

I found this Planet Money Episode [0] really insightful as well to understand the components that drive the price of a gallon of gasoline.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120422634/breaking-down-the-...

Isn’t that sulfur more valuable than ever now?

You are not required to repeat uncited and likely incorrect suppositions.

Not in the US, but I believe there are some countries that have tried that. For a while Europe (in general - but individual countries had different policies!) had less tax on diesel because it was more energy efficient, then they realized it was more polluting (less CO2, but more NOx...) and started encouraging gasoline which they decided was overall better.

In the US diesel taxes are often different from gasoline, but polluting is generally not a factor.

...because Diesel is taxed differently than standard gas/Benzin there...

EDIT: meaning "less taxes"

> Gemini says since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, so another thing to blame Putin for), now it's about 5% more expensive...

No. That's not correct. It got more expensive than gasoline since the attack on Iran.

It is, but it isn’t because of free market economy.

Not just massive, they were the largest single-day protests in US history, each exceeding the last.

The problem is that they didn’t move the needle at all, politically - the Oct 2025 protest, for example, was followed immediately by the embarrassing capitulation by the Dems on the shutdown. This is the real reason protest in the US is relatively rare: the political class has thoroughly insulated itself from it.

The moron in the White House is bombing his own oil supply.

* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition

Really wish I had a better memory so I could memorize these as a lot of them would be really fun as everyday quips.

Only for a short time, everybody knows about cheap drones and they are ordering cheap drones (likely from Ukraine where they are field tested to work) to shoot down drones. If the next round is in a few years patriots will only be used on much more expensive ballistic missiles.

That said, the patriot is a lot cheaper replace than the things it was defending so it was a good investment even if expensive.

The smart ones properly realized that their home is no longer in the republican party. The others were swept up in culture war because... What other adults do in their lives needs immediate government intervention from the party of small government.

Because fuel is so expensive.

And cars not as big.

Diesel engines in the US are used for things where they do count fuel costs. (there are a few diesel cars/SUVs, but they are a tiny minority). In short for most diesel users the efficiency is very similar between US and Europe.

Diesel in Norway was about €2.5 a litre today.

I don’t think the US is a sovereign nation. No one wanted this war but we did it anyway. Our politicians are all bribed and blackmailed by Israel.

Diesel was over $4/gallon in 2005. Please run inflation against that, not last years prices. (I remember 2005 prices I'm not old enough to remember diesel prices in the 1970s, but that would be an interesting place to run inflation from as well)

Russia stopped exporting diesel due to Ukrainian strikes. That badly hurt Turkey and to lesser extent Brazil. And Brazil started to get diesel from US allowing US companies to make a lot of profit. So Ukrainian strikes clearly affect global prices.

But then it also makes Chinese EV including trucks extremely attractive replacement. So China making a profit as well.

A lot of the Ukraine strikes affect Russia only. Russia has changed to import a lot more, and exporting less (I do not know the balance - most refining countries both import and export fuel from different locations), but the vast majority of the oil refined in Russia was used in Russia and they are unable to replace it.

Ukraine strikes to impact the world price. However most of the impact is in Russia, elsewhere the effect is less. Iran is larger effect because the middle east as a more significant share of global oil. (both have an effect, but Iran is larger)

Russia hasn't exported products in over a month now. If Diesel prices hit $6 today, it's purely because 6 months after the US president started his war on Iran, Iranian forces in Yemen have routed the Saudis and cut off the second of two SA oil export routes, damaging a vital pipeline in the process, sending crude to $100 and beyond.

Check historical prices of diesel. Diesel has been up since April 2026 when Trump launched his war against Iran regardless of what Ukraine has been doing. This is the same story with weapons, the Trump administrations blames Ukraine for their lack of Weapons to fight Iran, if you look at the weapons they are using to fight Iran, 95% of them were never given to Ukraine.

The whataboutists will tell you Bernie would storm the front himself.

And the other party was (among other faults) amazingly complacent as major landlords colluded at scale - via RealPage software - to send apartment rents skyrocketing.

If you look at the timeline, and the demographics of voters who lost enthusiasm for Biden between 2020 and 2024, it looks like a whole lotta the Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck decided to vote their pocketbooks.

Vs. back in '72, when Biden was just getting elected to the Senate, Pres. Nixon was a noisy anti-inflation zealot. (Not saying Nixon was sane, nor legal...) Since Nixon was re-elected with >60% of the popular vote - in spite of negatives like the Vietnam War - I'd say that the Dem's failure to follow a so-obvious winning reelection strategy was exactly what handed Trump the opportunity to make the decisions which you so strongly dislike.

Current US leadership has very much failed ordinary people in the US and allied states.

Incompetence or malice? Both is also possible...

Would be great if americans actually cared about those issues instead of complaining online all the time.

"both sides" is the reason we're in this shit show. It's like comparing a wart to stage 4 skin cancer.