Gas prices go brrrrrrr
And diesel prices (which underpin essentially all industry and production) have gone even more brrrrrrrrrr. Which means just about everything else will be shooting up in price soon if the strait remains closed…
And much of the world’s fertilizer is shipped out of the strait of hormuz,and it’s currently spring, when fields would be getting fertilized right now. So food prices will jump too, and crop yields will be Lower
Wright posted that “the US Navy successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure oil remains flowing to global markets,” crediting President Donald Trump with “maintaining stability of global energy during the military operations against Iran.”
Within hours, a senior source in the IRGC’s naval force told Iranian outlet Iran Now that the claim “has no basis in truth,” insisting that no US-escorted tanker had transited the strait.
The source described the announcement as part of a “media war and attempts to mislead public opinion,” adding that the strait remains under “precise surveillance” by Iranian forces and that “any military movement in the area is fully monitored.”
Wright subsequently deleted the post without public explanation, undermining a week of administration messaging aimed at convincing the world that commercial traffic would soon resume.
For an administration that relies so heavily on propaganda lies, they are remarkably terrible at lying.
In any case, even if it were true and not a pathetic lie, Donald Trump would deserve no credit for slightly mitigating the problems Donald Trump caused when Donald Trump decided to start bombing Iran and slaughtering its civilians.
The trick is the people they’re lying to won’t look past the surface, so the lie does not have to be good.
Some people just want to believe I guess. Like they could start pushing lies that trump cured cancer and there would be some people that believed it with no credible evidence even as they died from cancer. The media would spin words to make it not sound like complete fabrication but rather everyone being misdiagnosed, and then appease some moderates by stating cancers are all different issues really, so they don’t really have cancer but a more acutely defined illness and at the end of the day 30% of Americans would answer polls that Trump cured cancer, 30% say he didn’t cure cancer and 40% didn’t know how they felt or if their head was infact in their ass at that very moment. Because yes, several of them look around and only see shit.
At a certain point the propaganda stops making any sense on purpose. It’s not designed to deceive. It’s used to identify resistance.
1984 ass
the timeline in which the IGRC’s public statement are more trustworthy than US officials…
They have always been bad at lying. Every lie this administration tells is obviously transparent, if they were good enough to concoct a reasonable lie they would be intelligent enough to not get involved in a war with an oil producing country without first restocking their oil reserves. No one this administration has any brains at all.
Oil companies and oil tanker crews are subject to the same fog of war as everyone else. They don’t know if there are mines. They don’t know if they can trust the US government to protect them or pay out the insurance. They have seen US bases get bombed. They don’t know if the US is lying or not because trust in the US is at an all time low.
It doesn’t matter if the strait is mined or not, because the perception the strait could be mined is enough. It is simply not worth the risk.
Edit: lmao nevermind. 3 ships just tried running the blockade. Emphasis on tried
They don’t know if the US is lying or not because trust in the US is at an all time low.
Yup.
I wonder why.
Oh right because the US commander-in-queef is a Russian shill because Russia managed to influence the US enough to make the whole country cognitively challenged through environmental lead (more of an accident than anything purposefully neurotoxic but anyway) and the destruction of the US education system.
Once again posting this chart because when you realize which age group has the most enthusiastic Trump supporters, and you recognize the correlation between their behavior habits and the neuropsychological symptoms of lead poisoning during childhood development, everything starts to make way more sense.
Some of the symptoms include being more prone to anger/rage, which itself inhibits logical, critical thinking. They literally used to spike vehicle fuel with it, dump it in paint, etc.
- Poor speech articulation
- Poor language understanding or usage
- Problems maintaining attention in school or home
- Problems with learning and remembering new information
- Rigid, inflexible problem-solving abilities
- Delayed general intellectual abilities
- Learning problems in school (reading, language, math, writing)
- Problems controlling behavior (e.g., aggressive, impulsive)
The study specifically identifies atmospheric lead from additives in gasoline as a substantial source. Which makes sense since the highest incidences coincide with peak leaded gas usage.
Wait, do people really believe that Trump is the culmination of a 70 year Soviet and Russian campaign, and all of America’s mistakes leading up to today are the result of this? Seems a little far-fetched imo
Culmination? Nah. Just a step in a game.
But yeah, Trump is very clearly a Russian shill. Where have you been living for the past 10 years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2024_United_States_elections
It’s so obvious that anyone actually arguing Trump isn’t a Russian shill is almost definitely a Russian shill themselves.
I remember thinking it was a silly idea in 2016, too. Like, the supposed “interference” was facebook ads featuring buff Bernie, stuff like that. It just seems like it’s a way to make an excuse for the US (and more specifically the Democrats), like their problems aren’t of their own making and everything is Russia’s fault. Linking it all the way back to Kruschev is especially ridiculous.
But, supposing it is actually a plot that goes all the way back to the Krushchev era, good for them. It worked perfectly. The gameshow man is radpidly destroying America.
Found the guy who bought into the propaganda.
The evidence is all right there. Do you think Putin is the leader of Russia because of honest elections and he’s just the best candidate and Russian democracy works?
Cmon man. Russians have bought celebrities from the US for longer than either of us has been alive. There’s a reason the most chess GM’s come from Russia. They play the long game.
They’re terrifyingly good at spycraft.
So like, was George Bush a Russian puppet too? The Iraq war harmed America. Was Obama a Russian puppet for cancelling the public option and letting the bankers get away with crashing the economy?Was Biden a Russian puppet, since he was sleepy and feckless?
I’m a lot more inclined that your problems are due to institutional and societal rot, accumulated failures, a lack of planning, etc., rather than a grand Russian conspiracy. But if that’s true and you’re penetrated to the point where your government is just secretly controlled by Russia, I think you should just ask China to annex you. That way you at least could have a functioning country.
Strawmen.
“Uh you’re saying Russia has completely controlled the US for several decades.”
No I didn’t lol, learn 2 read a bit.
Challenge the facts instead pushing your childish whatabout strawmen.
“Your problems”
Roflmao illiterate bro. Too illiterate. I’m not American in the slightest. I could drive to St Petersburg in a matter of hours.
Challenge the facts.
A Russian asset: Trump’s policy behavior confirms evidence he was groomed by the Kremlin since the 1980s
Huh. I haven’t seen a picture of Khrushchev recently, but I rewatched Enemy at the Gates the other day, and I guess Bob Hoskins did a surprisingly accurate portrayal (with kudos to the makeup department, too).
Tanker-insurance is impossible to get, now, therefore there simply won’t be any ships going through, until that gets remedied.
& it won’t get remedied until MUCH more than “an assertion that it’s clear” is in-place.
https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/actuarial-warfare-how-seven-insurance
It’s going to be 1/4y MINIMUM before ships begin going through, again, from the looks of that…
maybe closer to a year.
Dominoes got BIG, thanks to the economic-rules underpinning everything in industry…
_ /\ _
If only this wall could have been prevented. Sadly that was impossible since the US started it for no reason at all, oh wait.
They don’t know if they can trust the US government to protect them or pay out the insurance.
With how many of Trump’s lawyers got their bills paid in full and on time, I would be skeptical too.
Markets going up in response.
Lolz. Lmao, even.
Trump said it’s almost over, so uhh, I guess mission accomplished?
We certainly didn’t hear about Epstein the past couple of weeks so yeah, mission accomplished
We certainly didn’t hear about Epstein
Yes we did.
Its because European countries announced they are going to release strategic reserves.
I still don’t get it though because that only covers 2 weeks and Iran has already taken down some permanent capacity in the region and a bunch of places had to stop pumping (meaning well mineralization and reopening times of months). I would expect oil to be at $100 even with the strategic reserves announcement.
Ah, but you see that’s a problem for future people.
Fuck future me. I got mine!
In the next couple weeks, demand is going to go down as the weather warms up. After that, they have all summer to to work on shifting production to renewables as much as possible and shifting fossil fuel suppliers to ones that don’t need to use that strait.
How much sense it makes depends on which markets went up. If, for example, you are an Alberta oil producer, this situation is wonder for the bottom line.
Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. Machiavelli
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
- George Orwell
The convoy idea is so dumb that I can’t believe anyone said it out loud. Effective strategy against commerce raiders, which Iran explicitly does not have. Might as well offer to mount a CIWS on tankers and hope your insurance premiums will see it as a wash (they won’t). Makes as much sense as suggesting you counter drones with cavalry.
If I was one of those oil companies, I’d say sure. You staff the tanker with your people and you insure us for any losses incurred. Also, put an upfront amount of insurance money in escrow.
But we’re not risking lives, merchandise, and equipment. You want the oil that badly. You move it. We’re just going to raise oil prices to cover our losses in the meantime, so we’re fine.
Oh they tried this, admin offered to pay oil companies for damages and move it themselves. Little catch there is tanker ships take half a decade or longer to build. The companies cannot afford to roll the dice on losing one, even if they’ll get reimbursed for the ship. They lose capacity ($$$) waiting for the replacement.
And USA doesn’t build those ships.
Yeah, losses would wouldn’t just be the cargo and the ship, it would be a decade long hit to earnings. And I’d want to see money for all of that, in escrow, before I moved an inch. Trump is famous for not paying his debts. I’d want all that money secured upfront.
It’s not just normal insurance cost either. These ships take years to replace. They also have to insure against the multiple years worth of profits and loss of market share.
Exactly. It’s the ship, the goods, the lost earning over many years, severance for staff that won’t be used, etc. It would be mess.
I also wonder how clean up for a spill would be handled. Currently that’s managed by Iran and the vessel that spilled pays.
Makes as much sense as suggesting you counter drones with cavalry.
Not drones exactly but this is a sound straregy in the early civilization games
The Shahed-136 uses a MD550 engine, spec sheet says that’s 50 horsepower. An actual horse has a peak output somewhere between 10 and 15 horsepower[1] so it should only take 4 or 5 horses to match/exceed the Shahed’s strength. Seems reasonable enough to me, it’s simple math.
Stevenson, Robert & Wassersug, Richard. (1993). Horsepower from a horse. Nature. 364. 195. 10.1038/364195a0. ↩︎
The math on the convoy doesn’t make sense to me.
The larger the convoy becomes a more attractive target, as a single salvo of missiles has greater chance of bypassing missile defences and hitting any target.
Plus they have drones or missile boats, which would be harder to defend against. You can do missile defence in a radius around a ship, but now there’s obstacles and small fast moving targets that only need to land 1 hit and can use blind spots.
So I guess you need 3+ navy ships to form a perimeter and guard a few tankers at once.
But now there’s mines, so your perimeter becomes another vulnerability, you’ve increased the surface area where mines can be.
So now you can add more navy ships to get better geometry but it’s a much higher cost.
Also, the US lies about what it is going to do all the time.
In fact, there is a big fat lie right in this article in which the US claimed to have already escorted a ship through despite the fact that they simply did nothing of the sort.
Would you be willing to stake the economic future of your company, the lives of your staff, and millions of dollars of equipment and product on the promise and competence of these guys?
After a decade of trump you still can’t believe he would say something like this out loud?
Prices for everything will increase…again. Thank to the MAGA and Likud fucknuts!
Trump, the climate change denialist, doing his best to speed up the green energy transition.
Nice to see the US government still supporting EVs these days.
I still think that EV rebates and tax credits would be more cost efficient and much less jarring than provoking Iran into destroying 20% of the world’s oil supply… but I guess that I am too simple-minded for politics.
Gas is $5 near me. EVs are gonna start flying off dealer’s lots subsidy or not
No joke, electricity is getting so expensive that I was just about break even on running my PHEV on gas vs. electric… Then this happens to make the choice easy again
Well funding for those data centers are getting blown up… literally in the case of Amazon’s data center. So we might get to see that AI bubble pop that we have all been hearing so much about. That should help a little bit. Too bad Trump is offsetting that by cancelling all renewable projects though.
Trump went like “Why just stop with US when I can fuck supermarket prices globally”
Trump denied this, and it is extremely unlikely. Iran has the full power to sink every ship that comes close with drones alone, and is why no US navy ship dares come close. The Yemen Houthis have to this day still closed the Red Sea to undesirable traffic, (despite yet another mission accomplished bombing campaign by Trump) and they have less than 1/10th the power of Iran.
Mines would be a sign of loss of control, but more likely the US is bombing small civilian boats under guises that they could lay mines.
Makes sense. Mines don’t recognize friend from foe so laying them means the area is a no-go for everyone.
Decarbonise already FFS, make this irrelevant
Irrelevant for us. The loss of a major shipping route is always going to be a blow to the regional economy.
If all they export is poison…
deleted by creator
I don’t see how sailing around Africa is a plausible alternative to the Strait of Hormuz…
It basically just means zero access in/out of the Persian Gulf at all. The closest thing to an alternative is overland access to the Red Sea through Saudi Arabia.
Now if we were talking about the Suez canal, that would make sense.
You are thinking about the Red Sea/Suez Canal.
The Straight of Hormuz is the only way into and out off the Persian Gulf. Unless a ship has business in the Persian Gulf, it has no reason to cross the straight.
Yeah… so, have you looked at a map lately?
The Red sea is actually next door (on the other side of the Arabic peninsula).
They also export fertilizer. You know, the stuff that makes food.
Genuinely curious, how many percentages is that of total export?
Approximately 10% of global trade according to the UN.
I stand corrected then. Interesting.
Please, someone tell me I’m not the only idiot that read this and thought they were trying to do the other type of mining.
The one that doesn’t make sense at all, but rather than realising that’s not the mining they were doing, because it doesn’t make sense. I just got more confused as to what they possibly could have found there worth mining for in the middle of a war.
If this is true, China is soooooooooo fucked.
I’m talking mass starvation.
How so? I’m not challenging you, I honestly just don’t know what relationship you’re talking about.
Well as other’s already mentioned China get’s roughly ~20% of their oil from this region. All of that oil has to go through the Strait of Hormuz.
The most interesting part about why this is bad for food security in any country is that our agriculture systems runs on oil (you could say we eat the oil). You need to run your farming equipment & all the processing that is needed to make the food edible. Transporting food from the countryside to cities where most people live is also very “Oil”/Gasoline intensive. At the same time you need to cool/freeze the food (needs electricity which is mostly fossil fuels still). So if your Oil supply runs dry your just fucked. Modern society will just not be able to function with it’s City focused infrastructure.
Oh and the most relevant part is that fertilizers use a lot of oil to be produced. Well it’s not directly involved but still relevant. The Haber-Bosch ammonia production needs Natural Gas (by product from Oil extraction) to function or you can substitute it with Petroleum Coke (Petcoke) which is a byproduct of oil refining. Having less fertilizer is a HUGE problem for the next harvest season because your yields will be much lower which in turn reduces food availability.
So yea everything that you eat & is grown by a farm needs a fuck ton of oil.
you could even say that a globalised food supply chain is not the ideal arrangement and that localised food production should be every country’s priority with surplus going to market. National and global corporations don’t do this because the local markets are too small to deliver industrial scale profit, but the most efficient approach to food production is least amount of travel and processing as possible. It’s not for profit, it’s for efficient food supplies.
Well it’s a major shipping corridor isn’t it and mines tend to be sort of a detriment to that that’s kind of the whole point really.
Add on to the fact that China isn’t all that industrialised and tends to import a lot of its food and you’ve got a problem. The Chinese government are more competent than most (not really a shining endorsement of capitalism is it) so they might have pivoted to India but I don’t know how much time they would require.
The amazing thing about all of this is it probably isn’t going to increase the price of RAM, so that’s the first for 2026.
I guess they’re referring to China getting 11% of it’s crude from Iran and nearly 50% from Arab countries that use the hermouz straight. They also have a huge reserve that should last them 3-4 months (or 6-8 months assuming they only lose 50%).
Or… they’ll import more from Russia and reduce consumption to last much longer.
It’s a national emergency, but I don’t think they’re facing mass starvation because of it… Would love for them to expand on what they mean.
Edit: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/iran-ships-oil-china-strait-hormuz-closure-.html
“Iran has sent at least 11.7 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began”
I’ve heard this before from people - that this is some kind of 3D chess attack on China, but that doesn’t hold water.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/09/china-oil-shock-iran-war-hormuz-energy-transition.html
I’m not cheering for China to come out rosy, but look, they have huge strategic reserves, a much bigger penetration of electrification, and the ability to ramp that up quickly. Overall, China is probably one of the BEST positioned countries to weather this - the impacts on other countries, including US allies, will be FAR worse. This is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Trump and Hegseth aren’t playing 3D anything.
Bubsy 3D.
Didn’t get chinese and idian ships get an exception from the closure.
Sea mines are indiscriminate weapons.
They really aren’t anymore. Mines have advanced a lot in terms of technology. You’d be amazed.
If they are mining the strait it’s to put pressure on the US.
They would not give up that pressure.
Also, either they are communicating with the mines to tell them which commercial ships have Chinese bound cargo, (I guess that is possible, but I have never heard of it) or they are indiscriminate.
On the other hand, if they have a live data link to the mines, then that would be a pretty good way for minesweepers to sweep up the mines. That doesn’t sound like a really prudent course of action.
A sea mine is like a land mine in that you always have a safe path through that you know and can communicate to allies. Even if enemies know the location of the minefields, you’re still forcing them to go through an area of your choosing rather than allowing them free movement. Most likely, Iran will have mined the areas closer to the UAE side of the strait, forcing any ships to hug Iran’s coastline and allowing them to strike with even their shortest range missiles.
No, but at least one Chinese ship ran the strait yesterday. And a Greek one I think.
You think China would just throw in the towel and do nothing about it? They’re sitting on the second most funded military in the world. They’ll put the soldiers to good use and they’ll fight their way to whatever they need. This isn’t the 30’s anymore.
The People’s Liberation Army’s Navy is designed to reach Taiwan. They have no ability to defend ships all the way from the Persian Gulf.
India and every country on the way also NEEDS oil and will go out and take it to prevent disaster in their own countries.
China is at the wrong end of straw.
That would have been true like 20 years ago, but the PLAN is absolutely a bluewater navy capable of projecting power. Their focus is on their backyard, but they have 3 aircraft carriers, 64 destroyers (with two more of the advanced type 55 commissioned a couple days ago), and 69 submarines.
Is there any evidence of actual mine-laying? All I saw was Trump’s Truth Social post which started with “if Iran has started laying mines, which we have no reports of”
Everything is propaganda.
Actually a good question. A few different news agencies had reported on it with quotes like “Intelligence says/shows” but that doesn’t mean anything to me.
Whose intelligence? Is it US intelligence, if so then that’s probably the most believable simply because I don’t see any benefit for lying about this. They never even tried to sell Americans on the war to begin with, so what justification would they need to do anything else.
If it’s GCC intelligence or Iranian intelligence then obviously there is incentive to lie. If it’s Mossad then it’s probably a lie to keep pressure on the US.
Honestly surprised this wasn’t talked about after day 1, it’s what I would have done if I were defending myself in that situation.
