Tag: oil

War With Iran: A Double-Edged Sword for the US Economy and Agriculture

The sharp swings in oil prices following the latest round of attacks and negotiations over safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz demonstrate that wars do not always reveal themselves first on the battlefield. Sometimes, their earliest signs appear on gas-station price boards, in transportation bills, and on the balance sheets of farmers standing thousands of miles from the front lines. Now that the confrontation between the United States and Iran has moved beyond pressure and deterrence and turned into direct military conflict, the issue is no longer limited to security calculations. It is about the real costs of war – costs increasingly borne by American farmers, truck drivers, and consumers.

The economic effects of this war are being transmitted through channels that are highly sensitive for Washington politically: energy markets, inflation, supply chains, and, above all, agriculture. A war that Trump justifies in the language of national security and displays of strength could, in practice, become a self-inflicted shock to the U.S. economy. That is the central contradiction: the most direct pressure is falling on the very social and economic constituency Trump has repeatedly claimed to defend – the American farm belt.

The Energy Shock, From Hormuz to American Farms

The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption passes, now lies at the center of the conflict. Repeated surges and declines in oil prices show that even news of a temporary pause – or the possibility of renewed escalation – can shake the energy market. Higher fuel prices feed directly into transportation, production, and consumer-goods costs, adding to inflationary pressure. This also leaves monetary policymakers caught between controlling inflation and preventing a further slowdown in economic growth.

Market instability and direct military expenditures are rising as well. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that the true cost of military conflict often extends far beyond initial estimates. Brown University’s Costs of War Project has placed the cost of the post-9/11 wars at approximately $8 trillion. A war with Iran, particularly if it becomes prolonged or expands geographically, could generate new and uncertain financial commitments. Yet one of its deepest and least visible consequences may be felt not on Wall Street, but on American farms.

Modern American agriculture is intensely dependent on energy. Diesel powers farm machinery; natural gas is a primary input in the production of nitrogen fertilizers; and gasoline and transportation fuels move crops from farms to markets. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has repeatedly shown that higher energy prices increase production costs and reduce farm income, ultimately affecting food prices.

The pressure is even more severe in the fertilizer market. The production of ammonia and urea is directly dependent on natural gas, while disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has constrained global supplies of raw materials and fertilizer. During the first weeks of the war, urea prices nearly doubled, leaving American farmers to confront fuel-price increases and supply shortages at the same time. Under such conditions, corn production, which requires more nitrogen fertilizer, becomes especially vulnerable. Farmers may be forced to choose among reducing planted acreage, switching crops, or accepting substantially higher costs.

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US Oil & Gas Association Drops in On Hunter Biden with Epic Takedown

The US Oil & Gas Association dropped in on Hunter Biden in an epic takedown after the former ‘Burisma executive’ trashed President Trump.

Hunter Biden on Friday went after Chevron and accused President Trump of ‘making big oil great again.’

“Chevron just posted $12 billion in profit. Up 400% in a year. Their biggest quarter ever. Exxon made $14.5 billion. You paid for all of it at the pump,” Hunter Biden said.

“Say what you want about Trump. He’s making something great again. And who’s more deserving than Big Oil,” Hunter said.

The US Oil & Gas Association slammed Hunter Biden and mocked him for his previous “work” in foreign oil.

Hunter Biden was paid more than $80,000 per month to sit on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, despite having zero knowledge in the field. Hunter Biden enjoyed this lucrative gig while his then-US Vice President dad Joe Biden was tasked to handle Ukraine.

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‘Making a Killing, Literally and Figuratively’: Big Oil Profits Set to Double Amid Deadly Heat

An analysis published Tuesday highlights how the world’s top fossil fuel companies are expected to rake in nearly twice as much in second-quarter profits as they did during the first quarter of 2026, a windfall that comes as their polluting products help fuel extreme heat that kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world annually.

Oxfam International’s analysis warns that the profits of the world’s six largest oil and gas companies are on track to skyrocket from $23 billion during the first quarter of the year to $45 billion in Q2 as emissions from their products intensify deadly heatwaves.

“Projected full-year profits of BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies amount to $147 billion, more than their combined profits over the previous 21 months (Q2 2024 to Q4 2025),” the report states. “Among the biggest winners, Chevron is expected to report that it has quadrupled its profits to $1,200 a second in the last three months, while ExxonMobil’s profits are expected to have tripled to $1,800 a second.”

“Oil and gas corporations share an outsized responsibility for the climate crisis,” the publication continues. “Emissions from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies were sufficient to cause around 1 in 4 heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023—heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.”

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Ukraine/Russia War Intensifies, As Drones Strike Major Russian Oil Refinery

The war between Russia and Ukraine fell through the cracks a little when the United States and Israel started a war with Iran back in February. However, Ukraine and Russia are still very much locked in a war, as Kiev used drones to strike a major Russian oil refinery overnight.

Back in late June, Ukraine struck a Moscow refinery and caused “oil rain” to pour over the Russian capital of Moscow.

Drone Strike on Moscow Refinery Causes “Oil Rain” in Russian Capital

The Russian Defense Ministry added that Vladimir Zelensky, Ukraine’s ruler, ordered the attacks on the eve of the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit in Ankara “to demonstrate to his European sponsors, including the UK, his willingness to strike civilian targets in Russia from Ukraine at their expense.”

The UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) attack occurred on the Omsk Oil Refinery in Omsk Region and is the first in central Russia since the start of the Ukraine conflict.

The Omsk Oil Refinery, which is operated by Gazprom Neft, specializes in the production of gasoline, diesel, aviation kerosene and road‑building bitumen. The refinery has an installed capacity of 20.5 million tons of crude per year. Omsk accounts for around one in every six liters of Euro‑5 gasoline and diesel fuel produced in Russia, as well as a significant share of the country’s aviation fuel.

Governor Vitaly Khotsenko wrote on Telegram on Monday that the facility was hit after several drones reached the city’s northern industrial zone.  Khotsenko said most of the incoming UAVs were destroyed by air defenses and that, according to preliminary information, there were no deaths or injuries, according to a report by RT. 

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Canada Just Admitted Justin Trudeau’s Climate Agenda Was A Scam

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave Canada a lost decade. A key contributor to the country’s stagnation was the Liberal government’s obsession with climate change and its ushering in of green energy policies that were disastrous for a nation rich in natural resources. To make Canada great again, Prime Minister Mark Carney is abandoning climate alarmism and embracing what made the country wealthy in the first place: crude oil.

Canada Loves Oil Again

On June 30, the prime minister published a 17-minute YouTube video, focused exclusively on his predecessor’s climate agenda. He used words like “expensive” and “divisive” to describe Trudeau’s environmental endeavors. Carney essentially admitted that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives were right.

For right-wing political pundits, this was a rare win for the incumbent. Indeed, in a bid to resuscitate the ailing Canadian economy, Carney is trying to make the country fall back in love with fossil fuels – and appease Alberta – despite years of climate doomerism.

Ottawa announced earlier this month a new West Coast pipeline that will ship up to one million barrels of crude oil per day from Alberta to Asian markets. The federal government gave its blessing to a new west-east crude oil pipeline that will run from Alberta to Ontario. This comes as the Carney Liberals begin to expand liquefied natural gas exports, scrap the consumer carbon tax, and remove the cap on the oil and gas sector’s pollution levels.

Carney already accepted that Canada’s emissions will be higher in the coming years, a fact that was inevitable. Various models currently indicate that the Great White North has been missing its emissions targets, even before the current government’s reforms. Canada lags behind other G7 countries in emissions reductions, and even the United States is outperforming its northern neighbor.

“The certainties of the world of 2015 are long gone. Our neighborhood hasn’t been this hostile since Canada was founded,” the prime minister said. “The world hasn’t been this unstable geopolitically since the end of the Second World War.”

Of course, skepticism is warranted because Carney has spent much of his tenure just talking with his elbows up. From housing to pipelines, it has been all talk and no action. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany surprisingly sprang into action and constructed Floating Storage and Regasification Units (FSRUs) to import seaborne liquefied natural gas in fewer than 200 days.

The prime minister has been in office for 15 months with nothing to show for it. Still, capital might be optimistic about Canadian energy moving forward, having been hesitant to invest in various projects across the country over the last 11 years.

What About America?

America’s decision last week not to renew the USMCA could be a major blow to the Canadian economy. The post-NAFTA trade deal will now be subject to annual reviews as the United States raises grievances over production quotas, supply management, rules of origin, and other provisions.

Despite Ottawa’s efforts to diversify its trade by importing more students from India and exporting more oil to Asia, the country still needs its southern neighbor. More than 90 percent of its energy is shipped to the United States, making it an extremely difficult market to replace, even if Canada desires to become an energy superpower.

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Why are taxpayers paying for pipelines private companies used to build?

Canada’s pipeline sector, once entirely funded by private investment, is now leaning on taxpayer subsidies after years of federal regulatory hurdles.

On Tuesday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Noah Jarvis, Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, joined Ezra to discuss two newly floated pipeline proposals — one from Alberta to the Port of Vancouver championed by Prime Minister Mark Carney, and another to Ontario backed by Premiers Doug Ford and Danielle Smith. 

Both projects are expected to require significant government subsidies, in sharp contrast to a decade ago, when private companies competed to build pipelines without a dime of public money, including proposals that were later killed by federal decisions, such as Northern Gateway and Energy East.

“The government is very much in the way right now,” Noah said, pointing to the Impact Assessment Act, passed by the Trudeau government in 2019, and the industrial carbon tax as key barriers driving up the cost of producing Alberta oil.

Noah cited a recent Fraser Institute report suggesting the industrial carbon tax, if it climbs to $140 per tonne, could add roughly 20 percent to the cost of producing a barrel of Alberta oil. Canada, he noted, is the only country that levies such a tax on its oil and gas producers. He urged Smith and Ford to pressure Ottawa to repeal the Impact Assessment Act and roll back the carbon tax, rather than turning to subsidies. 

Ezra questioned why neither proposal has any backing from producers, calling the Vancouver route’s estimated $30-billion price tag “insane,” and describing the Ontario pipeline as “at best, PR gimmicks, and at worst, government white elephants.”

“You don’t have to spend all this money,” Ezra said. “Just get rid of those blockages and blockades and regulations.”

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Ottawa’s carbon capture obsession is making Alberta oil more expensive for customers who aren’t asking for it

Prime Minister Mark Carney wants Alberta’s oil industry to spend tens of billions of dollars on carbon capture before Ottawa will fully embrace new pipeline projects. The problem? The evidence suggests customers aren’t demanding “decarbonized” oil in the first place.

A new Fraser Institute study concludes that carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) faces enormous technical and economic hurdles. Despite decades of investment, large-scale projects have routinely fallen short of expectations, often capturing less carbon than promised while costing far more than initially projected.

The study also notes that scaling CCUS across the energy sector would require building an entirely new network of pipelines and storage infrastructure comparable to today’s oil and gas system itself.

In other words, politicians are asking Alberta to construct a second energy industry just to support the first.

That wouldn’t matter if customers were demanding it. But there is little evidence they are.

Instead, buyers continue to purchase Canadian crude because it is reliable, competitively priced and comes from one of the world’s most politically stable energy producers.

The Canada Energy Regulator reports Canadian crude exports reached record levels following the Trans Mountain expansion, with Alberta supplying more than 90 per cent of Canada’s exports. New customers in Asia have rapidly increased purchases, not because Canada branded its oil as “decarbonized,” but because they wanted dependable supply from a democratic country.

Reuters has also reported that the Carney government is linking future pipeline approvals to large-scale carbon capture commitments and net-zero requirements, effectively making Alberta producers absorb billions in additional costs before projects can move ahead.

The theory behind this policy is that customers will reward lower-carbon oil. Yet commodity markets have rarely worked that way.

History offers an uncomfortable but revealing example. During its control of territory in Iraq and Syria, ISIS financed much of its terrorist operation by selling oil through black-market networks. Buyers still purchased that oil despite knowing where it came from because oil markets are driven overwhelmingly by price, availability and logistics.

No one is comparing Alberta producers to ISIS. The point is the opposite: if even oil produced by one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organizations found buyers, it demonstrates that commodity markets are driven primarily by economics, not moral branding.

That reality raises an obvious question. Where is the evidence that refiners are willing to pay a significant premium simply because Canadian oil has a lower carbon intensity?

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B.C.’s oil tanker ban exposed: Why U.S. oil gets a pass but Alberta doesn’t

B.C.’s oil tanker ban is once again under scrutiny as questions mount over why it restricts Alberta crude while allowing foreign oil shipments to pass through the province’s coast.

Drea Humphrey argued that Premier David Eby has emerged as the biggest winner from the latest pipeline discussions between Alberta and Ottawa. “He’s getting exactly what he wanted,” she said, pointing to billions in promised infrastructure spending while any potential pipeline benefits remain years away.

Humphrey also questioned the province’s opposition to transporting Alberta oil by tanker, noting that large foreign vessels already travel the same waters. “How is that any less of a risk to the North Coast?” she asked.

Sheila Gunn Reid argued the federal approach ignores what she sees as an obvious alternative. She noted that American tankers from Alaska are permitted to use the same coastal route, saying, “The tanker ban only applies to Alberta oil. It doesn’t apply to American oil.”

Rather than reviving the cancelled Northern Gateway route to Kitimat, Gunn Reid said the proposed pipeline would head south to Vancouver, making it “infinitely more expensive and inconvenient.”

“I refuse to see this as the win everybody is touting it as,” she added. “It’s likely never going to get built.”

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DOJ urges states to join investigation into major oil companies

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are urging states to join a sweeping probe into major oil companies.

In a joint three-page letter sent to state attorneys general on Friday, federal antitrust regulators called for localized investigations into oil distributors for potential price-fixing, market monopolization and consumer fraud.

Federal antitrust lawyers are asking states to deploy all tools available, as they believe several companies are keeping prices high despite a steep drop in wholesale crude costs.

The coordinated federal-state push comes on the heels of an executive directive from President Donald Trump last week.

On Monday evening, the president accused oil corporations of “gouging” American drivers.

“Gasoline Retailers must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY! They’re too high considering that Oil is now at $68 a Barrel, and heading south,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Retailers must quickly react to this statement, and so what they know is right — DROP YOUR PRICE FOR OUR GREAT AMERICAN PEOPLE!”

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“We’re Running Out of Oil”: The Lie Used to Support the Green Energy Agenda

In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, then the nation’s leading oil producer, warned that the U.S. had only four years of oil remaining. Forty years later, in 1914, when oil still hadn’t run out, the federal government said the U.S. had only a ten-year supply remaining. In 1940, the government announced that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half.

An article published on August 3, 1966, reported that “a geologist stuck a figurative dipstick into the United States’ oil supplies Tuesday and estimated that the country may be dry in 10 years,” placing the projected date of U.S. exhaustion at 1976. The most widely cited doomsday prediction came in 1972, when the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report calculated that global petroleum reserves, growing at then-current consumption rates, would be exhausted within 20 years, implying oil would run out by 1992.

For the past several decades, the claim that oil will run out has been used to promote the green energy transition, framing the use of solar and wind power as necessary to preserve human life. However, the people and institutions promoting the “oil is running out” narrative are the same people and institutions advancing the climate crisis narrative. As with other forms of propaganda, new vocabulary had to be invented, including the term “peak oil.

Peak oil is the theory that global oil production rises to a maximum point and then declines irreversibly as a finite resource is depleted. Yale Environment 360 reported that Rystad Energy expects natural gas production to peak and decline as renewables take over, and that the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2021 called on oil companies to immediately end oil prospecting and pull back on production as part of a net-zero pathway explicitly grounded in the “peak oil” framing.

The context of the Yale report, and the peak oil claim in general, is somewhat dishonest. If they really believed the world was running out of oil, they wouldn’t need to warn anyone or demand that we stop looking for or producing oil. Instead, they could simply wait ten or twenty years, or whatever the latest prediction is, until oil runs out naturally. At that point, the world would transition to green energy out of necessity, and the climate advocates would win. The fact that they continue pushing the issue suggests they don’t really believe oil is running out.

A Cambridge University Press academic text states plainly that the peak oil belief is a myth, “at least for the next decades,” and warns that peak oil framing can backfire on climate advocates because the oil industry echoes the peak oil argument to convince governments to approve, and even assist with, new fossil fuel projects whenever prices spike. Effectively, the article presents circular logic. It suggests that the peak oil argument should be abandoned to prevent the oil industry from drilling for new oil, which would prevent the world from running out of oil.

All of the peak oil predictions had a common flaw: they made straight-line mathematical projections, assuming that no alternatives or solutions would be found. Each treated known reserves and existing extraction methods as fixed, when, in practice, both variables continued to change simultaneously.

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