So Much Winning

Americans on social media have been wincing at paying six dollars a gallon for diesel, when the cheapest here in Edinburgh when I filled up recently was £1.867 per litre, or US$9.42 per US gallon. It’s up 50p per litre since February, so that’s a Trump tax of ten quid per 20 litres or US$25 per ten US gallons. At least diesel is still available—for now. It’s felt surreal this month that nobody’s acting as if it might not be soon. Even that inflated price has barely changed since its initial spike in March, when the expectation was that UK “supermarkets and refineries are on course to run down their stockpiles of diesel” by… now. The number of oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz since the start of Trump’s war has been negligible, and that months-long gap in supply will linger in the global economy whether or not Trump caves in to Iran’s demands in order to claim “victory”. At the start of the month, one American writer warned that: the data says the United States of…