There is a certain kind of economic remedy that sounds like common sense until the economists get hold of it. Diesel is brutally expensive in the United States right now — so why not simply stop letting refiners ship it overseas? Keep the fuel at home, the logic goes, and the price comes down. According to reporting by Al Jazeera, energy experts are warning the opposite: an export ban would likely push fuel costs up, both at home and abroad.
The numbers behind the anxiety are not subtle. On Friday, the average price of a gallon (3.79 litres) of diesel in the US was $6.50, according to the American Automobile Association, which tracks fuel prices daily. A month earlier it was $5.61. That is an 89-cent jump — roughly 16 percent — in about thirty days, which is the sort of math that turns a line item into a crisis for anyone who moves freight, farms, or owns a bus.
Al Jazeera’s report ties the record prices to two wars’ worth of disruption: tensions between the United States and Iran, and the Russia-Ukraine war, both of which are interfering with key oil and fuel trade routes. Diesel, the fuel that runs the trucks that run everything else, tends to feel those shocks first and hardest.
Precisely how an export ban would be structured — and by whose hand in Washington — is a level of detail the reporting available so far does not supply. The experts’ warning, though, points in a counterintuitive direction that is worth sitting with: walling off American diesel from the world market would squeeze not just foreign buyers but domestic ones too.
It is a rare policy idea that manages to be bad news twice — once at the pump in Toledo, and once again in every port that was counting on American fuel. Record prices have a way of making unusual proposals sound reasonable. The price of that illusion, at the moment, is $6.50 a gallon and climbing.