Oh, before I forget, Trump changed his mind, we don't get any of that diesel. "America First"!
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Posted on 10/13/2026 7:43:24 PM PDT by Miami Rebel
Diesel futures traded sharply higher Tuesday, as doubts mounted about the likely impacts of the Trump administration’s latest efforts to push prices down. U.S. diesel futures were up 5% by midday to their highest level in weeks.
In Europe, diesel futures rose by about 3.8%, while gas futures spiked to levels not seen all year. A move higher in futures markets typically signals that prices will climb in the coming days. Already, the average nationwide price of diesel is up 70% since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. The cost of unleaded gas has risen by more than 45% over that period.
Crude oil prices, meanwhile, were mixed. Brent traded around $106 per barrel, while U.S. crude oil neared $95 per barrel. Both of those key energy benchmarks have risen around 70% since the start of the year. Gas and diesel prices are rising especially fast in parts of the country where President Donald Trump and Republicans can least afford to anger voters ahead of November’s midterm elections. “Absolutely stunning price spikes in wholesale diesel today,” Gulf Oil adviser Tom Kloza wrote Tuesday on X. “US retail diesel price record of $6.53/gal could be topped by the midterms.”
“Up 18cts/gal Gulf Coast and East Coast; but up 28cts/gal in Southern California and 25-30cts/gal in Great Plains and Great Lakes,” he wrote. Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, wrote on X that “$6/gal diesel may be here to stay for now. Truckers and farmers not going to see any relief anytime soon,” he wrote.
The broad spike higher in diesel futures came just days after Trump announced a controversial deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to increase diesel supplies in the United States by buying previously sanctioned Russian reserves.
When Trump announced the deal, he said it would result in millions of metric tons of additional diesel for the world. While that may sound like a lot, analysts have since crunched the numbers and determined that, at best, the diesel in question would amount to less than two weeks’ worth of U.S. demand.
Tuesday’s higher diesel futures are evidence of the market “clearly not believing that Russian oil is on the way,” Kloza said. The deal with Putin also required that the Trump administration suspend long-standing sanctions on Russian energy purchases. The sanctions were put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the decision to lift them until April has drawn widespread backlash both at home and abroad.
Trump has also applied pressure to European allies in an effort to get them to release more of their diesel reserves. The president’s Oct. 2 announcement that Europe had bowed to the pressure and would release fuel temporarily cooled prices for a few days. But a lack of additional details about that release gradually erased any price relief.
A subsequent statement from the International Energy Agency confirmed what traders had suspected: Europe would not be releasing any new diesel reserves, merely continuing to fulfill a pledge it made in March as part of a multinational effort to cap rising fuel prices. Trump also signed an executive order this month that sought to ease restrictions on an off-road formulation of diesel that is dyed red and not subject to federal gas taxes.
But industry groups quickly warned truckers to avoid using “red dye” diesel without more information about how the taxes would work. As of Tuesday, it was unclear whether Trump’s red dye diesel order had any impact on domestic prices or supply.
Fuel prices will plummet after the election. But if Dems regain full control of the government in 2029, prices will skyrocket even worse than what we saw last time they were at the helm.
Winston Churchill
Yes, everyone predicted this.
The deal is mediocre at best. It concerns a one day diesel consumption for America. So all that mess to obtain peanuts anyway.
But what really pushed prices up was Trumps so called “Energy Ceasefire”... “agreed by Russia and Ukraine”... as Trump stated a couple of days ago.
Well, Russia and Ukraine declared they never heard about such a ceasefire.
And it later turned out to be a Trump fantasy.
However, after Trump declared that though, Russia immediately doubled down on bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. And Ukraine had to respond in kind destroying even more Russian refineries...
Thus, Trump’s fantasy declaration did in fact escalate the war at the detriment foremost of Russia, but also Ukraine.
Made things worse for Americans too, if you care them at all...
If EU and China withhold their stocks, as is their sovereign right, this is what happens.
The US will be forced into an export ban.
And we are both the number 1 producer and exporter.
Oh, before I forget, Trump changed his mind, we don't get any of that diesel. "America First"!
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Propaganda
>> Made things worse for Americans too, if you care them at all...
Can you explain how your constant hate-Trump TDS trolling, designed to discourage voting GOP in the midterms, will make things better for Americans? If you care about them, that is. Punk.
See post #9. It goes for you too, TDS troll punk. You suck, America hater.
On what basis do you suggest this?
Trump has threatened to resume bombing after the election, with Iran promising to retaliate against infrastructure in the region that we demonstrably can't defend.
Meanwhile, the last few days have seen over a dozen ships attacked in the Strait.
So why do you think prices are about to go down?
Market makers are bloating the price.
As soon as it rises high enough, they’ll all turn around and short on the way down.
It will happen before the election, so don’t wait till after to sell.
Exactly!
A possibility I suggested months ago was to sail a cheap, old protective ship in parallel to and north of the ship to be protected.
Another possibility I suggested would be to weld (or bolt) vertical protective plates to horizontal spacers welded (or bolted) to a Strait transit tanker.
I also suggested:
The oil can be transferred in the Indian Ocean to China/EU-bound tankers as Iran did near Malaysia.
That is the current procedure, but without my suggested protection measures.
“a growing backlog of aging tonnage that is expected to head for the breaking yards in the coming years. Included in the backlog are hundreds of tankers operating in the so-called dark fleet”
https://shipbreakingplatform.org/platform-publishes-list-2025/
There are hundreds of tankers of little value available for Strait transit use. These tankers might proceed to India, which is a short trip away. The oil can be shipped on from India as Russian oil has been.
The world uses about 70 million barrels of oil a day. At a $30 premium to pre-war pricing, that means it would cost the world $2.1 billion a day to allow Iran to block the Strait.
Iran may be able to sink a few tankers before the US Navy eliminates foolhardy Iranian boaters, but the loss of say $500 million of old tankers and the oil put in them is tiny compared to $2.1 billion/day, $15 billion/week, and $65 billion/month.
The best hope for Americans is to see how these wars for foreign nations make us poorer.
It's gaslighters pretending everything is fine while Trump increases spending, increases debt, and fights another stupid war in the Middle East. And all of it feeds into higher interest rates that immiserate Americans.
I'm going to call a spade a spade, and 2+ trillion dollar annual deficits will be the death of this country.
Trump doesn't care, his family's wealth is exploding by billions, while our nation's debt grows by trillions.
So why are you an apologist for him? Punk.
“The same year saw South Korea (713 units), the Netherlands (691 units), and China (282 units) collectively responsible for 72% of global tanker output.”
https://www.indexbox.io/store/china-tankers-market-analysis-forecast-size-trends-and-insights/
About six tankers a day are built worldwide.
More fodder for a DEM takeover of Congress in January 2027, at which point higher diesel and gas prices will be the least of our problems.
Less important than how many make it out of drydock is how many make it through the Strait loaded with oil.
If the fragile extraction, refining, and distribution infrastructure in the Gulf gets crispy it won't matter if we build a 1,000 tankers a day.
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