shreeda

Spencer Schneier Verified account @spenceraviav · 5d

From @freeshreeda and the team @commendamedia

"To stop the political bleeding, the Trump administration has considered several interventions to lower gasoline and diesel prices. Among them, a proposed 90-day ban on diesel exports gained traction in September.

Asked about it during a late-September meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said, “I’ve called for that, too. I’ve said, ‘Let’s not send out the diesel.’ We make a lot of diesel … I’ve called for it within my people.” By October 2 he had reversed himself: “Europe has a lot of diesel, and they’re going to be making a major world contribution, and so are we. And we’re not going to be doing the export ban.”

Trump is not the first president to consider it. In 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gasoline prices soaring, the Biden administration weighed a similar policy.

The idea will return the next time fuel gets expensive, so it is worth understanding why it tempts and why it fails. An export ban could lower domestic prices in the short term, but it does nothing to address the heightened global conflict that is making diesel so expensive in the first place.

To lower diesel prices for good, the United States needs to engage in a mix of industrial policy and diplomacy to stabilize the international supply of diesel. A ban, meanwhile, would tell every company weighing a refinery or a well in the United States that the rules can change the moment the business turns profitable. The relief would end with the ban, but the fallout, including damaged investment in US refining and production, would outlast it."

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