Forest

Canaltia wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the White House is currently trying to get Ukraine to stop bombing Russian refineries, because that's making diesel extremely expensive? Ukraine doesn't want to stop doing that, because it's actually a very effective way to cripple the Russian economy so that they stop doing war crimes reconsider their special military operation in Ukraine. Trump wants them to stop, because diesel prices spiking right before the midterms is a bit of an L, optically speaking.

I think that Trump is a power-hungry opportunist, and he can't overlook Ukraine undermining him because Zelensky is The Woke™ or whatever, and Ukraine won't act solely as a proxy for America.

...however, that's not mutually exclusive with your take, so maybe both?

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epc0_im0_mbblpd_a.htm
https://www.afpm.org/newsroom/blog/how-much-oil-does-united-states-import-and-why

For one, 60% of US crude oil in its refineries comes from the US itself. another 28% from North America (25/28 from Canada alone) for a total 88% roughly, from North American sources. The rest are from a smattering of about 86 different countries, none of which (since like 2023) have been Russia (which peaked in 2010 at 269 thousand barrels per day, compared to mexico which peaked in 2004 at 1,598 thousand barrels per day)

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRIM_NUS-NRS_2&f=A
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRIMUSMX2&f=A

US diesel prices have been on the rise since its yearly low in February 2026, and rising ever since. About the time the US invaded Iran. Also, about 25-ish days before Iran closed the straight of Hormuz (when the price starts increasing dramatically)

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=EMD_EPD2D_PTE_NUS_DPG&f=W

As for Ukraine bombing Russian refineries? Yes, it's a very good strategy to cripple the Russian economy. We don't actually know why Trump is trying to get Ukraine to stop bombing Russia, but plenty of news articles do speculate that there is Trump-Putin collusion in some way.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/08/14/the-real-collusion-between-donald-trump-and-vladimir-putin
https://www.reuters.com/world/what-do-we-know-about-putin-trump-relationship-2025-02-13/
https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-aligns-with-vladimir-putin-yet-again-leaving-ukraine-and-us-relations-with-europe-under-pressure-294119

That, alongside Musk doing some underhanded things with starlink in Ukraine (and the potential link to the starshield limit coming from inside the whitehouse), make it seem very clear that anything to do with diesel prices or general oil prices, is just made up to stay on Putin's and Russia's side.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/order-limit-starshield-ukraine-came-inside-white-house-sources-say-2026-10-15/

Really, the best thing that Trump could do to reduce diesel and oil prices, is to stop blocking the straight of Hormuz. Russia is not even close to strong enough financially to damage the global oil price market without the help of OPEC. and Destroying Russian refineries won;t even be a blip on the US oil market since they don't buy Russian oil (at least not since the really small purchase Trump apparently has in the works).

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/15/goptrump-russian-diesel-deal-01119657

As to you last point, Trump is definitely a power-hungry opportunist, but the USA has outwardly claimed to side with Zelensky and Ukraine multiple times, while always siding with Putin in Russia's war of conquest (my words).

He is, of course, using Ukraine's bombing of Russian refineries as another excuse in bad faith to prop up the midterms.
He is attacking America's long time allies (Canada especially for some reason), and befriending its enemies (Russia, North Korea).

Also, my last two cents about the Russian invasion, isn't it rather funny that in 2013, about a year prior to Russia's annexation of Crimea (that's when all this stuff really started), Ukraine discovered a massive oil reserve on its land, and said that they were making deals with the EU to help them and itself wean off of Russian oil? A little funny, that.

https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-discovers-oil-field/25044815.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/ukraine-signs-10-billion-shale-gas-deal-with-chevron-idUSBRE9A40ML/

As you can tell from this long a** post, I really really don't like Trump. I'm admittedly very biased, considering he actively makes it harder for trans people to live, and that mentality is pouring over into Canada. So, I guess you can take all this with my biases on notice, and a pinch of salt poured into the letters saying "do your own research if you don't trust mine".

Edit: I apologize if this all felt directed at you. You just happened to be the last post I read on the topic

How about we try just using less oil?

Quite apart from the environmental benefits, lowering demand should also help lower prices.

Station 8 wrote:

How about we try just using less oil?

I fail to see how this would make the line go up.

But in all seriousness, we're kind of in a bind here, because there's a handful of things that just about require oil products, and a whole lot more that don't necessarily need them, but we don't have the infrastructure built to bypass that. Oil is, unfortunately, an extremely efficient source of energy, that can let things function regardless of surrounding energy infrastructure. So you get into situations where we've just decided not to build that infrastructure.

Take trains, for example. We don't need gasoline to make trains run; we've already figured out it's more efficient to just have overhead wires, which let you use any type of power generation. However, here in North America, we just never built any of that. I'm sure it's possible to make battery-powered trains, but the technology for that has lagged so much because electrified rail is just objectively better, so that's a huge part of the logistics network around here that requires gasoline. We could electrify the rail network, and people have been suggesting this for decades, but even if rail companies and/or the government decided they wanted to do that (which they probably won't), you need construction equipment to do that. Which all runs on gasoline/diesel. So to use less oil, you need to use substantially more oil first (trains still have to run while electrification is in progress), which is an issue when there's critical supply shortages of oil. Maybe if every country hadn't already burned through their strategic reserves, that would be a good place to get it.

Anyways, I'm probably preaching to the choir, but there's a lot of sectors that have similar issues. I work in aviation, and I honestly don't think non-oil burning airline fleets are viable, at this point in time. For the foreseeable future, you need jet fuel for your jets, because we don't have an alternative that can power narrow/wide-body fleets, and there isn't enough manpower available to replace all of those aircraft with smaller electric aircraft (from what I can find, most electric planes are single-seaters or two-seaters). The technology just hasn't caught up to where it needs to be.

On this issue, there´s a very interesting book by Timothy Mitchell, titled "Carbon Democracy". Mitchell points out that fossil fuels actually shaped modern democracies. Just think about the coal industry in the 19th century: its heavy dependence on manual labour (miners, railroad workers, etc.) resulted in a growing bargaining power by the workers´ unions, which could sabotage the whole system by going on strike. This, in time, resulted in the gradual concession of labour, social and political rights by the ruling classes... Then we had the transition from coal to oil, which slowly eroded the previous political structure and paved the way for corporate capitalism to thrive (since oil workers are fewer and more isolated, and the infrastructure needed to transport oil -pipelines, tankers- can be managed more easily than coal in the previous era). In a nutshell, there are structures now that cannot be reformed, because they are fundamentally dependent on oil. And then consider plastics, which are a by-product of the oil refining industry... Candlewhisper says that "none can afford not to be motivated by a lower price point", and this is absolutely true. One could even say that the consumer democracy that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War (and which is usually linked to the emergence of the "Welfare State") was largely dependent on the mass production of cheap plastic products. Just take a look around you in this precise moment and consider how many of the objects you see are made of plastic. Plastic is very cheap. We could never have millions and millions of cars going around if they were still made of steel, wood, leather and natural rubber as in the early 20th century: back then, it was a luxury only some could afford. Consider your clothes, made of synthetic fibers. Or your melamine furniture, or the foam inside your mattress, or the packaging of almost every conceivable edible product in your fridge. Our whole way of life, poorer or richer, depends on oil and its derivatives to an astonishing extent. And yet, all of that somehow needs to go if we are to leave a livable world to our grandchildren. Maybe -just maybe-, as the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has written, our best shot at survival as a species is to "become indigenous". If that sounds too naïve, that only goes to show how deep we have sunk in this ecocidal system.

Candlewhisper Archive wrote:

Any writers here?
I'm keeping my novels offline to preserve first publication rights, but have shared some of my flashfics in my factbooks. May add more.

I'm thinking of how to make my Factbook but I am slacking! Are there any templates to make it look good?

I have been writing a magic story, but it's a long process. I think I really have something though! What's your story about?