ETHANOL FAILS ANY REASONABLE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS.

Matthew "Slow Boring" Yglesias, who argues with but mostly votes for Democrats, correctly details that argument.

Uisung Lee, Hoyoung Kwon, May Wu, and Michael Wang from the Argonne National Laboratory say that [ethanol lowers greenhouse gas production] because improvements in corn yields have eliminated prior concerns. By contrast, Tyler Lark, Nathan Hendricks, Aaron Smith, and Holly Gibbs say that the land-use changes induced by ethanol mandates (i.e., turning more acreage into growing corn) mean that “the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the [Renewable Fuel Standard] is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24 percent higher.”

The thing is, even if you use the Argonne numbers, this still comes out to something like $160 to $190 in costs per ton of carbon dioxide abated. Using less generous math, of course, the cost is essentially infinite because you’re raising emissions.

Beyond the specific carbon accounting, though, there are without a doubt significant environmental impacts of growing dramatically more corn. This means extra pesticide in the water and corn grown in space that could otherwise be used for conservation or recreation or housing. In a world of growing electrification, that land could also be used for utility-scale solar and wind projects that are dramatically more energy-dense.

All this carbon math really hinges on the fact that the amount of land dedicated to growing corn goes up, which happens because the biofuels mandate pushes up the price of corn, making it lucrative to grow more corn.

The primary cost here is simply that turning corn into gasoline makes food more expensive.

As we noted, directly, in the price of beef, and as multiple researchers called attention to, directly in the price of other food grains as farmers plant more corn and fewer beans, grain grasses, and substitution toward rice takes place.

THE BOTS HAVE BEEN BUSY AGAIN.

I hope they are learning something.  Sometime during the Memorial Day weekend our page view counter rolled through nine million, some five weeks since the counter took a weekend stroll through eight million.  It's been the same pattern, episodes of activity in the tens of thousands of page views, interspersed by days with our more common experience of two hundred to two thousand page views in a day, and views of specific posts in the thirty to sixty range.

I extend my thanks, once again, to the two hundred to two thousand real readers who look in each day, and I surely don't lack for things to carry on about.  It's likely that I'm going to carry on about how expensive ignorance is, based on the ongoing public conversations about data center construction.

THE 1970S CALLED AND THEY WANT THEIR MALAISE BACK.

"Shell’s profits ‘obscene’ as European oil majors’ profits surge by 43%."  Logic is always to socialists as crucifixes are to vampires, and so it is as the anaconda's coils tighten on Iran.  "In the first quarter of 2026, the combined $21.7 billion* in quarterly profits recorded by bp, Repsol, TotalEnergies, Eni and Equinor was 43% higher than the same period last year, reflecting a significant windfall from volatile oil prices caused by the US-Israel war in Iran."

The way out?  More enforced deprivation.  “It’s time to break free from the fossil fuel doom loop – we need robust taxes on big polluters to insulate households from price shocks and to fund a cheaper, cleaner, more stable energy future for all.”

Nothing changes.  The way to avoid the end of the world the doomsday environmentalists fear is to restore the sustainable life of the primitives.  That'll show those energy profiteers!

CEASE AND DESIST THIS POINTLESS PALAVER?

There are multiple layers of conflict in Asia Minor.  The United States seek freedom of seas, including transit of the Strait of Hormuz, and an end to Iranian nuclear weapons work as long as the crazies are in charge of former Persia.  Israel's government have their own, more salient fears, of an Iranian hot rock, while they and the Lebanese seek some sort of recognition that Lebanon's government have the monopoly on violence in Lebanon, whether or not the Hezbollah militia like that.  Recently, news has come out that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been trading shots with Iran, both in the closing days of Epic Fury and after the so-far frustrating negotiations between Iran and the United States began.

NOW DO HEALTH CARE.

The strong libertarian position on positive rights bestowed by government is that they involve the conscription of others.

In "The Impossibility of Endless, Cheap Gas," a Common Dreams contributor who majored in sociology grasps that point, at least in the special case of energy.  Yes, she starts with the recognition that oil is most likely an exhaustible resource (although the Hotelling price pattern that provides incentives to optimally conserve and to develop backstop technologies has not yet presented itself) she then acknowledges the labor of others.

Access to cheap fuel is not a right. It is a subsidy built on violence, both societal and environmental harm. The price of cheap oil is exploitation and death, including death of children and the destabilization of our climate, which all risk future generations’ viability on Earth. In the face of such consequences, surely we can do better.

It's asking too much for the lady to acknowledge the "exploitation and death" inherent in the mullahs looking the other way while infidel oil transited the Strait of Hormuz while the infidels looked the other way while the mullahs used their oil money to exploit their people and fund gangbangers masquerading as religious nationalists throughout Asia Minor.  It's certainly too much to point out that access to college, or medical services, or Doritos, is no more a right than access to cheap fuel is, nor that such access is also a subsidy built on violence.

LET THE ANACONDA'S COILS TIGHTEN.

In The American Thinker, Heyrsh Abdulrahman, who has foreign policy experience germane to the conflict, notes, "The era of believing the Iranian regime can simply be managed indefinitely appears to be ending, and Washington should not waste the opportunity created by that realization."  It's a lengthy essay, considering several dimensions of the conflict, and it reinforces the Cold Spring Shops position that the current Iranian government ought not have nuclear capabilities, ought not be financing gangbangers masquerading as religious zealots in Asia Minor or beyond, ought respect the status of the Strait of Hormuz as an international waterway, and ought compensate the Gulf Arab states for damages resulting from their unstructured response to the Israeli and United States military campaign.

SAGE ADVICE FOR OUR TIME.

In Brussels Signal, Conrad Black offers a verdict that it might behoove the process-worshippers in the faculty common rooms to read and understand.

China is a challenge but not a rival and America’s ostensible allies are much less formidable than they were in the World Wars or even most of the Cold War. If Europe wishes to be taken seriously by the Americans, it has to act seriously and bring something to the party besides unction, loquacity, patronisation, and the compulsive will to appease America’s enemies.

For that consummation to be achieved, dear reader, it is essential that the coils of the anaconda continue to tighten.

What appears to be the last shot in the locker for the beleaguered and fragmented Iranian regime is the false claim that they control the Strait of Hormuz. The United States Navy could certainly convoy oil tankers through in approximately three 30-tanker convoys per day. They have the ships and aircraft necessary to assure reasonable safety and could put Marines on all ships to repel boarders and respond instantly to shore attacks and to the small craft of the Iranians that have so terrorised unescorted tankers. President Trump has already declined the belated offer of the Europeans, who need this oil, to assist in clearing the Strait. The United States doesn’t really need oil from this source and its lack of alacrity in reducing the price of oil for allies who would not allow the United States use of their own airspace and American bases in their country for the purposes of conducting this war, is understandable.

In his view, the mullahs might posture and puff in the way of men of Asia Minor, but it's likely for show for the benefit of their own subjects, but they won't do anything foolish.

The correlation of military forces now between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other is approximately a thousand to one, and any recourse to aggression against the United States by Iran would be so horrifying a mistake that even the blooded and divided fighting bull government of the Islamic Republic has eschewed it. The departure of the United Arab Emirates from OPEC also indicates that that country will assist in moderating the world oil price while Iran flounders to the end of this operetta of a war in which the principal terrorism-sponsoring country in the world and a relentlessly belligerent source of threats and outrages has been reduced to impotent mendicancy, all at a cost to the United States of eight battlefield fatalities and a non-combat accident in which five other servicemen died.

What has been most remarkable in the response of the West has been this sour grapes recognition that the United States does not need anything from NATO to achieve its international strategic goals.

All of which might be true, and yet now is not the time to go wobbly.

Turn over the fissile material and destroy the machinery of uranium enhancement.  Stop funding proxies throughout Asia Minor.  Compensate the Gulf Arab states for damages to their tourist infrastructure.  Recognize that the Strait of Hormuz is international waters.

PAIN FOR THE MULLAHS, NOT AT THE PUMP.

Let's set the Wayback Machine to August 2003.

The University's press liaison just rang, asked if I would speak with a reporterette about gas prices. Here's the fieldwork I did: nominal and real gasoline prices to 1997, and an inflation calculator. When you see unleaded regular at $2.73 a gallon (I'm not sure how the Energy Information Administration treats taxes) give me a holler. For an exercise, plot the size of a passenger truck against the price series you see.

In those days, Blogger did not have image embedding capabilities, which we now have.  Adjusting for inflation, when you see unleaded regular at around $6.00 a gallon, and again, my disclaimer about accounting for taxes applies, give me a holler.

That's a screen capture from an Energy Information Administration series, and the agency publish additional inflation-adjusted price series.

PRIZE AND BOOTY.

Maritime law features all sorts of interesting terminology.  The most familiar pairing might be flotsam and jetsam.  At law, how that stuff wound up in the water (loosely, floated off as opposed to jettisoned) determines who has the right to retrieve it.

Now contemplate, with or without a dead-man's chest and a bottle of rum, prize and booty.

Prize law is the body of maritime law and the law of armed conflict that applies to captured neutral or enemy merchant vessels. Prize law applies to civilian merchant vessels, distinct from enemy warships or aircraft, which automatically become booty of war when captured. Prize law only applies during armed conflict, making it distinct from routine maritime interdictions or sanctions enforcement, which can occur outside armed conflict and are not necessarily belligerent acts. Eight specific grounds make a neutral state’s vessel capturable, including breaching a blockade, carrying contraband, and resisting visit and search. Contraband consists of goods destined for an enemy of a belligerent and susceptible to use in armed conflict, a definition that was has not been broadly applied since World War II. According to U.S. policy, a blockading state has the right to stop vessels bound to or from blockaded ports anywhere on the high seas and apply prize law. Although the U.S. has recently interdicted other Iran-linked vessels outside the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. has invoked maritime interdiction and sanctions enforcement for those interdictions, not for blockade violations.

The law has developed over the years and it isn't as simple as putting Marines on the bridge and steering a course for a friendly port.

Once vessels are captured, they can be escorted to a port under belligerent jurisdiction for inspection and adjudication by a prize court. That court would determine whether the capture was lawful. If so, the court may condemn the vessel and cargo as prize, and award title to the capturing state.

Meanwhile, back at the Strait of Hormuz, a few ships might be moving, but free movement by ships from or for Gulf Arab ports isn't happening.

Maritime activity across the Strait of Hormuz and adjacent corridors is showing early signs of recovery, but under sustained enforcement pressure and continued sanctions-driven disruption.

Transit volumes rebounded on April 25 following several days of suppressed movement, with all crossings conducted under full AIS visibility. At the same time, U.S. enforcement activity expanded beyond the Gulf, highlighted by the interception of a sanctioned LPG tanker in the Arabian Sea.

Iranian export infrastructure continues to operate under strain. Kharg Island shows active loading alongside a growing anchorage queue, indicating throughput pressure rather than a full recovery in export flow.

Across the system, vessel behavior reflects a controlled reopening environment, where movement is resuming, but under active monitoring, enforcement risk, and persistent sanctions pressure.

The article notes increased open and clandestine transit of the strait, without disaggregating Gulf Arab traffic that enjoys freedom of transit once clear of the area from Iranian traffic subject to U. S. enforcement anywhere at sea.

As far as effects on the price of gasoline, Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green notes,  "Sure, nobody likes paying four bucks for gas, although $5 gas under Joe Biden would be $5.75 in today's dollars. But as Robin Brooks noted this weekend on Substack, 'the current physical shortage of oil was entirely predictable and got priced long ago.'"

We'll take stock of the motor fuel prices another day.

CHERNOBYL WAS A COMMUNIST DISASTER.

Reason's Ron Bailey recalls the corner-cutting that led to the failed emergency test that destroyed a nuclear reactor.

The world's worst nuclear disaster began 40 years ago at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power generation facility experienced an explosion and meltdown. Ironically, the explosion was caused by a botched safety test.

The point of the test had been to see what would happen if the power plant lost its main electrical supply: Could spinning turbines generate enough power to run the coolant pumps until emergency backup diesel generators could kick in? The experiment had failed three times previously, but never as catastrophically as it did that night.

Before the meltdown, Soviet officials had bragged regularly about the safety of their nuclear power plants and disparaged those in the West.

Oops.  It transpires, dear reader, that the only thing more destructive than capitalist cost-cutting, which presented a few years earlier in the form of exploding Pintos, was communist cost-cutting.

The Soviet system put economic decisions in the hands of planners far removed from both the data people need to make decisions and the immediate consequences of their actions. Gosplan, the economic planning bureau, initially determined that nuclear power was unnecessary because the country had more than enough fossil fuels to produce electricity. When it became clear in the late 1960s that they had miscalculated, the energy planners rushed the development of nuclear power. In the process, they neglected to include the containment buildings used in the West, which are designed to prevent the escape of radioactive materials even during severe accidents.

Containment, you see, would have increased the costs of the plants by 25 percent to 30 percent. The "leaders of the Soviet energy sector faced a choice between disrupting the Party's five-year development plan if they built expensive nuclear facilities or abandoning the project altogether," a group of Russian researchers noted in 2025 (originally in Russian). "Priority was given to the solution that was safe for the officials, but which subsequently created a threat to people's lives." After the disaster, an IAEA engineer told the Los Angeles Times that if the Chernobyl reactor had been housed within a standard Western-style containment structure, "it probably would have made a huge difference." Even if an explosion breached a containment structure, most of the radioactive particles would nevertheless have been trapped.

The Soviet nuclear power industry was plagued by shoddy workmanship, bureaucratic infighting, and a shortage of trained personnel.

"Close enough for government work."  Unfortunately, clean nuclear power was collateral damage to the demonstration of the follies of communism.

ANOTHER LOST WEEKEND IN ISLAMABAD.

Pakistan's government, which might be acting as agent for what passes as Iran's government, is hosting another round of discussions between Abbas Aragchi, who is touring several capitals including Moscow, and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

Red State's "Captain Ed" Morrissey isn't expecting much.

Pakistan isn't part of the US-Israel war with Iran, and except for a couple of attempts in the early days, it has not been the recipient of Iranian retaliation, unlike the experiences of Iran's Persian Gulf neighbors. Pakistan has good relations with the US – not as good as those GCC states, but warm enough, especially after Trump brokered a peace agreement after war briefly broke out between Pakistan and India.

Araghchi doesn't need "consultation" with Islamabad to know what steps Iran has to take to end the war. They have to surrender their highly enriched uranium (HEU), end support for terror proxies, renounce their illegal claim to sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, and negotiate missile limits with Israel and the countries in the Abraham Accords. Araghchi's problem is that he doesn't have any power to negotiate on any of those points, because the IRGC has depantsed him publicly and made sure everyone knows he's an impotent boob with an airplane at his disposal, and that's all.

Araghchi likely knows that Trump won't extend the ceasefire as another favor to Pakistan.

As we wind down the business week, the Captain has correctly spelled out United States' war aims.  Israel's government might have additional aspirations, and their ongoing negotiations with Lebanon's government to crack down on Hezbollah provide an additional list of items for negotiations.  In addition, the Gulf Arab states might want to hang onto some of the Iranian money laundered through Gulf Arab banks to cover repairs to their hotels and airports.

As far as moving cargo for and from Gulf Arab ports, neither the United States Navy nor their European nor Indian nor Japanese counterparts have yet organized convoys or escorts.

WE'RE STILL HERE.

It's Earth Day, and it's worth noting, yet again, how a cause that might have been motivated by the Cuyahoga River catching fire, by inedible fish in some of the Great Lakes, or by the health risks that rescue divers ran in Chicago, was quickly captured by the scare-mongers.

That's how our 2024 post opened, and it continued with a few examples of the recent scare-mongering.

Our 2025 post called attention to a half-century and counting of failed forecasts.

We also noted, "Somewhere the doom-sayers are doing their thing."

A LOT CAN CHANGE IN A WEEK.

At the beginning of the week, a Daily Kos diarist posted a cartoon critical of United States war aims.

That's likely a dig at Our President's dig at Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

THE MERCANTILIST TEMPTATION.

Those oil tankers that transported the final shipments out of the Arabian Gulf had to go someplace after they delivered their cargoes.  Many of them are heading to United States ports for their next load.

I don't know whether this train, which passed the train watching camera at Sturtevant on Sunday, is a load of ethanol or of Bakken crude.

The You Tube channel soundtrack includes Canadian Pacific radio, and of late train crews have been calling attention to trespassers more frequently of late.  Whether that reflects a security bulletin or the effect of better weather on kiddos looking for new places to take selfies I don't know.

I do know that Our President is hailing all those tankers heading Stateside to pick up, and some of his cheering section in the media are carrying on about "jobs" and "exports" and all the rest.  Which is true, but let us balance that against the higher prices for finished product and the efficiency losses from sending the natural gas crude carriers over longer distances between loads.

As far as the Strait of Hormuz, Windward's most recent briefing notes, "The operating environment is now defined by active enforcement, partial compliance, and continued evasion, with vessel movement shaped by both restriction and adaptation."  There are still some eight hundred ships of all kinds west of the strait, which is a lot of cargo still to move.  The briefing noted that one of the outbound ships flew the Chinese Flag with a Hong Kong port.  Some people are making a lot of noise about that.  The ship has a cargo from one of the Gulf Arab states and its manifest is in order for passage.

WHAT PART OF "NO NUKES" DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

According to Jake Johnson with Common Dreams, "Iran’s foreign minister said Sunday that the Trump administration’s representatives derailed marathon talks in Pakistan’s capital with maximalist demands, just as the two sides were 'inches away' from a preliminary agreement to end the six-week conflict."  Read on and discover the spin.  "Oman’s foreign minister, who mediated previous talks, said hours before the US and Israel started bombing Iran on February 28 that 'we have already achieved quite a substantial progress in the direction of a deal.'"  Let us give due consideration to the possibility that something might have been lost in translation, but "substantial progress in the direction of a deal" sounds like the kind of phrasing that might come out of marriage counselling.  He and she are very much at odds over many things, and yet, both of them are in the same room, and maybe they've both agreed that they like puppies.

That's very much the stuff of peace-process liberalism, which produces "a lot of process and precious little peace."

BLOCKADING HATTERAS INLET IS HARDER.

I allude, of course, to Gideon Welles's Anaconda Plan, which ultimately strangled the rebellion.  It took four years to implement, because getting control of the Mississippi River and the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico America wasn't easy.  Note how in four years, Vladimir Putin hasn't been able to do something similar with Ukraine.

LET THE ANKLE-BITING BEGIN.

Our President gave a speech last night that probably changed exactly zero minds.  That might be because everybody who has been paying attention to the dismantling of the mullahs' tyranny is so wedded to his priors that there's no changing minds.  Consider "Trump's Iran Speech" by Outside the Beltway's James Joyner.  "Nineteen minutes. Zero answers."  Which conclusion he validates by citing all the usual founts of Establishmentarian Process Worship, i.e. New York's Times, Washington's Post, National "Public" Radio, The Associated Press (editorial takeaways rather than reporting), Reuters (same gripe), The British Broadcasting Corporation (This is Londonistan).  His complaint?  "While I’ve thought President Trump owed the public more explanation for the war effort than he’d given so far, scheduling a prime time address creates expectations that some major new development will be announced. Simply, as BBC put it, rehashing his social media posts falls well short of that. This was the classic meeting that could have been an email."

TRADE THEORY IS TRANSPORTATION THEORY.

Higher transportation costs have the same effect as tariffs.  The academic study of international trade and finance generally considers a different class of problems than the academic study either of industrial location or of transportation.  In part that is because some problems of international trade and finance are tractable using a general equilibrium framework, while problems of industrial location and transportation involve nonconvexities that foul the works where general equilibrium is concerned.  Paul Krugman, qua regional economist (rather than in his court-intellectual-for-Democrats role) has done good work on urban and regional economics that exploits some of the insights from trade theory.

General equilibrium models of trade tend to abstract from transportation costs in contemplating the effects of tariffs or factor intensity or factor price equalization.  To a first approximation, though, we can evaluate the effects of space on wage and price differentials in the same way that we'd evaluate a tariff: prices differ by transportation costs, and a tariff has a further effect on price differences on the dock of the exporting country and offloaded at the importing country.  Heck, "tariff" refers both to a schedule of import duties and a table of transportation rates.

PROGRESSIVISM PRODUCES PENURY.

In "The Iran War Reveals a Global Chokepoint," Common Dreams contributor Richard Heinberg admits as much.  "The current fixation of world attention on the Strait of Hormuz should remind us of the inherent brittleness of an economy in which our food and energy security, and our livelihoods, are intertwined with depleting and polluting resources and expectations of perpetual growth."  If you don't ask too much of his essay, there is wisdom in it.  "The more extensive the market, the finer a division of labour is possible.  That's generally for the good, but what happens when the s**t hits the fan?"

That question of the delivery trucks not coming turned from online musings to messy reality a couple years later, when the politicians panicked and cities had to make do with stocks of toilet paper, and sometimes foodstuffs, on hand.  But if you're contributing to Common Dreams, you think that reducing the carbon footprint of the civilized word is a good thing for its own sake.  Helium and fertilizers, as well as sweet crude oil, transit the strait, and what's left of the mullahcracy seems bent on flipping their remaining drones and antiship missiles that way.  Now is the time, this Heinberg fellow asserts, to reduce our dependence on shipping through the strait.

These developments underscore a message that we at Post Carbon Institute have been repeating for over two decades. Oil and other fossil fuels are the basis of the modern industrial economy. They’re polluting, but they’re also depleting. And in the case of oil (and, increasingly, natural gas) they’re internationally traded at massive scales, raising geopolitical risks. This is a system destined to fail.

But when? During and shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the all-time peak in world conventional oil production seemed to be at hand.

pppIt wasn't.  But the real kicker comes at the end of the essay.

The current fixation of world attention on the Strait of Hormuz should remind us of the inherent brittleness of an economy in which our food and energy security, and our livelihoods, are intertwined with depleting and polluting resources and expectations of perpetual growth. More chokepoints loom.

As always, we advise community resilience as the best strategy for coping with what’s coming. Localize production and consumption, reduce your dependency on global supply chains, and get to know your neighbors.

Reduce the extent of the markets, reduce the division of labor, revert to the living standards of the early nineteenth century, before steamships and railroads.  So it always is with these environmentalist true believers.  Hard pass.

TRANSCENDING COMPLEXITY.

Physicists Have Mathematically Proven the Universe Is Not a Simulation.  It's unlikely that somebody could program the universe as a simulation for the same reason that it's difficult to write a climate extrapolation model.  "The short form of Steven Hayward's argument is 'in a complex adaptive system it is impossible to capture the behavior of the system without fully describing it in your model.' There's something Cantorian, or perhaps religious about the problem." Add more code, run out of computing capacity.