Create a Crisis and Capture the Market

What This Costs You

Gas prices, grocery bills, fertilizer costs. Let me be specific about what's actually moving for American households right now — because the numbers have already started.

Crude oil is the single largest input in gas prices. Every $10 increase per barrel adds roughly 25 cents per gallon at the pump. If oil crosses $100 — which analysts consider likely if the Strait of Hormuz stays commercially frozen — that's 50 cents or more per gallon, in a matter of weeks.

Natural gas utilities are already out of control. Potential increases of 10 to 15 percent on top of whatever you're currently paying.

Then it moves into the grocery store — and this is where it gets personal for American farmers in a way that hasn't gotten enough attention.

Urea is one of the most widely used nitrogen fertilizers in the world. It feeds corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton — the backbone of US agriculture. It's produced from natural gas. Qatar is the second-largest urea exporter in the world. Iran is the third. Both are either directly involved in the conflict or commercially frozen out of the market right now.

Urea prices at the Port of New Orleans were up nearly 15 percent in a single week, according to data reported by Wired. Nearly half of global urea production is at risk. March is when US farmers place orders for spring planting, which starts in April. There is no Strategic Petroleum Reserve equivalent for fertilizer. There is no buffer.

Veronica Nigh, senior economist at the Fertilizer Institute, told Wired: "Fertilizer is not going to be the most valuable thing that's gonna transit the strait."

What that means: oil tankers move first. Fertilizer waits. The triage is already decided — energy assets get protected, food inputs get queued. Farmers don't get a vote on that priority order. Neither do the consumers who will feel it at the register.

What most people don't realize is that triage decision — oil over food — is already being modeled by the same algorithmic systems that will eventually run the new infrastructure.

US farmers are already facing steep losses from the trade war with China. This is arriving on top of that.

If planting gets delayed, the grocery store feels it months later. Less supply, same demand. Grocery inflation doesn't need a shortage to spike. It just needs uncertainty. Right now there's plenty of that.

No single one of those impacts is a crisis. All of them together, hitting at once, is a tax. Paid by everyone. Collected by no one you can name.

And the taxpayers funding the new risk infrastructure? They're also funding the data infrastructure. Every ship movement logged, cargo manifest recorded, route decision tracked.

The public is paying to generate a pattern — and has no claim on what it's worth.