The Diesel Dilemma

Trump is considering banning export of diesel refined in the U.S. and getting European countries to release their reserves of diesel, to keep the price down.

There's a BIG problem with that. 

Currently, Europe is in a proxy war with Russia. If Europe expends it's diesel reserves, that's reducing it's capability to run military vehicles. If the stocks are drawn down by any significant amount, Russia may consider it's worth a gamble to go the whole hog and go for all-out war with Europe, because Europe's ability to resist will be curtailed by the lack of fuel. 

Military tacticians know that logistics are critical: any shortages, even ever so slight, affect the ability the wage war fully. That hamstrings you and you lose. Napoleon and Hitler tried and failed due to lack of logistics.

Drawing down our reserves of Diesel significantly increases the risk of war with Russia.

Because Putin will seize upon a weakness and exploit it. It's like a new version of Red Storm Rising is being written.

Although, the U.S. supplied weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan and there was never talk of war between Russia and the U.S. back then. Mind you, back then, we had strong leadership. They knew how to play the political game.

Nowadays, we have weak leaders, political pygmies who cannot compete with a political operator like Putin. We have leaders that want safe spaces, that cannot stand criticism, that stand almost as tyrants, jailing people for not following their ideological political position.

Basically, we're fucked. 

Europe's leaders will bow to pressure, release Diesel reserves, Putin will see an opportunity and all hell will break loose.

This dear reader, is the problem with globalism. When everything runs right, it's fine. But it doesn't have the redundancy required to work on a national scale. 

Every country needs to define certain industries as strategic assets and of national security importance. 

Steel production, water, power generation, oil refineries, distribution pipelines for gas and aviation fuel, are amongst those industries that absolutely cannot be offshored and offered up to globalist interests. 

The lack of refineries in the UK and of course the cost of the energy to refine crude oil in the UK has completely fucked up the notion of strategic reserves and strategic industries. We are reliant on supplies from other countries, who are in turn influenced by the prices they can get in certain markets.

American diesel is being put in tankers and sold abroad because the petroleum companies can get more money for their diesel outside the U.S. 

It would take an executive order banning the export of diesel to stop them exporting it. And of course it doesn't guarantee that production of diesel will continue. The refineries and companies making the money may just stop, if they're not making enough profit, or stockpile the diesel and not release it, until such time as they are able to maximise profits.

Markets are good when they work fairly. But an out of control, unbalanced global market like we have at the moment that maximises profits above all other considerations is an evil and immoral animal. It will literally condemn us to hell if it is allowed to continue. 

We need political will and power to sort the issues out with globalism. We are moving towards a time when we will need to put limits on globalism. We need to define certain things as off-limits to globalists. That's not to say to socialise things and have governments running industries. But we need certain industries to have certain rules and regulations, not to curtail, but to nudge. To keep them honest and working for everyone.

Fuel production: in-house, in the UK, not reliant on fuel from the other side of the world.

Water, strict regulations on pollution and sewage release and large punitive fines in the form of taxes on dividends. So it pays the companies to re-invest and avoid controversy. Profits and especially Dividends are maximised by being good and keeping clean.

Steel: we need diversified production, plenty of different steels available produced here in the UK.

Aviation: we need diversified production inside the UK and limited reliance on production from outside the UK.

Distribution networks need to be resilient. Power, fuel, water. We need to be able to move either around the country easily and have the ability to divert around breakages in the network.

Critically, we need the political will to go ahead will the above at the expense of global corporate profits.