In mid-September, Chinese scientists announced a breakthrough in extracting hydrogen and fresh water from the ocean with about 15% better energy efficiency than older techniques. Their research, published in Nature Energy on Sept. 15, underscores that China continues to dominate in the renewable energy race, generating so much that the country can’t even use it all. As Reuters reported in August, “China turned away enough clean energy to power Mexico ​for a year in the six months through June as its grids hit their limits.” At the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8, Youyuan Huang, executive vice chairman of BTR New Material Group, the world’s top maker of battery anode materials, said “China’s grid is a very strong and stable one . . . but we’ve installed too much green energy.”

Boy, the U.S. could sure use some of that excess juice. Currently, this country is embroiled in a self-inflicted energy crisis, largely a result of President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, that is sending deep ripple effects across the globe as oil prices spike. In the U.S. alone, diesel prices have risen around 70% since before the war began on Feb. 28, hitting a record $6.52 on Sept. 22, and in the last two months, at least 16 trucking companies, both large and small, have been bankrupted. The world’s richest nations are trying to staunch the bleeding, recently vowing to release up to 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil within four months. But on Monday, Amin Nasser, CEO of Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, cautioned that this is little more than a Band-Aid and that long-term supply issues remain. Until the Strait of Hormuz “fully reopens and confidence returns, the crude reality is that pressure at both ends of the barrel will intensify,” Nasser said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London.

Some “crude reality” would be another nice-to-have for those helming U.S. policy. The rising fury against the war and high energy prices threatens to clobber Republicans in the midterm elections. So the Trump administration is frantically trying to drive down diesel prices, first by floating the idea of banning exports. This tactic, criticized as “unwise” by some oil executives, has been abandoned for now, but at a Monday rally in Nebraska — where Trump also seemed to promote the idea of Iran attacking two California cities — he signed an executive order promoting the use of red-dyed diesel. Normally reserved for agriculture operations, red diesel is exempt from highway fuel taxes, but experts caution that expanding its use probably won’t help much because major fuel suppliers are unlikely to go along with it. For one, the taxes are only deferred, meaning companies could end up paying them later. But red dye, when used, can also gum up tanks and fuel systems. “We do not expect most reputable diesel retailers and fuel marketers to do this,” the Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America and the National Association of Truck Stop Owners said in a note to their members, citing “limited upside.”

On Friday, Trump announced his latest bid to reduce prices: buying oil from Russia. Shortly afterward, the Treasury Department issued a temporary license allowing Russian diesel to be supplied to the global market. Though details were scarce, this undermines the president’s own sweeping Russia sanctions law he signed last month. Regardless, it doesn’t look like it will do much to lower prices. “It’s kind of shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic,” Michael Lynch of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, told the Associated Press. “If we get diesel from Russia, basically it means that their existing customers are not going to get it and they’ll have to go somewhere else, and that will keep the price basically where it is now.”

With diminishing options — besides the obvious one of ending the Iran war immediately, which Trump can do whenever he wishes — the administration’s primary strategy is to blame everyone else. On Monday, he repeated claims on social media that Ukraine is most at fault for high oil prices thanks to their continued attacks on Russian oil refineries, and that “What’s driving up gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz.” The president also said the closure of oil refineries in “blue states” is part of the problem. 

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has also spread these claims, appearing Oct. 4 on “Face the Nation” to blame Ukraine and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the latter for closing two refineries. (In fact, Newsom had nothing to do with the refinery closures.) Wright insisted that fuel prices will drop soon, as Trump has been claiming for months now. He also said that Trump was warned before attacking Iran that it might create an energy crisis — “he was well aware of the risk to energy flows that were coming out of the Persian Gulf region” — but the president insisted it would all be worth it to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Wright has been especially busy lately trying to instill a sense of optimism around the energy sector, dismissing climate change as a non-issue while laundering Trump’s vision of “energy dominance.” All of this is remarkably myopic. Half of it is an artificial war against renewable energy projects, including the cancellation of almost $8 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants, and using specious claims about “national security” to cancel offshore wind projects. The other half is accelerating oil, gas and coal extraction while slashing protections for endangered species threatened by drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But here’s the rub: Neither approach has made fuel cheaper, and it doesn’t seem that will change any time soon.

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There’s little wonder why: Wright founded Liberty Energy in 2011, one of the fossil fuel giants that led that decade’s fracking boom, and he has attacked renewable energy projects almost as enthusiastically as Trump, saying they can never fully meet increasing energy demands. China and other countries have conclusively proved that false, but it’s not an either-or situation. Despite being the world’s No. 1 renewable energy producer, China is also rapidly expanding its coal industry. “The growth of renewable electricity is not incompatible with maintaining, and sometimes developing, fossil-fuel capacity,” science and technology historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz explains in his 2025 book “More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.” 

In other words, human energy consumption is rising so fast that we’re continuing to grow all energy sectors rather than entirely replacing fossil fuels with renewables. (That’s not great news for the climate, of course.) But only the U.S. is leaning quite so hard into 19th-century fossil fuels instead of 21st-century solutions.

Why would the Trump administration push so hard for retrograde technology? Perhaps it’s time to admit that the president actually has no interest in driving down consumer prices or the cost of living, let alone ending the war, whether it hurts his party’s electoral chances or not. Trump is deeply invested in oil and gas companies, which have enjoyed obscene profits throughout the conflict. As Reuters reported in late September, “The ​five largest Western oil companies — BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies — are expected to report combined third-quarter profits of around $53 billion, according to RBC Capital Markets estimates, up from $48 billion ‌in the second quarter and more than double year-earlier levels.” 

Trump has caught plenty of these profits, with an August report from the Joint Economic Committee finding that the president “owned as much as $45.6 million in oil and gas company stocks in 2025, a portfolio that is now worth as much as $61.1 million given the surge in oil and gas stocks driven by Trump’s war in Iran.”

No wonder Trump continues to hint that the Iran war will heat up again after the midterms: He has a vested interest in keeping it going and inflating gas prices, so maybe it makes sense to call his bluff here. After all, truckers may be dropping more than $1,000 every time they fill up, or losing their jobs entirely, but the ultra-rich aren’t feeling much stress from all this. They are well positioned to buy up bankrupt trucking companies and jack up prices, further consolidating their monopolistic or oligarchic power. It’s the classic “shock doctrine,” in which corporations exploit disaster conditions, created intentionally or not. 

It would be more sensible to follow China’s lead on renewable energy, just as it would probably be smart to retreat on Iran rather than get entrenched in another forever war. But that just wouldn’t generate such spectacular windfall profits for Trump or those in his orbit. The solution is to nail these people to the consequences of their decision. They don’t want to end this crisis, so we must make them.

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America and Israel’s ongoing war against Iran has sunk the global economy so deeply in the mire that economists are now seemingly throwing down their pencils in frustration. On Thursday, for the first time since the start of the conflict, analysts at JPMorgan said they don’t have a baseline view of oil markets. 

“We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” Natasha Kaneva, head of the company’s global commodities strategy, said in a note. According to CNBC, analysts at JPMorgan assumed there were some economic red lines the U.S. simply would not cross in the conflict, and that President Donald Trump would eventually be forced to reach a deal with Iran. But close to seven months after the war began, most of those red lines — including oil hitting more than $100 a barrel, gasoline nearing $5 a gallon at the pump or 10-year Treasury yields rising above 5% — have already been crossed, and “the exit strategy is less clear, not more,” in Kaneva’s words.

Earlier this month, diesel prices climbed above $6 per gallon in the U.S. for the first time ever, and continues to climb. Costs are expected to rise as winter approaches, a season of peak demand for the fuel. Meanwhile, oil stockpiles continue dropping toward record lows, as highlighted by a new analysis from the S&P Global Energy Fuels and Refining team, which warned “winter is coming for diesel markets.”

Karim Fawaz, executive director at S&P Global Energy, warned in the analysis that “Inventories are low, spare refining capacity is scarce, and seasonal demand is about to strengthen at exactly the wrong moment.” 

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Maybe it’s bad news when even the economists have quit pretending that everything will be fine. The Iran war continues to be a disaster, yet Trump has refused to stop bombing the Islamic Republic. On Thursday he indicated he might even double down, telling Axios, “I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me.”  

Anything but peace, I imagine. The previous day, the president recycled an old line, claiming that the Iranians “want to make a deal.” Given how many times we’ve heard that one before, I’m just not convinced. Economic forecasts for the coming months continue to be grim as fighting in the Middle East intensifies. A drone attack that heavily damaged one of Saudi Arabia’s pipelines is expected to cause crude oil exports to fall by 400,000 barrels per day this month alone. That’s just one of countless reasons why energy prices are predicted to keep spiking. Although more war clearly isn’t helping, Trump is now promising to sell 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Just what everyone needs.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon told Congress that the cost of the war has climbed to $42 billion, a bit over the most recent estimates of $38 billion from the Congressional Budget Office. Some experts have estimated the cost to be even higher, such as Linda J. Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, who told The Hill it could be as much as $100 billion — and that was back in July.

But honestly, who cares about gas prices and grocery bills? The most severe cost in war is always human, and Trump’s aggression in the Middle East has resulted in an estimated 1,800 to 3,800 civilian deaths. The Washington Post reported Friday that the Pentagon is also not disclosing the true number of U.S. soldiers who have died in the war. The Pentagon’s public database cites 18 servicemember deaths, but officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the figures, said the true number could be as high as 23, plus three U.S. contractors based in the region have died since Feb. 28. Meanwhile, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have attracted significant attention for their attacks along the Red Sea coast, threatening Saudi Arabia’s oil exports, but less attention is being paid to the more than 100,000 people who have fled the renewed fighting.

On Thursday, the U.N.’s top human rights body reported “reasonable grounds” to believe that the U.S. has committed war crimes in Iran, citing two strikes, including one on a school in the southern city of Minab that killed 150 people, including 120 children. A White House spokesperson responded that the human rights body has “accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.” While the focus on bottom lines and costs at the pump is understandable, I don’t need baffled economists to know that Trump’s war is born of absolute insanity.

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