$5, $6, or even more, people will curse loudly and vow to vote in November, but they'll pay it and absorb the impact.

But if gas is in desperately short supply, and becomes rationed, people will curse, but they'll also move to get relief. A huge upswelling of anger will accompany any announcement of a rationing plan. Here in California, in the ’70s, we were restricted in our buying to even or odd days, based on our license plates. Cars queued in lines blocks long waiting to get into gas stations, only to be turned away after a wait of hours when the station ran out of gas. Anger was palpable. I can only imagine how it will go today, when guns are even more widely available and tempers are at short fuse.

And a word of caution: The gas queues happen suddenly, without warning.

We no longer get 30% of our oil from the Middle East. The US is a net exporter now.

…in the time of the first embargo, most cars in the U.S. averaged 10-20 MPG. Cars today are much more efficient. And, of course, many are hybrids, or even pure electrics that don’t need gas at all.

I just plug in at home a charge mine.

And I have home solar too.

price gouging is very common during times like these

Gasoline hasn’t been as low as $5 (per US gallon) in about 20 years. We’ve rarely been much under $7 for that matter.

Brent crude is flirting with $79 this morning (10:20 AM CET), and gold is hovering at $5400 an ounce, up from below $5000 less than ten days ago. In cities here, women have been warned not to wear necklaces with gold chains in public, since a fast thief could make himself a couple of thousand dollars in a day by ripping the chains off of three or four women, and then disappearing in the crowd.

The price here used to be just the price of the gasoline plus the so-called "mineral oil tax." But then the government tacked on Value-Added Tax to the whole package: not just VAT on the gasoline, but VAT on the mineral oil tax as well. The German Constitution expressly forbids any and all double taxation (it seems the Germans did that to a certain ethnic group here about 90 years ago, and the framers of the post-war constitution wanted to make sure it could never happen again). I even asked one of our neighbors who is a judge on the German tax court who wrote his doctorate on double taxation. He said the VAT of the gas tax is absolutely unconstitutional, but so far no one has considered it worthwhile to launch a class action suit for the few Euros extra it costs the people every time they go to the pump. Years ago, a wealth tax was proposed in Germany, and their Supreme Court struck it down instantly, noting that it constituted an unconstitutional double taxation. Of course, here, the maximum tax bracket of 47% (42% plus 5% supplement) kicks in at under $100,000, so the government already takes a serious bite out of people's incomes.

$72.12 in futures market. Up $5.10

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/02/oil-prices-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-shipping

"Oil prices rose and stock markets came under pressure on Monday after intense US-Israeli strikes on Iran prompted fears of significant global economic disruption.

Brent crude jumped by as much as 13% during early trading – to hit $82 a barrel, a 14-month high – as the effective closure of the strait of Hormuz, one of the most important arteries for global trade, intensified concerns over oil supplies.

Markets fell in Europe, with London’s FTSE 100 down 1% to 10,798 points. Airlines IAG, the parent company of British Airways, and easyJet were among the worst performers, as thousands of flights were cancelled, down nearly 10% and 7%, respectively.

However, the surge in the crude price pushed shares in oil companies Shell and BP up by about 6%. Shares in the weapons manufacturer BAE Systems jumped by 7% as investors piled into defence stocks.".... (more)

@ 6pm est Sunday. Currently up about 7%.

No one is moving oil out of the Gulf at the moment. Most insurance that oil tankers need isn’t being offered except at very high mark ups so owners have parked for the moment

So the longer this goes, the more oil piles up. And as supply begins to dwindle, price goes up and maybe someone decides to take a chance and move oil out of the Gulf and then we’ll find out if Iran has already mined the shipping lanes or will attack the oil tankers directly. There’s a reason we targeted Iran’s navy after all.

that when the price of oil goes up, the price of gas goes up immediately, and when the price of oil drops, the price of gas goes down slowly, eventually?

Curious, that.

from about $2.25- $2.35 on Saturday morning to around $2.45- $2.50 Sunday.