Crude oil is embedded in products far beyond fuel. He says 99% of pharmaceutical feedstocks derive from petrochemicals, including aspirin, Tylenol and ibuprofen, along with synthetic fabrics, vegan leather and artificial heart valves — over 6,000 products in all. He argues that even if every factory and car ran on renewables, crude would still be needed for these.
All US manufacturing depends on oil, if only for lubrication. He cites over 623,000 US manufacturing businesses and a fuel split of 43% gasoline, 20% diesel, 12.2% other liquids and 7.7% jet fuel. He calls pipelines the cleanest way to move oil, and says railroad lobbies oppose pipelines because they want the transport business.
Full reliance on renewables is impossible for a major manufacturer. He reports renewables now produce a record 21.3% of US electricity, but says the world's second-largest manufacturer cannot match Paraguay's 100%. Citing a free-market think tank, wind supplying half of world electricity would take nearly 2 billion tons of coal and 1.5 billion barrels of oil, a figure he suspects is overstated.
Hydro, geothermal, tidal and nuclear are the cleanest, safest options. He calls nuclear the closest thing to unlimited energy, noting the US has 93 of the world's 436 reactors. He presents fusion as different from today's fission, claiming its radioactive waste decays within a second, and says the UK, not the US or China, currently leads the fusion race.
Taxpayers overpaid for Panasonic's plant, with the surplus unexplained. He says Panasonic received $6.8 billion in Inflation Reduction Act money for a $4 billion EV battery plant and he cannot find where the other $2.8 billion goes.
The battery plant will run on coal, then natural gas. It needs about 250 megawatts, a small city's worth; the coal plant supplying it will emit 6 million tons of CO2 a year, and the planned switch is to natural gas, the fuel whose projects Biden just paused.
Local ratepayers subsidize the plant's power. He reports Evergy is seeking a rate hike for local customers to cover the added load while Panasonic gets a 40% developer discount on its electricity.
The plant barely offsets its own electricity emissions. By his figures it must produce over 2 million EV batteries a year, about 5,500 a day, just to offset the coal power, before construction, steel or mineral mining.
Trump's sub-$2 gas pledge is as undeliverable as Biden's. Reading his own Substack piece, he likens it to Biden's "no more drilling" promise and calls the LNG pause an attempt to appease those voters; both promises, he argues, cost the industry later.
Voters misremember why gas was cheap under Trump. He says Trump inherited low prices after the 2015 crash, prices rose in his first two years, and fell only after a late-2018 crash and then Covid.
A second term cannot reproduce first-term prices. He cites producer capital discipline, OPEC's unwillingness to repeat its 2018 output increase, and lost refining capacity, so lower gasoline would need even lower crude than before. He expects gas to stay above $3 a gallon, with US producers blamed.
The promise is politically "great" precisely because it is broken safely. With no reelection to face, and supporters concentrated in low-price states such as Texas, he expects Trump to claim victory if local prices near $2 even with the national average around $2.79.
Among major currencies tracked against the dollar, he singles out the Mexican peso as the standout, calling it on a "strong tear" since COVID and one he's optimistic will keep rising. By contrast he describes the pound at a recent record low, the euro down from near $1.50 to about $1.08, and the ruble having gone "from crappy to poopy."
He argues dollar dominance has swung through decades of similar cycles before, undercutting current "de-dollarization" claims. He traces the dollar's share of global foreign exchange reserves from 35% in 1951 up to 84% by 1970, down to 47% by 1989, back to 67% by 1998, and roughly 57.5% now.
He cites the euro's launch in 1998–99 as the closest historical parallel to today's dollar-decline narrative, noting it was expected to challenge the dollar but never broke 25% of reserves. As further evidence, he notes the BRICS bank itself still operates in dollars because that is where the largest pools of liquidity are.