Gas Prices Skyrocket, Trump Freaks Out & His Powerlessness Is Exposed: The True War Agenda Revealed

Tucker Carlson (0:00)

We don't want to be cynical, but it does sometimes occur that maybe we're talking about the wrong things. We mean that when a big news event happens, and everyone in the media is talking about one element of it, and we're usually part of that herd, embarrassingly, you have to ask yourself at a certain point, could it be that the thing that we're all talking about is not the most important thing? Could it be that we're talking about it or being led into that conversation on purpose? I mean, again, not to be a conspiracy nut or anything, but it's possible that happens, and here's an example ongoing, and that's the Strait of Hormuz. We've done a bunch of different shows in the Strait of Hormuz. Strait of Hormuz is obviously inherently significant. It's the waterway, now famously at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf through which a lot of the world's energy flows. Iran has the longest shoreline along that strait. We're all geography experts now, and so now we all know that it's essential to keep that waterway open, and then it curves around on the Red Sea, along the coast of a country called Yemen, which is controlled almost the entire country by a group called the Houthis. People are getting an ongoing education and all this, and why is that meaningful? It's meaningful because you can't get oil out of the richest oil producing region in the world unless you have access through those waterways, Strait of Hormuz into the Red Sea. So, the ongoing conversation, again, including the conversation we participated in, has been about how to open the Strait of Hormuz, how to get that oil through. But if you think about it, is that really the most important question that arises from the Iran War? So, a waterway, of course, it is inherently important. On the other hand, that's a problem that you can fix really quickly. If you have a blocked waterway, if one country says you can't come through or we're going to blow up your tankers, well, you could reach an accommodation with that country, and you could fix that in about 10 minutes if all sides are willing to do it.

What's harder to fix is the destruction of energy infrastructure, pipelines, well heads, but more than anything else, refineries. So, a refinery is the plants, the factory where crude oil pumped out of the ground is turned into products you can actually use. And people may not have an appreciation for how different crude oil is from the refined products made from it. So, from crude oil we get famously gasoline, jet fuel, aka kerosene. We get all the way down to asphalt. We get diesel, fuel, and we also get a lot of the precursor elements for fertilizer. So, none of those things come directly out of the ground. They are made from this commodity called crude oil, and they're made in things called refineries. So, without refineries, you really can't run a society. You cannot run a country on crude oil. There's very little you can do with crude oil, actually. You can't even put it in a diesel motor. I mean, they'll run on vegetable oil, but you can't run crude oil. You have to refine it. So, refineries are actually the most important link in the chain from drilling to turning on the lights in your house or getting on an airplane or eating food that's grown in the ground. And the problem with refineries is there aren't very many of them. So, there are a lot of oil and gas wells. In fact, no one really knows the number. There are about 70,000 new oil and gas wells drilled every year globally. The US alone has almost a million active oil and gas wells. But refineries, which are absolutely necessary, are a different question. So, how many refineries are there globally? On planet Earth right now, we know the answer because it's not a very big number. There are a total of 825 refineries on the planet for a population of 8.3 billion people. 825 So, that's about one refinery for every 10 million people. One refinery for every New York City, plus 2 million.

So, when you destroy a refinery, that's a big problem because a big refinery is incredibly expensive. Twenty-five billion dollars, for example. Very expensive to build and time consuming. It could take more than 10 years to build a big refinery. So, when you destroy one, you have an immediate and long-lasting effect in a way that closing a strait does not achieve. It's a big deal to destroy a refinery. And so, with that in mind, you have to kind of wonder what's going on with refineries. All of a sudden, they're getting hit by our count, and this may be off, we may be undercounting it, but we think, as of today, seven refineries in the Persian Gulf have been hit, destroyed, damaged, shut down for a while anyway. Maybe some long term, so far, in this war, not even a year old. Seven refineries. So if you're wondering why diesel is 650 nationally, and much more expensive than that in other parts of the world, it's because of that. It hits on refineries, and not just in the Persian Gulf, but in Russia, which makes about 7% of the world's diesel fuel, refines it.