SuperTalk Media MidDays with Gerard Gibert 2026-09-24

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Gerard Gibert (0:32)

You're listening to MidDays with Gerard Gibert here on SuperTalk Mississippi.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to MidDays. SuperTalk Mississippi, I'm your host, Gerard Gibert, along with Will East, in for the vacationing Rhino. We're in the Element Well studio, where we'll be guiding you through the middle of your day with facts, fodder, and fine music on this, as Rhino would say, Friday Eve. What's up there, Will?

Will East (1:25)

My kid just rolled over for the first time.

Gerard Gibert (1:28)

Oh, that's awesome.

Will East (1:30)

My wife just sent me the video.

Gerard Gibert (1:31)

That is fantastic. I know that's fun, man. Yeah. Well, congratulations. That's awesome. So just one of the many milestones. Yeah.

That's just fantastic. So we got a whole bunch of stuff going on. We'll certainly get to as much as we can of it today. It's one of them days. Well, I don't think we got enough time to get to everything going on both within the state, across the nation. Whole bunch of stuff. We've got Dr. Catherine Pannel coming on at 1105

She, of course, is a DO and the medical director of Right Track Medical Group, legislative chairwoman for the Mississippi Psychiatric Association. We're going to talk about the Pathways to Mothers program and just building public awareness of psychiatric care for pregnant women. Hmm. I hadn't really thought about that, but that's clearly an area that she knows a lot about. She'll come on and tell us about it. And then to kick off the afternoon hour of MidDays, it's John McKay, president and CEO of the Mississippi Business Alliance. We'll get an update from the Mississippi Business Alliance's Business Forward Tour. What is the purpose of the tour? Where are they stopping? And what are they hearing from business leaders across the state?

I'm sure a bunch right now will, with the price of fuel in particular, on everybody's mind. Diesel, the big one.

Now, I get it. And there's folks out there, like Commissioner Andy Gibson says, hey, you got to do something. It's kind of what he said yesterday. And he's right in pointing out that our farmers, in particular, I'm hearing from legislators as well who've said that the loggers are really struggling with this high price of diesel. It's affecting them. I ran into one, well, somebody's been on the program before. I don't think he reminds me to talk about this. So Jim Richards, he's the CEO of KLLM, one of the state's largest companies and trucking organization, transportation company. And I asked him, you know, how's it going? And he said that their business had actually improved. They do a lot of cold products, refrigerated truck transportation. And he said their business had actually improved because the last time we talked to him, it was kind of down somewhat. And I asked him about the typical provisions in contracts with customers.

You have kind of an established degree to upon rate for the transportation. But then you've also got a fuel surcharge. Kind of the way your electric and your gas bills work. Like, this is the basic charge, but we don't actually have to get PSC authority to adjust the price based on the price of the variable price of fuel, the input, right? So you'll see it go up and down. You can see it on your bill. You'll see the little fuel adjustment. Folks that are accustomed to looking at that. The same is true in the trucking industry. They have a provision that says, well, this is how much we'll haul this stuff for you. We'll charge to haul this stuff. But by the way, if the price of fuel spikes or comes down, we can adjust that, right? Mainly if it goes up, there's a surcharge, what they call it, and they pass that on. And he said they're obviously doing that. But it's still kind of a tough industry right now with the price of diesel. Now, I know a lot of folks out there that are in that business don't have that luxury, and I think that's kind of what's happening, for example, in the logger industry.

So that's a big deal. Now, there have been some talks in Washington about banning US diesel exports.

And there's not universal support for this within the Trump administration. For example, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, he confirmed they're looking at this, but he hasn't said whether or not a full or partial ban is even feasible. Now, economists, energy analysts say, yeah, that may lower the price on a very short-term basis, by a little bit, if at all, but it would likely raise prices globally, and eventually, that would catch up in the US. So it's kind of a short-term little pain reliever that is going to produce long-term gain. Now, you got to call it what it is, folks. This is sort of socialism. And what do I mean by that? That's the government basically telling private companies where they can sell their product. That's central planning socialism. I don't think, honestly, this would benefit consumers. I don't really believe this move. I applaud the president and the administration for trying to do something, trying to provide some form of relief, because there is an energy component, a transportation component, in virtually everything we consume. And diesel, the price of diesel, obviously is a major cost aspect of that transportation component. So, I really don't think, however, that government price controls, or in this case, government management of the supply chain, I'm not a fan. I'm just not a fan. That's socialism. That's central planning socialism. You got to let the market do its job. Now, we're a structural diesel surplus producer. We produce about 5.3 million barrels of distillates per day against demand of around 3.6. Now, that's the producer from the refinery. We don't, however, produce sufficient crude oil to satisfy our total demand. We can refine enough, but we import oil that's refined, that produces the finished good fuel products. So this is largely being driven by the Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refinery infrastructure. They are one of the most significant diesel producers in the world. The real bottom line core problem here is that we stopped building refineries in this country. And to a large extent, that's because the big oil and gas company said, well, we don't really feel good about the future of environment for fossil fuels, given the Democrats' constant messaging that we're going to just end use of fossil fuels. Why in the world, as a private company, would you want to take that risk, especially something that has such a long-term return on investment? We're talking 10 years before you get your money back when you build a refinery. So they've been shutting them down because some were losing, especially during the COVID era. Though we do have sufficient, again, refining capacity in this country to meet our needs, overall global supply of the product is down because of Ukraine launching drone attacks and striking Russian refineries. Remember the president a few weeks ago?