Looks like the US is the #1 producer of diesel fuel, that nasty concoction that makes Mexico smell like hell. In a sane world, we would reduce diesel (and regular gasoline) use and replace them with cleaner fuels, or go electric. Replacing all diesel with electric motors would take a huge amount of money and a lot of time, but you have to start sometime and somewhere. Just don't hold your breath. You'll still end up smelling like diesel.
TRUMP'S ABOUT TO THROW AUSTRALIA UNDER A BURNING FUCKING BUS
With Mates like this cunt, who needs enemies. A 90-day export ban on the table, and diesel rationing within weeks if it lands. Eighty years of somebody else holding the mop, and now it's ours.
Saul Kavonic went on the ABC’s The Business last night and said the quiet part in a suit. If Donald Trump follows through on banning American diesel exports, Australia could be rationing diesel within weeks, and in the severe scenario the price could run 50 per cent higher than it is now. Fifty per cent on the national average he quoted takes diesel past four dollars a litre. Fifty per cent on the $3.97 I paid at my local servo on Tuesday takes it somewhere near six. And overnight Politico reported that the plan being drawn up inside the White House is a 90-day ban. The White House denied it within hours, and if you’ve followed this bloke for three days running on anything at all, you know what that’s worth.
Kavonic runs energy research at MST Marquee and he’s the bloke the ABC rings whenever the fuel situation turns crook. He tore strips off the government’s excise cut back in April because cheaper fuel meant people burning diesel we didn’t have. He is nobody’s cheerleader, which is exactly why what he said last night should have every ute owner in the country spitting chips.
“The scope for the US to now ban diesel exports is probably the most worrying development we’ve seen in global fuel markets since the war began, when it comes to Australia’s vulnerability.”
“If the US does go down this path, and particularly if they do it in a very severe way, I think we’ll be looking at that in a matter of weeks.”
That’s rationing he’s talking about. Stage three and stage four of the national fuel plan, the levels where the government stops asking nicely and starts deciding which servos stay open and who gets to fill up.
Let me tell you what this actually is, because it’s the story of the man’s entire fucking life.
Donald Trump has never once cleaned up his own shit. Every time he’s fucked up, and he’s fucked up on a scale most blokes couldn’t manage with a crew and a budget, somebody has come along behind him, wiped his fucking arse and paid the bill. Here we are again, and this time it’s a country on the other side of the world that gets to carry the can.
Start with his father. The New York Times spent a year inside the family’s tax records and found Fred Trump shifted at least $413 million in today’s dollars into his son’s pockets, a fair whack of it through schemes the paper described as dubious and some of it as outright fraud.
When the Atlantic City casinos were going under in 1990, Fred sent a lawyer down to Trump’s Castle with a cheque for $3.35 million worth of chips. Nobody gambled a single one. New Jersey’s regulators later ruled it an illegal loan and fined the casino for the privilege. That is Daddy’s Little Bailout at forty-four fucking years of age.
The banks came next. By 1990 he owed them so much that a bankrupt Trump was worth less to them than a rescued one, so they rescued him. They put him on a personal allowance of $450,000 a month while they worked out how to unpick the mess, and that was 1990 money.
Between 1991 and 2009 his companies went through Chapter 11 six times. The bondholders and the tradies who built the joints took the haircut. He took a television show and told everyone he was a fucking genius.
He is the six-time Chapter 11 champion of the world, and he has never once paid for a belt.
Then he got the presidency and the cleanup crew became the American taxpayer, and now, with the war he started in February still burning and American diesel at a record $6.52 a gallon, the cleanup crew is the rest of the planet. Kavonic said it without the swearing: if the US shuts off exports to buy itself a few weeks of relief before the election, “the rest of the world’s going to pay the price.”
A special mention now. Over the past few months a particular kind of Aussie has turned up in my comments to give me a spray. This is supposed to be an Australian Facebook page. What are you carrying on about American politics for? Stick to your own backyard, mate. The whinge was always the same, and a couple of them got creative about where else I could stick things, and the comments turned into a bin fire.
Righto, here’s your answer. This is fucking why.
The bloke who told me to stick to Australian politics is standing at the bowser this morning watching the numbers roll past what he paid for his first fucking car. He isn’t stunned. He’s doing the sum. He’s working out whether there’s enough in the tank to get to the job and back, and whether the client will wear a fuel levy on the invoice. He’s about to find out that both answers are being decided in fucking New York, along with whether the servo out past Woop Woop and Bum-Fuck-Nowhere will even have diesel by the time he gets there.
Because here’s the shape of it, straight from Kavonic:
“Australia is actually the largest importer of diesel in the world... We account for only one per cent of the world’s fuel demand, but ten per cent of the world’s seaborne diesel imports.”
“It was probably only a month ago... that Australia and the Australian government thought we’d managed through the worst of this crisis. We could actually disband the fuel task force... The only real hypothetical scenarios which might see us have to revisit rationing was if passage of oil through the Red Sea started to be disrupted, or the US started to ban fuel exports... A month later, both of these things are now potentially happening at the same time.”
Diesel runs the mines and the paddocks, and every litre of it comes in on a ship. The cocky up the road needs the header full for harvest, and the truckie who brings the groceries over the mountain needs a tank to do it. Chris Bowen is on his way to India this week to stand inside the biggest refinery on earth and ask for whatever’s spare, and then on to Riyadh to ask the Saudis the same thing, and Kavonic’s word for that job was thankless. Bowen’s line before he left was that Australia’s fuel supply remains secure.
Kavonic’s answer was that we still have several weeks of storage, some of it floating, and that it can run out very quickly.
Canberra didn’t cause this. Kavonic, who is no fan of this government’s excise politics, says the government stepped up early and the fuel kept coming, and he called that commendable. The cause is fifteen thousand kilometres away, sitting next to Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations, telling reporters “let’s not send out the diesel” because Republicans in Iowa are in tight races and the harvest is on there too.
That’s American politics. It’s also the price board at your servo. They’ve been the same thing since the war started in February, and anyone telling you otherwise is either not paying for their own fuel or not paying attention.
The midterms are on 3 November, six fucking weeks away.
On Monday a White House official told CNN nobody was considering an export ban. On Tuesday, at the UN, Trump told reporters, “I’ve said let’s not send out the diesel. We make a lot of diesel.” Asked when they’d decide, he said fast, one way or the other. That is the planning horizon of the bloke who decides whether the header gets fucking filled.
Then came Wednesday. By the morning his own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, was in New York telling a room that “the blunt tool of banning diesel exports definitely doesn’t work.” By lunchtime Politico had five people familiar with the discussions saying a 90-day ban was being drawn up, Trump inclined to sign it by the end of the week. One of the five said the cooler heads had been shoved aside by a camp insisting that something, any bloody thing, had to happen. By the afternoon a White House official was calling the report fake news and Wright was back out saying nobody is considering a flat ban, only “the most efficient way to get more diesel into the United States of America.” Five positions in three days from one administration, each announced as though the last had never fucking happened.
He’s doing it because American diesel is at a record $6.52 a gallon, up 77 per cent on last year, and the farm-state Republicans facing voters in six weeks are shitting themselves.
Chuck Grassley proposed the ban and Ashley Hinson in Iowa demanded it while slamming the Iran war in the same breath, which is quite the frikken trick. Marjorie Taylor Greene, last seen telling the world that America did not vote for this, is backing it too.
And the beauty of it is that the ban doesn’t fucking work, and the people who’d have to run it keep saying so. Patrick De Haan at GasBuddy put it plainer: “You can’t fence off a globally traded commodity by executive order.” Kavonic said the same from this end, and then the part that matters:
“But that doesn’t mean they won’t do it for a short period of time, because doing something like this into an election could at least provide some price relief for several weeks, which is what you need heading into the midterms.”
So that’s the deal. This Mango-Mussolini-Oompa-Loompa-Fucknuckle is going to throw Australia under the bus to scrape a few seats back from the train wreck, the catastrophic clusterfuck that used to be the Republican Party, so some semblance of it survives the midterms. Ninety days of cheaper diesel in Iowa, paid for with rationing in the bush.
Ninety days from the end of this week lands on Christmas Day, give or take, the midterms covered with five weeks to spare and credit taken over the fucking turkey when the ban lapses. Kavonic reckons we’ve got several weeks of storage. Ninety days is longer than several fucking weeks. The American farmer paying $6.52 a gallon is as much a victim of his war as the cocky up the road, and the ban won’t save either of them past the first Tuesday in November, but it doesn’t have to. It only has to look like something until the fucking polls close.
Donald Trump is going to fuck us just like he does with everybody. In a transaction, as soon as you’re not of any use to him, he’ll throw you under a burning fucking bus.
If you want references, ask Mark Carney what a signed trade deal is worth in Washington these days. Ask the Saudi prince who found out last week that the bombers stay on the ground unless there’s something in it for Donald.
Australia has been useful. We signed up for a $368 billion submarine deal and we copped a 12.5 per cent tariff in July, and Canberra copped it sweet without so much as a whimper. Now the cocky’s header is empty and the ship isn’t coming, and it turns out being useful was the whole arrangement.
The Bus Driver of Mar-a-Lardo only runs one route, and it goes over whoever’s standing closest when he needs the numbers. This week that’s a country that buys ten per cent of the world’s seaborne diesel and has a harvest to get in. Send the bill to Mar-a-Lardo if you like. Nobody in eighty years has ever got this arse-wiped, ally-burning cunt to pay one.
THE AUSSIE-TO-YANK WORD WIZARD: THE ONLY THING AT THIS SERVO THAT ISN'T RATIONED
Righto, Yanks: your weekly vocabulary lesson, delivered at an exchange rate your President could only dream about. Every term above, translated free of charge:
Servo: a gas station. Where Australians go to be robbed by geopolitics.
Bowser: the fuel pump, specifically the bit with the numbers you can’t look at anymore.
Ute: a pickup truck, usually diesel, usually owned by somebody spitting chips right now.
Cocky: a farmer, named for the cockatoos that eat his crop.
Header: a combine harvester. It runs on diesel and it does not run on Truth Social posts.
Truckie: a trucker. Brings your groceries over the mountain and pays for the diesel to do it.
Tradie: a tradesperson. Builder or plumber, and a proud thing to be in this country, unless you’re still owed money by a casino in Atlantic City.
Fair whack: a decent share of something. $413 million qualifies.
Spitting chips: furious. No potatoes involved.
Carry the can: to wear the blame or the bill for somebody else’s mess. See the entire planet, September 2026.
Cop it sweet: to take the hit without complaint. What Canberra did with the July tariff.
Bin fire: a dumpster fire, Australian edition. Smaller bin, same smell.
Woop Woop: the middle of nowhere, a long way past the last servo.
Whinge: to complain at length, usually about the price of something Donald did.
Give someone a spray: to abuse them, loudly, usually in a comments section.
Crook: unwell or broken, depending on what you’re describing. The fuel situation, in a word.
Mob: a group of people, no crime implied. Except the media marketing mob.
Fucknuckle: an idiot of rare and specific uselessness.
IFLA (I Fucking Love Australia)
