Note that it doesn't count the cost of second- or third- order effects (like the cost from the price of oil going up by 50%). Since February 28, crude oil prices increases cost $42 billion in the United States alone.
I guess what matters is that the increase in revenue largely stays within the country, but that doesn’t help consumers directly.
Prices are still set on the international market, that subsidy does not affect prices.
Or, do you have some other subsidy that brings down the prices that consumers in the US pay? If so, name it!
If President Trump–who is so deep in oil & gas special interests that he has decided that US Taxpayers need to pay nearly $1B to cancel a wind power project–is going to start doing export controls to keep oil prices down, well then he runs into the problem that we export and import a ton to get the right type of crude in our refineries. If he is going to start subsidizing oil consumption, well, my god we are in for a wild ride on the economy and deserve all the misery that it will bring.
The “long term thinking” you allude to is just a mind trick to keep you at bay.
There is enormous, real suffering hitting those who can least handle it.
Edit: I would add that those in the renewables industry are absolutely making lemonade off the situation. Energy analysts agree that short term profits will go up, but long term, everyone is going to be running to renewables. No country wants to have this existential fuel disruption risk hanging over their heads.
That this makes you wonder indicates that you fundamentally misunderstand the entire point of environmental movements.
Further, even if there was "celebrating" how would you know? Are you involved with the groups politically working towards those ends? Perhaps you should question your information diet, rather than assuming that your information diet is representative of reality.
Look at a small sampling of Iran's external actions in the region through the Quds force. The hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed by Hezbollah or the almost 300k dead in Yemen due to the Houthis. Iran's actions in 2019-2022 against CENTCOM bases in Iraq and elsewhere. The puppet Iraqi president propped up by PMF.
North Korea doesn't do anything like this until very recently when they started sending troops to invade Ukraine. They don't organize their state around an expansionist death cult ideology.
NK doesn't behave different due to owning a nuclear weapon. Before the 1990s they were like this too.
Iran is not organized around an expansionist death cult. They have not expanded or attempted to expand at all. They are involved in lots of neighboring conflicts because they are in a region with lots of conflicts. We are also involved in lots of conflicts there.
There is no possible closer comparison for a nuclear Iran than nuclear North Korea.
MAD has had its virtues extolled, yet assume it won't work with another country because somehow they are even more irrational (if true). Even though that is exactly for whom the MAD strategy is designed and operates under.
It is only the build up of Iran getting a nuclear weapon that is used to go to war.
The game theory here seems rather simple, honestly.
And if Iran is seen as hostile, we need to look at the countries for whom the USA allies with and what wars they launched in the region. And they are plausible nuclear capable where their neighbors are not.
I think Israel is currently a larger aggressor, literally flattening more towns through demolition.
...wat? You mean like the peace that Iran exports to the region, and the peace that all those protesters experienced a few months ago?
Is the job of a leader (or the administration) to foresee threats before anyone else can see it coming? Is their job to make sure that it does not manifest?
It is interesting that when they does it, the majority is against it, precisely because no one else could see it and can agree with the action of the administration?
So it seems that if someone is a very good leader, they will be ridiculed by the very people they are trying to protect. I think this happens if the unit in question is a family, or a country.
I am not picking sides in the on going crisis. But just making an observation.
- Many cannot accept its dangerous world.
- Many don't understand that stewardship of nuclear weapons alone is a major undertaking that Iran cannot be trusted to manage. US & USSR alone has several near-miss detonations/launches.
- Many will refuse to accept solely because 'orange man bad'.
- Some are paid to criticize on influential online forums and HN makes no effort to moderate or police such activity.
The ballistic missiles are the danger, and Iran already has those. There is no missile or reentry vehicle in Iran's possession that can credibly threaten the United States with a nuclear weapon.
> US & USSR alone has several near-miss detonations/launches.
According to Seymour Hersh, Israel was close to using their nuclear weapon as well. Why not focus on their disarmament first to deter Iranian retaliation?
> Some are paid to criticize on influential online forums and HN makes no effort to moderate or police such activity.
Please reread HN's guidelines if you don't want to be permabanned: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like.Their Tom & Jerry reenactment is not casus belli for the US or Europe. You'll note that no Article 4 has been invoked over Iran because it's not a legitimate security concern for any of NATO's members.
That the Islamic Republic of Iran's words such as 'conduct terror attacks in the UK right now' and 'death to America' have the actual threat of death behind them and aren't just 'rhetoric' as HN claims.
One that HN won't care about, but that Iran targets and kills jews, not just Israeli jews, but all jews, anywhere in the world, as their political agenda.
> One that HN won't care about
It's not HN. Most of the world doesn't care about it. You can't cry foul over threats to civilian populations amid the annexation of Lebanon. America doesn't get to operate from a position of moral authority after it's overthrown a democracy it didn't like and threatened to wipe a civilization off the map. NATO service members aren't excited to fight on behalf of the nation that invented the Hannibal Directive. HN is just a sample of this overwhelming majority, many of whom are American taxpayers with an opinion they'd like to voice.
I'm sorry that you struggle to find empathy for your minority political opinions. Don't blame it on HN.
How much blatant terrorism started via Iranian Ambassadors in the UK becomes a level the UK should respond to? You obviously don't think knifing a few jews is worth consideration.
The pro-Iranian side don't actually care about terror attacks by one country carried out in another. The pro-Iranians don't actually care about targeting specific ethnicities for murder simply because of their ethnicity.
Wait the hannible directive is about Iranian embassy staff instigating ethnic killings in the UK? Seems like your just injecting a random unrelated propaganda point. The fact is the Isalmic Republic of Iran's actual policy is to carry out attacks to kill random jews around the world (like the attack they attempted today in the UK).
Look at your argument from the European or Indopacific perspective - why does a nation like China or India need to participate in a joint blockade? What is the value in attacking Iran for a nation like Pakistan or Egypt? The American goal of "stop them from making a nuke" is clearly not possible from an air campaign, and nobody but Israel is in Iran's crosshairs. The Gulf states all have fragile economies that won't survive the type of asymmetrical conflict that America is equipped to wage. Even rebel groups like the Kurds don't see any promise in attacking Iran, and have told American diplomats that they're on their own. They all know that the promises are empty, and a broken or Balkanized Iran would be the end of their regional stability.
Interventionism is not a helpful policy for Iran's people. Arabs know it, Europeans know it and most of the Americans and Israelis know it too. The status-quo is only confusing if you assume that the Arab and European states are run by morons that want to destroy the Middle East.
>There is no "death to Europe" or "death to jews"' "nobody but Israel is in Iran's crosshairs"
Iran's UK embassy called for attacks in the UK yesterday, and attacks in the UK happened today against random jews.
'The status quo is fine because Iran only calls for the death of the USA and Israel, and that is justified and totally isn't responsible in part for anything that is happening , and Iran only tried to kill a few people in Europe, and they are only jews, and Iran can't target Europe (other than the attempted murders instigated publicly by their diplomats in the UK)'.
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not Iran's fault. And if it was, Iran didn't mean it. And if Iran did, the US/Israel/random UK jews stabbed deserved it.
The UK has already chosen a side, they're not being singled-out by random.
You seem to have shifted focus after I countered your claim that Iranian violence wasn't a threat to Europe with an example of Iranian violence in Europe from today.
Violence instigated by the official Iranian embassy delegation to the UK. Conducted/called for publicly by Iranian officials in the UK. Conducted against random jewish people because they were jewish and in the UK (a valid target for random civilian attacks in your opinion I guess because 'The UK has already chosen a side, they're not being singled-out by random.')?
Funny how you jumped from number 1. Iran isn't a threat to Europe all the way to 6 on the narcissists prayer with 'The random UK jew deserved the stabling because the UK picked a side'.
My original statement is that Iran does not present a credible nuclear threat to the United States. The justification for the war is an outright lie, the "dangerous new world" saber rattling has been criticized by defense analysts for the 40+ years it haunted Israeli state media. Retaliatory terrorism in the UK is not going to cause the global stage to reevaluate their position in the US/Iran conflict, your original comment upstream is just more reason not to enable America's war.
> and how does that tie back to your hanible directive comment?
I mentioned the Hannibal directive once in this thread, to illustrate the dirt-poor optics of war with Iran. You've brought it up three times now. Insecure much?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/29/science/iran-...
Oh wait, that the Trump and his war criminal friends. They make the problem, blame it on someone else, and then claim they fixed it while making life worse for everyone else. Meanwhile Trump and his corrupt oligarch cronies are profiting massively.
howmayiannoyyou 1 hour ago [dead] | root | parent | next [–]
Regurgitation of talking points doesn't change the irrefutable fact that the JCPOA only kicked the can down the road & Iran was cheating the entire time - as they now admitted during negotiations.
Remember when multiple US administrations have internally pushed for nuking Korea and Vietnam, and yet we are apparently still allowed to have nukes?
Remember when Iran used to have a fully operational biological weapons program that they have dismantled as confirmed internationally.
Iran has enough Uranium to make bombs. The physics package that actually detonates things is not as hard as enriching Uranium in bulk.
Why hasn't Iran used a weapon of mass destruction yet in this almost existential war? I thought they were nuts? I thought they wanted to nuke all the infidels?
China has every incentive to goad Israel or Iran into starting another round in this conflict so that America will deplete even more missiles. Iran destroying one of these[1] and an AWACS should startle everyone and with the right supplies from China Iran has the capacity to take out even more of them.
So if in two months this conflict heats up again and we're looking at half of these radar systems destroyed and minimal amount of missiles available, would you consider it well worth it?
Because that's a very plausible scenario and I'm very concerned about what the world will look like by the end of the summer if that comes to pass.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPY-2_transportable_radar#