Yes US produces mostly light crude and production of refined products requires also inputs of heavy one, but it's not produced in the Middle East anyway, so current situation can't impact that, either.
It's a global commodity. The reason there likely won't be a shortage in the U.S. has little to do with our production volumes, and has more to do with the fact that we're rich enough to be able to afford the higher prices when many other countries will have to forgeo using oil.
But if we weren't a rich country and we couldn't afford to pay a higher price for oil than many other nations on earth, we would produce and export oil to people that can pay more.
Ireland during the famine produced enough food to feed every person. But much of it was exported to other places, that could afford to pay a higher dollar amount to survive.
The US is also sovereign and if things would become really bad the government would just ban exports.
Ireland wasn't sovereign and it turns out, as much as other countries act brotherly (not that the UK really did), nobody really cares about you like you care.
Tariffs are mostly just politics and pretty heavily partisan. Banning oil exports would be objectively evil.
> It’s silly to blame the current generation for something their ancestors did.
As silly as it is, it's a widespread practice around the world.
> possessing supreme or ultimate power: in modern democracies the people's will is in theory sovereign.
For example, in the UK Parliament is sovereign, not the people. That's effectively how it is in representative democracies or republics where there is no fast representative recall mechanism.
The U.S. Constitution doesn't say that Congress is sovereign, but the effect is the same. For that matter, the U.S. President has a great deal of power.
To the benefit of those on the political left, an oil shortage shows itself almost exclusively in poor countries (because they actually don't have money to pay), and these tend to not have automotive industries of their own, thus have no reservations about switching to electric cars, which means that any oil consumption decline these days tends to be sticky - when the oil flow resumes, these people won't need it anymore. No one is going to get back to driving an ICE car once they tried electric, even if they initially did it under duress.
I am not confident that the Democrats would even implement such a ban, as they get pretty big campaign donations from the oil industry as well.
The US produces oil which goes to foreign refineries for the same reason.
The effect of "banning exports" is non obvious.
Conversely not starting a war with Iran had some really obvious benefits that every previous administration recognized.
Also, the U.S. is currently prosecuting a trade war against Canada that has, thanks to Trump, become a question of sovereignty for Canadians. The U.S.'s largest source of foreign oil is, potentially, one outburst from Trump away from Canada placing export duties on oil. It has been discussed in Canada, and it's viewed as an extreme option, but an option nonetheless. Trump would have to say or do something truly outrageous for that to happen, but his ability to turn allies into enemies should not be underestimated.
Bottom line, fuel could become a lot more expensive, quickly. Even if there's still gasoline to be had, it still qualifies as a shortage if it becomes unaffordable. Fuel prices affect food production, delivery of goods to markets, and pretty much every aspect of the economy.
Oil tankers travel at about the speed of a bicyle. If a price shock does happen it will last for months. If the war with Iran is not resolved promptly, this is precisely what will happen.
https://www.newsweek.com/costco-starts-rationing-motor-oil-w...
Costco is the only one rationing right now.
That's the best case. Worst case (for Venezuelan oil) is that the Republicans lose the House and Senate in November, then the new Congress starts investigating the Venezuela deal, and court cases start flying, and oil companies back out, and the date for the impact of the deal becomes "never".
Venezuela oil also need a lot of refinement in any case, and this is where the US made a mistake, because they could just have insisted on refining Venezualan oil rather than directly taking a cut, which will be seen worse by the locals. Basically help more venezualan crude oil to get out of the field than their refinment capacity can afford, and loan them tankers to sell the crude to US refineries. US corpos could have profited a lot more (and if the US could tax them, the US government could have taken a cut) than this weird, dumb and aggressive position of taking a cut.
I appreciate the sentiment but order of magnitude is thrown around to the point of meaninglessness. What is the 'order of magnitude' of 3 years in this case? 1-9? How is 3 years roughly the same as 1 or 9 years? Same order of magnitude, off by a factor of 3 to 9, in years is not close enough I'm afraid.
There's also the fact that Venezuelan crude oil is basically among the worst grades of crude oil, the sort of stuff that the refineries don't want to use unless they have no other options. Which also means that as global oil demand hits its maximum (likely within decades), this is also going to be some of the first oil production to be permanently mothballed. With massive necessary investment to get anything running, subpar product, and a very uncertain political situation for the necessary long-term investment, most oil companies are reluctant to invest.
As a result, the only major oil company to have really been contemplating investing in Venezuela is Chevron (which itself appears to be mostly hedging its bets); Trump more recently announced another deal with a supposed major investment in an unnamed operator to extract oil from Venezuela, but without any companies being named, I'm skeptical of how real it is as opposed to merely being a vehicle for graft.
As AnimalMuppet says, if anything does get built, it's on the order of years before anything starts flowing.
Clearly you haven't been paying attention to oil and gas prices