Strait of Hormuz

A couple of points on why attacking Iran may turn out to be the greatest folly by a sitting president ever. Iran sits along the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint where much of the world's goods travel through. It was flowing freely before we attacked. Now, in response to Iran closing it, we've established a blockade - it's the New World Order.

About 20 percent of the world's oil supply goes through the Strait. That's oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Iraq and Iran. Much of that is going to Asia, but when you remove supply from a tight system, well, you've seen what it does to the price at the pump. Trump said you should be happy to pay that btw.

Another problem is fertilizer. Much the fertilizer we use today comes from Natural Gas as a feedstock, of which about 40 percent or so flows through the Strait. That affects our ability to feed 8 billion people.

A third issue is Helium. We can probably make do without balloons and raves, but helium is also a key ingredient for making superconductor chips, and cancer drugs. When you remove these types of critical components from society, it starts to have real impacts on people.

There's another problem around the oil that is not flowing out of Iraq. There's only so much storage available when the ships are full and sitting still. Many of the wells in that region are aging, and that means they are injecting water to try and keep the wells viable. When they run out of storage, they have to make a decision of whether to burn it off, dump the oil or shut the wells. If they shut the wells, some of them may never produce again.

We are entering a period of intentional scarcity.

If you follow the oil industry, you're probably aware that we hit peak oil production in 2005. We've already used more than half of the resource that exists on the planet. From now on, we'll use less, which I suppose is a good thing for the environment. But as we ride out and fight over the last few drops of oil, we should probably make some decisions about what's worth keeping.

I'll work from home if we can keep making cancer drugs, OK?