I don’t know what Canada oil ate, but it might need a juice cleanse or something.
Trump is putting a 10% tariff on this shit.
This is called heavy sour crude oil. Because not all crude oil is the same. It can be light. It can be sweet. It can be heavy. It can be sour. Light and sweet is the easiest to refine. Heavy and sour (the Canada poop) is the most difficult.
But the US specializes in refining the shittiest crude. That’s why we import so much from Canada. We have developed the best technologies to turn this shitty tar sand oil into something useful. We buy it cheap from Canada, make it useful (gas, kerosene, plastics, asphalt, etc), and then resell it.
This ends up being about a $700 billion business that generates about $175 billion in tax revenue.
To make things more interesting, the US has a lot of its own oil. Which is why Trump loves to say “drill, baby, drill.” But our oil is light and sweet. It’s the good stuff. Easy to refine.
That’s good… right?
Not so fast!
Since no other countries are very good at processing the shit oil, we send our good stuff to Europe. They can easily refine it and we make a lot of money selling it to them.
Here’s the rub…
The US isn’t really set up to refine the good shit. Most of our refinery infrastructure is meant to process the Canada poop. So even though we technically have plenty of our own oil, we don’t really have a lot of places to process it.
So I guess we would have to send it to Europe and buy it back.
Or we would have to build new refineries.
Or we would have to get shit oil from other places.
And those places?
Russia and Venezuela.
I have no idea if Trump understands any of this. Or if he thinks all oil is the same. But I feel like fucking with a $700 billion industry is bad for the economy.
I really don’t understand why this is happening. I don’t know if Trump is going rogue and doing this on his own. Or if Putin set this up so we will buy oil from Russia. Or if there is some other special interest group that wants to torpedo our refinery economy.
None of this makes a lot of sense to me and I don’t see many people talking about this aspect of the tariff problem. I don’t think oil quality is well known to the general public and maybe Trump’s puppeteers are counting on that ignorance to do some sinister shit.
In any case, I imagine gas prices are going up. I’m sure the MAGA crowd, famous for being angry at gas prices, will finally see the light and turn on Trump.
I’m just kidding.
They will find some way to say it is a good thing and keep kicking themselves in the nuts.
First, this issue is probably much more complicated than my moderately researched little explainer. So please keep that in mind.
The only reason I knew about crude oil is because while my brother was in engineering school and learning about fuel and whatnot, I asked him why we wanted the oil in Kuwait so much that we were willing to go to war. He told me that we actually get most of our oil from Canada, but it was shitty and most of it went to making plastic and asphalt. But the oil in Kuwait is less shitty (medium sour) and doesn’t need to be extracted from tar sand (very difficult). Being a rich country, Kuwait had great refineries too, so it was fantastic after processing.
That conversation always stuck with me because I think it was one of the few politically charged conversations I had with my brother. I don’t think he is apolitical, but he rarely shared a political opinion out loud.
And in the 20+ years since that discussion, refining tech in the US has advanced to the point where we don’t have to just make plastic and asphalt from Canada poo.
Anyway… I’m pretty sure my broad generalization is fairly accurate. But it is a broad generalization and I encourage anyone interested to do further research if you want to speak on this with confidence.
As for why Trump is doing this… I think I figured it out.
He’s fucking serious about this.
I honestly thought this was the one thing he was joking about.
But he means it. I knew he thought he could just buy Greenland. But it seems he genuinely thinks he can absorb Canada.
amhrancas 