Mike Adams analyzes the Iranian war's 30% fuel cost spike and global shortages, citing Slovenia, Australia, and Thailand as crisis zones. He alleges U.S. sabotage of Nord Stream and Hormuz restrictions triggered this energy shock, predicting food scarcity due to hydrocarbon-dependent agriculture. Adams warns that ICE/TSA lockdowns facilitate a shift toward CBDCs and AI labor replacement, while European leaders face "energy suicide" by abandoning nuclear power. Ultimately, he argues the petrodollar collapse and $40 trillion debt repatriation signal an impending economic restructuring requiring immediate food stockpiling. [Automatically generated summary]
For the first time in U.S. history, the United States Postal Service is now adding a fuel charge to every package that you ship because, well, why else?
The Iranian war.
Fuel costs have jumped more than 30% since Israel's war with Iran broke out.
So now they will add this on top of your shipping costs.
Imagine how, like, if you're a small business and you're shipping items on a regular basis, you're not Amazon, adding on this additional fuel charge on top of that.
Then this morning, the Financial Times reporting U.S. inflation will surge to 4.2% on energy shock, warns the OECD.
Fuel lines around the world are getting very long.
We've been covering, of course, what's been happening in Slovenia, parts of Europe, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines.
It's just getting worse and worse.
Many countries have run out of petrol, gasoline, or have declared now a state of emergency.
President Putin of Russia just declared that the energy shock from this Iran war is having a devastating effect around the world, just like COVID.
Here was his statement just a short time ago.
Watch.
That is escalating and it's making a more and more significant contribution to the global situation today.
And it's dealing great damage to the global logistics, supply chains, production chains, and entire industries of the fuel production, fuel refinery.
Our industries are getting these heavy blows, and it's difficult to predict what happens next because of this.
So Putin also, through his diplomatic team, are issuing a damning message about this war, that we are about to face an energy crisis, the likes of which we've never seen before.
You don't want to hear that.
And that Europe is going to be begging Russia for oil and gas.
Too bad one of your pipelines was blown up by the United States government.
But here is Dmitriev.
So it's really in their hands now.
It's amazing how the tables have been turned, isn't it?
Mike Adams is the founder of the Brighteon Platforms, the health ranger.
You might know him on X.
I love following Mike on X because he just cuts through all of the BS and gets right to the heart of the matter.
And Mike, great.
Welcome back to the show.
One of the areas you've been very focused on, of course, is fuel shortages, food shortages, and what the global impact of all of this is going to look like.
Maybe you can just give us your 30,000-foot assessment before we get into more details.
Okay, sure.
Great to join you again.
Love your work.
First of all, I would say that every major form of recognized abundance across our world comes from affordable, abundant energy.
So energy is the primary driver of affordable food, which for many people translates into affordable families because you have to feed your kids in most countries, right?
Hopefully.
Also, affordable transportation by plane or by car.
So it's personal mobility, it's personal freedom.
And food comes from energy.
That's what a lot of people don't necessarily realize is how strongly every calorie of food that comes from a farm today is tied to energy inputs.
And not just the fertilizer and the urea, which of course you've covered on your show, are now incredibly scarce because of what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz and with Trump's war on Iran, but also because of the fuel for transportation and the fuel for the tractors to do the planting and harvesting, etc.
So food is extremely hydrocarbon intensive.
In fact, farming is really more of a rearranging of hydrocarbons with the help of photosynthesis.
That's what farming really is.
And a lot of people didn't realize just how devastating this would be when the Strait of Hormuz is now constricted.
And I just want to remind you, I'll turn it back to you, but the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump launched this war by choice.
So it was open.
So not only did the United States, as you said, destroy the Nord Stream pipelines affecting Western Europe and their affordable, abundant energy from Russia, now Trump has effectively indirectly closed the Strait of Hormuz through his actions.
And now he's probably desperately trying to figure out how to get it open again.
But that's where we are.
Until the Strait of Hormuz reopens, the world will suffer dramatically economically and through food scarcity.
Mike, you make a great point.
In fact, we had a senator just a short time ago on the floor of the Senate making that exact point about the Strait of Hormuz.
Watch this.
Here's the problem.
The Strait was open before the war began.
We are now seeking to solve a problem that we created.
This is insanity.
$2 billion is a lot of money.
That's the minimum amount of money that is being spent every single day on this war.
There are over a dozen families who are burying their loved ones in the United States.
And there may be dozens more if this war continues.
Prices are skyrocketing, not just in America, but all across.
Someone in the chat says, Chris Murphy's an idiot.
In many ways, I agree with you, but what he's saying is true.
Now, did Congress actually vote to end the war escalation?
No.
So we can't give Congress too much credit.
You wrote about how, you know, the mobilization of ICE, the strategic closures of the TSA, and now the looming fuel and food shortages are not disparate things.
You said these are visible threads of a deliberate premeditated pattern, one that is weaving a trap to the American people.
And you said that it will lead to national lockdowns of movement, food, and fuel.
So can you play that out, please?
Yeah, that's where this is headed.
Clearly, in my view, it's the same pattern as COVID, but now with a different justification.
So already many countries are suffering so-called energy lockdowns.
You mentioned some of them in the intro, but also, for example, in South Korea, you're only allowed to drive on certain days of the week if you're a government employee based on your vehicle license plate.
In Australia, you know, hundreds of petrol stations have run out now, and it's not clear when they're going to be replenished.
What's going to come is government-controlled delivery of food and fuel.
And this will encompass Americans, especially as prices get much higher and more job displacement takes place because of the AI displacement.
And you just saw a humanoid robot walking around the White House.
That's also part of the plan.
That's why I have the AI background here today behind me.
But as you have all this displacement, the public will scream for universal basic income.
But the UBI will be tied, in my view, and Catherine Austin Fitz talks about this, and she's excellent on the subject.
It'll be tied to a government-controlled CBDC that allows you to purchase a certain amount of food, but builds in the scarcity or the quota allowances through that digital control grid.
And the same thing will happen with fuel.
And also the same thing will happen probably with the number of kilowatt hours of energy that you're allowed to consume as a household.
And interestingly, one of the off-ramps to that is to have your own off-grid solar power system and an EV, which is funny because Trump is becoming the world's greatest EV salesman now because more people are buying EVs.
Go be here.
Well, you bring up a great point.
This whole push, like I couldn't help but thinking when we're seeing this TSA move, right?
The long lines at the airports, all of this is tied together and these austerity measures.
Jeff, I love the CNN headline here, Mike, from Asia.
Asia embraces austerity, right?
Like Asians are thrilled about it.
Like, look at this picture of this little girl.
That's great.
Asia embraces energy austerity.
We're fine with it.
As dire fuel shortages force Philippines to declare national emergency.
They're so all across Asia and now through Europe.
We'll get to Europe in a minute.
I want to unpack that, what Russia just said.
But on the Asian side, it's very dire, but they're embracing this idea of austerity because they want to keep people home.
That's been part of the plan all along.
Can you sort of see the racist undertones there?
It's like they're a third world.
They don't need much, you know, so they don't know any better is sort of what I read from a headline like that.
What do you think?
Well, in the Philippines, they're very heavily dependent on transportation to and from work.
They have long commute times in cities like Manila.
And the fact that their fuel is now in short supply is going to be dire.
And also the percentage of the Philippines income that is being spent on fuel is now outrageous and unaffordable and unsustainable.
So Philippines is headed for a real dire economic collapse situation if this doesn't get reversed.
But I want to mention something.
You said you're going to have Daniel Davis and Colonel McGregor on the show.
They're excellent sources.
And I believe that they will tell you that if this land invasion takes place, that it's not going to be a quick fix.
The Strait of Hormuz is not going to be opened in any kind of permanent, reliable way by U.S. occupation of southern Iran because Iran is going to fight back and they're going to fight back from an existential position of their own national survival as well as their own national pride and thousands of years of Persian civilization.
So that means that the Strait of Hormuz will not be open anytime soon, not reliably.
There might be a few ships that slip through, but they're all going to be under heavy fire and the insurers won't insure those ships.
And U.S. naval vessels will take hits and possibly be destroyed or sent back for repairs like the USS Gerald R. Ford.
So this situation could go on for literally years, even if we land troops in Iran.
And I don't think Trump is factoring that in.
That's my position.
I want to talk about the European piece of all of this.
You heard the message from President Putin today about how this is basically on par, if not worse, than COVID, and it's spiraling out of control.
You heard from his diplomats saying that this, that Europe will be begging Russia for oil and gas.
And we're already seeing major cutbacks and states of emergency being declared in Europe.
We saw what's going on in Slovenia specifically, but this is going to be a cascade effect all through Europe.
Maybe you could just unpack the European-Russian perspective on this.
Well, I think Russia is absolutely correct here that Europe will be begging Russia for affordable, cheap energy or abundant energy, because it was upon Russian energy that the European economic miracle, especially in Germany, gave rise in the first place.
The industry in Germany, for example, BASIF, BASF, and the manufacturing of 45,000-plus synthetic chemicals, plus using the Haber-Bosch process, you know, urea and nitrogen-based fertilizers, et cetera.
All of that has been compromised and shut down because of the destruction of Nord Stream pipelines.
But as Putin says, one of those pipelines could still be reopened.
And if Europe doesn't want to commit energy suicide, they will beg Putin to open that pipeline and get some gas flowing.
And don't forget that China and Russia signed a deal six months ago or something to have 50 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia's Yamal gas fields piped across Mongolia into northern China to feed China's industry.
China's going to maintain its dominance of the world's industrial sector.
The manufacturing coming out of China for vehicles and robots and drones will be incredible because of their access to affordable energy, some of it, a lot of it, coming from Russia.
I just, having lived in Europe for five years, it astounds me how the European people work so hard not knowing who's holding them under their thumb so in such a cruel manner.
And it's hard to watch.
It's really hard to watch.
And, you know, Germany took offline energy sources because of the green policies.
And then also lost access to liquid natural gas.
And their leaders are like, that's what we're doing.
We're doing this.
And then also supporting Ukraine.
We've talked a lot about how if we see copious amounts of bloodshed, the American people will revolt.
And I hope that that's true.
Do you think there will ever be a consequence for the European leaders who have inflicted this on their people?
Good question, Natalie.
I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that countries like the UK are busy trying to figure out how to send their young men to die in the war with Russia.
So that's part of their answer to stay in control.
They want to eliminate their own nationalist populations and then have them exchanged, replaced with someone else coming in across the open borders.
But what you're really getting to is the fact that Western European nations, they decided for one reason or another to commit energy suicide.
You know, they have the energy in Europe.
They have it.
They've got the fields, but they close them down and they close the nuke plants, like you said, which is a carbon-free, no-carbon emissions source of renewable energy, if you think about it.
They've made these decisions.
It's a suicide cult in charge of Europe.
That's not the European people.
The people, they despise their leaders.
The people of Germany despise what the German leaders are doing.
So I'm rooting for the European people to somehow replace or dismantle their overlords who are destroying their cultures and civilizations.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
You know, one of the most troubling pieces of this is that, well, you compare this to COVID, right?
And President Putin just compared this to COVID just a short time ago this morning.
But I argue that there's differences because there was a lack of demand during COVID.
People were being told to stay home.
So they were overproducing.
They had all this abundance of oil and natural gas and they didn't know what to do with it.
So that's why you had the now we have an incredible demand and we don't have enough of it.
So it's the exact opposite.
And even like a short, like a sort of a 10% supply demand offset imbalance here could be catastrophic.
The other big piece of this, Mike, is that, you know, you've got petrol usually is not the first to fall.
Gasoline is not the first to fall.
It's usually diesel jet fuel.
But now we're seeing petrol almost first.
We're seeing long lines of gas stations running out UK two-day supply throughout the Philippines.
So you're seeing this weird imbalance from a gasoline perspective, petrol perspective.
And then I'm just curious your thoughts on the diesel jet fuel petrol piece of all of this and how much of an imbalance would it take for this to be catastrophic, 10%, 20%?
Well, remember that refining oil into diesel fuel requires the right type of oil.
So it's not just that we could, you know, we can't just close our borders in America, for example, and just generate all the diesel fuel we want, regardless of what else is happening in the world.
We need other mixtures of oil, including, you know, Saudi Arabian oil, for example, to fuel the refineries.
Petrodollar Trade Punished00:07:49
So the lack of oil trade, even though we are a net energy exporter in America, the lack of oil trade impacts our ability to produce some of these fuels.
On top of that, countries like China, for example, have completely halted their export of refined fuels, such as kerosene, jet fuel, diesel, et cetera.
That's affecting Australia.
This is why Australia's airlines are going to end up being grounded.
And Australia is a massive, large continent, and there's a lot of road miles required to live and work in Australia.
That's going to get strongly impacted, strongly shut down.
And again, that's why EV sales are skyrocketing in Australia right now, which is extraordinary.
But to answer your question, it doesn't take much to lead to a collapse scenario because our modern civilization is far more fragile than people thought.
Nobody thought about the fact that so much of the world's abundance and food came from, went through one narrow strait, 20 kilometers wide or whatever it is, that could be closed off very simply just by a credible threat from Iran to say we will harass ships.
Therefore, no one's allowed to pass unless you pay in Yuan or you pay the toll or whatever.
So our civilization is very fragile.
We stand on the verge of a planetary scale collapse of the system that has kept 8 billion people alive.
I want to ask about the petrodollar because it's a shaky system as it is.
It was negotiated through backdoor negotiations after we promised OPEC leaders we wouldn't do it.
And now we are collapsing it ourselves by giving allies and non-allies, all other countries, an incentive to trade outside the petrodollar because we cannot be trusted.
What do you think will happen to the U.S. dollar?
The petrodollar allows us to spend and rack up debt.
That's the reason we can do it.
So what happens when that collapses?
We will have to feel the nearly $40 trillion in debt we've got.
That sounds horrific for the world we're handing off to our kids.
What do you think of that domino effect that I'm laying out here?
You're exactly right.
You just described it.
The repatriation of the inflationary effects of fiat currency creation will be devastating to American consumers.
We're going to be living in impoverishment across the United States of America.
And also countries that are already struggling financially, such as Japan, are about to offload hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. treasuries as a means of their own financial survival because of what's happening there.
Trump has, in the meantime, punished our allies like Taiwan through tariffs that are punitive, as well as 301 sanctions that are punishing Taiwan for being really good friends of ours and exporting microchips, for example, to the United States and making them affordable.
And then they get punished for excess production.
You know, what is that?
And India gets punished for purchasing oil from Russia.
So the U.S. is being a bad neighbor on the world stage under Trump.
And sadly, the American people will suffer as more and more countries choose alternatives to the petrodollar.
That's where this is headed.
And so with this austerity, do you see these lockdowns on a large scale where you talked about EV and the electric car piece of this?
I can't help but think that this push, I mean, it's all intentional, right?
This plan has been in place for decades to move us in this way in this 2030 agenda and get us to stay home, use electric energy instead of gasoline, ration how much we're allowed to eat, tell us that we're not allowed to eat beef, all of these things.
So it seems obvious.
I mean, it seems obvious, I think, to the three of us sitting here.
I guess what comes next are will we see wide-scale power disruptions?
What is your sense of looking at this, like playing this out, sort of gaming this out, I guess, on a chessboard?
Well, as you know, I believe that the big picture is the widespread replacement of human cognition and labor with either AI agents on the cognition side and AI-powered robots, which we just saw introduce again, you know, with Milan in the White House.
And even she was saying that these can basically replace teachers, which is, which is technically true, but it shows you what they are up to.
As AI cognition gains in technology, and Jen Sen Huang recently said that he believes that it's already achieved AGI.
I have jokingly responded and said AGI is not a very high threshold because the average human worker is not that smart.
So, you know, there's still a lot more upside to go on that.
But robotics is making a lot of advances.
And when you begin to replace labor, which will be a gradual thing, it'll happen over the next 10 years.
It will take time.
Then the question becomes, well, what is our government's plan for us as human beings when we cannot meaningfully participate in this economy?
And I believe that these fuel and food lockdowns, scarcity and rationing are just the opening chapters of what they have in store for us.
What do you see over the next week to two weeks?
Because we're really at the beginning of this.
We haven't even felt the ripple effects yet.
Like we're, you know, we're using up stuff left in the pantry, so to speak.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, Americans in particular are in a much more generous situation compared to people in the Philippines or other countries.
I was just checking, you know, my staff orders bulk food supplies from farmers in America.
We are still able to order food that was grown last season.
And my understanding is that at least half of American farmers got the fertilizer that they needed for this current planting season.
The real question for America is going to be the next planting season, you know, late summer or fall.
That's where we're going to see a lot of fertilizer scarcity in place if we don't get the Strait of Hormuz opened between now and then.
So America itself has more of a buffer than almost every other country in the world, other than perhaps Russia or, yeah, probably just Russia.
But a lot of other countries are going to suffer.
And as they bid up fuel prices, many American oil companies will end up selling American oil to other countries because they make more on that.
And that will drive up prices domestically for the American consumer.
So price increases, but not Mad Max yet.
Yeah, it's weird to me as, you know, a mother of three housewife.
I go to the market and I'm like, we're not panicking about this, but we panicked about COVID.
COVID, which had a low mortality rate.
But this, like, hey, everybody, put peanut butter in your cart.
Like, that's how I feel all the time.
Maybe there's cognitive dissonance in the United States, Mike, because like David on our staff here, he's in Thailand and he said that he's never seen lines like this, right, David?
I mean, it's good, correct.
And I was going to say it in the other part you're talking about.
The Thailand economy is basically run on motorbikes.
I mean, they deliver everything, mail, everything.
So if the gas is gone, you're going to shut down the whole economy here.
Yeah.
I haven't seen long lines.
I think the fleet there is in trouble because of a lack of diesel.
So they're not fishing as much as they used to either.
So a lot of the big seafood exports are halted.
Oh.
So the United States, I guess, my cognitive dissonance point, I think there's, you know, people just still running to Costco, still living their life.
They're not really seeing it yet.
They're seeing gas prices going up, $1, $2, diesel prices going up significantly across the country.
As I mentioned, nearly 30% in some areas.
That's why the U.S. Postal Service is asking for this fuel surge charge to be added to packages.
But for the average American yet, maybe they're not seeing it in the way that the people in Thailand or the Philippines are seeing it.
Well, Clayton, if more Americans just watched Redacted, they would be well informed and they could get ahead of this.
The sad part is that people just don't have the information.
They have busy lives.
They're taking care of whatever.
And they're just catching glimpses of news from bad sources that won't tell them the truth.
Stay Informed and Follow00:00:33
So that's why I'm honored to be on your show.
And I'm really, I love the work that you're doing.
And I'm happy to come back anytime.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, follow him on X. Really one of my favorite voices.
Really incisive.
Always great to see you, Mike.
Thanks so much.
We'll keep checking in with you as well.
Thanks, Mike, as always.
All right.
Take care.
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