Mike Adams warns that a prolonged Strait of Hormuz closure could push oil past $200 by late 2025, triggering a depression that cripples U.S. refineries reliant on heavy crude and spikes fertilizer costs above $1,000 per ton. This geopolitical stalemate between major powers will cause nonlinear crop yield drops, forcing a shift to legumes and creating "non-consenting vegetarians" while crushing retail and automotive sectors. Ultimately, food security becomes the primary form of wealth, urging immediate stockpiling of organic supplies before shortages arrive in late summer 2025. [Automatically generated summary]
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Extreme US Fuel Shortages00:12:26
I want to comment on the fact that there are many experts and analysts who are saying that there will be famine in America and that there will be fuel shortages beginning later this summer in the United States.
That is, we could run out of diesel, they say.
And even though I've been on many shows talking about the global famine, I've been very careful and very specific naming which countries are most vulnerable.
And those countries tend to be.
Countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, for the most part.
And I've named those specific countries.
And I have also, in covering all of this, I made a conscious decision to be more optimistic about the outcome for the United States.
And I think there's justification for that at some level.
But some of the experts that are warning about what will happen in North America.
Are very credible people, such as Michael Jan or Chris Martinson and others.
And so I want to comment on that here and tell you that one of the reasons I made a conscious decision to be more optimistic is because I don't want to dwell on doom scenarios.
And I'm relying on the fact that most of you listening to this are already very well prepared.
And of course, You can think for yourself as well.
You know, you can decide how bad you think it's going to get.
And honestly, we don't know yet if the Strait of Hormuz is going to stay closed.
And so I prefer to talk about the effects that are already baked in rather than the effects that could happen if the Strait stays closed for another two, three, or four months, although that is certainly within the realm of possibility.
But one of the things that got me thinking about the fact that I need to do this podcast.
Is when Professor Jiang, he's been right about a lot of things, not everything, but most things, and he is putting out the message through various interviews that, in his view, he thinks that the war with Iran will go on for many, many years.
In fact, he's not even willing to put an end date on the war with Iran as he sees it, because as he's explaining it, the United States is fighting for its.
Hegemonic global dominance position where the U.S. has been the unipolar nation of power and power projection through the U.S. Navy since the end of World War II, essentially.
And fighting Iran is part of a U.S. strategy to maintain that dominance.
And remember, that dominance includes U.S. dollar dominance, petrodollar status, which requires.
Very strong control over the flows of energies through the various sea routes that define our world, and especially the choke points.
Strait of Hormuz being one choke point, Panama Canal, Suez Canal, Strait of Gibraltar, and Strait of Malacca are probably the most critical points.
In fact, yeah, there's no doubt those are the most critical points.
So Professor Zhang doesn't think that this war with Iran is going to end anytime soon.
And he also seems to agree and understand one of the things that I've said before, which is that.
Iran cannot surrender control over the Strait of Hormuz to the United States.
At the same time, Russia cannot allow Iran to be defeated by the West, and to some extent, nor can China, because Iran is the gateway.
It's the gateway between the Middle East and most of Asia.
I mean, not all of it, but most of it.
If the West were to control Iran, then it would be a tremendous defeat for Russia and China, and it would expose.
In essence, their southern flank.
So, when all of the major players are fighting for their existence or fighting to defend their current dominant positions, in the case of the USA, then there's no room for compromise.
It's a winner take all type of conflict.
There is no middle ground, in other words.
From the United States' point of view, either the US controls the Strait of Hormuz or the US loses its position as a dominant.
Unipolar currency, you know, world reserve currency status country.
But from the point of view of Iran, if Iran gives up control of the Strait to the United States, then Iran becomes more of a third world power instead of a first world power or let's say a dominant power in a multipolar world, which is exactly where Iran is currently headed.
By controlling the Strait of Hormuz, Iran can assert control over.
20% of the world's oil supply and more like 25% of the world's natural gas supply, and a huge portion of the world's helium, etc.
In other words, if Iran can hold its position and survive the US attacks, then Iran emerges as far more powerful than it has been since, let's say, thousands of years ago.
So that's what's at stake.
Given that, it seems unlikely that there will be any kind of a quick solution.
For the Strait of Hormuz.
And given that, it almost certainly means that the oil shortages, the fertilizer shortages, the gas shortages, et cetera, will last a lot longer than what I had hoped or what I wanted to see in terms of a more optimistic outcome.
So I do need to be intellectually honest about that, even though I'm not trying to push doom.
I do need to tell you that based on what I just said, I don't see a quick resolution.
And if we don't have a quick resolution, then these other experts that I mentioned are absolutely correct in that eventually the fuel shortages and the food shortages come to America.
Now, America is better buffered than most countries in the world against that.
There are other countries that also have a lot of self reliance, like New Zealand, for example, and you could say, you know, Papua New Guinea.
They have a lot of food resilience.
A lot of countries in Central and South America can become very self reliant if they have to.
But the United States is not permanently insulated from the catastrophic collapse of oil and urea and fertilizer that would emerge from a continued long term closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
So that means we have to seriously consider what life is going to look like in America.
If this closure continues for many more months and potentially through the end of this year, and even also potentially for many years to come, that's not an implausible outcome given the priorities and the nature of the fight as I just previously described it.
So let's take a look at the United States.
The US imports millions of barrels of oil every day.
Even though the U.S. is a net exporter of petroleum products, including distillates and so on, but to simplify it, the U.S. primarily exports light crude oil and primarily imports heavy crude oil because U.S. refineries are built around the chemistry that works well with heavy oil.
And when I say heavy oil, you know, it's more sludgy, et cetera, it's the kind of oil that Venezuela produces in abundance, which tells you something.
About why Trump targeted Venezuela.
But the U.S. domestically doesn't actually produce enough heavy oil in order to feed the demand for domestic energy that can be processed with domestic refineries.
So, you know, it's easy for Trump to say something like, well, we produce more oil than we need, we export oil to other countries.
That is true, but all oil is not the same.
So we export one kind of oil and we import a different kind of oil.
And what that means is that If there is a global supply collapse of the kinds of oil that we import, then we're in deep, deep trouble because then we will start to have shortages of refined fuel products, including diesel fuel and kerosene, jet fuel, et cetera, in the United States.
Even though we have our own oil supply, even though we have our own refineries, it's not the right kind of oil.
So it is plausible that in the United States, we could see extreme fuel shortages.
After the summer, or maybe later in the year, if the strait stays closed.
And even if we can find a way to buy the oil that we need, you know, the heavier sludge oil, which is somewhat likely, maybe we could.
Maybe we could somehow crank out more oil out of Venezuela, even though the infrastructure there is wrecked.
And it would actually take many years of infrastructure investments to get Venezuela producing more oil, it turns out.
But if we turn up the crank on what we have right now, we might be able to produce another half a million barrels a day.
Or, you know, if we really go crazy, possibly maybe a million barrels a day.
That's not enough.
Now, if we start bidding up the price of oil to try to import it from other countries, then yeah, possibly we could redirect some of the heavier crude oil that's coming out of certain countries and we could redirect it to us.
But at a cost, at a cost that could easily, on a global scale, push oil.
Above $200 a barrel.
And some analysts, even major bank analysts, I'm thinking like Goldman Sachs, et cetera, and I don't recall the exact numbers that they mentioned, but across the board, many analysts are predicting that oil could hit $180 to $200 a barrel later this year.
And then if you extend into 2027, depending on how bad things get, that number gets even higher, much higher.
I mean, in some people's minds, it becomes hundreds of dollars per barrel, and I don't mean just 200.
So, what happens to the economy when oil is, let's say, $200 a barrel?
And the answer is that you start to move very quickly through recession into depression.
You crush many different markets that depend on transportation, such as airlines.
You crush new car sales, RV sales, the travel industry.
And you also cause a spike in food prices.
And you end up in a situation where FedEx and UPS have to have surcharges on every shipment.
So then e commerce companies like my own start getting hammered with surcharges on every box that you ship out.
So then e commerce becomes more expensive, groceries become more expensive.
Soaring Food Prices Explained00:08:51
You see the point here.
Ultimately, because of the transportation costs associated with construction materials, then you start to get a major hit on the homes market, real estate, especially new construction.
And this is a cascading problem, obviously.
So, can we live through that?
Yes, we can.
It's not the end of the world.
But is it going to be economically very painful?
Absolutely.
Now, then we haven't really considered the food issue yet.
So, let me talk about that for a moment.
Yes, we produce a lot of our own food in the United States.
Yes, we are the breadbasket of much of the Western world.
However, growing that food, being that breadbasket, requires imports of fertilizer.
And, you know, we currently import fertilizer from many different countries.
But you have to understand that in almost every country, in fact, I can't think of an exception to this, where fertilizer is produced, including in the US, the feedstock of that fertilizer is natural gas.
Because it's simply the most cost efficient way to produce nitrogenous fertilizers.
So you pump gas into the system, and we've talked about this.
You know, you have the Haber Bosch process, and you can essentially crack the N2 nitrogen gas molecules out of the atmosphere, and then you can form them up with hydrogen.
You can make ammonia, you can turn ammonia into urea, and then combine it with other things, and you end up with all these complex fertilizers that farmers used to be able to buy at $400 a ton.
Or $500 a ton, and now they're paying $800 or $900 a ton, that's going to go above $1,000 in the United States probably by the fall.
And so, right there, you can see there's a shortage and there's a very high price hike coming, which will cause farmers to have to borrow more money to plant their crops, which means that farmers will need more money liquidity.
They'll need To have sources of loans in order to buy that fertilizer, or they have to cut back on the fertilizer.
And that creates two problems.
Number one, if you use less fertilizer on a crop, you get a nonlinear response in the loss of the crop yield.
And I've used the example before of if you reduce crop fertilizers on corn by 10%, you get much more than a 10% drop in the yield of the corn.
Now, how much drop do you get depends on a lot of conditions, but it could be 20% or 30%, just depends on.
Many other variables, but it's not a straight linear response.
Now, if you drop your fertilizer to 50%, you can get much less than a 50% yield, you see?
And remember that our world could only feed 8 billion people because of fertilizers that produce much more output with the same agricultural acreage.
So, even though you say the United States is blessed as the breadbasket of the world, the U.S. has all this acreage for farming and agriculture.
That is true, but that acreage could be cut in half in terms of its yield, or in some cases more, without affordable, abundant fertilizers.
So it's not a question of how much acreage you have, it's a question of how much yield you can get out of those acres.
And without abundant and affordable fertilizer, then your yields absolutely plummet.
And without natural gas based fertilizers, the supportable population on planet Earth is only about 4 billion people.
Not 8 billion.
And some people say it's actually more like 3 billion people, but I've been more optimistic saying it's only half the population that won't make it if we were to lose all nitrogenous fertilizers.
And I'm not saying we will, we're not losing all fertilizer.
We're losing 25%, let's say, of the fertilizer of the world.
The remaining 75% of the fertilizer just becomes much more expensive.
Which results in the domino effect of food prices going higher and farmers using less and food yields going lower, etc.
So, even losing 25% of the world's fertilizer can also have a nonlinear response in the price of food and the availability of food.
So, if you lose 25% of fertilizer, that doesn't mean your food is only 25% more expensive.
In other words, you lose 25% of fertilizer, food could become 50% more expensive.
And now, these are just numbers that I'm Estimating, just to be clear, I'm not citing USDA figures here, but the overall principle is accurate, even though the numbers are going to vary by crop and by season and by soil conditions and microbiology and rainfall and everything else, right?
So there's like a thousand variables.
But overall, if fertilizer goes up 25% in price, your food goes up much more than 25% in price.
Now, since we're talking about America today and not Sudan or Ethiopia or Bangladesh, Let me ask you this question.
In America, who do you know in your circle of friends and acquaintances and family members, et cetera?
Who do you know that can easily absorb a 50% increase in the price of food?
And the answer is probably not that many people.
There are some.
There are some.
There are people who are very well off financially who can just write that check.
They can just say, well, my food bill last month was, I don't know, $600.
Or maybe it's a lot more than that.
And my food bill this month is going to be $1,200 or whatever.
There's plenty of people who can just pay that.
But there are far more people who can't.
For many Americans, even a 25% increase in food costs results in them having to make extreme cuts in expenditures and other areas of their life.
And they don't have a buffer zone, they don't have savings, and they don't have a lot of discretionary income.
So, where do those cuts come from then?
If you have to eat, and yeah, everybody has to eat, you might think, well, so I'm just going to eat cheaper food.
I'm going to buy, you know, lentils and potatoes and whatever else.
Well, did you know that the price of potatoes is being reported now as going up 700%?
I mean, I hope I'm quoting this correctly, but I saw charts that showed that effectively the spot price of potatoes right now.
Is seven times higher than what it has been.
Now, it was very, very low until recently, and now it's seven times higher.
And maybe it's a blip because I'm not in the potato market, so I don't know the potato industry.
Maybe there's something happening that's just short term.
I don't know.
Or maybe the chart's wrong.
I don't know.
But it wouldn't surprise me if potatoes became seven times more expensive.
And see, that's the problem.
You can tell people to change their eating habits, like stop buying prime rib steak at $50 a pound or whatever it is.
Stop buying so much meat and start buying more vegetables, which are cheaper, things like rice and potatoes and things like that.
Well, or corn.
Well, number one, that begins to resemble a 15th century diet where the impoverished masses couldn't afford much meat.
Couldn't afford cheese and milk and meat.
You know, that was a delicacy to be able to have meat.
I'm talking about like the Middle Ages of Europe.
And that's why the invention of pumpernickel bread, which I covered in another podcast, out of pre Germanic peoples of northern, what would be called northern Germany today, the Westphalia area, the invention of pumpernickel bread was such a critical innovation for those people because it delivered high iron absorption from the bread.
Pea Porridge with Bacon Grease00:08:41
And the other main source of iron is meat.
But since those people did not have much meat, and any iron that they ate in wheat was bound up in molecules from phytic acid, which is part of what you get in wheat grain, those people were often iron deficient.
And they ended up having to get their iron from pumpernickel bread and also zinc and copper and other trace minerals as well.
But a lot of those cheaper crops, such as corn or rice, are crops that require very high levels of fertilizer to be produced.
And they've only been cheap because fertilizer has been cheap itself.
You see what I mean?
So then the question becomes well, what kinds of crops can people shift to in their diets that will be more resistant to higher prices of fertilizer?
And reduce crop yields.
And you're not going to like that answer because the answer is soy and beans and legumes.
And so you're going to get to eat, well, and peas.
There's an old rhyme that actually, I think it came out of Western Europe centuries ago.
You've probably heard this pea porridge hot, pea porridge cold, pea porridge in the pot, nine days old.
So, what was that rhyme about?
Well, it described the diet of the medieval times and sometimes beyond that, where you would have a pot over a fire in a fireplace in your domicile.
And in the pot for your protein, you would put peas.
And you cook it up and you try to add something that might make it taste decent a little bit of onion, a little bit of garlic, some salt, if you could get it, whatever.
You throw some carrots, whatever you have in there.
You make a giant pot of pea porridge.
And everybody eats the pea porridge, but you don't eat it all.
You leave some in the pot.
And then the next day, you scrounge up whatever else you can get from the garden or the forest in the back, and you throw that in and you mix it with the two day old pea porridge.
Okay.
And you cook that again.
You keep cooking it so it doesn't go bad.
You cook that again and then you serve that up.
Everybody gets a spoon or a ladle of the pea porridge.
So that's day two.
You know, it goes on day after day.
You just keep throwing stuff in.
And occasionally, if you can get peas, you throw more peas in.
So, pea porridge hot, pea porridge cold.
Pea porridge in the pot, nine days old.
It's probably older than nine days sometimes because that's what impoverished people could afford.
And that's also where things are headed for many Americans if the situation doesn't get turned around.
Americans are going to have to get their protein from legumes.
Now, for the vegetarians, they're like, well, I already do that.
Okay, great.
You know, you're going to.
You're going to be on that diet by force, probably economically forced on the diet.
There's going to be a lot of new non consenting vegetarians in America.
And maybe if they could get some bacon grease, they'll throw a little bacon grease in there pea porridge with bacon grease, pea porridge with lard.
Yeah, because that's where this is going.
So a lot of Americans are going to have to start eating the way their grandparents or their great grandparents ate, which was to.
Conserve everything.
If you cook bacon on the stove, you save that bacon grease.
You had a container for bacon grease.
I mean, you save the bacon grease.
And then you use a little bit of that bacon grease for the next thing that you're doing.
You're making gravy or you're making, I don't know, lasagna or whatever.
You've got to throw some bacon grease in there in order to do that.
And you don't throw it out because bacon grease, those are difficult calories to get.
You don't throw that out.
And that's the way grandparents and great grandparents, you know, the pioneers of America, that's the way they lived.
So, some of you may have experienced this if you're old enough.
That, I mean, did you ever see this when you sat down at a family Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner or something?
Where if there was one person in the family who didn't like to eat the fat of a piece of steak or the Or the fat of bacon or whatever.
And they would take the fat off and push that to the side of the plate.
Okay.
Now, I'm not trying to be insulting or judgmental, but did you ever have a grandma or a grandpa who would take that fat and put it in a container and use it for another meal?
Yeah.
Cause that's the way they survived.
Okay.
And that might seem gross to a lot of people today.
It's like, you just throw it out.
Yeah.
Well, The throw out culture of America is about to become a famine culture.
You don't throw out calories if you get hit with famine or the risk of famine.
So, those are some of the changes that we are going to see in America if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed.
It's like, well, Trump bombed Iran.
Now we got to reuse the bacon fat.
You know, like that's the way it's going to be in a lot of families.
Christmas dinner, what do you got?
Turkey giblets.
It's like, what are giblets, man?
What are the giblets?
Well, you don't want to know, but it's got some fat and some protein in it.
You're having giblets.
To this day, I don't know what giblets are.
And the other thing you might know do you like black eyed peas?
See, I like black eyed peas.
And if you make black eyed peas, you normally want to make them with bacon grease.
I mean, that's the southern way of doing it.
And that it's more tasty and it's actually a more complete intake of calories.
But did you know that black eyed peas were renamed?
I think it was back in the 1940s or 19. 50s, they were renamed.
I think the USDA had something to do with it.
And they used to be called, I'm remembering, I think they were just called cowpeas.
And cowpeas were considered a legume that was only valuable to feed to cattle.
Did you know that?
And then there was an effort, as I'm recalling, there was an effort to try to repackage cowpeas to be good for humans.
And so they had to rename them, so they called them black eyed peas.
And since then, humans have been eating them.
And again, they can be quite delicious if you cook them up correctly.
You know, basically bacon grease and salt.
I mean, maybe a little bit of pepper, some onions, or whatever.
So we're about to see more pioneer cooking in America.
About to see some old school recipes coming back around.
Because, you know, for the price of one expensive Uber Eats meal, You can eat black eyed peas for two weeks or more.
Black eyed peas are cheap.
And that fact is going to have to be rediscovered by a lot of Americans.
And that might not be a bad thing, frankly, to have a little bit more pioneer cooking, more food self reliance, and things like that.
And you can grow peas yourself.
You can grow green beans, and obviously, you can augment your diet in your own garden.
And that's a good thing for more people to learn how to do that.
It's just that.
They're going to be forced to do it.
You know, it's not like they signed up to do it.
But hey, they're going to have to learn or starve.
So, anyway, let me just bracket this entire podcast by saying that everything I just described is only going to happen if we end up with an extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Preparing for Extended Closure00:02:48
That is, if it's closed for several months.
And That could very well happen.
I mean, several more months from what it is already.
So, if it remains closed through June, July, August, whatever, that's when we're going to start heading into that kind of territory.
And the longer it stays closed, the worse it gets.
So, food security is going to become a form of wealth in America.
It'll be a very valuable asset.
And those who want good food security will stockpile food.
And you can do that with our online store, of course, healthrangerstore.com.
And the good news there is that we have food that was grown before the strain of hormones was closed, and food that is laboratory tested for heavy metals and glyphosate.
And we test many items for atrazine.
We test everything for microbiology.
There are other tests that we do as well.
We test the animal derived products like cheese and cream powder for dioxins.
And we've already published those test results, and it's ultra clean.
So if you want really clean, certified organic, long term storable, Foods, superfoods, and nutritional supplements, you can get all that at healthrangerstore.com.
And it's a good idea to do it now because shortages are coming.
And I told the story recently where we had ordered, I think, 20 pallets of a grain and we had to send those back because we had to reject them because of a quality issue.
And so that was 60,000 pounds of food that we had to reject.
Probably we're going to see a lot more of that.
So, you know, get the food now while it's clean and relatively affordable compared to where it's going.
That's my advice.
And thank you for your support.
And get ready for some interesting times.
You know, pea porridge hot, pea porridge cold, pea porridge in the pot nine days old.
If you don't want to eat nine day old pea porridge, get yourself some storable food or garden seeds and grow your own food right now.
And then you can have a more diverse diet than pea porridge or black eyed pea porridge.
Nine days old.
That doesn't sound fun, actually.
No, no, thank you.
Like, one time is okay, not every day.
All right, thanks for listening.
Take care.
Stock up on the long term storable Ranger bucket set 536 servings of clean organic superfoods for your survival pantry.