Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has backed the President Donald Trump administration’s plan to cut down on diesel exports, but GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan warns the move could do more harm than good in the long term.
Banning Diesel Exports is an America First Move
In a post on X on Monday, Greene touted the administration’s plan to ban diesel exports as an “America First” move amid the war with Iran.
“All of our home produced gas and diesel should be for Americans and should be cheap!” Greene said. She then slammed oil producers, saying that the domestic oil resources should not be “for oil companies to make huge profits” out of.
De Haan responded to Greene’s post, warning against an export ban. “This would not be good at all for long term investments in refineries,” the analyst said, adding that “refinery expansions” and not “government control who refineries can sell to” would make America stronger.
The analyst then said that if there were a ban on exports, “refineries would just shift to jet fuel and it’d lead to more market madness.”
Greene responded to De Haan’s comments, saying that she has been in support of more refineries, but that the “absurd price gouging” has caused record-high diesel prices in the U.S. “We need to keep our diesel at home, and the prices need to drop drastically,” she said.
She also said that a lot of the “regular working class people” she knew were critical of the high costs. “We have so much oil that we shouldn’t even have to know about the Strait of Hormuz,” she said.
Greene also outlined how the administration “kidnapped” Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro, saying that Trump assured Americans “it was going to give us cheap gas,” calling the entire situation “absolutely insane.”
Oil, Gas Movement
According to data collected by the American Automobile Association (AAA), the national average price of gasoline on Monday was $4.4786/gallon, while the national average price of diesel on Monday hit a record $6.5107/gallon.
The West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures contracts expiring in November rose 1.41% to $93.67 at press time. The Brent crude futures contracts maturing in November gained 1.68% to $102.03 at the time of writing this article.
Oil ETFs also reported growth, with the ProShares Ultra Bloomberg Crude Oil (NYSE: UCO) ETF rising 1.88% to $52.70 during overnight trading on Monday. The United States Oil Fund (NYSE: USO) gained 1.59% to $150.51 during the overnight trading session.
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