Don’t Expect Cheap Gas Any Time Soon

Jeff D. Colgan

May 29, 2026

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Photo by Bruno Aguirre

There are flickering signs that the United States and Iran might negotiate a settlement to end the unprovoked war launched by President Trump earlier this year.

A settlement would be welcome news. But even if a deal happens tomorrow, here’s the reality: Americans will be paying high fuel prices for months to come. The economic damage from this conflict is already done.

Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in late February, energy prices have devastated working families. Gas prices jumped from under $3 a gallon to $4.50 or more. In California, they soared past $6. Diesel fuel climbed just as much — up more than 50 percent.

The culprit is the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping channel through which much of the world’s oil travels. When that channel closes, oil can’t reach markets. Prices spike everywhere — not just at the pump, but in grocery stores, in delivery services, and in heating costs.

You might wonder: the United States has plenty of oil, so why does it matter if the Strait of Hormuz closes?

The answer is simple. Because the U.S. exports oil, global oil prices also affect what Americans pay at the pump — even for domestically produced fuel. When world oil supplies tighten, prices everywhere go up. Additionally, many U.S. refineries depend on imported crude oil to operate, so disruptions to global shipping directly affect what they can produce and what they charge.

My research team at Brown University tracks the real-time energy costs of this conflict. By now, we found that higher gasoline and diesel prices alone have cost American consumers almost $50 billion — far more than the military costs acknowledged by the Pentagon.

That damage is done. It won’t be reversed by a peace agreement.

The average American household has paid an extra $360 in fuel costs since the conflict began — and that number is still climbing. That’s more than a week’s worth of groceries for the average American family (groceries cost about $270 a week).

That’s money many working families simply don’t have to spare. Many families have had to cut back on driving. Some have canceled trips to see relatives. Others struggled with heating bills. That pain is real and it’s here now.

Even if a peace deal reopens the Strait of Hormuz soon, prices won’t drop immediately. Oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf has been damaged — refineries and production facilities will take months or years to repair. Shipping insurance companies may remain wary of the route. Some tankers may face new tolls. These supply constraints will keep prices elevated long after diplomacy succeeds.

The reality is that the conflict has already imposed enormous costs on ordinary Americans — especially the poor. A peace agreement can prevent things from getting worse. It cannot undo the damage already done — or quickly restore cheap energy.

We need policymakers to understand this. A settlement should happen, and quickly. But Americans shouldn’t expect quick relief at the pump. The tab from this conflict will be paid by working families for months, regardless of what happens next.

President Trump’s foolish decision to start this conflict is the reason families are struggling to fill their tanks and afford groceries. That’s a fact voters this year are unlikely to forget.

Jeff D. Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson School for Public and International Affairs at Brown University.

The Tragedy of UPS Flight 2976

Austin Bartley

May 29, 2026

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N259UP, the aircraft involved in the accident, pictured in April 2025. Image Wikipedia.

The NTSB hearing behaved like the crack they spent two days describing. It started small. Layers of engineering language and maintenance jargon. Another bearing. Another migrated race. Another report. A strange noise somewhere in the machinery. Not ignored exactly. Just filed away. The sort of thing giant bureaucracies learn to absorb without flinching. Reduced to paperwork. Then slowly, under pressure, the crack began to spread.

One question led to another. A missing record here. An undisclosed lug deformation there. Repeat failures that somehow never triggered reevaluation. Service letters with no mandatory inspection schedules attached. “Not a safety issue.” “Current inspections are sufficient.” “No records available.” Tiny fractures branching outward through the testimony just like the stress fractures investigators described in the metal itself. And just like the accident, nobody in the room seemed to understand just how far the damage had traveled until suddenly the explanation collapsed under its own weight.

By the afternoon session of the first day the hearing no longer felt like an investigation into a failed airplane component. It felt like wandering through the interior of a dying institution while everyone inside continued speaking in a perfectly calm tone. Lawyers shuffled papers with the detached precision of accountants balancing funeral expenses. Engineers spoke about load paths and fatigue analysis while somewhere underneath all the terminology sat the ugly truth that an airplane had fallen out of the sky because too many people convinced themselves that a warning sign was merely maintenance clutter.

Every witness tried to isolate the problem to one bearing, one decision, one misunderstood analysis from years ago. But the questions kept widening. How many assumptions were built on incomplete data? How many weak signals were filtered out in the name of efficiency? How many “not safety issues” remain buried in databases because somebody long ago convinced themselves the crack growth would be slow enough to live with?

And sitting at the center of it all was Boeing’s decision to treat repeated bearing failures with the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. Not an Alert Service Bulletin. Not a request for a mandatory federal safety directive. Not mandatory fleet action.

A service letter.

In aviation that distinction matters enormously. Service letters drift through the industry constantly. They are informational and advisory. Background noise. But an Alert Service Bulletin changes the emotional climate inside maintenance departments. It tells operators this thing matters now. It tells engineers to stop treating the problem like another line item and start treating it like a possible future obituary.

Instead Boeing repeatedly told operators the issue was “not a safety of flight condition” and that current inspection programs were “sufficient.”

That word lingered over the hearing like exhaust trapped in still air.

Sufficient.

Sufficient enough for fractured bearings to accumulate.

Sufficient enough for migrated races to accumulate.

Sufficient enough for lug damage to accumulate.

Sufficient enough for entire structural bulkheads to be replaced while somehow the larger danger still failed to claw its way high enough through the hierarchy of urgency.

And maybe the most astonishing moment came when investigators pushed Boeing on why the spherical bearing itself still is not classified as a principal structural element even after a fatal crash tied directly to its failure.

The exchange froze the room.

Investigators pointed out the obvious. The bearing fractures. Loads redistribute. The attachment lugs fail. The airplane crashes. Yet Boeing still defended the old classification structure around the bearing itself, arguing the surrounding bulkhead and lugs remained the principal structural elements while the bearing remained outside that designation.

Technically defensible, perhaps.

Spiritually absurd.

From the outside it sounded less like engineering rigor and more like a corporation trying to negotiate with reality after reality had already rendered judgment over Louisville. United Parcel Service testimony made the whole thing darker still. Their engineers described maintenance logic in brutally simple terms. A task. A schedule. A procedure. Three things required to keep the maintenance machine moving. But in this case Boeing effectively handed operators only fragments of the system while simultaneously assuring everyone the existing maintenance structure was already adequate.

There was a migrated bearing inspection procedure sitting quietly in the maintenance manual, but no mandatory inspection interval formally driving operators toward it through the official maintenance planning system. Like hanging a warning sign in the basement while telling everybody upstairs the building was structurally sound.

And the hearing board recognized immediately how dangerous that combination becomes inside giant systems. People do not merely react to technical information. They react to hierarchy. To tone. To institutional body language.

If Boeing says “not a safety issue”

If Boeing chooses a service letter over a service bulletin

If Boeing says current inspections are sufficient

If the Federal Aviation Administration does not challenge the determination

Then the entire downstream ecosystem absorbs the same message…watch it, but do not worry too much. And floating behind every exchange like a ghost was the word nobody wanted to stare at for very long.

Efficiency.

The old agreement between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration explicitly referred to the shared “need to operate efficiently.” On paper it sounds harmless, sterile. But once investigators established Boeing was filtering enormous amounts of reports down to only a few thousand items serious enough to enter the continued operational safety system, the word efficiency began to change shape. First the hearing heard Boeing received roughly 120,000 reports annually. Later the number quietly inflated during testimony to roughly 168,000. Out of that mountain of data, only 50 to 100 airworthiness directives are issued per year. The rest disappear into a bureaucratic filtration system built around judgment calls, screening criteria and assumptions about what did and did not constitute a meaningful safety threat.

Efficiency meant deciding what deserved escalation and what did not.

Efficiency meant deciding what operators absolutely needed to know versus what could remain buried in internal databases.

Efficiency meant convincing yourself repeated failures represented manageable trends instead of warning flares.

Efficiency meant service letters instead of service bulletins.

Efficiency meant avoiding operational disruption until the evidence became impossible to ignore.

And by then gravity had already completed its investigation.

The hearing kept circling back to the same horrifying realization…the original hazard model was wrong.The system assumed the bearing would fail visibly. The migrated race would be obvious. The attachment lugs would remain fail safe long enough for detection. The damage progression would be manageable.

Instead the real world failure chain moved through the structure quietly, feeding stress into places engineers believed still had margin remaining. Tiny betrayals accumulating year after year inside aluminum and steel while the paperwork above it all continued insisting the situation remained “sufficient.”

And once investigators started asking Boeing why certain reports were not escalated, why lug damage was not disclosed, why records no longer existed, why inspection intervals were later increased despite mounting failures, the hearing transformed from a technical inquiry into something much more unsettling.

An examination of institutional memory decay.

Nobody appeared reckless in the cartoon sense. No villains. No dramatic confession. Just layers of engineering confidence hardening over decades until assumptions themselves became structural problems. And like the attachment lug on that MD-11, those assumptions carried load, year after year, until eventually the stress concentrated in places nobody thought to look.

That was the real sound echoing through the hearing room for two days.

Not outrage.

Not scandal.

Fatigue.

Austin Bartley (pseudonym) is a package handler and writer from Louisville, Kentucky.

History Running Absurd

John O'Kane

 May 29, 2026

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Photo by Joseph Corl

In a recent essay for The Atlantic, “History is Running Backwards,” David Brooks argues that ever-more people are disillusioned by the moral chaos and uncertainty that characterizes our society. They believe there is no hope for the future if progress no longer provides rational answers to the issues that matter. So they’re turning toward tradition and history for meaning, especially conservative religion, frustrated as they are with the corrosive secularism they believe has contributed to this problem.

On this journey the disillusioned beings’ search for the correct history will likely be filtered through the lens of nostalgia, driven to capture the comfort of immersing themselves in imaginary moments when images and symbols and the vibrations of belief held sway, helping them assuage their guilt for missed opportunities and crippling bloopers.

There have always been urges to abandon moments of chaotic social change for greener pastures, whether imaginary or real. They stoke the desire to believe that some doctrine or screed attached to an earlier congruence of truthfulness will deliver them from anxiety. As Paul Tillich contends in The Courage to Be, this turn is common during moments of disruptive social change and as the end of an era approaches. Threatened by disruptions to expectations and comfortable lifestyles, beings find ways to alleviate this anxiety.

Our moment can easily be seen and felt as the end of an era. The arrival of AI and especially AGI (artificial general intelligence), the machine that portends to control human intelligence, and the resulting job losses already occurring on a big scale; the threat of nuclear annihilation that appears increasingly possible; the random acts of violence that saturate our daily lives; the epidemic of elite malfeasance and scandals; the sieve of moral relativism and the insufficiency of traditional religious denominations; the ever increasing difficulty of economic survival, etc.

The palpable presence of these changes is surely enough to presage the complete loss of control over everyday lives, even transit some into a feeling of nothingness, what Tillich refers to as non-being, the voiding of human existence. This can lead to suicide for those who are ill-equipped to manage the void, especially the uneducated who can be easily seduced by apocalypse-speak. Ignace Lepp calls them the “psychically immature.” They’re captured by a closed morality “which has its origins in the superego, taboos, social conventions, the hope of rewards, and the fear of punishment in the next life” (The Authentic Morality). They’re obedient, Bible-reading subjects.

Those with this mindset won’t easily grasp what the perplexities at the end of an era mean. They’ll select what they want to see. And it is likely they won’t grasp the full significance of what it is they’re turning to either. Instead, they’ll identify with symbols and images to compensate for a misread of this absurd existence, but their limited awareness will likely entrench their dilemma, reproduce their confusion in another form until they become unwitting victims of the absurd.

There’s a mindset at work at this moment that’s reacting to the absurdity of how our internet culture has evolved and especially what it has done to our everyday lives. According to an April 2026 NBC News Decision Desk Poll, 47 percent of adults aged 18–29 (Gen Z) would choose to live in the past, with many expressing discomfort with modern technology and constant, 24/7 networking. A significant number in this group identify with the 1980s, 1990s, or early 2000s, often describing them as the “pre-social media” era.

These numbers are far higher for older generations. According to a report in Consumer Affairs (“The Effects of the Digital Age by Generation,” June 12, 2024), 91 percent of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers feel overwhelmed by these same pressures, identifying with the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s. But interestingly, they feel a different kind of discomfort compared to the Gen Z generation, which assimilated, to a degree, the Digital Age’s advances until the negatives became nearly impossible to face.

Neither one of these older generations grew up with the internet (many boomers have never plugged in, refusing to even use email), though this does not automatically translate to oblivion. The attraction to new toys inspires many in our consumer-driven culture. And facing off with PCs and then smartphones was nearly a religious experience for many who were not inclined to be sci-fi aficionados. But as the absurdity of this evolution has become threateningly clear, they’ve imagined living inside certain enclaves of history. In this sense, the generations overlap.

The threat is greater among the older victims since they witnessed such a striking contrast between worlds, crashing through the end-of-the-era gates. The boomers grew up in an age of promise and optimism when progress was ascendant. They’re retiring into a culture of regression. The Gen Xers got a belated piece of this aura before the millennium and the post-9/11 years of endless wars and societal stasis.

What do these frustrated folks imagine will replace the strictures of the Digital Age? Its tentacles extend far, wide, and deep. They could develop their aesthetic intelligence and imagine other worlds, teleport themselves to places where they can find solace and simplicity. They could physically transport themselves to places where people simulate primitive lifestyles, an island off the west coast of Ireland, for example, or exile themselves to unplugged pockets of rural America. Some boomers might literally reconstruct the good old days and resort to communal living or, even move back to their home towns, possibly live in their parents’ digs. It’s debatable whether they’ll find the kind of certainty and simplicity there that preserves the lifestyle options they had when living among the moral chaos. The less gutsy might start immersing themselves in all facets of throwback culture.

The impulse that shapes the search for certainty and simplicity is utopian. Nostalgic reflections and utopian thinking are forms of longing. Nostalgia looks backward to an idealized past while utopia imagines an ideal future. They link in the sense that nostalgia is a utopia with orientation to the past, and utopia is a nostalgia that’s oriented toward the future. “Good nostalgia” involves more than merely remembering a certain time. It turns the past into a vision of wholeness, authenticity, or lost perfection. The nostalgia impulse in this sense is utopian since it imagines a better place or time that feels complete, even if it never truly existed. They differ, however, in significant ways. Utopia is change oriented while nostalgia resists it by idealizing the non-existent past.

The utopian impulse, therefore, is vital for forging an authentic existence and positive change. An actual utopia, on the other hand, is unattainable. The semblance of one will be static. However strong the impulse behind the attempt to create a utopia, the end result will be less than perfection. It’s very definition is “no place.” The structure of advanced industrial societies as we know them—organized with degrees of capitalist exploitation—simply can’t accommodate everyone. Some anthropologists contend that primitive societies, those before the agricultural revolution spiked the populations and solidified hierarchies, could approximate utopian experiments. These can surface too in small-scale communities—subcultures especially—where ta unifying cultural and egalitarian bond prevails. The Amish communities, effectively mini-states, serve as a good example. They’re bonded by a strict religious, communistic ethic resistant to external influences. But they’re mostly the exception.

Utopian experiments in recent times have been fated to fail. The Llano del Rio socialist cooperative was founded in 1914 by Job Harriman. It was located fifty miles north of Los Angeles, just east of Palmdale. Housing just over 1000 residents, it succeeded for a few years until water shortages, internal conflicts, and sabotage from conservative activists forced its demise in 1918. The infamous communes of the 1960s are another example. Alienated by urban civilization, educated middle-and-upper class dropouts scattered to rural America, embodying composite identities of cowboy and Indian, in search of a lifestyle modeled on that of the Romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But they found a less-then-romantic challenge in having to work the land like tenacious farmers. Plus, the tensions between those steeped in the ethic of individualism and collectivism were difficult to resolve.

Literary representations reveal a similar fate, the striving for a more perfect society that falls short. So far short, in fact, that for the most part they can be characterized as dystopian, especially in the 20th century. H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ape and Essence (1948), and Island (1962), George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), and Anthony Burgess’s 1985 (1978), among others, demonstrate how increasingly difficult it is to fashion large-scale utopian experiments given the complexity of industrialization and the limits of liberalism.

Ursula Le Guin’s notable story from 1974, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” captures this dilemma. She offers a comparison in the subjunctive mode between the state of American society and a sketch of what a utopian society might look like, her language erupting throughout with reservations. She presents an inventory of negatives about American capitalist society and its institutions, its exploitative stock market and technology, repressive mores, military culture, etc., and provides a humane substitute for each. Omelas is painted as a city infused with aesthetic and natural beauty where complex and intelligent people live caring and tension-free lives. Its excellence is undercut, though, by the presence of an immiserated child, allegorically the underclasses, mostly hidden from view. Enough of the citizens know, however, so that this knowledge spreads. Even though most become aware of this impoverishment, they suppress it, conform to the existing social contract and accept their limited freedom. Though some walk away, and Le Guin questions their motives, she posits the argument that given our existing knowledge about how societies work, there must be those who are excluded.

Whether a mental capture of the past, an experimental possession of a space that conjures it, or one that paints a future of perfection from it, chasing utopia can compound disillusionment and create new uncertainty. Facing up to this limitation, breaking free from a dependency on the idea of utopia, can provide paths to satisfy the need to simplify lifestyles and manage the chaos of our moment. This means coming to a realization that there are ways to survive in the present free of a fixation on nostalgia or the future. This means accepting the chaos and uncertainty of the present as limits we confront from day to day.

Albert Camus provided insight into this dilemma in his book, The Myth of Sisyphus. It was written at a moment of crisis, during the early years of World War II. He felt—feelings were paramount for Camus, rejecting the role of absolute reason—that the world we live in is absurd, that it is always absurd with respect to the meaning of life. His notion of the absurd is defined as a clash between our constant need for clarity, purpose, and order, and a world that offers no clear answer, no final meaning, since it remains unreasonable and silent. It arises in the tension between a mind that wants meaning and a universe that gives none back. Now he was an atheist, a thinker associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and historical Existentialism, so he nixed the dependence on external and higher meanings—essences—that many who are captured by the chaos are tempted to embrace, along with a belief in rational progress, hope for the future, and nostalgic throwbacks. Any escape from or leap to a space away from the absurd present, even suicide itself, constitutes intellectual dishonesty. According to Camus, “The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man.”

The absurd man practices absurd reasoning, which is a way of thinking that means refusing to escape. He keeps facing the struggle, acting consciously to manage the chaos and uncertainty, accepting that meaning is not forthcoming. Like Sisyphus fated to roll a rock up a hill repeatedly, in perpetuity, he comes to realize that nothing will ever change this equation. It is in this realization that this limit is transcended, enabling life to be lived freely and passionately.

The big question here is how one comes to this realization. How does one develop the consciousness to grasp this situation? Not everyone possesses the psychic maturity. Many are lost in the routines of everyday life and can’t gain perspective until the “stage sets”—the heretofore unseen scaffolding that sustains one’s existence—collapse. Then the victim becomes the absurd man, ready to revolt against all imposed meanings. This state is Camus’ absurdly-rational “utopia” where the absurd man lives day to day, moment to moment, responsibly and with integrity, in an ethical realm beyond the ordinary markers of good and evil.

This alternative to escapism, however, which clearly broaches the philosophy of Existentialism, is confined to the ethic of individualism. Can true freedom and stability be secured through this ethic? Is this sufficient to navigate through the clutter and chaos, tune out the noise and confusion and achieve stability and certainty? Camus’ absurd hero acts aggressively to keep up the struggle to live lucidly in the present, but he’s an isolated individual who performs strictly through his own efficacy, fearing that the wills of others might impose essences—divine or pre-determined meanings from outside one’s subjectivity, etc.—on his capacity to act. However important it is for the absurd man to power his struggle, the experience of being part of a group that meshes the willful can serve as a replacement for “tradition” and repel the urge to escape. ///

Subcultures could be created where members probe options to survive within the chaos, something an isolated individual is unable to do. These could be housed in creative communities—within or outside of cities and conurbations—where members experiment with how to develop alternatives to the mainstream, the mega-connected global machine that lords over the whims of the willing like Big Brother. With cooperation—outside the corporate profit system—they could develop an enlightened version of AGI through a dark web that gives control to the willing, refusing to submit to neo-Luddite fantasies. This cooperation could extend to the structure of the social mechanism, producing the equivalent of the egalitarianism practiced in pre-agricultural societies, tempering the cost-of-living extremes. Communal living would perhaps flow naturally from this, helping to break down the isolation of the individual. Then add a pinch or more of soul-bonding religiosity to infuse the grouping that’s shaped by an honest and diversity-directed morality laced with integrity and faith. And if qualms remain about security and safety, add a bomb shelter.

The end result could surely deliver at least a smidgen of possible perfection, certainly a new conception of progress that the disillusioned can identify with, but no utopia as such since the concept itself negates flawlessness. The best experimental configuration is one that exists within the limits of the possible.

John O’Kane publishes AMASS Magazine. His latest book, The Accidental Jesus, is a novel set in San Pedro, CA. It is published by Europe Books.