The War At Home

We are nearing the end of the writing process for the book, which means I will be able to return to more consistent letters here.

Obviously we need to talk about the war with Iran. There is a lot to discuss here– this is a needless war of aggression on the part of Israel and the United States, a colonial/imperial endeavor intended to ensure Israel is able to expand in the region, and it has seen the deaths of countless innocent people–but for the sake of this newsletter our focus is the Strait of Hormuz. We've talked about Haber-Bosch here before–the energy-intensive and petrol-derived process by which we turn nitrogen into useful fertilizer– but focusing on Haber-Bosch is perhaps optimistic, or maybe myopic. The conditions that would end the Haber-Bosch process (collapse or the drawdown of widespread drilling) would also end everything else. I guess I rather naturally focused on food as a priority since we will always need that and not always need microchips.

With the Strait of Hormuz entirely or partially closed off–depending on the day or hour that you read this–comes the loss of 20% of the world's oil. It turns out that when you take away a fifth of the world's main source of energy, things start to crack. The cost of everything is going to rise, and there is a non-zero chance that this tanks the global economy. The latest on this front is that Iran is letting everyone but the US and Israel use the strait, effected by these ships pledging to use the yuan over the US dollar. This, rather than tanking the global economy, would only wreck ours.

Currency Collapse

The threat of this happening is quite real. While we don't necessarily depend on the oil that passes the strait, the petroleum industry is an ecosystem, and as you surely already noticed, that ecosystem suffers as one entity. While we might have only seen an increase in gas prices thus far, the cost of oil underpins everything we do. Food of course gets fertilized by Haber-Bosch, but once grown it is transported by vehicles and trains that run on petroleum products. The fertilizer made by Haber-Bosch is transported on fossil-fuel power; the parts that make the trucks that transport the fertilizer; the components that make the computers that monitor the movement of those trucks transporting the fertilizer are made in part with processes using fossil fuels. This goes on forever, for everything. What I mean is, there is no escaping even a bump in the cost of a barrel of oil should it persist for much longer than a few days. Everything we do will increase in cost.

It's not just inflation and the Strait of Hormuz we have to worry about. Iran's attacks on the Gulf Cooperation Council (an economic and military alliance of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) have the potential to destabilize the physical resources that back up the American dollar. Couple that with letting yuan-backed oil through the strait, and our currency is in danger of plummeting in value on the world stage. And before you think "well if we buy American," (I don't actually think you think that) remember that the US doesn't actually produce much of anything anymore. The food that we grow (that we might not be able to afford to fertilize) is mostly livestock feed, and much of what we eat is imported.

You might recall what happens when a currency falters this way–it's happened a lot in the last couple decades. A drop in value is equivalent to hyperinflation, because you need much more of the given currency to purchase anything. Anything of a fixed cash value–like your savings account or investments–becomes worthless, or at least worth less. Imports, like the aforementioned food, skyrocket in cost. People will go hungry.

Get Serious

The very basic things are always where you should start: if you haven't yet built up some kind of a pantry, now is the time. This won't happen overnight, but even if the war resolves some way in the United States' favor (that's a real pyrrhic victory, right there), we will likely still see some kind of increase in the cost of things. Buy food today because it will cost more tomorrow.

Utilities will likely get dicey, so having a store of water is a good idea, as is having some kind of redundancy for essential electronics. Obviously "redundancy" for an air conditioner is no mean feat, but it may be something worth looking into if you're able. Solar-powered electric generators are getting cheaper and more viable every year. I don't like recommending capitalism as a response to what is effectively a capitalist disaster, but we can't afford to play with the kind of heat waves that are in the pipeline. El Niño is likely to rear its head again this year, which could supercharge the end of summer and make 2026 another record-breaker.

I don't say any of this out of indifference or hatred of Iran. Within the first hours of this war the United States and Israel killed Iran's Ayatollah and bombed a girl's school–and despite what Pete Hegseth said, we did start this war. And though the goalpost moves on "victory" for the US by the day, it could go on for quite a while and Iranians are suffering the most. Lebanon, too, is under attack by Israel, and it seems clear that the genocide that began is Gaza is being expanded. Iran is not the problem here. The US-Israeli empire is the problem.