Urea prices

burnt-resistor

LNG -> urea (fertilizer) -> food About half of all fertilizer is artificially created using fossil fuels. There is no undoing of this price shock because the planting and growing season has already arrived in the Northern Hemisphere. Expect grains to become more expensive and downstream food products like milk and cheese to increase a lot.

Trasmatta

Incredible how Trump ran on a "no wars" and "lower prices" platform. And that people actually believed it.

avalys

Up 30% is not “nearly doubles”.

malshe

Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast did an episode on this today. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?...

jmyeet

What's astounding about this entire misadventure is there seemed to be absolutely no plan for what the goals were and what the exit strategy was as well as how to counter the most likely outcomes. I would bet money that military planners had long considered these issues (as they consider many hypotheticals) and those warnings were ignored. For context, about 30% of the fertilizer supply chain relies on the Strait of Hormuz, mainly due to natural gas. Additionally, ~15% of crudel oil exports are effectively blocked. All of this was known beforehand. It was also known that breaking the blockade was essentially impossible. Iran's entire military is designed for this scenario: cheap drones and missiles in huge numbers from cheap launchers and in hardened facilities. Commercial vessels can be attacked with drone boats, basically. The navigable part of the Strait at its narrowest point is less than 8 miles wide. And we're paying about $1 billion per day for all this. But that's OK because somebody is getting rich from contracts to replenish every munition we're using. Invading Iran is geographically impossible. Every single thing I mentioned here has been known for years. Yet here we are. IN a just world, people would hang for all the crimes we've consistently and repeatedly committed against Iran since at least 1953.

adrianN

Sooner rather than later we need to decarbonize fertilizer production. Maybe this will speed the process up a bit.

WaitWaitWha

Yes urea is used in fertilizer. Yes, the price is going up relative to May 13, 2024 (lowest in 5 years). look at the chart in the article, then click 5Y on the bottom of the chart. Click the + sign between the calendar and wrench icon Type in "US Food inflation". It will overlay the "urea" price with the "US food inflation". Yes, urea seems to be a leading indicator. It is nothing like in 2022, yet .

SigmundA

Saw posters on /r/Truckers complaining that truck stops were taking advantage of situation to gouge for DEF too on top of diesel before someone pointed out that Iran is the second largest producer of urea, the primary component of DEF. They are not happy right now with $5.00 / gal fuel and higher DEF as well. Worried the administration will use it as an excuse to rollback NOx emissions regulations that mandated DEF usage in diesel engines. They are already not enforcing "deletes" of the emissions systems which is a federal crime.

mikelitoris

What if we collectively pee in buckets (to not dilute it with water and other human by-products) and give them to refineries for purification? /s

yellowapple

My first thought from this is that (if my napkin math is right) I'm apparently pissing away a penny a day.

snthpy

Someone's taking the piss