This headline today seems to have many frazzled: *THUNE SAYS HE IS 'OPEN TO CONSIDERING' AN EXPORT BAN ON DIESEL An export ban on deisel would have the OPPOSITE effect as intended, imho. Here are my thoughts on WHY: A diesel export ban would work against its own intent for three reasons. First, the United States is not short of diesel, it is short of cheap diesel, and the price is set by the global barrel. Gulf Coast refiners export a record volume of distillate because Europe and Latin America lost roughly 30% of Russian refining capacity to Ukrainian strikes and then lost the rest to Moscow's July export ban, so the marginal buyer of American diesel sits in Rotterdam and Santos, not Pennsylvania. Pulling US barrels off that market does not lower the global price, it raises it, and the US retail pump still prices off the global market because the Northeast, the region actually feeling the squeeze, imports its diesel rather than sourcing it from Texas. Second, the barrels that get trapped do not flow north. The Jones Act waiver in force through November 15 has moved about 125 thousand barrels a day across all products combined, is now administered voyage by voyage with an individual Department of War determination for each ship, and is throttled by clean tanker rates that are already at multi year highs. Stranded product in PADD 3 collapses the Gulf Coast diesel crack, and refiners respond to a collapsing crack the only way they can, by cutting runs, which removes the very supply the ban was meant to protect. That is exactly what the Energy Department found when it modeled the same idea in October 2022 and quietly dropped it. Third, the signal is permanent even if the ban is temporary. The United States became the supplier of last resort for the free world's distillate over a decade, and a ban announced to get through a midterm tells every buyer from Mexico to Germany that American supply is politically conditional. They respond by building redundancy, contracting with other suppliers, and paying a premium for reliability elsewhere, which weakens US refining margins structurally long after the ban is lifted. The diesel problem is a refining capacity and crude quality problem layered on a war. An export ban addresses neither and makes both worse.