Today, by virtue of my income producing semi-retirement employment, I learned something about the supply chain that is certainly important – going on urgent, that we should be aware of; in fact, it may only be the tip of the iceberg. There’s currently a shortage of something called urea. Urea is the primary ingredient in an additive to diesel fuel called DEF that reduces smoke and stench from those engines. No complaint from me on that score, the stuff really works; diesel vehicles are a lot more pleasant to be around using the treatment. The problem is that it’s now being rationed, part of the larger supply chain problem. The reason this bears mention amidst the constellation of other goods and services that are in short supply is that most diesel engines on the road now require the additive. This includes trucks, buses, tractors used in agriculture and diesel engine cars. When the urea stops, diesel engines stop, and with that every critical mission that those diesel engines are associated with.
If that isn’t bad enough, urea is also a critical ingredient in agricultural fertilizer and those markets are also disrupted worldwide, such that abundant crop yields are also endangered.
Last month, you thought you had it bad when your Christmas presents were sitting out in the harbor beyond Los Angeles without any way to offload them to the inland distribution network. Why is this circumstance so much worse now? When the buses stop, public transportation grinds to a halt. Schools and education are forced to go virtual or not at all with no way to bus kids. When the trucks stop, every good and service that you put your hand on and every manufacturing layer leading up to that point, all of these come to a grinding halt. When the tractors stop, food production stops and suddenly our grocery stores are going to look like a Soviet Union commissary ca 1970. So this whole supply chain thing which was up to now a minor or middling inconvenience is going to suddenly turn into a major catastrophe.
I’m no expert on these things but I’m going to guess that urea is not the only critical choke point in our supply chain that’s ready to be interrupted. It’s just one that I happened to hear about first hand just today, followed by some research. Of course, no one is talking about it, it’s not on CNN, CBS, or even the New York Times but it’s coming soon to a reality near you. Of course, urea is not going to disappear entirely all at once and all these end users of the product are not going to have zero on hand all at once. But let’s play a game of pick and choose; if we suddenly find ourselves short by another 25%, 30%, or 50% who do you shut down first? The truckers, public transportation, the schools? The farm tractors? Or individual drivers? Choose your poison.
The problem in this equation is that we can’t just compromise and go back to running our vehicles in such a way that they produce a lot of smoke. The vehicles will not run at all without urea; they were engineered and manufactured that way. We can think Obama for that because it was during his administration that he mandated that all diesel engines moving forward must have this feature. Like I said I am not going to dismiss this entirely because it’s nice to have diesel vehicles run cleaner, but if you’re going to mandate something maybe you should pay more attention to the critical supply of the needed commodity for its manufacturer and control a sufficient portion of that industry. The same thing applies to computer chips and rare earth metals essential to the entire ‘green’ industry. If we’re dependent on India or China for those resources and they restrict our supply, you have no more ‘green’, period.
The person who is presently responsible for this shortage is none other than our Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigeige. While he was AWOL for two months nursing his infant sons, this crisis was deepening. Of course, the only thing that the Biden administration is obsessed with specifically about Buttigeige is what appears to be the frantic effort to shift away from the certainty of Kamala Harris as a successor to the Presidency and to replace her with Buttigeige. By what means still remains to be seen but Mayor Pete is by no means qualified to handle that role given how gloriously he has ignored or mismanaged the impending doom that’s coming upon us by way of our supply chain. While this is staring us down, the Democrats only care about his pretty face the fact that he can speak, that he’s not senile and he doesn’t soil his pants. His only qualification for his present job was that as mayor of South Bend, he oversaw projects like the installation of bike paths and the fact that he’s homosexual. His handlers only care about one of those qualifications and it ain’t the bike paths. He would not be Transportation Secretary otherwise.
We’re in dangerous territory now and very few are aware of it. If these shortages progress further under the current administration at its present trajectory, it will be disastrous for the millions that can’t work because their vehicles can’t run or because the crops cannot be even put into the ground. Seeing our food prices increase by 100%, 200%, or 300%, is going to crush everyone up to the middle class and beyond, and the millions of impoverished will be in life threatening crisis if this isn’t solved. Inflation caused by monetary recklessness is one thing but when you add to that the shortage of basic commodities, we’ll be in third world status overnight. If our money is no good, you can still barter for fuel and food, but if the fuel and food disappear, no amount of bartering will make it appear.