By George Christensen
A government that cannot guarantee the fuel to keep your country moving may soon offer to decide which journeys you are allowed to make.
That is the political danger buried beneath the language of energy conservation. When supply becomes scarce, decisions about work, travel and family life can migrate from the household to the official who administers the shortage.
The restrictions are already appearing.
Fuel shortages give governments an opening to turn energy conservation into control over ordinary journeys.
Just days ago, BeInCrypto reported fuel rationing or shortages across five countries: France, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal. Its examples included French petrol stations missing at least one fuel, compulsory earlier business closures in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and cooking-gas shortages in Nepal. In South Sulawesi, Indonesia, September restrictions were reportedly linking refuelling days to number plates and limiting trucks and buses to overnight filling hours.
These measures determine when people can trade, obtain fuel and organise their day. To understand how much further that control could reach, consider both the damage to global supply and the restrictions already sitting in international policy documents.
The supply problem begins with a distinction easily lost in headlines about oil reserves. Crude must be refined into petrol, diesel and aviation fuel, then delivered where it is needed. Having oil somewhere in the system does not guarantee diesel at a depot or petrol at a service station.
Vitol chief executive Russell Hardy has reportedly estimated that the market was missing roughly two million barrels a day of refined products from Russia and almost another two million from the Middle East.
Diesel shortages reach well beyond motorists. Diesel moves freight, powers machinery and supports the work that puts food in shops. Households encounter the consequences through delivery charges, production costs and the price of essentials.
Unfortunately, not even the President of the United States can’t tweet a tanker into port or sign an executive order to make a tankful of diesel magically appear. Emergency spending cannot instantly repair a refinery, reopen a pipeline or unload a vessel. Money can finance recovery but the physical work still has to happen.
Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, also called the Petroline, provides an alternative by carrying crude across the kingdom to Yanbu on the Red Sea. But a bypass offers little protection when its own essential machinery comes under attack.
On 17 September, reports drawing on satellite imagery and industry sources identified damage to three pumping stations. The pipeline had been carrying four to five million barrels a day before its shutdown. Three sources put possible repairs at five to six weeks, although the reopening timetable remained unresolved.
Independent analyst AJ Signal argues in his 18 September investigation into the Petroline strikes that the targeting reveals an understanding of the pipeline’s engineering. His maps and elevation diagrams identify stations PS8, PS9 and PS11 as the targets, placing them in the elevated western section of the route to Yanbu.
His thesis is that the attackers selected a combination of stations essential to maintaining movement across rising terrain, frustrating attempts to keep oil flowing through the remaining equipment. From that pattern, he infers possible assistance from someone with access to Aramco’s engineering knowledge.
His assessment of the repair burden is equally consequential. In accompanying commentary published on 17 September, AJ estimates one to three months, citing replacement equipment, specialist labour, difficult working conditions and transport constraints. His longer investigation argues that full restoration could take longer still.
An early restart therefore requires more than an optimistic announcement. It requires the necessary machinery, people and supplies to reach the damaged sites and restore dependable operation. And even successful repairs leave another question: what prevents the next strike?
The longer these disruptions last, the greater the pressure on countries waiting for fuel. Deliveries slow, businesses shorten their hours and drivers queue for what remains. Cargo schedules and depot inventories could become daily household concerns, followed as closely as case numbers were during Covid.
That dependence gives enormous political power to whoever promises to manage access.
The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental energy organisation, has already set out measures governments could adopt. Its 20 March recommendations included working from home, lower highway speed limits and alternating private-car access to roads in large cities. It specifically described number-plate rotation schemes, under which the days motorists can drive depend on their registration plates.
You own the car. You pay for its registration, maintenance and fuel. Yet the numbers attached to it could determine whether you are permitted to make an ordinary journey.
In Australia, where distance shapes daily life, the consequences would be especially severe. A suburban parent may need to get children to school, reach work and care for an elderly relative. A regional contractor carries his livelihood in his vehicle. A shift worker may begin before public transport operates.
A planner can classify those journeys as consumption. The people making them experience them as necessity.
And the burden would not fall evenly. An executive can reorganise meetings and work from a comfortable home. A cleaner on contract work cannot clean a building over a video call. Restrictions designed around office workers near railway stations punish people whose work is physical, local and indispensable.
These proposals also have a history that predates the present emergency.
The IEA’s March 2022 oil-reduction plan proposed car-free Sundays in large cities and alternating private-car use. It explicitly connected immediate action with longer-term structural reductions in oil demand and net-zero objectives. Emergency measures and permanent policy ambitions appeared in the same document.
Now, the agency is maintaining a policy response tracker covering government control measures. Updated on 9 September, it also described coordination with globalist institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
Independent writer UNSHADOWED identifies the political concern in a recent essay: a fuel emergency creates an opportunity to move longstanding restrictions from policy papers into daily life. Scarcity supplies the justification for administering consumption.
When institutions already favour a lasting change in behaviour, an emergency gives them a powerful opportunity to pursue it. The question shifts from whether people want the change to how quickly they can be made to comply.
This is where the comparison with the COVID plandemic becomes relevant: an emergency, international recommendations, national rules and increasing official involvement in ordinary decisions. Ministers could invoke the IEA to defend restrictions on fuel use and travel, much as they invoked the World Health Organization on health policy.
The crucial questions are how much authority governments will claim and how citizens recover control once the immediate disruption passes.
A serious Australian response should focus on securing fuel, removing barriers to supply and keeping the country working. A shortage gives ministers no entitlement to decide whose journey matters or whose livelihood can be sacrificed.
Restrictions on ordinary freedom should be rejected outright. An international agency’s recommendation confers no authority over Australian citizens.
A fuel crisis is a problem to solve, not a licence to control the population.
Until next time, God bless you, your family and nation.
