It used to be that we couldn’t propose making gasoline more expensive to protect the environment because Americans wouldn’t sacrifice cheap gas for other policy goals.
I guess Donald Trump has thrown that argument out the window:
REPORTER: If you need more time, does that mean Americans should anticipate spending more on gasoline for the foreseeable future?
TRUMP: For a little while. And, you know what they get for that, you know what they get for that? Iran without a nuclear weapon that’s going to try and blow up one of our cities or blow up the entire Middle East [Reporter and Donald Trump, Oval Office press conference, transcribed by CNN, 2026.04.23].
That’s funny: the last time we completely and totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program, just ten months ago, on June 22, 2025, we did it with one air strike, on one day, and Americans didn’t pay any price at the pump. On June 16, gasoline nationwide averaged $3.265 per gallon. On July 7, after the big holiday weekend, gasoline averaged $3.251 per gallon. Gasoline prices kept sliding down all year.
Now we’re waging a two-month war to accomplish what Trump said we did in a day last summer, and we’ve jacked our gasoline price up by more than a dollar, from under $3 before the war to over $4 now. And we’re paying that price for nothing. Before all these boom-booms, this year’s and last, we had an Iran without a nuclear weapon. We had an Iran that didn’t even have all the technology necessary to build a nuclear weapon.
And even if Iran were on the brink, for the second time in less than a year, of completing and deploying a nuclear bomb (and those Iranians would have to be awfully resilient to go from complete and total obliteration of their nuclear program to winding up to pitch their own Fat Man at Jerusalem in less than eight months), let’s take a hard look at what’s worse, one city destroyed by a nuclear bomb or an entire planet ravaged by climate change:
We’ve seen two cities destroyed by nuclear bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, the death, sickness, and destruction were awful. But that destruction was localized; Japan, the occupying bomb-dropper, and allies quickly rebuilt both cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained livable; Hiroshima regained its pre-war population level by 1958, while Nagasaki matched its pre-bombing population in 1961. The two bombs the United States dropped in war and the 2,000-some other nuclear weapons humans have detonated have caused some environmental issues but no widespread climatological catastrophe; one Iranian bomb won’t either.
Meanwhile, climate change driven by our reckless burning of fossil fuels is causing real harm right now worldwide. An entire planet suffering rising seas, wildfires, longer heat waves, more severe storms and droughts, more widely spread mosquito-borne illnesses, and other climate-change-related impacts will lose far more lives and economic output than a single nation would suffer from a single nuclear strike from a single suicidal regime.
I’m not saying a nuclear bombing isn’t bad. I’m saying the likelihood of Iran deploying a nuclear bomb (at best single-digit percentage, quite possibly 0%) times the harms that deployment would cause (maximum impact: millions of people) is far less than the likelihood of climate change (definitely not 0%, more likely 100%) times the harms climate change is causing (impact: billions of people).
I’m saying that if the President of the United States can decide unilaterally that I have have to pay an extra dollar for gasoline to address some global threat, I wish to heck I had a rational President doing rational threat assessment.
I’m saying I’d rather have a President who takes that dollar with an honest $1 tax on each gallon of gasoline to raise $137 billion a year to fund collective action to fight climate change instead of letting his friends in the oil industry hoover up that cash in a wartime windfall that only supports their production of the very substance that’s setting the whole world on fire.