Tesla has begun deliveries of its long-awaited electric semi-truck, opening its first mass-production facility outside of Reno, Nevada. The company’s CEO Elon Musk touted the new trucks in a video at the facility launch, calling the vehicle “a revolutionary truck that is capable of carrying the heaviest loads.” The company first unveiled…
Page F4From§Eachthe noon edition — 26 September 2026
The Hill blames green mandates for diesel prices; three states already cut taxes over the war.
As it ran on the front
The receipts keep dating themselves, hon, and the dates don't line up with the culprits everyone keeps naming.
Start with the war's own arithmetic. In August, gasoline closed above four dollars a gallon every day of the month for the first time on record, with the Iran war unsettling crude the entire time. By September 4th, diesel hit $5.85 a gallon, a record. A week later, on the 11th, it climbed to $6.06 — up fourteen percent from a month before, a twenty-one-cent jump in seven days.…
…(cont) On the 21st, Atlanta pressed the governor to pause the state's diesel tax as pump prices kept climbing. By the 26th, the wire reported Georgia, Kentucky and Indiana had already cut or suspended their gas taxes, with Ohio and Massachusetts weighing the same relief before Election Day — three states giving up road-fund revenue to cover a price spike none of them caused.
The wire dated Tesla's electric semi-truck rollout to September 26th as well, delivering trucks out of a new plant outside Reno, its CEO calling them capable of hauling the heaviest loads. The receipts don't say why the delivery date landed the same week three states started cutting their diesel tax. They just say it did.
The Hill ran its op-ed on the 26th too, arguing the actual fix for high energy costs is ending green mandates — not anything in the diesel numbers above. That complaint had a head start. On September 5th, one day after diesel set its record, the Washington Examiner had already run former Obama economist Michael Greenstone's University of Chicago study pricing the cost of renewable mandates — filed three weeks before The Hill cited the same argument as this month's fix.
Run the file in order: one war, one diesel record, three states cutting the tax that funds their own roads, one company delivering trucks timed to the same week, and two op-eds pointing everywhere but the war that set the price. The diesel number traces to Iran every time the wire dates it. The states are the ones eating the shortfall. Whoever's writing the op-eds isn't.
“They started a war, diesel hit six bucks, and now three states are cutting the tax that pays for their own roads just to cover the damage. And some op-ed's out here blaming windmills for it, like the mandate wrote the invoice instead of the missile. That shortfall doesn't vanish — it comes out of the next pothole, the next school bus route, whoever was counting on that road money showing up.”
“Look, Michael Greenstone worked for Obama, so when his own study says renewable mandates raise costs, that's not spin, that's bipartisan economics, case closed. The diesel spike is global commodity markets doing what they do — volatile, complicated, lots of variables, the war being just one of them. Did I just call a shooting war "one of the variables"? That's — let's move on.”
Earlier in this story
- Heritage bills Americans nearly $1,465 for climate lawsuits; the receipts charge it to Trump's war and drug deals. By Ruth · the breakfast edition, 26 September 2026
The receipts
Democrats spent the summer talking a big game on “affordability,” but their energy approach raises prices across the board.
Since the Iran war sent gas prices soaring, Georgia, Kentucky and Indiana have cut or suspended their gas taxes. Similar proposals are under consideration in Ohio and Massachusetts.
· Obama’s own economist just exposed the massive cost of green energy mandates from the morgue, 5 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.