$4 a Gallon

Yesterday, gas hit $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022.

The last time it was this high, Russia had invaded Ukraine. This time, we bombed Iran.

Someone is standing at a pump right now, watching the numbers climb, feeling it before their head catches up. That grimace. You know it. The specific helplessness of a number you cannot argue with.

That grimace has a history. Longer than most people know.

---

For centuries before anyone thought to drill for it, oil seeped naturally from the ground near what is now Baku — on the coast of the Caspian Sea, the landlocked body of water that sits between Russia and Iran. The ground caught fire on its own. It smelled like sulfur and something older, something the earth had been holding for three hundred million years. Zoroastrian priests tended flames that had not gone out in living memory, pressing their palms to the warm ground, feeding fires they believed were holy and eternal. Marco Polo passed through in the 13th century and wrote about it like a wonder of the world. Nobody drilled for it. Nobody needed to. None of them knew that the sacred fire and the substance beneath it would one day be the same thing men went to war over. When the drilling rigs arrived in the late 1800s, they tore through the fire temples to get to what was underneath. The eternal flames went out. The industry had no use for wonder.

Then Edwin Drake arrived in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859 with borrowed money, a steam engine, and a drill. His investors had already given up. The locals called him Crazy Drake. On August 27, he hit oil at 69.5 feet — and beneath those 69.5 feet, though no one standing there could have named it, lay three hundred million years of compressed organic matter, ancient seas and vanished creatures folded into carbon by heat and pressure and time, waiting. He was drilling to produce kerosene — not gasoline, there were no cars, not jet fuel, there were no planes — kerosene, for lamps, to replace whale oil, which was running out. Drake is the moment the addiction got industrialized. Nobody standing at that well could have imagined that what they were looking at was the circulatory system of the next two centuries. That the substance dripping from a 69.5-foot hole in rural Pennsylvania would become the thing every army, every economy, every suburb, every commute would be organized around. That wars would be fought not over land or ideology, in the way people had always understood wars, but over who controlled the infrastructure of this one black liquid and the routes through which it moved.

The fire the pilgrims prayed beside and the fire in the engine of every car on every highway are the same fire. The same carbon, released.

By the time World War II arrived, oil was already the condition of modern power. Hitler’s push into Russia was not only about Moscow — it was about Baku, the same ground where priests had once tended eternal flames, now the fuel that would keep the German war machine moving east. A soldier somewhere east of Rostov in the summer of 1942, moving toward those fields, did not know he was fighting for oil. He knew he was thirsty. He knew the trucks needed fuel. He knew they were told to keep moving east. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz said later that if the Japanese had come back a third time and hit the oil storage tanks, the Pacific war would have taken another two years. The United States won that war partly by cutting the oil lines supplying Japan, draining the machine until it could not run.

We won that war. We kept the dependency.

It does not matter what the regime is. Theocracy. Democracy. Communist state. Capitalist empire. Venezuela holds 800 years of proven reserves at current production. Iraq holds 300. The planet has perhaps 30 before the climate damage becomes irreversible. And still, few states seem to be in any rush toward alternatives.

The bomb and the barrel are entries on the same ledger. The Gulf War 1991. Iraq 2003, dressed as weapons of mass destruction. Iran 2026. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply through a passage thirty-three miles wide at its narrowest point. Whoever controls that passage controls the price on the sign at every pump in America. This is not conspiracy. It is the same calculation, made in the same region, over the same substance, that pilgrims once crossed on foot to reach.

Meanwhile, Costa Rica generated 98.6 percent of its electricity from renewable sources in 2025. Hydropower, geothermal, wind, biomass, solar. A small country that banned oil and gas exploration and production until 2050, by decree. They are not finished — transport still runs on fuel, the transition is incomplete — but the lights stay on without it, and the rates held stable while the rest of the world watched a war in the Middle East move the number on a sign.

The infrastructure of our imagination runs on the same fuel as everything else. The same fuel that buries men, women, and children and moves the number on a sign.

---

The number today is $4. Analysts warned this week that if the Iran conflict extends through the summer, oil could hit $200 a barrel. At that price, gas could reach $7 a gallon.

Seven dollars.

At the pump, the person is still standing there. That number was not inevitable. It was not geology or fate or the necessary price of civilization. It was a set of choices — made in budget rooms and war rooms, by governments of every ideology, every faith, every flag — that show up, every time, on a sign at a gas station, in the chest of someone who cannot argue with a number.

Drake died poor. He never patented his drilling method. He moved away from Titusville and spent his final years in pain, living on a small pension the Pennsylvania legislature eventually granted him out of something like guilt. The well that launched a global industry produced nothing for him.

He drilled 69.5 feet for lamp oil, and we have been at the mercy of what is beneath us ever since.

Beneath the person at the pump, past the concrete and the asphalt and the compacted earth, three hundred million years of the same compressed darkness. The same ancient fire. Still down there.

The numbers on the sign keep climbing.

---

---

Notes & Sources

1. National average gas hit $4 a gallon for the first time since August 2022, rising $1.05 through March 2026. https://gasprices.aaa.com/national-gas-average-jumps-one-dollar-in-one-month/

2. Gas prices climbed eleven consecutive weeks through March 2026, tying the longest streak since early 2022. https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2026/03/24/gas-prices-up-more-than-1-in-march

3. Analysts warned oil could reach $200 a barrel if the Iran conflict extends through summer, pushing gas to $7 a gallon. https://time.com/article/2026/03/31/gas-prices-us-iran-war/

4. Zoroastrian pilgrims traveled to pray at natural flames on the Absheron Peninsula near Baku. Marco Polo described the site in 1298. https://jpt.spe.org/azerbaijan-the-land-of-unquenchable-fire

5. The Ateshgah fire temple’s natural eternal flame was extinguished in 1969 after nearly a century of petroleum extraction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateshgah_of_Baku

6. Remains of the older temple were most likely destroyed when the land was excavated for oil and gas from the late 19th century onwards. https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/baku-fire-temple-0016127

7. Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial U.S. oil well on August 27, 1859, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, at 69.5 feet. He never patented his method and died on a state pension. https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/american-oil-history/

8. Drake Well site history, financing collapse, and Drake’s failure to profit from the discovery. https://www.drakewell.org/about-us/site-history

9. Petroleum formed from organic matter deposited roughly 360 to 490 million years ago during the Ordovician and Devonian periods, compressed by heat and pressure over geological time. https://carnegiemnh.org/the-story-of-oil-in-western-pennsylvania/

10. Hitler authorized Operation Edelweiss on July 23, 1942 — a plan to capture the Baku oil fields and deny the Soviet Union its primary fuel supply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Caucasus

11. Hitler’s push toward Baku’s oil fields in WWII. Admiral Nimitz said a third wave at Pearl Harbor hitting the oil tanks would have prolonged the Pacific war by two years. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/japan-almost-attacked-pearl-harbor-second-time-1941-heres-why-it-didnt-108706

12. Venezuela holds 800 years of proven reserves at current production. Iraq holds 300. Iran, Kuwait, and Libya all post triple-digit reserve lifespans. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/who-has-oil-reserves-and-who-can-produce-oil/

13. The world has roughly 47 years of proven oil supply at current global consumption. https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

14. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply through a passage thirty-three miles wide at its narrowest point. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-irans-disruption-of-the-strait-of-hormuz-matters/

15. Costa Rica generated 98.6 percent of its electricity from renewable sources in 2025. https://ticotimes.net/2026/03/03/costa-rica-closed-2025-with-98-6-percent-renewable-electricity-generation

16. Costa Rica has maintained a moratorium on oil and gas exploration since 2002, extended by presidential decree until 2050. https://thecostaricanews.com/costa-rica-extended-prohibition-of-oil-exploitation-until-2050/