I spent enough years in and around refineries and supply operations to develop a reflex that has never failed me. When the financial world gets excited about a story, look at what is physically moving, and what it costs to move it. The numbers on a trading screen can lie for a while. A loaded tanker, a diesel pump, and a warehouse full of copper cathode cannot.
This week two very different pieces of institutional research landed in my inbox, and at first glance they have nothing to do with each other. One was a survey-driven look at trucking, airlines, and hotels. The other was a tight little analysis of whether Washington will put a tariff on imported refined copper. Read them together, though, and they tell the same story, the one I keep coming back to on this blog: in 2026, the physical layer of the economy is reasserting itself, and the bill is coming due in fuel and in metal.
The Fuel Surcharge Is the Tell
Start with the boring stuff, because boring is where the truth usually hides. Across freight and travel, the recurring theme this spring is not demand. Demand is actually holding up. The theme is fuel. Truckload carriers are pushing through the biggest spot-rate increases in years (industry surveys put spot rates up roughly a third year over year), and a big reason they can is that everyone in the chain is staring at the same rising energy bill. Airlines are quietly raising their assumed price per gallon and telling investors they expect to recapture only part of it. Even the casino and hotel operators, of all people, are talking about gasoline prices, because the lower-income customer who drives to a regional casino feels every nickel at the pump before they ever reach the floor.
None of this is mysterious if you have been reading along. The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year did exactly what physics and geography said it would. The U.S. Energy Information Administration now expects Brent crude to average around $79 a barrel in 2026, a figure it revised up by more than a third after Gulf producers shut in volumes and Brent briefly spiked to $138 in April. Retail gasoline is now forecast near $3.34 a gallon, and on-highway diesel has been sitting above $5. Jet fuel, which is roughly thirty percent of an airline’s cost structure, has been one of the most painful line items in the industry.
Why Diesel Is the Honest Number
Whenever people ask me what energy price matters most, I usually give the same answer.
Not gasoline.
Diesel.
Diesel moves freight. It powers farms. It fuels construction equipment. It sits alongside jet fuel in the middle-distillate barrel, where global supply has become increasingly constrained. When diesel gets expensive, the entire physical economy gets taxed at once. Diesel and jet fuel come off the same middle of the barrel, and that middle is where global supply is tightest. Diesel moves freight, runs farms, powers construction, and, as kerosene’s close cousin, gets airplanes off the ground. When the middle-distillate complex is tight, it taxes the entire physical economy at once, which is exactly what those trucking and airline surveys are picking up. A fuel surcharge is not an accounting footnote. It is the economy telling you that energy got more expensive and that the cost is now rippling outward through every box that moves and every seat that flies.
Copper Is the Other Shoe
Now the metal. Washington is weighing whether to put a phased tariff on imported refined copper, reportedly starting at 15 percent in January 2027 and climbing toward 30 percent the year after, with a Commerce Department recommendation due around the end of June. The United States imports well over half of the refined copper it consumes, so this is not a small lever. The market is already front-running it: COMEX copper hit a record near $6.65 a pound in May and has been trading meaningfully above the London benchmark, which is the market’s way of pricing in a duty that has not been imposed yet. Traders have been shipping metal into the country to beat the deadline, and by some estimates the U.S. is now sitting on more than a year’s worth of normal refined-copper imports.
Here is the systems-thinking point. Copper is the metal of electrification. You cannot build a data center, a transmission line, an EV, or a heat pump without a lot of it. So the same energy transition that is supposed to free us from molecules runs straight into a different physical constraint: a red metal already heading into a structural supply deficit, now distorted further by tariff policy. The financial story is the spread between two exchanges. The real story is that we are trying to electrify everything at the exact moment the input we need to do it is getting scarcer and more politically loaded.
Same Lesson, Two Commodities
So you have fuel on one side and copper on the other. Oil and metal, the old economy and the new one. Both are being squeezed by the same combination of tight physical supply and government policy, whether that policy is sanctions and geopolitics choking crude or Section 232 tariffs reshaping copper flows. And in both cases, the spreadsheet jockeys are reacting to a reality that was set in the physical world first.
That is the through-line I want you to take away. Energy and materials are not background noise to the real economy of services and software. They are the substrate. When a trucking company raises a surcharge, when an airline trims a marginal route, when a trader rushes copper across an ocean to beat a tariff, you are watching the physical world reprice itself and everyone downstream scramble to keep up. You can model it after the fact. You cannot wish it away. Molecules and metals do not care about your forecast, and 2026 is reminding all of us of that the hard way.
Further Reading
- EIA Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update (weekly U.S. retail prices)
- EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook (May 2026 crude and product forecasts)
- EIA Raises U.S. Fuel Price Projections for 2026 and 2027 (Rigzone)
- IATA Jet Fuel Price Monitor
- Congressional Research Service: Section 232 National Security Tariffs on Copper Imports
- White & Case: United States Modifies Steel, Aluminum, and Copper Section 232 Tariffs