How Bad Could the Iran Oil Crisis Get?
3/24/20261 hr 2 min
Iran has currently shut off more than 10 percent of the world’s oil supply. If that goes on for a lot longer — or if the war escalates to include more strikes on energy infrastructure in the region — the price of oil could go through the roof, and the damage to the global economy could be catastrophic.
So what would that look like? What tools does the United States have to avert it? And how is this crisis already reverberating in countries around the world?
Jason Bordoff is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a founding dean of the Columbia Climate School. He served as a special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for energy and climate change on the National Security Council.
In this conversation, Bordoff answers all my questions about the crisis so far and how things could spin out from here, the strategic positioning of the United States, Europe, Iran, Russia and China, the developing countries likely to suffer the most and the lessons the world might take from this.
Mentioned:
“Making the U.S. More Resilient to Oil Price Shocks” by Jason Bordoff and Spencer Dale
“The Return of the Energy Weapon” by Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan
Book Recommendations:
Material World by Ed Conway
More and More and More by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
Deliver Me from Nowhere by Warren Zanes
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSolana Pyne0:00
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Ezra Klein· Host0:29
[gentle music] If you want to see just how bad this energy crisis can become, just read what President Trump and Iran are saying to each other. On Saturday night, Trump posted a missive to Truth Social. He wrote, "If Iran doesn't fully open, without threat, the Strait of Hormuz within forty-eight hours from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various power plants, starting