Ezra Klein
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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 48 hours from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various power plants, starting with the biggest one first.
It's a brutal threat meant to make Iran back down.
It did the opposite.
In response, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament said, immediately after the power plants and infrastructure in our country are targeted, the critical infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, and oil facilities through the region will be considered legitimate targets and will be destroyed in an irreversible manner.
And the price of oil will remain high for a long time.
I'm recording this on the morning of Monday, March 23rd.
As I woke up today, oil prices had fallen a bit because Trump had extended his 48-hour deadline by five days, citing positive talks with the Iranians.
Iran is denying any such talks have happened.
They say Trump is backing down out of fear.
They've already hit energy infrastructure in the region, so their threat is credible.
But I don't pretend to know the truth here.
The news and the price of oil and gas are changing radically by the hour.
But here's a key fact that has not changed yet.
The Strait of Hormuz remains mostly closed.
If it stays closed, and even more so if the war expands, if Iran destroys more energy infrastructure through the region, and the U.S.
and Israel destroy it inside Iran, we are going to enter the kind of energy crisis we have not seen since the 70s, or maybe even something much, much worse.
Jason Bordoff is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School.
He served as a special assistant to President Obama and senior director for energy and climate change on the National Security Council.