Ezra Klein

The economist James Hamilton famously documented that basically every major oil shock of the 20th century preceded a recession.

Do you think that's likely to happen in this situation?

I think we think about this from the American perspective where it would cause economic hardship and pain.

It is hard to pay more at the pump.

It is hard to pay more for a flight.

But

What will happen very quickly is that rich countries will begin bidding for scarcer energy supplies, and those supplies won't make it to poor countries who cannot pay the cost.

So if this continues, I think there's been a lot of talk about, say, recessionary risk in America, but we and Israel started this war, right?

But if it continues, what happens to people in Malaysia or people in Kenya?

What is the cost that we are risking imposing on the 2 billion poorest people in the world who had no say in this?

So you've mentioned that a lot of the world's oil, and obviously it's not just oil or even primarily oil coming from Iran, goes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Much of it doesn't.

If the world began turning to other geopolitical actors for supply, who has the capacity to increase supply?

And in a situation where this war kept going and there's much more pressure to adapt, what might those adaptations look like?

You mentioned the shale revolution a few times, which I think many people probably don't know what that is.

Can you just give me the brief overview of U.S.

energy production from 1990 to 2025?

What happened and how different is our position now than it was then?

One of the things you mentioned early on in this that I think will sound strange as a sentence is that one of the moves the Trump administration has made is to de-sanction Russian and Iranian oil and gas reserves.

Now, to the extent I know anything about our current foreign policy, it's that we have been trying very hard to sanction Russian and Iranian energy exports.