Justin Ho

If we do this, this is a decision that will affect all life on the planet.

I don't think it should be up to a couple guys in California.

And while so far solar geoengineering is happening at a small scale, what happens if a rogue nation or a rogue billionaire makes the decision for us?

I don't see that we have a world government that is capable of making a decision on behalf of everybody who lives on the planet.

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The market for actual physical barrels of oil is really complicated.

There are different grades of oil that can't be substituted for each other.

And nobody really knows what anybody's paying because transactions are private.

But oil futures contracts are a totally different matter.

They're standardized and they're traded on public exchanges.

That's Mark Finley with Rice University's Baker Institute.

He says futures contracts for one month from now give you a pretty good sense of oil prices right now.

But contracts are also sold for basically any month in the future.

Finley says some people buy oil futures to lock in prices, to hedge against uncertainty.

Others trade them to speculate.

Either way, the price of oil that's baked into those contracts reveals people's expectations about the future, says Anna Mikulska, head of analytics at CGCN Group.

For instance, if the market thinks demand for oil will slow down in the near future...

But right now, futures markets are reflecting a very different expectation, that prices will remain high over the next few months, as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, around $90 a barrel.

Matt Smith is director of commodity research at the data and analytics firm Kepler.

Even a year from now, the futures market is betting that prices will still be higher than they were before the war.