Noel King

I wonder, is the war in Iran, the subsequent closure of the strait, the subsequent high oil prices, is any of that changing the conversation in the United States around, hey, maybe we should go back to what we were doing under Biden?

Well, the United States...

especially in this period last 10-15 years has also turned up its production of natural gas and oil at record levels and so it is now the world's largest producer of oil the largest exporter of natural gas and so the price shocks that the rest of the world is feeling

The U.S.

is not really feeling.

Yes, gasoline prices have gone up about $4 a gallon, but that is really a very small increase relative to the gas prices that Europeans or Asians are paying.

So that hasn't really led to a place where people are in a shock and they want alternatives.

That said, there has been a boom in the sale of used electric vehicles in the U.S.,

I think there is a sense that with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the understanding that there has to be a way to find other sources of energy, that this is like a really good moment.

That this war, even though I think many, many people don't want it to have happened, the knock-on effect of people looking differently, nations looking differently or in a more aggressive way at renewable energy is a really good thing.

Is that how you would characterize this?

I don't know if there's anything really good from a war, even if it's going to really speed up the clean energy transition.

But you're right, it just might.

We have seen that when the 1970s oil crisis happened, at the time, clean energy wasn't a big deal, but...

Governments really tried to move away from oil as fast as they could.

They went down building a lot of nuclear power plants.

They started to sell these fuel-efficient vehicles in the US.

The Japanese automakers got a real push.

We are likely to see

similar trends trying to go away from oil and gas as fast as possible.