Trump: The Accidental Clean Energy President

We just look at the results. I mean, you know, I don't think Donald Trump, you know, has any desire to place himself in camp green, but the outcome of his actions is everybody scrambling to say, I need more solar. I need more battery. Like, and if it comes from China, hey, I'm okay with that. And that he and Pai. James Gottman back by popular demand. I know it's like midnight where you are in London, but appreciate you jumping back on the podcast. You are on March 2nd. I think we're on like 17 days into this conflict and inquiring minds want to know why you got so much stuff wrong. No, I'm kidding. But, you know, I think that you gave our listeners a framework for how like to really think about what was happening. And it really was under the new dual order framework that was applied in real time, right? I think you talked about the price spike. You talked about all these other things like two weeks in, you know, what do you see it? Gosh. Well, let's start with what I got wrong. And I think the big one is I said we would measure this in days, not weeks. And I want to like, I want to go on that because clearly we're moving into weeks. When the US didn't win, whatever win means because it's not really clear to me what those objectives are, when the US wasn't, you know, able to say we've satisfied our objectives in the first three days, then I think at that point, the optimal outcome was to declare victory and walk away because where we are today was was in many respects of forecastable event. The Iranians, you know, with, you know, decapitation strikes, putting them basically against the wall, you know, they were going to push the economic nuclear button and, you know, close the straits when the US is in a position where that's the obvious next step for the adversary, you walk away. Like why would you do it? For whatever reasons, we decided to double and triple and quadruple down. And so we're still here. The Iranians have pressed the button. And so we're now in this situation, which I didn't expect to happen. I thought that the US would have cut its losses by now. And, you know, gone home. We didn't pull off of Venezuela. So move on. So we're now in a, in a slightly different world than the one that I was, that I was talking about before. What hasn't happened is we haven't seen a sort of collapse in consumer confidence. We haven't any more than had already been soft. We haven't seen a collapse in the financial markets. You know, we haven't seen everybody sort of, you know, in the US in particular sort of panicking in the way that you might expect, given the magnitude of the disruption. And I think there's, I think there's sort of, you know, a couple of different reasons for that one. The US is, as I said before, it's, it's to a great extent insulated from, from these, from these events in the Straits of Hormuz, because US consumers are able to consume, consume natural gas, which is domestically produced and has limited exit opportunities because we have the price at the Henry hub as well has been relatively unchanged. I mean, certainly gasoline prices are up 60 cents a gallon. But is that really a lot? Well, I mean, politically it's a lot. Once you hit $4 a gallon, you know, folks start to lose elections. But I agree with you that, you know, the percentage of people's salaries that fossil fuels represents was, at its peak in 1973, was lower during the first call for and is much lower today, right? So we're going to have some inflation just because energy going up, you know, by this much is going to flow through to fertilizer and all sorts of other stuff. But, but I agree with you, natural gas prices remain low in the United States. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think one of the things we talked about before was that the implications for the rest of the world were going to be extreme and dramatic and the implications for the US consumer, at least in the beginning, were going to be a lot, a lot lower. And I think that's one of the reasons why the US is doing this, you know, because, you know, we kind of look at this and we say, well, it's not that bad, you know, you say 60 cents. I mean, you know, 60 cents is not the end of the world in the same way. Well, that certainly Trump's point of view, he thinks that everyone makes so much money that 60 cents a gallon is immaterial to most family incomes, even though I think a lot of his mega voters probably think of this. Might disagree. Yeah. But let's just go through some of the other things you said, right? So I think one of the things you said was that, you know, Iran was going to let its friends, you know, send their oil through the street, but not their enemies. It does seem like that's happening. Is that how you read it? Is it too to your system? Yeah. So it's more than seen. It's becoming pretty explicit now. So the flow through the streets never really went to zero. They went down quite a lot, but you were still getting something like a million barrels a day, you know, push through. And that was almost entirely Iranian flagged and owned tankers. Now what you seem to be getting is you're starting to get Chinese, Pakistani, Indian, tankers and cargo ships who are being, you know, granted safe passage. And it seems that what the the Iranians are trying to do is to funnel them through a a straight, which is very close to the Iranian coast as a way of checking them. So this is just a report that I've that I've heard as a possible indication that what they're implementing is sort of a long term strategy to try and manage who gets to go through and who doesn't. And you know, that's that's kind of what you'd expect them to do, right? Oh, yeah. No, I mean, I, I mean, I totally get it. I just wanted to give you credit for predicting it, right? All right. The next one is you predicted that the 50 largest oil importing countries would look at 2026 and say, we need alternatives. Earlier this week, NPR, National Public Radio, ran a story about how the Pakistani solar boom is helping them weather the crisis better than anyone expected. Bloomberg is calling this the first oil crisis where clean alternatives are fully priced competitive. Is that acceleration real? Where do I begin? So I think one of the things we talked about is behavior changing. And I think it's it's obviously only a couple weeks in. So it's it's too it's too soon to see like these massive shifts. But I think you are seeing sort of governments respond in the first order with which you'd expect them to do. So you have the SPR releases that's that's not really a surprise. You also have people, you know, implementing export controls in China, in Brazil. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point, and I have no indication that this is being discussed, but it wouldn't surprise me. If at some point we get export controls out of the US, you know, which would be bonkers. I mean like us like not selling finished goods and diesel, whatever I mean. As you know, our refineries cannot use most of the oil that we produce, right? I mean, we still import 6.6 million barrels a day into our refineries. So there's and there's a trade and a lot of, you know, a lot of that trade takes advantage of the global network so that, you know, the Northeast is sort of plugged into the, you know, Atlantic refinery system and the Gulf Coast is plugged into a different refinery trading system. So, you know, for the US to sort of take advantage of this, you know, so called autarky, you know, you have to restructure those, those trade flows. I think the thing that's concerning is that you're starting to see a little bit of that happening around the world where other people are saying, right, you know, my refined products, you know, not yours, which is sort of a flashing, a flashing red light. I think something else though that we've talked about is what the longer term implications are for people's countries, behavior. And this is where I think it gets really, really important. And you're starting to see movement at the sort of the verbal level or the signaling level and I think this is going to follow through on the policy level. You know, when Trump first came out and said that he wanted, you know, other countries to start escorting traffic through the straits, you know, helping the US to solve this problem. He listed, you know, what was it? The UK, France, Korea, Japan and China, right? So he has already created this bucket of countries that have shared interests and are sort of aligned in what they need to do. He's sort of pushed America's allies into a relationship with a country that, you know, in theory, they have this sort of, I wouldn't say adversarial relationship, but, you know, that they're not aligned with. And I think that is something that we need to look for over the course of the coming months and years, which is European countries, America's partners in Asia and throughout the world and the Gulf as well, you know, saying China, we may not like certain, you know, political values that you hold or we may not like these aspects of your economic policies. But we have more in common with you now, and we're willing to cooperate or negotiate or, you know, well, that was the crazy thing I saw was that I mean, you're using words like allies and partners as if Trump has treated anyone like an ally or a partner over the last 12 months. And now we're going to them hat in hand and saying, it'd be so great for you to help us even though last time this was attempted, one third of all the ships were sunk, right? But like, but this time around, don't worry, it'll be different. We would love your help to, you know, to open up the Straits of Hormuz, like, I mean, you know, color me skeptical. I don't see a lot of folks taking them up on this. Well, I think the reaction from Europe has been pretty clear. They've said no. Yeah. And I think China actually just like spit out their tea laughing. Yeah, but I think China doesn't have to. I mean, I think something that, you know, we talked about before is that, you know, Iran, like, I mean, Iran is okay, you know, giving China China's already getting their stuff out and, you know, their importance is going to an increasing volume. Yeah. Yeah. Their imports are so small as a percentage of their total energy use. They've got their overland natural gas route from Russia. I mean, they, they're in pretty decent shape. They've been stockpiling oil the last year. So they have them in stockpiling natural gas. So they don't have the natural gas reserves that you would hope for. And I think, you know, on natural gas, you know, this, this is an area where they could be a little bit more vulnerable. But I don't think they're, I think they're prepared for this, actually. So I think that's, I think that's, so we're talking, I just want to go back to where the, the question started. You know, like, how is behavior changing? So one is, I think we're reshaping the alliance. We're sort of reshuffling the deck with, you know, like, who's in whose camp? And I don't, I don't think we're like creating any like new long term, you know, I love it forever, forever brother, kind of relationships. I think it's very like in this particular context, I've got more in common with you than I don't. Let's work together. The other one that I think is sort of very, very clear is that you have, you have got to stand on the accelerator for your localized energy. And I know this is something that, you know, we've talked about many, many times. I think, actually, I think you sent me the telegraph article that was talking about how the person who's in charge of renewables UK, renewables UK, the wind advocacy in the UK is like, let, let, North Sea oil and gas be developed. Like, it's okay. So I don't mean to go on a big tangent on this, but it's basically an X shell executive slash work to 10 downing, who is now the head of renewables UK. And she wrote an op-ed. She wasn't misquoted in an article. She wrote an op-ed in the telegraph saying, we need to like open up the North Sea to oil and gas drilling, right? Being the head of basically the offshore wind trade association. And in the UK, now at the same time Ed Miliband, right, who is a friend, like, is, you know, like an environmentalist, like he doesn't want to open up the, the, you know, the North Sea. And so, like, I hear you on the localization side, but the UK has got some complicated politics. And so for the head of renewables UK, to be calling on Ed Miliband, to open up the North Sea, to me is like bonkers. I don't know that it's bonkers. I think it, I mean, I think it makes, I think it makes a lot of sense. Wind, solar with battery, nuclear, all of these, you know, SMRs, you know, they need to compete with fossil fuels on their merits. And they are competitive on their merits. I mean, think about it like this. What's the worst possible outcome for the renewables path, the renewables transition? The worst possible outcome is blackouts. As soon as we get to a point where we actually can't keep the lights on, then the backlash becomes vicious. And people do what people do. They're like, give me power, whatever it costs, wherever it comes from, I want my lights back on, you know, where did Germany go when they had the power crisis because the natural gas from, from Russia was curtailed, they went to the, the Lignight call. They just went down and dirty. So get in front of that, like focus on building out your renewable stock, stand on the accelerator, you know, get it there. But make sure that if you're balancing the grid, your balance in the grid with local molecules. And make sure that if you're feeding you, if you're feeding a pet cam industry, which we can't do without the barrel at this point, do it with your local barrels. And if you're flying jets, which we can't do on batteries, you know, we're not there yet, or hydrogen, or SAF, make sure it's local. And throw money at solutions to, you know, solve those problems, which are solvable. But like, you know, focus on keeping the system functional so that everybody is like, yeah, okay, this whole transition thing is working. I think that's what I would, what I would lean on here. Okay, last setup question. Who's up and who's down? Tankers are, take our companies drop 60%. Airlines are getting crushed. United airlines dropped 33% in a single day. The solar and clean energy index is way up. You spend your days talking to investors and traders. Like, what is the money tell us about where the world thinks this is going? So I think the world is complacent to be quite honest at the moment. You know, the trades you're talking out of the obvious ones. I want to point out that Donald Trump has been extremely good for the renewables space on a financial return space. Oh, like, like in the first term, we were up like 200%. It was fantastic. Despite his best efforts, let's say that. I mean, ironically or not. Yeah, he is in fact the environmental president. As much as I think he hate to hear that. I mean, I feel like what you mean to say is he's the degrowth president. Like, we've got, like, I mean, Scott Besson on TV is like, I would like consumers to stop consuming as much. We'd like to tear off the things that they consume, but not like inputs into our oil and gas industry or semiconductor industry, etc. But look at what we just look at the results. I mean, you know, I don't think Donald Trump has any desire to place himself in camp green. But the outcome of his actions is everybody scrambling to say, I need more solar. I need more battery. So we're doing that not because of him, but in spite of him to be fair. Imagine what our growth would look like if he weren't fighting us tooth and nail every step of the way. Hey, I agree. I agree with you. But the fact is, first there's Donald, then there's green. Hey, it's a there's a causal relationship here. He doesn't intend it, but he gets there. All right, let's get into the next conversation. So Jason Bordeaux who runs the Columbia Center on energy basically has said that what really made the world use oil more efficiently was in 1973 oil embargo and all of the the 10 years after that, not the 10 years after the Paris agreement. It does feel like we're bet we're entering the 1973 oil embargo again now that the straights of form is seem closed for the foreseeable future. And I don't know, we might even need ground troops to be able to open it back up, right, which would be, you know, like an unmitigated disaster, I'm sure. And so, you know, like explain to me whether you think we're back, like this is 1973 level disruption. So I think the outcomes are going to be very very reminiscent of 1973, but maybe not necessarily in the same way for the United States. So in 1973, the oil was disrupted. The US was the big loser in that. And so there were sort of two policies that came out of it. The first one was Nixon who was the environmental president because he ended up pushing for project independence and, you know, pushed on nuclear and pushed on renewables in order to reduce America's dependency. The second big policy shift was was Carter who was, you know, the American sort of the multilateralist, the peace lover. But the Carter doctrine said that we were going to protect the flow of oil from the Gulf into the rest of the world. And then it was a Reagan corollary which said, and that extends to protecting Saudi Arabia. So that was the sort of the impact of this oil shock on US policy. Now look at the impact of the Hormuz shock on everybody else's foreign policy, right? So in the case of China, it means that they are now more deeply involved in what's going to go on with, you know, the Gulf states and with the flow of crude oil, they're more, they're being pulled more into helping to manage the global, the global trading system. So they're sort of stepping up as, I wouldn't say the next headgemon, but they're getting close. The European countries are, you know, finding themselves in this position where they have to change their, their economic policies dramatically in order to respond. So in the same ways as Nixon's project independence was really motivated by this fear of, that was generated by an oil shock, I think the Europeans are feeling this oil shock and I'm saying, my God, here we go again. Like, I need to have, you know, a change. I think the, I think something we talked about before was that, you know, there's going to be a spike in prices when we were last speaking oil had not yet sputged, but it then subsequently went up and briefly touched 120. But that the longer term implications are going to be the things that people talked about 10 years later. And I think the longer term implications here, very, very much like what we saw in the 1970s are a re-shuffling of the global alliances and that's happening like in real time at speed, a real push for localization, diversification and redundancy and structurally higher oil and gas prices, energy prices. So, you know, we are going to see for the foreseeable future higher insurance rates because now we know that tankers are a fair game. We are going to see, you know, more storage, you know, people are going to put, you know, more refined product into storage just in case instead of 10 days, it's going to be 90 days. We're going to see longer supply chains. We're going to see more oil on the water, more gas on the water as people have to avoid these places. And we're going to see redundancy in capacity. So, people are going to say kind of like we were talking about before, Jamie, I want to be able to, you know, to pull this out of the ground in my own space. So, this is going to mean a structurally higher energy price certainly for oil and gas. And then that's going to have that knock on effect for renewables. It's going to make renewables look better. Well, the other thing that Michael Semblist said in the eye of the market from JP Morgan was that the amount of trade finance that China is providing the 50 emerging markets around the world today in terms of solar, wind, battery storage EVs is larger than the US Marshall plant. As a percentage of? In absolute dollars, inflation adjust is like 250 billion dollars or so of aid that they're providing, like it's not aid in the sense of grants. It's aid in the sense of like loose credit for countries that probably couldn't get it. But that's how Pakistan shifted 10% of its entire, you know, gridden two years. Yeah, I mean, let's I mean, let's bear in mind that the Marshall plant wasn't a gift. It was, I will give you credit so you can buy stuff from America. Well sure. And they're doing the same thing. Exactly. You could buy stuff from China. Right. But but go back to what we're saying about, like, you know, knitting together alliances. I mean, I think, you know, China isn't like, you know, walking up to everybody in the world and saying, hey, let's sign a contract to be new best friends. China is saying, you know, at like, I got this thing, you need this thing. How about I help you out? And like, you know, we can hang out at the coffee shop and, you know, chat more. And I think people like, yeah, okay, I'll chat with you more, you know, you're not as maybe as airy as I used to think you were. I think that's the outcome. Okay. Here what you're saying, James, an Isaac Levi at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air called this the first oil and gas crisis in which clean alternatives are fully price competitive. And so the looking at the solar beams, we should expect this sabust deployment in a major way and that that might be significant and durable this time. So is that how you see it or do you think analysts are kind of getting ahead of themselves in this moment? I don't think they're getting ahead of themselves. I think before we got, we got, you know, it stuck into this, this conflict in Iran, I think renewables were looking cost competitive and attractive with the right conditions. Right? So like, always have that coffee, you know, you have to have to storage, you have to have the grid, et cetera, and so forth. But it starts to make a lot of sense. Now it makes more sense because oil prices higher, gas prices higher, wind and solar just look that much better. I think the other thing that we just kind of need to focus on is that we've renewables are very, very good at replacing jewels on the grid. But that's as far as they can go at this point. And on a jewels on an energy contained basis, they just look pretty good compared to or increasingly get better compared to fossil fuels. The harder parts are the ones that remained. It's where you really need that the molecule either because it's a, it's stored energy that you can really move around in a, in store in a way that's that's very, very useful or it can become a specialty chemical or or plastic that's really, really useful. Those are going to take a lot longer for us to kind of squeeze out of the system. But right now from a clean energy perspective, yeah, I mean, this just makes renewables look better. Yeah, if you look at China, I mean, China is about 10% of their economy more electrified than the United States. Right? So that opportunity exists, right? Like, you know, there are about 35% of their total energy uses electric electricity. The United States is like 25%, right? So it feels like the US could get to 35% all the other countries in the world could do the same. But I'm curious, like you said that oil hit 120 hours a barrel or touched it, right? It sort of retrenched a little bit now. What would you have to believe for oil to hit 200? If this curtailment of flow goes on for very much longer and in this is and in a meaningful way, 200's going to look easy. Meaning we start months. You are going to start exhausting the the excess inventory, the inventory above ground in strategic stocks and in commercial stocks that is incremental to what you need just to keep the basic system flowing. If you're running at 10 million barrels a day lost for the next eight weeks or so, you're going to start hitting tank bottoms. And at that point, you have to start destroying demand. And destroying demand gets really, really ugly. You have to take the price up so that somebody stops consuming it. The people who will stop consuming it are not going to be the Europeans or the Americans or the Japanese and Koreans. It's going to be people in Africa or Latin America or South Asia where they simply don't have the resources to pay for it. The Europeans will bid away LNG carriers and and pick them up. The other place where I think you need to be really, really careful is to bear in mind that you're talking about Brent. Brent is right now $100 commodity. But Dubai is a different grade and it's $150 commodity. What is that reflecting? Part of that is reflecting just shut in and trap the capacity for a particular spec. Part of it is reflecting that that is a kind of a barrel which is very keyed or which were find reason Asia, which are very keyed to take and which they need in order to produce the downstream products and in order to produce what we actually consume. Nobody consumes the barrel. So that's gotten bid very, very aggressively. So you talk about $200. You're talking about Brent. You're talking about WTI. You're talking about an Atlantic Basin barrel where inventories are still relatively robust where you don't have that particular grade being curtailed. What the the Iranians are holding up on is actually a Dubai barrel or a non-b barrel that is not $100. It's already at $150. Now if that starts to ripple out through the rest of the world, which is what globalized commodity markets do, they start to spread in their price implications. Then that can get pretty pretty ugly and that's how you get to your $200. We mentioned before one of the things that I'd be careful of is the possibility of export controls. There's this new idea out there that instead of having a global trading system where we look for efficiencies from trading with our neighbors, now what we want to do is have localized production in the entire chain in order to preserve our own economic independence, which by the way, I'm advocating for because we live in a scary time. In a circumstance where you start to see these extreme product shortages, you know, jet fuel in Singapore went to $230. It's back down below 200, but like that's extraordinary. When you see these extreme product shortages, you will see countries start to put in export controls. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a circumstance where the US started controlling its exports flows. In this world, I think one of the things that I'm not seeing yet, or maybe I'm starting to see, but I want to see more of. We have to recognize that energy has been weaponized. And regardless of how you want to score the events, the flow of gas and oil through the Straits of Hormuz have been used in the context of a war as a way to punish your adversaries. And the people who are feeling this pain are Europeans, amongst others. And what I need to see from the Europeans is a recognition that we need to look at our energy infrastructure in the same way we would any other vital national security infrastructure. So when we think about defense, one would hope we don't skimp on the resources that we provide in order to maintain our security and sovereignty. When we look at energy infrastructure, we need to take that same attitude. And I think policymakers and Brussels, heads of state throughout the European Union, need to apply that same focus and that same urgency to questions about aligning the grid infrastructure or developing a coherent strategy for rolling out localized energy, which is almost entirely renewables, for restarting nuclear where you can do it. But to do that with a sense of urgency as if your sovereignty depends on it, because I think the weaponization of energy is telling you that your sovereignty depends on it. The conversations at Sarah Week are going to be fascinating. Jigger, you said something on open circuit this week that really seemed to get a lot of people's attention, no surprise. You said you have no problem with countries building more coal plants because they're going to build them and not burn them. Solar and storage are just cheaper. China burned 3% less coal last year, even after building 60 gigawatts of new coal plants. Your line was why shouldn't we shouldn't be fearful of coal plant construction? We should be fearful of coal plant burning. James, what's your reaction to that? Do you think the LNG step is just getting skipped entirely? My reaction was I loved it when I heard it. I was listening to Jigger on the podcast. I thought it was just brilliant. The thing that I really liked about it was that it was really putting the focus on the utility that coal provides. The price per unit of energy, I mean, I like renewables, except when I can't get it. That's when I really want the coal. At that moment, fine, no problem. Turn it on. That's the price. When I don't need that, because I've got to better something out there, which is the wind blowing or the sun shining and the grid working, then it just sits there. The beauty of coal is it does just sit there. Before the whole set of events in the streets of Hornboos, I would have been arguing against Jigger on the coal side and on behalf of natural gas, because natural gas does other stuff. You can get to a less environmentally damaging place with emissions from natural gas. But going back to the start of the conversation, I didn't really think we were going to push ourselves into a situation where somebody actually closes the straight, which is just unheard of, I'm thinking. It's crazy town. It's what you get taught in basic, like, national security 101. There are no good options to reopening the straights of Hornboos. Do not take steps to close it. Exactly. Like, step away from the car, sir. Like, there's nothing good about this. But I really think Trump thinks that this is his legacy in some way. Right? But this is a thing that's so crazy for me is I feel like, I mean, Trump is the person who was like, I'm going to cut your energy bills in half, right? But I've bullied the oil companies to open up the spigot, such that oil prices are down, and I'm saving you a bunch of money on gasoline. His legacy, which is what he's pursuing, I think, right now with all this foreign war stuff, is now that Americans are poor. That Americans can't afford a plane ticket because one-third of the cost of your airline ticket is jet fuel. They can't afford to fill up their gas in their car every week because it's an extra 20 bucks now every single week, right? Electricity cost up 13% since he got into office. Like I just feel like execution is not his strong suit. Yeah, I mean, I just want to go back to the conversation that we were having, James, before it. Like, Trump inadvertently has made himself into the guy who's going to spread the environmental transition around the world. So I don't think he intended to, and he's clearly not in, you know, his intent wasn't to make Americans, you know, net poor, but you know, that may actually, you know, kind of be what happens. I think one of the things I struggle with here, Jigger, is like, we're sitting here and we're trying to ascribe a intent. I didn't expect the straights to be closed because the sort of sequence of events was so obvious. You keep saying it's bomb. It is half a brain cell actually worked there and that they wouldn't have like intentionally like launched this conflict without a plan. And then you're like, wait, what? There really wasn't a plan. I forgot. Don't forget that. We don't know what the goals are. Right. So let's not, let's not put, let's, I think they took a gamble. The gamble didn't pan out. I don't know that I should, that I would have taken that gamble, but when it didn't pan out, that was the time to cut the loss. Right. Yeah. Their best chance to have declared victory was before how many Sun was, was put in as supreme leader. So now that, like, and now that like he's been put in and they, I guess, narrowly missed killing him the other day, then like, you know, like Trump can't declare victory in leave because if the Straits of Hormuz are closed and he declares victory in leaves, then people will be like, what the hell? Like the Straits of Hormuz are still closed. So the only way for him to declare victory is if the Straits are open and that is controlled by Iran, not by the United States of America. So, so the Straits aren't fully closed. It's not a binary on, I mean, it's one million barrels a day that's getting through. Yeah, I understand, but it's one million and it's probably going to increase. It's just going to increase at Iran's discretion. And so you're saying they're making a lot of friends? I think they're, they're in a position of more power than they were in before. Wow. I mean, that's a hot take. I'm just saying, I'm just saying that so far the US mission has failed. All I'm saying is all I hear on day is how much winning we have, so much winning. And you're basically saying that like Iran is making more friends than Mark Zuckerberg ever could. So like you say friends as if people like you, I have yet to find any. Friends of convenience. I mean, it's sort of like you're in Chinese example in, you know, a coffee shop. Yeah. I'm going to find anybody, Jigger, who's, who's like said, oh, wow, I'm really bemoaning the Iranian regime itself. I see a lot of people who are deeply profoundly troubled for what's happening to the Iranian people and for the consequences of the choices that the Iranian regime is taking. But nobody really, I don't know anybody who likes the regime. So nobody's going to be their friend, but they have the ability to do things now that they didn't before. You know, they were always holding back from, you know, bloat, you know, the nuclear option on the Straits because they were afraid of getting pummeled by the United States. Now they've been pummeled. That's out like that's been done. Like we've blown a whole bunch of stuff up. We've, we've killed a lot of leaders and, and their family members. What left do they have to lose? So they push the button. They close the Straits, which by the way, they haven't actually blown up a lot of ships. They've just closed the Straits by threatening, blowing up a few and threatening to blow up a lot of ships. You know, something that's really important here is that like in sort of a brilliant way, they've used the Western financial system against the West. I tell you, hey, there's a pretty good chance that insured vessel is not going to transit. And Lloyd says, you're right. It's not going to transit. You know, the US offers, well, maybe we'll write to check and we'll ensure that vessel. And then somebody sits down and thinks, well, hold on, we've just made it more attractive for the Iranians to then blow up that vessel. Because then not only do they curtail the flow, do they scare people off, but they make sure that the US has to pay, has to write a check to compensate. So what they've done is they've sort of weaponized our own financial system, you know, against us in a, in a, in a, in a pretty effective way. The end result here is that an Iran, which is no longer afraid of being bombed, is an Iran which now has agency and capacity to do things which it would have restrained itself from doing in the past. If you want them to stop at this point, you can't say or else, "Albamiyo," right? Well, we've already done it. Look, the last time you came on the pod, James, you told us that nobody calls you when they want to feel better about the future. So, I don't know what you're going to say to this last question, but I'll ask it anyway. Is there a reason for optimism? Absolutely. I am an optimist. Let's clarify this. I go through every possible permutation of the downside scenarios and like, you know, ruminate them on them, you know, to the point where I have no friends left, and then I go ahead and do it anyways. So that, like, what is optimism except for that? I think that something that we've talked about over the course of these papers that have been working on with my colleague, Jeff Curry, over the past two years is how, you know, the circumstances that create incentives for the United States in particular have changed in some really, really meaningful ways. And so we wrote the new Jullar and we start with this one basic observation. When the US is no longer energy dependent, it's no longer an energy importer, it's incentives with respect to the global energy trade change. With the new Marshall Plan, we talked about the US being afraid of the Soviet Union. Soviet Union collapses, we're not afraid of the Soviet Union anymore, our behavior with respect to, with respect to Europe changes. And so we've been living in sort of this like, you know, you know, hallucinatory state for the past, you know, 10 years or so. We're like, we sort of imagine that like everything was going to continue the way it always had and that, you know, the US was going to continue providing all of these, you know, wonderful services like as a benign global headgemon. And that needed to stop. Like we needed to wake up and like not rely upon the US to do these things. And that's what we're doing. So you want to know like what good comes out of this? The good that comes out of this is that, you know, all of these countries which allowed themselves to be dependent and in some ways submissive to the US are not going to let themselves be dependent. We will invest in a localized energy system with, you know, renewables and nuclear at the core because that keeps us, you know, safe that provides us with cheap, abundant power. And, you know, we can do it on our own. We will talk to other countries around the world as if they are our, as if they deserve respect and we'll treat them as equals. We will negotiate, we will give, we will take and we will, we will work it out and we won't look for the US to sort of underpin and guarantee and, you know, chastise or punish and reward people who play, you know, according to the rules or who doubt. We're going to start to accept, you know, exercising a little bit of independent action. And sort of grow up a little bit. So you're saying that Iran is going to be the thing that solidifies Trump as the wind and solar president. You really love that one, don't you? Well, there is certainly a lot of hot air there. I think one of the things that has to happen is we have got to accelerate on renewables. I just don't see how you can avoid it in Europe and everybody I talk to is just like, yeah, you're right. I do also think that, you know, we want to be careful in giving him credit as opposed to acknowledging his role as the midwife. Well, and I think the thing that we didn't talk about, but I do think is even more important to get accelerated is going to be electric vehicles. I mean, I think that you're just going to see such a huge acceleration of the deployment of electric vehicles into these 50, you know, oil importing nations because like why would you keep yourself dependent upon importing gasoline and diesel? So the so the beauty of electric vehicles is like, you know, gas gasoline does something really super useful. It is portable stored energy. It's just like it's great. Now, if I have an EV and I have a grid that can support it, then I can start to take away the utility of that gasoline. And I want to do that if I feel like that gasoline can be curtailed like war after war after war is started and fought over resources. So, you know, when I think about what's going on in the Straits of Formos and I ask myself, am I comfortable having that dependency? No, where's my oil consumption largest transportation fuels? How do I get that out of the system on a like high volume basis? I electrify my park, my vehicle park. I expand my infrastructure of chart my charging network infrastructure. I increase, you know, the support for EVs on the road and that reduces my dependence. And the beauty of it here is that you can reach this sort of tipping point where like you no longer actually have to do that much in order to just let nature take its course and people naturally move to an EV charging network. So think about it like this. You know, we talk about range anxiety with electric vehicles and, you know, that's sure. Like you can solve range anxiety with batteries, you know, with a charging network, you know, all these wonderful things. So it's not like we don't have range anxiety with ice vehicles like I still, if I'm particularly if I live in Texas or, you know, Wyoming, like I need to know that there's a gas station where I can, I can refuel my vehicle. As EVs start to extend, you know, throughout the system, there are fewer vehicles that are going on to the petrol station for courts. There are fewer people paying for, you know, the soda pop and the candy bars and filling up their tanks. So the economics behind the gasoline recharging infrastructure start to deteriorate and those are expensive. Like it's messy having, you know, a petrol station and paying to make sure that you're not leaking into the housing estate next door and all that kind of stuff. So once you get to this certain level of EV penetration, you kind of just, you don't really need to do anything anymore because the utility of having an ice vehicle starts to go down. I start wondering how can I get to Scotland, you know, without having to hunt around for a place to refill my, my ice engine kind of stuff. Well, always a pleasure, James. I hope this is the last time we'll have you on, but I'm, I'm, unfortunately don't think that's going to be the case. I feel like like your expertise is going to become more and more important in the coming months. So well, Jigger and Jamie, I always have great pleasure in talking to you. So I hope I do have another chance to come on. I just need to find, you know, really cheerful things to say. I want to thank James Gottman for coming on with, I think 24 hours notice. He is a rock star. I always learned so much from him. So thank you, James, for coming on board. Thank you Simon for getting all of the notes and everything else together in such record time. And thanks everyone for listening. Really important to have your support. And like people say, you know, give us a review and a rating. It really does help people find the podcast and visit us on YouTube if you're so inclined. Even though I find I never do the video thing. I heard that I look fantastic kind of video. So kidding. But anyway, thank you so much and thank you to our sponsors. Just really important to have your support. Thanks S2G.