The war in Iran is entering its third month, and according to the War in Iran Energy Cost Tracker — a new project from the Watson School's Climate Solutions Lab — the war has already cost Americans over 40 billion extra dollars in gas and diesel. But as Jeff Colgan, professor of political science at the Watson School and director of Watson’s Climate Solutions Lab, explains, when it comes to the effects of this war, the rising price of fuel is just the tip of the iceberg.

On this episode, Watson School dean and economist John Friedman talks with Jeff about its effects on everything from individual consumer finances to national security, geopolitics, and the future of climate change.

Check out the Climate Solutions Lab’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker

JOHN FRIEDMAN: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm John Friedman, the Dean of the Watson School and your guest host for this episode. By the time you are listening to this podcast, it will have been three months since the start of the war in Iran, and with it, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important shipping passages. Its closure has cut off more than 10% of the global oil supply. A shock with consequences not only for consumers and their pocketbooks, but also for the shape of global energy markets, green technology investment, and the politics of the climate transition.

To help make sense of the wide ranging effects of this war on the global energy economy, I have with me here today Professor Jeff Colgan. Jeff is the Richard Holbrooke Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs. He is the author of several books on energy and international national politics, including most recently Partial Hegemony-- Oil Politics and International Order. And he is the director of the Watson School's Climate Solutions Lab. Jeff, thanks for coming on the show.

JEFF COLGAN: John, thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to be back on Trending Globally.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So I want to start with some of the more immediate effects of this war on the energy sector, and how it's being felt by everyday people here in the United States. Last month, you and your colleagues at the Climate Solutions Lab released the Iran war energy cost tracker. Tell the audience about that.

JEFF COLGAN: Well, we're seeing in the wake of the February 28 attack on Iran, that prices for gasoline, for diesel, for lots of other petroleum based products were skyrocketing almost immediately because suddenly that Strait of Hormuz was closed. The Climate Solutions Lab had a little bit of experience with this, that four years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine, we did a report on what that meant for Europe's cost of fossil fuels, and we knew that there was something of a gap there that people could see prices moving, but there was still an extra step that would be useful for people to understand-- what do those prices really mean for households and for countries as a whole, in terms of the aggregate amount of extra spending on fossil fuels?

And then this semester, I had a student in my class who was a double concentrator in economics and computer science and who really understood commodity trading. So I want to give him a little bit of credit. John Perdue has just been an excellent RA to work with and helped me build this website that could share the information about how much the total cost to the United States, to Americans of the price increases from just two products-- gasoline and diesel. What did that actually mean for the country as a whole?

And so as of today, as we're recording this, it's meant that we as a country have spent $43 billion extra on fuel compared to what we would have or what we could have expected to have paid for fuel if the war hadn't happened starting February 28. And that number, of course, keeps tracking up.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So let's unpack what we're seeing on the tracker. And so first just starting at an aggregate level, you mentioned that we are in total at $43 billion. So that's like $100 a month, maybe a little bit more per household. One of the strange features of this is that the United States actually does not get hardly any oil from the Middle East, or that would have transited through the Strait of Hormuz. In the first place, we are an energy exporter as a country now. So if that's where you started, help us understand why it is that all these consumers are feeling these effects as they are.

JEFF COLGAN: Great question. And you're absolutely right that a few years ago, thanks to the fracking revolution here in the United States, we as a country moved from being a net importer of oil to a net exporter. And that means that we have less direct physical contact with the oil that comes out of the Middle East. But the global market for oil and for oil products like gasoline and diesel and jet fuel, these are very globally integrated markets. And so when you get a price shock in the Persian Gulf, it turns out that it first affects Asia because those are the immediate consumers of that product. But then it rapidly ripples through the whole global market.

And when the price of various products, oil and gasoline go up in Asia, then American producers think, aha, we can now sell our oil for higher prices in Asia than we would in the United States. And so they start exporting it to Asia. And that in turn drives up the price here in the United States. And so there really is this very interconnected market. And the only real way to separate that would be something like an export ban, which we actually used to have as a country up until Twenty Fifteen. We in the Nineteen Seventies established an export ban, but we got rid of it in Twenty Fifteen when we started to have this very strong economic interest in exporting.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: I was actually in the White House when we were preparing to get rid of the export ban. And I remember this meeting very clearly. We'd been talking about something else, and then someone came in and they said, hey, we got the polling back. And eliminating the export ban is like the least popular thing we've ever pulled for. And I was like, I don't get it. We have a thing and other people want to pay us a lot of money for it. I don't understand. And they said, yes, that's why you do the economics and we do the politics. And that's let's keep it that way.

We should come back to some of these potential longer run dynamics, but let's dive in for the moment into some of the patterns that we see on the tracker. And one of the aspects of it that I thought was really neat was not just that you show these patterns at an aggregate level for the US, but you have a map on the tracker and we've put the link to it in the show notes for those of you who are listening. So you can check it out for yourself. And you have these statistics for different states across the country. And what's, I think, really interesting is you see quite a bit of variation.

So just to pick two numbers, Alabama turns out to be one of the hardest hit states. We see households there paying as much as an extra $270 as a result of the war, while those in Washington State, as another example, have paid less than half of that. And so I had thought that maybe just the prices have gone up more in Alabama than in Washington, but turns out that's not the case. Their prices are, in fact, very, very similar in terms of the increase. They're both about $1.25, $1.50 higher per gallon in both of those places. So help us understand what else is driving the fact that Alabama households are really paying a lot extra for this, and others, like in Washington or not.

JEFF COLGAN: Yeah, great. So you're absolutely right. This is a good comparison to do. So some of the story is just that on average day to day, some states have more expensive fuel than other states. So California famously has the most expensive gasoline in the country, sometimes eclipsed by Hawaii, but usually it's California. That has to do with local taxes. It has to do with local fuel requirements. So actually the type of fuel that is sold in California is more tightly regulated than in other parts of the country.

But then on top of that, there's also differences in how much we drive and what vehicles we drive. And so we might expect more, say, pickup trucks or larger vehicles in Alabama than we do in Washington. And again, these are broad averages and also the distances are different. So the distances that we typically drive you and I in Rhode Island are very, very short compared to say, Texas, where the average driving distances are much, much larger. And so that means that the total household burdens are quite different, as you say, from state to state. And some people are feeling it more.

I think it's worth pointing out not just something that we don't track in the tracker, but something that is happening in reality is that there's variation not only between states, but also between professions. So farmers especially, are getting hit in all kinds of different ways because they're paying more for their fuel for their tractors, but they're also paying more for fertilizers, which is a product that is made from crude oil derivatives as well.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And you mentioned that point about how it's not just gasoline and diesel that are being affected, it's other petroleum products. You mentioned jet fuel or plastics are petroleum products. The Middle East turns out to be one of the largest suppliers of fertilizer around the world. And then the prices of fuel and all of these things will not just show up in the prices that consumers are directly paying for them, but in higher prices for food because the farmers have higher input costs and higher prices for consumer goods, because the cost of trucking things around has gotten more expensive.

JEFF COLGAN: Yeah, it's definitely the case that we are underestimating the total impact on this because, as you say, there's so many impacts. Gasoline is the one that, I think, almost everyone can relate to that. Yes, gasoline clearly going into the tank of almost everybody's car.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Well, it's not just that everyone uses gasoline. It's that you drive along the road and there's the price of it right there. So I think if you wanted to pick one thing that's going to be not just salient, but maybe representative of how people are responding to it, that makes complete sense. They're going to be much less sensitive to the fact that the strawberries are a little bit more expensive because the tractor fuel and the fertilizer have gone up.

JEFF COLGAN: Yeah, but I mean, just to give you some answer to the question, I think you're right to think about it as at least another order of magnitude. So it would probably be if today it's $43 billion, the total cost is probably on the order of $86 and above billion. But it's going to be differently distributed to different parts of society. So jet fuel is going to hit the upper segment of society harder because richer people fly more often. And yet diesel fuel, I think, is going to affect, again, mostly everybody, but especially hard hit for the lower parts of society because it drives up the prices of any goods that are shipped, which is basically everything. And so groceries and anything that gets shipped by UPS or FedEx or anything, they all run on diesel fuel.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So another of the patterns that you've laid out very nicely on the tracker is that you can see the entire time series of this since the war started at the end of February. And what you see there is a very interesting pattern. Roughly for the first two months of the war. So until the end of April or so, gas prices, as you mentioned, they immediately went up, but then they really leveled off. They were less than $1 more expensive, $0.75, something like that.

Over the past month, we've seen them level up again. And so, of course, this differs by place and by day, but I think we're now closer to more $1.25 higher on average across the country. Help us understand what's been happening that's been making this cost increasing and how you see that going forward.

JEFF COLGAN: Great question. And I think we should pull apart two different things. There's one thing that's happening, which is that the price of crude oil itself is very volatile and actually has been reacting quite strongly to President Trump's Truth Social account, where he announces, oh, there's going to be peace. No, there's going to be no more bombing, et cetera. And that's driven a huge amount of spiking up and down in the price of crude oil.

But on gasoline and diesel, as you say, there's been a different pattern. It's steadier. The dynamic there that's more important than the president's daily statements is our expectations of when is this buffer going to run out? And by the buffer, I mean the set of inventories worldwide that include both commercial inventories and government controlled strategic petroleum reserves. We are drawing those down. And as we get closer to the bottom of those reserves, we'll want to draw less and less. And that tightening of the world's consumption of oil and oil products is going to drive the price up.

And so there's worry in the global energy market that if this conflict continues to go on, that buffer gets used up more and more. And the immediate short-term worry is that the inventory constraints will start to bind more thickly in the first couple of weeks of June, which coincides with what is traditionally in the United States, the kickoff of the summer driving season, where Americans are on the road a lot more and therefore consuming a lot more fuel.

The people who are most affected, though, John, are not Americans. It's really where the consumption patterns are most dramatically felt are folks in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Vietnam where the poor are seeing dramatically higher price increases, even compared to the ones that we experience here in the United States. And they have fewer resources to adjust to it. So that's where we see the big consumption changes. Is the global South gets hit hardest when we see that.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Now at some point, one assumes this war is going to end. The Strait of Hormuz will open back up again. And I think people might have in mind that the evening you see the tweet go out, the next morning gas prices will fall back down to whatever they would have been. But I'm guessing you're going to tell us that's not the case. So what should people be expecting at some point when this whatever needs to happen in order for the state to open back up?

JEFF COLGAN: So we should expect months of delay between a political settlement of some kind and normalization of prices for fuel. And there's a bunch of different reasons for that. There's a question about how the Strait of Hormuz would reopen, because prior to this conflict, ships were able to transit the Strait of Hormuz without paying any toll or tax.

Now Iran is demanding a toll. Last count, it was $1 million per ship that goes through the Strait of Hormuz. So one of the questions about the political settlement is would the US or Israel, or the world at large, accept Iran applying a toll like that on ships on an ongoing basis? So this would be a continuing source of revenue. That would be, frankly, a big loss for everybody who's not Iran. And in particular, I think, a loss for President Trump, who would be hard pressed to call that a victory from the conflict. But it might be the expedient way to end the conflict.

Then after that, there is, of course, quite an adjustment period where the energy system has to get back to normal. And by that I mean, OK, so ships have to start transiting through. Insurers are really the people who say to the captains of those tankers, whether they are allowed to transit the Strait of Hormuz or not. And what we've seen previously, when, for instance, the Houthis were attacking tankers in the Red Sea that insurers were very cautious about allowing tankers to then transit choke points, even after the violence had nominally stopped. It takes months.

And in fact, many tankers are still going all the way around the Horn of Africa-- the long way to get to Europe-- to avoid that choke point that the Houthis were controlling. And so there's going to be some adjustment there. And then on top of that, there's the physical damage of the war itself. So some countries-- Kuwait, UAE, Qatar-- have experienced physical damage of missiles flying at them and various production facilities that have been damaged. And how long it takes to get those back online is anyone's guess. But it ranges between months and up to five years for things to stabilize in that respect.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: So we're in this for the long haul is what you're saying? It seems not just in energy prices but in other ways too. This war is going to cast a long shadow on the world economy and the global politics going ahead. We've already seen some disruptions to historical patterns, whether about that specifically or just more generally. How do you see this war changing the international politics of energy?

JEFF COLGAN: Well, there's a lot of things going on. One of them, of course, is about the green transition and how people think about energy security. And so we're seeing this incident of disruption of the flow of fossil fuels on the heels of a previous disruption with the Russia-Ukraine war just four years ago. And so I think that's motivating many policymakers around the world to reexamine the national security advantage of having domestically sourced energy, and that domestically sourced energy could be a different fossil fuel like coal that's on their territory. But happily, it could also be solar or wind energy that powers not only their existing electrical grid, but maybe new products as well, like electric vehicles, which we've seen surge in sales since the conflict began at the end of February this year.

I think the important thing to emphasize for we Americans is that this is happening to a much greater degree in the rest of the world. The United States, we're really not seeing so much of this. There has been a modest uptick in electric vehicle sales, particularly used vehicles here. But our car market is really stuck in the past on some level, that we are still 99% internal combustion engines. In part, that's because we've decided that we are worried about being flooded by imports from Chinese electric vehicles in particular. And so we've got tariffs on them and we're shielding ourselves from that. But the rest of the world has a very different attitude towards those imports. And sales are going up of not just electric vehicles, but of solar panels of batteries for electrical grids and for residential use and wind turbines, et cetera, et cetera. So that green technology is really taking off.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And it seems to me a really important part of that growth and demand for the green technologies you just mentioned is that in some cases, almost entirely in some cases, primarily those are produced in China. Those are in an increasing number of cases. The innovation and research behind them is coming in China. Just to give people some sense. Effectively, all solar cells in the world are now produced in China. 75% of batteries in energy storage. And that's both the batteries themselves and a bunch of the critical inputs to batteries like rare Earth minerals. They're the leading producer for turbines on wind power. They're the leading producer of nuclear plants. The list goes on and on. And so how do you think this affects the political standing, the economic growth prospects of China, the US, and the dynamics here?

JEFF COLGAN: Yeah, that is a great question because it really is driving home, John, that the emerging spheres of influence, if you will, of a US led fossil fuel global energy system. And on the other hand, a Chinese led green energy system. And we are starting to see some countries are playing both sides and participating in both parts of that. But we are, I think, increasingly seeing some specialization where under President Trump, the US has doubled down on fossil fuels and wants to really be dominant in that type of energy and has a long history, of course, of partnering with countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, who are the suppliers of those fossil fuel.

But then, on other hand, you've got many countries in Africa, Pakistan, and elsewhere that are saying we'd like to take some of China's energy exports, and they're particularly attractive because once we buy the solar panels from China and install them, now we're not importing anything else in terms of fuel. And so there's a really politically attractive component to this that you have cut the cord from your importer. And that gives China potentially some leverage to be the core energy supplier to a whole range of countries. And how that plays out politically, what those ties are, that's going to be one of the interesting questions, I think, of the next decade.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And so I've heard this argument before, where, great, we buy the solar panel and then we don't have to worry about further imports, we don't have to worry about supplies. But I would have thought for so many of these things, there's going to be a very long life of maintenance. There's going to be upgrades, probably, that will be financed in many countries with debt that comes from China. Is it really a plausible place to get to where this shift leads to more energy independence for countries around the world? Or are we just reinforcing a different type of energy dependence?

JEFF COLGAN: Yeah, certainly the financing of any product could produce political interdependence that can be weaponized in various ways. And so that's clean energy is not going to be separate from that. But I do think that the key national security advantage of renewables is that we can say, OK, if China says we're not going to sell any more solar panels to you anymore, there's a relatively long timeline to adjust. So when I say to you tomorrow, you're not going to have natural gas, then your people are going to freeze in their house this winter. That seems like a much bigger political problem, a much bigger threat, more powerful security threat than it is to, OK, there's a long-term threat about like, we need to generate electricity in a different way than we had expected to. There's different ways to adjust to that threat.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Now, you mentioned earlier that another way in which certain countries were responding to this is by burning more coal. And that's not only a much more carbon intensive technology in terms of the climate, it's much dirtier in terms of just local pollution. How do you think about if we integrate over all of this? There's potentially more demand for renewables. There's potentially more demand for coal. How do you think this crisis affects the future path of carbon emissions and ultimately climate change?

JEFF COLGAN: Well, that is a great question and it is a hard one to answer. It does look like it is accelerating the transition towards green technologies, at least in some countries, maybe many countries. But it's not a simple linear pattern in that there are definitely going to be some countries who say, OK, we're going to double down on fossil fuels. And what this really means is that we have to actually get closer to the United States. Even though the United States might be seen as the source of the geopolitical volatility in this particular incident, it's still our lowest cost option. And so our best play here is to embed our political relationship with the United States.

And Qatar is probably not going to stop producing natural gas because that's what they have and that's what they can sell and it's just such an attractive economic resource for them. So they're going to continue to want to do that and to get protection from the US military to make that happen. And so while I would love, as the director of Climate Solutions Lab, to be able to say, the silver lining here is that we're definitely going to be on a more sustainable path, I think there's real uncertainty around what the future holds from this.

I do think that in some places, like Europe, there is starting to be a real shift towards this, where there's a sense that they didn't move fast enough after the Ukraine crisis. And fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me. And so maybe there's a sense in which they really do need to bite the bullet and make this shift happen faster.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: There are two different strands of pro-climate politics. And this war has landed actually on very clearly on one side of them. So there's one strand, which let's call an abundance strand, which says, look, let's not worry so much about trying to shut down fossil fuels. Let's just focus on making solar panels and other renewable energy as cheap as possible. And that's going to lead to a world of clean energy abundance. And no one's going to want to burn coal, not because of anything having to do with the climate, but because it's just uneconomical to do it.

The other approach is much more of a conservation-based approach, which is to say, look, what we really want to do is not just shift from fossil fuels to renewables, but actually cut back. And I think the canonical policy tool, there is a carbon tax. And you see some people out there saying that Donald Trump has managed to accomplish the lifelong dream of many climate activists that has eluded policymakers for decades. Now he's put effectively an extremely large carbon tax on not all, but many forms of petrol carbon-based products in the world.

How do you think that affects people's views towards the green transition politically? Is this something that's likely to generate more political support because people start to see the larger risks more clearly of sticking with fossil fuels? Or is this something that is going to make people less excited about that because they are now associating what is a shift towards renewables with huge increases in cost and limits on what's possible?

JEFF COLGAN: So I think the crucial element of a green transition is going to be not just providing people with disincentives to use fossil fuel-based products, which is what a carbon tax does and what this unacknowledged tax from the war in Iran is doing. But to really give people a different option, an attractive, different option. So whether that's a low cost electric vehicle that they can then go buy, or whether it's better mass transit to make this politically feasible, it can't just be we're going to make a thing that you are doing now and need to continue doing a lot more expensive. Voters are not going to go for that.

And so that's, in that way, we're doing it the worst possible way right now. And I hope that that's one of the lessons that we take away from this that this rapid increase on the cost of energy without providing any of alternative to continue people's lives is going to be politically really unpopular, and probably not for certain, but we might expect to see a political backlash.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: One of the very interesting dynamics that you briefly touched on that we've seen in the US around green tech and the green transition is this conflict between, on the one hand, the desire to have more electric vehicles, have more renewable energy facilities, and the practical reality of the fact that most of that, if it were to happen, would be imported from China. And you mentioned that cars are a good example. We have extremely high tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in order to protect the domestic production of electric vehicles. How do you see this crisis as affecting those trade offs?

JEFF COLGAN: Yeah, you're asking the right question because even though I earlier argued against the national security vulnerabilities associated with green technology, I do think that there is an economic security vulnerability in the sense that if Americans are just buying Chinese cars, that is a real problem for our economy. We have too many people here in the United States who are either directly or indirectly employed by the automobile manufacturing sector for us to just ignore that and not think that that's going to have a serious negative consequence for our economy. And so we're caught a little bit in a vise grip as a country, because if we continue to just proceed with a technology that is now the outdated technology, the internal combustion engine cars, at some point, we are likely to become yesterday's news and internationally uncompetitive.

But at the same time, we can't just import all of the cars from China, especially when China itself-- and this is really a larger question-- China itself has not decided whether it wants to be involved in trade. It clearly wants to export things. He wants to sell things to the rest of the world. What's not clear is whether it wants to buy things from the rest of the world. And there's some work to do to try to figure out, well, what is the US-China economic relationship going to be in a way that is sustainable for both countries and doesn't just mean jobs are transferring from the United States to China. That is not something that the American government can possibly sign up for.

Maybe here, my home country of Canada is a good canary in the coal mine. This is a huge part of the Canada-US trade relationship is car parts flowing back and forth across the border. And with the recent turbulence in the US-Canadian relationship, the Canadian government has decided, OK, if our automobile sector is going to now face tariffs and is going to be put at this huge competitive disadvantage, we need to start talking with China and building relationships where we're getting Chinese investment and Chinese even technological transfer to build an automobile sector that is of the future is internationally competitive. And my guess is that the United States-- I don't whether this is six months or six years down the road, but my guess is that the US will probably want to go the same direction eventually.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Let's now circle back from China as the current global epicenter of a lot of the green tech back to the Middle East. And this is a region of the world where it's not like hydrocarbons has been the only reason that countries are engaged there. But going back 100 years or so, it's been one of the major reasons that there's been enormous attention paid in international politics in the US and elsewhere to that part of the world. How do you see this crisis is affecting that?

JEFF COLGAN: Let me say two things about that. There's, on one hand, a long standing set of relationships between the United States and various Gulf suppliers. So things that I've called, in my own work, oil for security deals, where the US military effectively protects Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar in exchange for a privileged oil trade with those countries. And President Trump has acted in a way that puts those relationships at risk, where those countries have to be feeling like, wow, we're not getting what we expected out of this. Instead of security, we are having missiles hitting our five star hotels and our refineries and various other targets.

And so there may be some real reassessment from their side. The second thing I'd say is that it will, I think, make oil plays outside of the Persian Gulf region more attractive. And one thing that we saw even just a week or two ago is a big interest in Alaskan oil, where the oil majors that had been signaling for quite some time that they actually weren't very interested in trying to drill in the Alaskan oil fields, are now bidding quite aggressively to get rights to do that because, of course, Alaskan oil, if you can get it out of the Arctic, is not behind the Strait of Hormuz and therefore is more predictable in the sense of generating those revenues.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And I'm interested-- I saw that news, and the question I always have about that is whether what's happened in the last three months, however significant it's been for the global energy market at the moment, really has the type of signal in it that would be meaningful over what are decades of the lifetime of that investment? And I would think, especially if one's view is that renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper and it's not fully substitutable, but it sets a little bit of a ceiling for what the global energy price could be, at least over the long-term, without just causing people to shift in renewables. Is this a reasonable play for companies to really think that just this is going to make these investments worthwhile?

JEFF COLGAN: The thing that's happening in oil companies every day is they're trying to figure out how to replace the oil fields that they already are operating. The questions, of course, are going to be, well, not only is that this moment right now going to be well, OK, so the oil fields that we might have been thinking about in the Persian Gulf region to replace our current fields, now suddenly they look much less attractive. That there's just a bigger investment problem. So then there's incentive to look elsewhere in the world.

And so where do you look around? Well, OK, so Guyana is being already very well drilled by Exxon. So suddenly Alaska, I think, starts to look more attractive in that way. And then on top of that pressure that is day to day of how do we replace our oil fields, is that the war is causing damage to some of those same oil fields in the Persian Gulf. And so you've got a double replacement problem. And I think that while I think you're right that these investment decisions are made over the course of at least two decades, maybe more than that, the dynamic I just described is probably enough on the margin to make a play for Alaska more attractive than it was three months ago.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: And, well, we're going to have to come back to this conversation in several years and see how those investments have played out. Jeff, let me ask you one more question. Just bringing things back here home at Watson. We're looking ahead. What's on tap for the coming year at the Climate Solutions Lab that you're really excited about? And how can students or other community members that are interested in listening to this podcast get involved?

JEFF COLGAN: Well, great. I mean, one of the things about climate change and climate solutions is that we can come at this a lot of different ways. There's climate and health care. There's climate and education. There's climate and food systems. But one of the things that we do really well at Climate Solutions Lab is think about energy, and in particular the politics of energy. And so we have a number of individual research streams that are being led by our core faculty members. And let me give a shout out to Professor Jennifer Hadden and Professor Chris Rea, who are both also working on energy topics in their own way.

And we are, I think-- I don't want to speak too much for them, but I think we are poised for a bumper crop of new research about the politics of energy that will come out next year. And of course, the politics of energy can run from international politics all the way down to local level politics. And so some of my own work is really on that local level to try to understand better the politics of siting solar farms and wind farms, which are very often quite unpopular in local communities. They say, well, this is great technology, but we don't want it here in our own county. And so there's many counties across the United States that are banning these technologies in their own communities.

And so understanding that pushback is interesting. Professor Hadden and Professor Rea are doing similar projects. And what I'd love to see the Climate Solutions Lab do is create that aggregation and synergy of not just having individual research streams, but then what are we learn by having them all happening here at Brown, at Watson, and taking some broader lessons away from that and getting students, of course, involved in that research as well.

JOHN FRIEDMAN: Jeff, thanks for coming on the show.

JEFF COLGAN: Thanks, John.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Juliana Merullo. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, with additional music by BlueDotSessions. If you want to learn more about the Watson School's Climate Solutions Lab and explore their Iran war energy cost tracker, we'll put links in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that too. If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at [email protected]. Again, that's all one word [email protected]. We'll be back soon with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.