Will this oil shock push the world further towards renewables or back towards coal?

From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Benishore, in for David Bruncacchu.

The U.S. has reportedly sent Iran a 15-point plan to end the war in the Middle East.

It sent the plan through Pakistan, according to Reuters.

Iran has yet to respond.

Oil is down a little from yesterday on that news, just below $100 a barrel. The disruptions from this conflict have made it

very clear just how much the world is still dependent on fossil fuels. And one question emerging from

it all is, will this push countries to become

less dependent on these fuels? For more on that, we are joined now by Jason Bordoff, founding

director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Good morning.

Good morning. Thanks for having me on. Fossil fuels are clearly and notoriously vulnerable to geopolitical shocks.

Does this shock in particular strengthen the case for renewable energy?

I think this shock today is a reminder that oil and gas is priced in a global market.

And one of the best things that you can do to insulate

your economy to volatile oil and gas prices that are exposed to geopolitical risk is to reduce

how much you use in the first place. And one way to do that is to electrify more of your economy

and then try to produce more of that electricity with domestic sources. Renewables could be nuclear power,

and for some parts of the world, it's coal. Are renewables actually more secure than fossil fuels,

or do they just come with a different set of geopolitical risks? The eventual economy that might

have a lot more low-carbon energy comes with a different set of geopolitical risk. That doesn't

mean we shouldn't have a transition,

but we need to anticipate what those risks are and try to mitigate them. And one of the most significant is the fact that so many of the technologies you need for renewables and other forms of

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