The sounds of commerce have faded on the streets of cities all over the world as the coronavirus pandemic has shut the economy down.

At the end of this podcast, we'll hear how that's made us aware of the sounds of nature,

which are always there, but which we don't always hear.

But that's just a side effect of something nobody ever expected for the first time in history.

Demand for oil declined so far, so fast,

that the price of the world's most important commodity dropped below zero.

Storage space for oil may now be more valuable than oil itself. Some 30 oil tankers are floating in the

waters off the port of Los Angeles alone, with upwards of 20 million barrels of oil on board.

Ben LaFave is Energy Reporter for Politico. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

So describe this scene, not just the tankers off Los Angeles, but beyond that. How is this representative of the current oil market?

The market is so bad that some oil

companies in Texas have asked state regulators there to basically become a mini OPEC and dictate

that companies there all kind of scale back their production. And as we, as you mentioned earlier,

we saw, you know, the historic dive into negative

prices on the oil markets earlier this month. And that's probably going to happen again in a

matter of weeks here, as you mentioned, with storage space getting so bad. So it's quite a historic

moment. How difficult is it for them to scale back production? It's more difficult than they'd

have you believe. A lot of these producers in shale fields would like to say that, you know, compared to

more traditional, you know, drilling, you could kind of switch on shale, you know, rigs,

off and on, you know, pretty much the flick of a switch.

That's not quite true. It is much easier to kind of stop your production than in more traditional wells.

...