Last month, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average swung back after four straight days of losses, I called Wilbur Ross.

The billionaire investor, who served as the secretary of the Department of Commerce during President Donald Trump’s first term, wasn’t surprised by his former boss’s ham-fisted attempt to reshape global trade.

“This is vintage Trump,” Wilbur Ross told me over the phone.

It wasn’t how Ross would have done things. Throughout our hour-long phone call on April 22, he said “the chaos, frankly, was pretty much inevitable.” He complained that Trump should have cut taxes before embarking on a worldwide trade war that included tariffs on islands populated only by penguins. He feared the White House was pushing the legal limits of what a president can do without Congress on tariffs.

“People voted for him presumably knowing that he was going to be tough on tariffs in general, and particularly in terms of China — though I don’t think anybody had any idea that he would go quite as far as he has in fact gone,” Ross said.

On Tuesday, the business magazine Sherwood News published a Q&A featuring the bulk of my conversation with Ross about tariffs. But the former secretary and I spoke for an extra 15 minutes exclusively for this newsletter.

In our bonus conversation, we discussed oil prices, what it will take to bring critical mineral production back to the U.S., what Florida shows us about adapting to climate change, and what’s so amusing about nuclear energy skeptics vacationing in Paris.

This interview was lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Alexander C. Kaufman: This newsletter is about energy. What effects do you see the tariffs having on energy?

Wilbur Ross: Energy, as you know, is a very complicated thing in and of itself. Let's focus for a moment on oil. First, what’s strange to me is that prior presidents, especially Biden, had sanctions on Russian oil and on Iranian oil. But they never really enforced them. They let both Russia and Iran continue to sell oil to China and to India. That, to me, is a great paradox. There’s not too much point to putting sanctions on something if you’re not going to enforce it.

Secondly, you have the wildcard of [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel]. While many of the OPEC countries tend to produce pretty much at capacity, there’s always some spare capacity. They, especially the Saudis, have historically shown a willingness to constrict supply if they don’t like the price.

That brings us to the U.S. Most shale oil needs a price in the $60s to make any sense to go forward and keep exploiting the resources. Opinions differ. Is it low $60s? The high $60s? But certainly at prices in that range, a little bit above, there’s no question that there’s plenty of oil that can be brought out pretty quickly. Shale oil in particular is very quick to be able to extract, so I’m not too worried about [our supply], depending on how these various variables play out.

Are you concerned about the ability to ramp up domestic supplies of different minerals like the ones China is embargoing?

With critical minerals, the real issue is not the ores themselves, not the raw materials. The critical issue is processing. What China has done is they’re dominating the world’s processing, because they drove prices so low through subsidies that it’s not economical to process.

The U.S., in fact, has lots of reserves of critical materials. But there’s only one fairly major facility that’s been developed and is capable of producing a lot. That’s the so-called Mountain Pass mine. But there’s many others that could be activated fairly quickly. What we would have to do is make up our mind that we, as a country, we’re going to subsidize the processing.

I tried to get that going in Trump 1.0. I just couldn’t get enough support. It was hard enough getting support for the CHIPS Act. But a lot of the Republicans and some of the Democratic members of Congress don’t like the idea of subsidizing private-sector companies.

Ideally, what form should those subsidies take? Defense Production Act spending? Tax credits?

There are a whole lot of forms. The simplest forms would probably be for the Department of Defense simply to enter into long-term purchase contracts at high prices. But there are plenty of forms. The form of doing it is in many ways simpler than the CHIPS Act because it takes a particularly long time to build a chip facility and to train the people to operate it.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company literally took hundreds of Americans from Arizona, hired them and – at the company’s expense – spent six months in Taiwan educating them on how to make cutting-edge semiconductors. That’s a harder challenge in some ways than the refining of these critical materials.

I know you’ve done a lot of investment in insurance, and understand the insurance industry well. What effects do you see climate change currently having on insurance? Between some of what we’ve seen in California and Florida, what do you see as the logical end point?

As you’re probably aware, my main residence is in Florida. So, we are very exposed to hurricanes, and therefore two problems. One is what they charge for insurance. But also just getting the insurance. Finding someone who’s willing to make a quote is somewhat challenging.

In California, in the more hazardous areas, it’s extremely difficult to get insurance coverage. Indeed, some of the houses that were burned down did not have insurance. They apparently hadn’t been able to get it, or didn’t want to pay the premium. So, insurance is a big problem.

Interestingly, insurance is also an issue in the sanctions. One of the ways to make it harder for people to export goods that you sanction is to lean on the insurance companies and get them not to insure the cargos. People are very afraid in today’s world to be shipping big, valuable, multi-billion-dollar cargos without insurance cover. So insurance is important in a lot of ways to the economy. And it’s a problem.

It’s partly a problem because interest rates are lower than they had been. The reason that’s a problem is that where the insurance companies make a lot of their profit is by the rate of return they earn on the premiums before they have to pay out claims. So, insurance earnings are fairly sensitive both to natural disasters and to interest rates.

So, what do you do as natural disasters get worse? Is it a game of modifying the assets that are insured such that they can better withstand increased fires or storms? Or is there something fundamental that has to change about insurance?

In Florida, for example, the building code standards have been tightened a lot over the years. By and large, it's mostly the buildings from before 1972, when I think they put in the first really strict code, that are vulnerable. Some of those were properly built. My house in Palm Beach was built in 1930. It has withstood all these storms. That doesn't mean it will succeed in withstanding the next one. But at least it gives you good hope.

Whereas on the west coast of Florida, which has been particularly badly hit, a very high percent of those are pretty modest structures that predated the stricter building codes. A lot has to do with that. A lot also has to do with what is the elevation of the property above the high-tide level. The worst thing is, if a hurricane hits in high tide and you get flooding to compound the wind, you've got a real double whammy.

Do you think that the state needs to further increase the strictness of the building codes in order to account for the changes to weather?

I can't speak for California, but I think the recent code increases in Florida probably are very close to being adequate, except for the properties that are located too close to sea level and are right on the water. Those there's not much you can do about.

After the disaster with the big, old condominium project in Miami, Florida put a rule that the condos – many of which were built in the ‘50s, and a lot of which have been under maintained

– had to retain a third-party consultant to tell them how much money they would need for maintenance over the next 10 years, and then to get that appropriated. It's caused a bit of turmoil in the market for those properties. But it's a pretty good way of helping solve the problem by being properly maintained.

Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican, has been pushing for a carbon border adjustment mechanism – essentially a tariff on imports made with higher carbon emissions, akin to what the European Union has put in place. Are you bullish on its potential to pass?

The place that is easiest to adopt something like that is Europe, because Europe fundamentally doesn't produce very much hydrocarbons. It’s all imports. It’s tricker to do it in the U.S., because so much of our consumption of hydrocarbons is domestically produced. The carbon adjustment mechanism varies a lot by country. Personally, I think that Europe has been more or less trying to use it as a protectionist measure as much as anything else

Then what do you think? Is it something the U.S. may adopt?

It’s complicated here. Under Trump, we were becoming a net exporter [of fossil fuels]. The arithmetic for a net exporter is quite different from the arithmetic for a net importer like Europe.

I see.

It seems to me that those measures really only work if they’re universal. One of the problems that nobody seems to want to talk about, relating to China, is that China is adding to pollution every year, even though they build a lot of hydro and a lot of nuclear. They’re resorting to coal.

In Germany, because the wind apparently hasn’t been very effective, they’re also using a lot of coal. It’s complicated. You really have to drill down.

Since you brought up nuclear, what is your general view on the so-called nuclear renaissance?

Well, I'm pro nuclear. I’m very surprised that the people who are concerned about carbon also tend to be anti-nuclear. When you go back over history, Chernobyl was a very strange one-off circumstance. So was Fukushima in Japan. But other than those two, nuclear has been relatively trouble free throughout its life. It amuses me that people who are anti-nuke are very happy to spend their vacation in France, when France is basically [run] all on nuclear power.

Do the tariffs risk any of the nuclear resurgence that we have been seeing in the US?

I don't think tariffs are the issue. I think public acceptance is the issue for nuclear.

I know I've gone over time, so any closing thoughts before I let you go?

No, I think you've done a very good job X-raying me. Thank you.

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PROGRAMING NOTES: This newsletter will be launching a new weekly feature – a roundup of stories I’m reading – starting soon. Stay tuned.

Since I last wrote to you, I had another story published in The Atlantic, this time on the paradox of the Trump administration’s policy on critical minerals.

My first piece with Sherwood News covered a similar topic; it was a feature on the magnet manufacturer USA Rare Earth’s stock market debut, in which the company’s chief executive talked about what kind of federal policy is required to bring production of rare earth elements and the magnets made from them back to the U.S.

I also started writing for the excellent energy publication, Latitude Media. My first two stories were an analysis piece on the slate of legislation in California seeking to make the state the top destination for geothermal energy developments, and a scoop on nuclear developer Holtec International’s plans to establish its small modular reactor hub in Utah.

Over at Canary Media, I had a news story about solar panel recycler OnePlanet’s plans to build a first-of-a-kind plant outside Jacksonville, Florida.

Last Thursday, I was back on my regular slot on the BBC World Service program “Business Matters,” talking about Trump's mineral deal in Ukraine, why Japan could beat tariffs by working with the U.S. on nuclear and geothermal, and the surprising dark side to the otherwise healthy trend of young people drinking less.

The soundtrack to this edition is “Barcode” by the Norwegian DJ and producer Bård Berg. It’s a smooth, jazzy house track with a crisp, driving beat and a crooning, reverby trumpet. Listening to the song brought me back to a vacation my wife and I took to Oslo, Berg’s home city, back in 2022.

Signing off from a dewy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the linden trees, Bradford pears and gingkoes that line our streets are bursting with fragrant pollen and fresh leaves that flail in the wind and entertain my daughter Eve’s curious, clearing eyes like natural mobiles dancing above her stroller on our daily walk.