The Rest Is History - 168. Oil: Conflict, Chaos and Climate Change

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Tom and Dominic are back with Helen Thompson for a second episode on the history of oil, its impact and how it shapes geopolitics. Tune in to hear about the impact of oil production on US Politics, its importance to the history and current situation in Ukraine, and what we can learn about oil from the exploits of J. R. Ewing in the TV show 'Dallas'. The pod also looks to the future, examining China's explosive growth and advantageous position with Green Energy, whether Putin's recent actions have shifted the basis of his geopolitical power and if Britain is on track for Net Zero by 2050... Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest is History and our second episode on oil, the history of oil, the way that it's shaped geopolitics over the past century and more with the brilliant Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. So in the last episode, Dominic was talking about oil as a curse. And that is quite a standard perspective that for lots of countries, the possession of oil has distorted their politics and has proven bad for the people who have that oil. Do you think that's true? Do you think the presence of oil in the country, that there is a kind of link often to the repressive regimes that tends to generate?

Well, I think the really interesting case here is the United States. Right on. The United States, you know, for a period of time, as I said, at the end of the 19th century and then again in the post Second World War period period probably actually in the 1930s as well uh it's the world's largest oil producer and as we know it's now again you know now and speaking this year 2022 it's back to being the world's largest oil producer it has been for a few years now um thanks to the shale boom and Cracking and all that. Yeah, obviously the American state and American politics doesn't really look like any Arab country's state and politics. It doesn't look like Cyrus Russia or the Soviet Union. It doesn't look like Mexico is full of that matter either.

And yet I still think that there's more to the story of American democratic politics through the course of the 20th century than can be understood without seeing the impact that the United States oil production had. And I just give one example for that, which is the way in which Texas became such an important state. And so in 1930, the East Texan oil field was discovered by a wildcat, a driller. And at that point, it was the largest oil field that had ever been discovered anywhere in the world. And what we see from the through the 1930s is the rise of Texas's influence in American politics. You know, these big figures in Congress, culminating obviously in Lyndon Johnson, who Senate majority leader, and then went on to become president after Kennedy's assassination. And you might say as well,

that the ways in which American politics shifted westward, as the New Deal era came to an end, bound up with that rise of Texas, if we pushed it a bit further than just the Johnson era. Even in a country like the United States, where the whole economy isn't running on oil, the whole of the state's finances isn't running on oil, it's still shaping the question of who has political influence in a country's politics. And even beyond that, Helen, I mean, oil, you know, in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, oil lobbyists played an enormous role in Washington. I mean, probably unrivaled by any other single lobby group. So you could argue that even getting apart from the demographic expansion of Texas or its obvious political role,

the oil money plays a massively distorting part in American politics. I mean, the interesting cases is, though, in 2016, just to skip on to that, is where you have the oil industry, the oil and gas industry, throwing huge amounts of money at a single candidate, Jeb Bush, to get the Republican nomination, the best financed presidential candidate there's ever been in terms of running for a nomination. And he doesn't get anywhere. I think, isn't it the highest he comes third in one of the primaries? He's low energy, ironically. That's what Trump called him. I very stupidly forgot to print off the questions, which is why I don't want to ask

the question. But I do remember, there was a question on twitter with which you engaged about dallas which was uh probably the most famous tv um soap opera in the world in the 70s and revolved around um a texas oil family um and the most notorious figure in that was jr ewing who was the kind of archetype of an American corporate baddie. Do you think that there's a... I mean, I don't want to oversimplify, but I'm going to. A sense that oil made the United States in its dealing with the broader world, a kind of geopolitical J.R. Ewing. I'm quite happy to talk about dallas i think that the the dallas is a really interesting phenomenon uh because you know the things that people you know those of us who watched it remember about it most are obviously the big things like you know like who shot jr um but

actually a lot of it you go back and look at a bit a lot of it is actually about oil they really are oil stories that are running through um most dallas um episodes and i think what's interesting is is that in some sense that jr represents what is necessary for the united states to do at the point of the end of the 1970s and interestingly you know his father jock eock Ewing, the patriarch of the family, he represents, I think, in the Dallas mythology, if you like, old American oil independence. So he's George W. Bush. He's a wildcat adriller in that East Texan oil field. And that's where he's made his money. And the thing about these guys is that they were just taking the chance. The big oil companies were not interested in the East Texas oil field

to begin with. They were just people, as the Depression had already taken hold, who were getting some land from one of the ranchers and trying their luck drilling on it. And that's what Jck ewing you know like represents but if you think when by the time the series starts as i recall is he's retired the company's been handed over to jr uh and he's very keen jr's always going on about how um the independence meaning not the big oil companies and there's a really crucial episode in which

jr basically mortgages Southport. Which is their ranch. Which is the ranch, which has been in his mother's family for generations. Then he's done that in order to finance some wells in Southeast Asia. So, you know, America has to, J.R.'s turning abroad to try and find oil for Ewing Oil, which is in crisis because basically Cliff Barnes has got the – he's running something called the Office of Land Management in Texas. And he's basically closed down Ewing Oil, being able to produce in Texas. So JR's chasing off oil on the other side of the world. He thinks this is going to save the company.

Then flooding happens or something in the oil wells, and then the mortgage comes due on South Fork. And there's this moment, there's this great episode, it's the best Dallas episode, I think, in which basically Miss Ellie, who owns South Fork, it's her family's thing, has basically to allow drilling on South Fork in order to save Ewing Oil. And I think that this episode goes out in the aftermath of Jimmy Carter's Malay speech, where he's basically saying, look, we need to make sacrifices.

We need to consume less. But actually what's going on in Dallas in this episode is basically saying, no, well, we have to make sacrifices, but we have to give something up that's sacred because we need to produce more oil and in a way it's all framed as kind of like Miss Ellie making this noble sacrifice because Ewing Oil must survive but actually really in some sense what's saving the day is is that JR is financing um Cliff Barnes running for office so that he will leave the Office of Land Management and Ewing Oil will no longer be controlled or constrained. So I think that JR is kind of like doing the unpalatable things all the time that are necessary for America in the symbolism Ewing Oil

to survive in this world in which America is not the world's largest oil producing country. Because America loses its kind of oil self-sufficiency, doesn't it, in the 70s. And that's the context for Carter's Malay speech in 79. Absolutely, yeah. And that is the context. I mean, Dallas starts, I think, in like 1978. It's either 77 or 78. It's starting as all these, you know know there's an energy crisis going on in the

um united states um it's providing i think some commentary um on that um problem and and i say jockewing you know the patriarch of the family who who's done it in the old american way that's gone that doesn't work any longer in In some sense, JR is now necessary. And then if we fast forward back, well, actually, if we rewind back to what we were talking about a second ago, which was about the Gulf Wars. Now, I would imagine that there's a proportion of our listeners who will say sort of automatically, well,

those wars were both really about oil. So 91, the liberation of Kuwait, and then 2003, George W. what's at stake is American and Western oil interests, that it would be a disaster for Saddam Hussein to control the oil fields in Kuwait. I think the second one is obviously a lot more, is a lot more difficult. I think there was a view at the time that was articulated, particularly, obviously, well, actually, not just on the left, which said that George Bush Jr. administration was pursuing this war for the interests of the oil companies, and, you know, stressed the relationship of Dick Cheney, his vice president, to the oil business. I don't think that that's right. I think, though, that we do need to see that there is an oil

context to the war, whether it provides decisive motivations over other things. I don't know, and I'm not particularly sure it's that important. But I think that what we can see is that the Bush administration, when it comes in, has a sense that America's got a growing problem. It partly, I think, thinks it's got a growing problem because it can see that as China develops economically, that China's going to want to use a lot more oil than it was doing in the 1990s. And China had stopped being self-sufficient in oil from 1993. And there's also a sense in which some of the world's largest oil fields are aging by the 2000s. And when the Bush administration comes in, there are three significant oil producers that are under sanctions for one reason or another, Iran, Iraq and Libya.

And it's certainly the case that Dick Cheney in particular had a sense that that was untenable, that they couldn't carry on with having sanctions on all three of these countries and restricting production. So I think that there's clearly an oil rationale for the second Gulf War, which is to say, if we can get a different gulf war which is to say if we can get a different government in place in baghdad if we can get one that's friendly to western um interests um then we'll be able to remove the sanctions off iraq um and we'll be able to encourage more production in iraq including allowing investment opportunities for the Western oil companies. Obviously, that part of it doesn't doesn't actually work out. But I'm quite prepared to say that oil is a very serious consideration in the second Iraq war.

But it's not just about oil. If we go back to the first Gulf War and its aftermath and the fact that it involves these no-fly operations, it involves militarily policing the Gulf to stop Iraqi oil getting out because of the sanctioned regime, I think it's fair to say that actually the military side of containing Iraq that way had become quite difficult and the French had pulled out of it by the time that the Bush administration came into office. So the status quo militarily, I think, had reached its exhausted itself or is at least becoming more more difficult.

And so an alternative was being sought, I think, on that side as well as on the oil side. So, Helen, we talked about the strain of hypocrisy that oil has fostered in American policy. Could we look now at Europe, which, I mean, you say, for the large European states bereft of domestic oil, the failed bids for energy independence constituted a perhaps decisive part of how European-dominated Eurasia came to an end. So what that meant was, I suppose, first of all, that in recent times, actually, Europe has been dependent on America's attempts to keep the oil flowing, even though Europeans may kind of object to it on moral grounds. They still benefit from it in economic grounds. The other thing that's happened in Europe, far more than in America, is a pursuit of alternative energy sources. And the anxiety about global warming, in policy terms, seems to have been felt much more strongly in Europe than in America. sink oil wells into South Fork to frack, to kind of develop national parks and smash it up to get oil out is an option in a way that it isn't in Europe. Do you think that would be fair? So the lack of oil in Europe has made hypocrites of us as well.

Yeah, I do think that. I think there was an understanding, actually, particularly in Germany earlier than elsewhere in Europe, that oil was going to run into difficulties of the kinds in which we've seen, perhaps we're beginning to see pretty clearly at the moment, and that there were issues with not only foreign dependency and not only the environmental consequences of the production of oil, but the straightforward future supply of oil. So the same kind of things that were concerning the Bush administration in the early 2000s about the future supply of oil, I think were concerning the German government in the 1990s. And Gerhard Schröder.

Yeah, in the 1990s. Yeah, so this is a whole other dimension, right, which is that Germany, obviously, I mean, this is incredibly controversial. Well, actually, we'll get on to Germany in a second. Let's put the Nord Stream pipelines on a shelf and dust them down to the delight of our German listeners. So the push for sustainability and for alternative sources of energy, Helen, I mean, do you see that going anywhere ultimately in Europe? Yes and no.

I mean, clearly one of the reasons why European countries energy helen i mean do you see that going anywhere ultimately in europe yes and no i mean clearly one of the reasons why european countries have been so concerned about alternative energy is because fossil fuel energy after the age of coal has been so problematic for them actually in italy's case the age of coal was problematic because they didn't have any yeah so i think that partly is you've talked about this enough times in your podcast, human motivation is pretty complicated about any number of things. And I think that part of the reason why Europeans have always taken

alternative, or for a long time now, have taken alternative energy more seriously, often the case in the United States, is because they have understood the geopolitical problems that are caused for Europe in a time in which oil and gas are the most important energy sources. So, of course, you would like leaving the climate motives aside. Of course, you would be hoping that there was a future in which alternative energies would do the same thing. And Europe will be in a much less disadvantageous position than it's been during the time of oil and gas. And I think, go back to Tom's point, is that there's been a certain inclination, I think, amongst many of us in Europe

to be morally disapproving of the way in which Americans produce oil, talk about it, etc., whilst at the same time benefiting from it. I don't think that many people, whatever actually in Europe or indeed anywhere else for that matter, whatever they might morally object to in fracking and shale oil actually would have liked to have lived in the world of the 2010s. Economically, if the shale oil boom hadn't taken place because we would then be living in already be living in an era of you know permanently high um oil prices that would have made economic growth very difficult and i think that there's a quite strong inclination to turn away from those um realities because they're not very they're not very palatable um yeah to look at that's all mentioned gerhard schroeder i i won't

say gerhard schroeder is a friend of the show he's absolutely not uh and we were first shyster yeah i think we well he's out he was audi man wasn't he because of his number of marriages and then he became olympic man um because of the number of ring lord of the rings they call him in germany but also now he's obviously a sort of the poster boy for what what's perceived as Western appeasement, Western hypocrisy and sort of willful blindness towards Vladimir Putin's Russia. Now, how much do you think, Helen, that our European anxiety about energy, about dependence upon oil, distorted our dealings with Russia since, let's say, the war in Georgia or the occupation of Crimea? First of all, I think there is, to be fair to the European Union

and to be fair to Britain, actually, as well, because for part of this story, it was a member of the European Union. I think you can see, going back to around 2000, where Putin's scarcely been in power, obviously, at that point, a concern about Europe's Russian gas dependency in particular, which is obviously more sort of entrenched, because at that point, pretty much all gas was coming through pipelines.

And it's going through Ukraine, right? The Russian gas is going through Ukraine. Yeah, going through Ukraine. And so I think that particularly actually the European Commission at times spent quite a lot of time trying to find alternatives. And the problem is that if you say, well, what were the alternatives for european external gas imports so i not the stuff that was coming not the gas that was already coming in produced in europe in the north sea you were talking really about azerbaijan and iran um

obviously iran's its own kind of problem where morality uh for its regime is concerned and the azerbaijani um or the oil from sorry the gas from azerbaijan complicated pipeline that got what got to be constructed for that and there's lots of politics around the gas in um azerbaijan so i don't think that in general there was an indifference to this question there was just a difficulty actually implementing alternatives i haven't said that i think the german situation with schroeder is a bit different because this wasn't just a question of like buying russian gas it was a question of like which pipelines russian gas was coming through and until that point in late 2005 where his government in its final weeks in office made the decision um to agree the first nordstream pipeline um with

russia that gas those guys gas pipelines were coming through um. So when Trudeau did that, I don't think he was actually blind to what the strategic ramifications of that were in terms of putting a pipeline under the Baltic Sea. That would, in time, from Putin's point of view, be a first move to cutting Ukraine out completely of the export of gas into northern um europe he was just indifferent and partly he was indifferent um because he was very soon after he left office going to material to benefit yeah um am i right that the the polish government compared it to the the nazi soviet yeah the then um polish foreign minister said it compared it to the the nazi so Yeah, the then Polish Foreign Minister compared it to the Nazi Soviet pact because obviously part of the Nazi Soviet pact was carving up Western Ukraine and handing it over to the Soviet Union in 1939.

Okay, we'll take a quick break there. Go and refill your tanks if you can afford it and we will see you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestistertainment.com. That's TheRestIsEntertainment.com. Hello and welcome back to The Rest Is History. Helen, one of the really striking things about reading your book, and especially in the current context, is just how important Ukraine is. I mean, you keep talking about Ukraine, and obviously, you wrote this, it's well before Putin invaded Ukraine. But in terms of oil politics, what is the role of Ukraine? Okay, well, where oil is concerned is the pipeline actually goes back to the aftermath of Suez. When the West European governments are turning to Soviet oil. I should say the Italians have already been interested in it before the Suez crisis. Obviously, for that oil actually to be transported into Europe,

it's got to come either by sea or it's got to come by pipeline. There's options with oil, which they weren't then later with later with um gas immediately anyway what happens in the early 60s is this pipeline that's called um one of its names anyway it has multiple names it's called the friendship pipeline which says something in its name when this is the you know the height of the cold war or one part of the cold war anyway not too far off the cuban missile crisis time um this pipeline is built. And the Kennedy administration is very, very unhappy about the building of this friendship pipeline and wants sanctions against the companies that are involved in building it

and a ban on the export of certain materials that are necessary in order to build it. But the West Europeans are pretty adamant about it and that they stand their ground against the Americans. And this is the first of the battles that take place. There's going to be replicated, you know, in the last 10 years or so over the Nord Stream pipeline. This is the first of the battles over the pipelines between European countries and the United States, where the United States wants to say, we don't want you to be doing this. But this pipeline, when it is built, it starts operating, I think, in 1964, and it goes through Ukraine and Belarus. And it is still the principal pipeline by which oil comes from Russia into Europe. The gas pipelines are different. The

gas pipelines are built later. And it's the gas pipelines that Putin has been most interested in making redundant by not only putting pipelines that go under the Baltic Sea, so Nord Stream 1 and then the Nord Stream 2 one that was built but never looks like it's never now going to be used but also pipelines that go into the Black Sea to take gas into into southern Europe and about a year after the the Crimea crisis it was 2015 I think this right when Putin had his agreement to build a pipeline that goes under the Black Sea called TurkStream, the first TurkStream pipeline. He basically had Gazprom write to the European Commission and saying, once this is finished, once TurkStream is finished, no gas whatsoever will be coming into Europe via Ukraine. You will have to use these the the sea routes and do you think now so you said

about um nordstrom 2 being nordstrom 2 has been cancelled you know people lost their jobs it appears to be definitively over and that's an extraordinary change given that what a year ago um all the sort of prognostications were about a future sort of you know russia and germany becoming ever more entangled in that kind of foreign policy because of them their sort of, you know, Russia and Germany becoming ever more entangled in that kind of foreign policy because of their sort of mutual dependence. I mean, do you think that what's happened in the last few weeks, therefore represents a seismic moment in terms of Germany's sense of its energy security, Europe's sense of its energy security? Or do you, I mean, I know we're not soothsayers, and we don't have crystal balls, so we don't know how it's going to play out. But is it possible that that Russo-German relationship could be revived in five or 10 years?

I think there's two things at the moment that are pulling in the exact opposite direction. The first of them is that 50 years of not just German energy policy, but German foreign policy is shattered in the last few weeks. Because it wasn't just that Germany embraced the pipelines and the gas pipelines in particular, but I think it's fair to say that in the 70s, that that energy relationship with Russia was the material foundation of Ostpolitik, of West Germany's then turn to an accommodation with Russia, so with the Soviet Union, in the hope that in the end that would create a context in which the reunification of Germany one day could take place. And that energy relationship then survived into the post-Cold War world. And I think you

could say that Auspolitik, there was a post-Cold War version of Auspolitik in the way in which there was a 70s and 80s version of it. And when the German Chancellor is turning around and saying, actually, we need to break our dependency upon Russian energy, that's a seismic moment. On the other hand, every day that's gone on since the invasion of Ukraine, Germany's been buying gas from Russia that's coming down amongst other pipelines, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. And there's no evidence, I think, that that is going to change anytime soon so i think what we can see with the announcement that schultz made that germany will build two liquid natural gas ports is that we should expect to see a competition between american producers and russia over the german gas market over the next decade or so which it kind of

ironically kind of reconstructs that competition between the americans and russians over european markets about oil at the beginning of the the 20th century but i'm not sure we should necessarily bet on the russians losing that um not least because china's extraordinarily high demand now for gas which which went accelerated through 2021, means that there's extremely fierce competition for liquid natural gas. And Helen, do you think, I mean, with China, obviously, that's, we haven't really talked about China, but its explosive economic growth over the past few decades has obviously been a massive additional factor in the geopolitics of oil. Do you think that Russia may end up in an increasingly subordinate role to China, particularly if China comes to Russia's rescue in its current crisis? What impact that might have on oil consumption from Russia and the world more generally? I think that the fact that Putin is overreached does strengthen China's overall

position in its relationship with Russia. I think, though, that we shouldn't get too quickly to the view that Russia's doomed itself in energy terms and economically by what it's done what however because it has the gas and oil quite rightly morally of course we are by what is um happening because asia matters at least as much if not more in the energy future than europe um and i don't think there's any evidence whatsoever so far that either China or India is going to turn away from Russian energy. And indeed, I think there's evidence even in the last 48 hours or so that India has actually been increasing the amount of oil that it's buying from Russia. In a world in which Russia was economically very dependent upon Europe, which was true of that world that brought the Soviet Union to an end.

That world doesn't exist anymore because Asian economic development is of the two big countries, China and India, is at such a level that their demand for energy is as important as anybody else's, certainly of Europe's demand for energy. I think that we will see Russia really trying to entrench its energy relationship with those countries and might be willing to let go some of it, at least some parts of Europe. Whether it really would let go of competing in Germany, I think maybe competing for the market in Germany may be another matter. But if oil and gas really matter geopolitically, then nothing's actually really changed in energy geopolitical terms by what's happened in the last few weeks. I mean,

is that what Putin has done is militarily pushed Russia too far by the looks of it. But I don't think that you can just read off from that and say, well, he's destroyed the entire basis of Russian geopolitical power. I don't quite see that. So if you see this sort of continuity, I mean, I personally completely agree with you. I think these deep continuities are not deflected by even individual wars or defeating wars. But that runs against something that I think a lot of our listeners will be thinking about, which is the climate crisis and the need to get away from gas and oil because the implication of what you're saying is that gas and oil will still be absolutely central factors in world politics for the rest of our lifetimes which i think they will um but for example you know hugh george has a question given the the current culture and climate change does oil count as immoral now do you think there has been a a cultural shift against the sort of the politics of all the world of oil or do you think reality dictates that we'll still be dependent on it you know for the rest of the time we're on this earth i think that there there obviously is a

widespread moral revulsion against what using fossil fuels um, that moral revulsion, I think, can coexist with an ignorance about our material dependency upon these energy sources in the present moment. And it goes back to the fact that, as I said earlier, I don't think lots of people find thinking about that very palatable. They don't want actually to understand just how ethically burdensome the energy sources on which our way of life depends are. I think it's also the case that there are good reasons, leaving the climate crisis aside, why lots of countries would like to get away from using at least as much oil and gas.

And that is that the geopolitics around them, as we've been discussing, are pretty destructive and worse than dysfunctional at best. And where the supply of oil is concerned, I think we can see that you know there are significant constraints in its future um supply and that that would lead to higher prices that makes economic growth um more um difficult i think where we're heading is a world in which an energy some form of energy transition will take place but that will mean that actually more and more green energy is used without that meaning that less and less fossil fuel energy is used because our growth will just keep going up yeah that will actually be living in a in a more of a multi-energy

world and that until unless and until a decisive breakthrough, technological breakthrough on storage for solar and wind takes place that would make it possible to electrify many things that are presently done via oil, that's where we're going to be. And that means that the old geopolitics, what we've been spending our time talking about today, and a new geopolitics around green energy, in particular China's advantageous position in relation to green energy, are going to coexist with each other. So we're going to have an even more geopolitically complicated world because we're going to have the old geopolitics and the new geopolitics happening at the same time. So when you say China's advantageous position with green policy, because it's more technologically advanced, do you mean?

Well, it's two things, or several things. First of all, is that China dominates various bits of manufacturing that are crucial to green energy, solar panels in particular. It's not a coincidence that one of the first two products that Trump slapped tariffs on China when he began his trade war with China, one was washing machines and the other was solar panels. The second is that at the moment, China just completely dominates both the production and the supply chains around the metals that are necessary for green energy infrastructure and batteries. And in terms of the distribution of rare earth metals in the earth,

it looks like China's in a pretty privileged position. Now, that doesn't mean that, you know, like mass mining operation, large scale mining operations elsewhere aren't going to find these metals. And it looks like the United States is pretty committed to going down that um route but no one has no country on earth it would seem has for them in terms of known distribution of these necessary metals so they're not likely to be found in they're not likely found in dorset who knows tom or even in wiltshire maybe um well that's that was the question i was going to ask so to be parochial for a second, where is Britain placed in this?

Because there's obviously lots more in your book that we haven't talked about. You talk about monetary policy, you talk about indebtedness, you talk about currencies, and you also talk about democracy and you talk a bit about Brexit. And I just want, if we look forward in the rest of the 21st century, where does Britain fit into this kind of geopolitics of energy, do you think? Or are we just part of Western Europe? I think that we can see that by the middle of the 2010s that there was a sense in which, and the Cameron government had it and it's continued since,

that Britain has to have a more active position in the Middle East. That in some sense, perhaps symbolically, the East of Suez retreat was over and we're going back to having some attempt to have some capacity to act militarily in the Middle East independently of the Americans. I think that in terms of the issues around Russian energy, we are in a different position than the other big eu countries obviously particularly germany we just were less dependent in part that was a consequence of of north sea oil and gas um which you know is not something that that germany or france um particularly benefited um from and also because once the american shale gas boom started then we embraced liquid natural gas imports in fact we kind of had before i think from the first first liquid natural gas ports have been built earlier than that in britain including taking imports from qatar and that way now Britain isn't the only European country that has a

significant liquid natural gas capacity for importing Spain does too but it does distinguish as I think from the from at least the German position I think you know the big hope and you can see this in the way in which Boris Johnson talks about this, is wind, offshore wind. I mean, he's quite, Boris Johnson's quite keen on talking about, you know, Britain being the Saudi Arabia of offshore. He loves a big scheme, doesn't he? He loves a big scheme. And so, obviously, where Sun's concerned,

we're in a less propitious position, but we do live in one of the windiest places probably in the world. I think that the political question, leaving aside the high energy cost political question that's coming, will be about fracking in the United Kingdom and about whether the present, essentially anti-fracking position that British governments have taken is going to come to an end. Now it should be said that you can have lots of

hopes that fracking will yield you know a lot of gas or oil and they turn out not to. I mean there was a point in the 2010s where Polandand was the great hope um for um shale gas and it turned out that you know the the fracturing the rocks in in poland didn't work out the same way as fracturing the rocks you know like in north in north dakota so just the the the possibility um that oil and gas can be extracted that way doesn't mean that actually it will turn out in practice. I mean, you've only got to look at the history of some of the big, huge oil drills that turn out absolutely for there to be nothing there.

There's a famous one in Alaska, I think it's called Mokluk, where they spent billions on this. And then when they got there, when they found where the oil should have been, it had moved. And they basically said that they were 30 million years too late.

That's quite late. Okay, that's not good. But do you think, I mean, do you think that the strains that, certainly, you know, the European economy and the global economy more generally, I guess, that suffering at the moment, that it will inhibit the drive to net zero that it will be maybe net zero but not yet

yeah i mean the thing is is that i think there's two different things going on here is is there's a set of issues around the energy transition and particularly the idea that net zero can be done by 2050 which rests on assumptions about technology that doesn't exist yet. And so I think that there will be a pushback against net zero as it becomes clear how difficult using much higher levels of green energy is. And then there's this, what I would call this fossil fuel energy crisis going on that's being driven by its own dynamics and isn't being caused by the attempts at the energy transition, despite the fact that some people, particularly on the right, the kind of like Farage take on it, would want to sort of blame high energy prices pre-Ukraine on the green energy transition. That's not right. I don't think that that's right at all. It's the dynamics of fossil fuel energy themselves, issues around oil and gas supply and demand that are producing the structural forces,

that are the structural forces that are pushing high energy or creating high energy prices. So my view is that we'll be dealing with these problems simultaneously and we'll be trying to find ways of living with high fossil fuel energy prices and at the same time trying to find ways of increasing green energy. And those problems will interact with each other in pretty politically complicated ways. Fun times. Helen, thanks so much. Not just the history of oil, but appear into the future as well.

And no one better qualified to give it than you and your book, Disorder, Hard Times in the 21st Century. Slightly depressing title that's more than justified itself since its publication is out now. Thanks so much. It's a pleasure, Tom.

Dominic, thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

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