How Energy Markets Are Shaping Putin's Invasion — and the World
About this episode
Energy historian Daniel Yergin argues that energy policy is foreign policy, and that Russia's invasion of Ukraine can only be understood through energy markets. He and Klein survey the pre-war landscape: oil as a single global market of roughly 100 million barrels a day, the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia as the three great producers, the American shale revolution's transformation of supply, and Europe's pre-existing energy crunch. They examine how sanctions — plus voluntary 'self-sanctioning' by companies — disrupted Russian exports and lifted prices even for American drivers, and why Germany's long entanglement with Russian gas made the war an energy inflection point. The conversation closes with Russia's pivot toward China, decarbonization as energy security, the geopolitics of battery minerals, and the permitting barriers slowing the transition.