Great Decisions #4: Energy Geopolitics
On Tuesday of this week, I had the unique (well, unique to me) experience of attending a lecture while I was in my car. The League of Women Voters (LWV) of Williamsburg has been presenting the Foreign Policy Association’s (FPA) “Great Decisions” lecture series in our local library. They offer the courses in a hybrid format, so attendees can either attend in person or through Zoom. I had plans to meet my sister for lunch in Richmond, so I thought I would miss this lecture. However, the Zoom format allowed me to “go to” this lecture while I was driving to Richmond. It worked just fine.
Tuesday’s topic was “Energy Security” – which seemed oddly appropriate as I was driving almost 70 miles to go to lunch – and then 70 more miles to get back home. I was not being very eco-friendly.
As you have seen if you’ve read my posts from the last three Thursdays as I’ve written about this lecture series, the FPA/LWV partnership does a wonderful job of presenting difficult topics in an understandable fashion. The FPA briefing book is a great resource, as it provides an overview of the topic along with discussion questions and suggested readings. When the LWV schedules its lectures, it brings in experts to do a live presentation that bounces off the relevant parts of the essays in the briefing books.
On Tuesday, we were lucky enough to have as our speaker the author of the briefing book essay. Dr. Carolyn Kissane serves as New York University s Academic Director of the graduate programs in Global Affairs and Global Security, Conflict and Cybercrime at the Center for Global Affairs and is a Clinical Professor where she teaches graduate-level courses examining the geopolitics of energy, comparative energy politics, energy, environment and resource security, and climate change and security. She has received numerous excellence in teaching awards at NYU. She was named Breaking Energy’s Top Ten New York Women in Energy and Top Ten Energy Communicator.
We were able to get her as a speaker because she had a personal connection to Don Schilling, who is the LWV Program Coordinator. He taught history at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, for 30 years, and Dr.Kissane was his student in the late 1980s. As Don was introducing her and she was responding to his introduction, it was clear that they had fond memories of their interactions when she was a student, and he was proud of what she has done with her life.
I won’t have time today to give you more than a quick summary of Tuesday’s lecture. Since I was driving, I couldn’t take any notes, so I’m relying on my memory. Because the speaker also wrote the briefing book essay, I am comfortable that I will be a reliable transmitter of her ideas, if not of her actual words on Tuesday.
She first provided some background on the history of global concerns about energy security. The world’s first full-blown oil shock with the 1973 Arab oil embargo. This shock led to both national and global action to avoid repeating those disruptions, and it led energy-insecure countries to consider different energy sources, turning away from dependence on imported fossil fuels.
After this brief recap, Dr. Kissane brought us to 2022. Over the last couple of years, COVID-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and fears of growing inflation have upended predictions about the future. Threats to energy security involve not only withholding supplies, but also the destruction of infrastructure. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission (the executive branch of the European Union) calls Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure “war crimes.” Last week’s lecture was focused on war crimes. The effort to deal with energy issues is complicated by climate change. Two weeks ago, the lecture focused on climate change.
As Dr. Kissane talked about this topic, she defined the meaning of “energy security” and its converse. In the 1970s, the International Energy Agency (IEA), created after the 1973 oil shock, defined energy security as ensuring the availability, affordability, and accessibility of energy supply for a country. Dr. Kissane suggests that this definition needs to be updated for the 21st century to include what is referred to as the energy trilemma: finding the balance between current and future security, equity and affordability, and sustainability.
In her essay, she used Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on oil, The Prize, to update the definition. Yergin defined energy security as “the capability to assure adequate, reliable energy supplies at reasonable prices in ways that do not jeopardize major national values and objectives.” This definition integrates economic, security, and ideological elements in addition to the core necessity of adequate supplies.
Dr. Kissane organized her analysis under four broad themes:
Energy is political
Energy security must be seen as part of the larger context of Great Power Competition
Security and sustainability are interrelated, but often contradictory
Energy diversity is key to both security and sustainability.
Dr. Kissane’s extended discussion of the interplay of these elements goes into much greater detail than I have time to do here. The discussion questions will give you some ideas about what the experts are thinking about as they address this topic:
Much of the current discourse on energy security is treading away from nuclear power towards renewable forms of energy like solar. In the article, we read that while we are trending away from hydrocarbons, they may always account for a portion of our energy production. Do you believe that nuclear power may have a similar future?
The article argues that climate mitigation requires energy shifting and a change in our primary sources of energy to cleaner forms. Do you believe that there is still hope in mitigation strategies, or should we move on and instead learn to adapt to climate change effects?
The war in Ukraine has exposed Europe’s intense energy dependence on Russia. What do you believe is Europe’s best option to gain energy security and move away from dependence on Russia?
China is increasingly the work manufacturing leader in green energy production. Given recent efforts by the Trump administration to decouple from China and create more independence in U.S. manufacturing, what do you believe is the best option moving forward? Should the US attempt to cooperate with China in green energy manufacturing and production, or should we develop our own manufacturing capabilities independent from Chine?
While EVs are a helpful and popular step towards decarbonizing our daily lifestyles, the article argues that the REES (renewable energy and Environmental sustainability minerals) that are crucial for the production of EVs are also harmful to the environment and create many energy security issues. What are some alternative options to EVs that are less harmful and more effective in decarbonization?
China has considerable leverage over the world’s progress in reducing carbon emissions given its extreme manufacturing power and REES processing capabilities. What sort of leverage does the US have? How can this leverage be used effectively to gradually move toward decarbonization?
The FPA briefing book suggests things you will want to read if you want to broaden your understanding of these complex factors:
Bordoff, Jason, “Why this Energy Crisis is Different.” Foreign Policy, September 24, 2021.
Gallagher, Kelly Sims, “The Coming Carbon Tusnami,” Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2022.
Kissane, Carolyn, The Upending of the Geopolitics of Energy: Disruption is the New Normal. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
O’Sullivan, Meghan, Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power. Simon And Shuster, September 12, 2017.
I would like to add Rachel Maddow’s 2012 book Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth to this list. It’s a decade old, which in today’s world qualifies it as ancient, but it’s a terrifying and startling account of the interplay of geopolitics and the politics of oil.
You pretty much can’t avoid getting smarter when you attend these lectures, even if you are in your car driving to lunch.