How Will The Shift To Green Energy Reshape Global Politics? (Your Radical Questions with Professor Helen Thompson)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions. This is where I put your questions to one of our radical guests.

0:48It's your chance to really engage directly with the super smart, super interesting people that we have on this podcast and ask them about their ideas for the future. You've all engaged so, so thoughtfully with our recent episode with Louisa Munch about the role that education plays in the functioning of a healthy democracy, why she thinks universities should be free. Thank you so much to everyone who has sent us a message. We read every single one. And by the way, if you haven't heard that episode, why not go back and have a listen after you finish listening to this episode? Because I'm joined, as you all know by now, by Professor Helen Thompson.

1:21She's Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, based mostly at Clare College. Is that right? Which department? Which swanky department? Politics and International Studies. Politics and International Studies. I should know that. The author of Disorder, Hard Times in the 21st Century, and Oil and the Western Economic Crisis. I think one of the reasons that we've had many questions for you, Helen, is because you're quite prolific on other podcasts, some other very good podcasts which are found on other podcast providers. But obviously we got the best of you in our main episode, which went out last Thursday.

1:49We have been having a really riveting chat about the US, China, Europe, the role that oil plays in what is happening in the world right now. the idea of the Western Hemisphere, the danger of debt, and also how to play great power politics in 2026. Helen is going to answer some of your questions. Are you feeling ready for this? I am. I am. Some of these questions are going to be pretty radical. Okay, you ready for them? Okay, here we go. This question, this is our first one, and it is from Thomas. Good morning, Radical team from Snowy Berlin. This is my question for Helen Thompson. I've often heard her talk on other podcasts about the problem of divergence in energy interests between the US and Europe after 1973, whereby the US became energy independent while the EU and Europe was increasingly reliant on countries like Russia for oil and gas.

2:41And my question is this, if there was a surplus of oil and gas in the US during the 90s and noughties, why did they not export this to Europe, thereby binding Europe closer to the US? And similarly, why did Europe not buy American oil and gas rather than relying on unstable supplies in places like Russia? Okay. Thomas's question, in a way, has got it the wrong way round. How dare you insult one of our listeners? But there's something really interesting about it, which I'm going to answer. And that is that the US problem from the 70s was that actually it became more like the Western European countries.

3:26Indeed, in some sense, in a worse position than the European countries because it became the largest oil importer in the world. so in that sense the period of common interests ran until the the u.s shale boom starting around 2010 ish and i think that with some exceptions that the united states actually found it rather difficult to police what west european countries were doing in terms of energy including importing first from the Soviet Union and then from Russia, precisely because it was needing to import oil itself. Indeed, in the 70s, for a short period of time, an American president, Nixon, actually moved in the direction of the United States importing oil from the Soviet Union.

4:20What changes then is when the US shale, oil and gas boom radically transformed the United States' own energy position. Now, when it came to oil, the United States has never been able to make itself self-sufficient in the shale period. And that's partly to do with the nature of shale oil itself. But what we can see is that it started to use gas and selling gas, or US companies selling gas to Europe as a geopolitical weapon. You can see that from the middle of the 2010. So if you go back to the first Trump administration, it ended up putting sanctions on the companies that were constructing the second Nord Stream pipeline.

5:09And many in Germany thought the reason for that was that the Trump administration wanted Germany to stop buying or buy at least much less Russian gas and start buying US liquefied natural gas. Now, I think you can certainly say that there hasn't been a systematic policy from the US administrations taking into account Obama and the Biden administrations to try to reconstruct European gas imports to make European states more dependent upon the United States. But you can absolutely see it in what Trump has done. So that agreement that the EU struck with the Trump administration on trade like earlier in the year, the biggest commitment that the EU made, not that it's actually acted upon it, is to buy significantly more US gas.

6:05When you say that shale oil and gas revolution is not complete, is that what you say? What I mean was on gas, the United States is like self-sufficient and it has a strong capacity to export. But oil is more complicated than that because the US is still most of the time a net, on a monthly basis, still a net oil importer. Can I abuse my proximity to this microphone and ask you a question in that vein? I hear a lot of people, I think this is a coming issue in British politics, by the way, people say, why the hell don't we just frack? Why don't we just frack a lot more? And there's a lot of people on the right of politics who think that one of the signature reasons in which you could say Labour has lost the old industrial working class, if you buy that, that's their argument, not mine.

6:47But if you buy that, is that fracking is such an obvious win. It could create manufacturing jobs. It could boost the economy and so on and so forth. Is Britain missing something of an opportunity when it comes to fracking? Well, Britain actually spent quite a bit of time trying to frack in the 2010s. And I think that the reality is that in not just Britain, but in pretty much all European countries where fracking is being tried, most notably Poland the rocks simply do not fracture in the same way and that is the so in that sense the impediment to it is geological not political not political and I actually think that it's a quite important part actually of the Ukraine story in the 2010s because one of the places where there was a great deal of hope put in shale gas at that time was Ukraine and Ukraine in government And including under Yanukovych, supposedly Putin, saw it as a road to some energy independence from Russia.

7:52And it turned out to be false hope. No European country has been able to make fracking work. Now, maybe things change because one thing that you learn if you spend enough time looking at resource history is that what seemed like entirely unpromising activities underground turn out to be or under the water turn out decades later to yield rewards. But it's also true that millions and millions of dollars, pounds, whatever can be sunk into resource projects that go nowhere. Such is the nature of investment. finally you should mention um thank you thomas for that question um finally you should mention russian adventurism and indeed vladimir putin because we have a question from um pavel um i often think pavel is actually parvel when you're out there so anyway pavel i hope i'm pronouncing your well if i say pavel and pavel one of them would be right um but pavel pavel thank you for your question he has written in to say um helen as venezuela can no longer send oil to Cuba.

8:51What might happen if Russian flagged tankers deliver oil to Cuba as they do to China? Would such tankers be intercepted and detained or turned back by American forces? What would Putin's reaction be? I think that it's highly unlikely that Putin would take any risks on that front. I think we can see from before the abduction of Maduro and what's happened since that the The United States is pretty serious about what it calls this oil quarantine around Venezuela. It does not want Venezuela to be able to export oil to anybody except the United States for the activities that the Trump administration allows Chevron to engage in.

9:37Unless and until the United States is satisfied with how Venezuela is being governed and what Venezuela's oil policy is now. Given that there's already been a Russian tanker seized in the last few weeks, I think for Putin to think that it was worth taking a chance on supporting the Cuban regime in this way, given the array of geopolitical difficulties that Russia faces from Ukraine to the Middle East, I just can't see it. Because I think that what we can say is that the United States is very serious in this policy. And in one sense, in the Trump administration's own terms, it has to be. Because all it has done in Venezuela is to take Maduro out of the picture.

10:25It's left the rest of the regime in place. So it has to have an instrument of coercion. It has to have an instrument of coercion. And this, I think, is its chosen instrument of coercion, the oil quarantine. Well, Pavel, Pavel, thank you very much for that question. sort of related from Will. Helen, this is a question from Will. Helen, given both the climate and increasing economic incentives for generating power without burning fossil fuels, how will the shift away from burning gas and oil and towards electricity and renewable energies over the coming decades affect geopolitics? I think we can say that it's already affecting it.

11:05Partly that is because that China is very successful on the manufacturing side of solar and wind energy, particularly solar, but also in terms of like batteries. But also because China is very effective at controlling or largely controlling the supply chains around the metals that are necessary for the energy transition. Rare earths is one part of that, but actually rare earths are needed for many more things than the energy transition. But if we go back to the Western Hemisphere question, and we look at where quite a little bit of China's investment in Latin America has gone over the last two decades, then metal extraction, lithium and copper, particularly like central to that.

11:56it is one of the you know the facts of the one of the geological geopolitical facts if you like of the energy transition that the metals required are disproportionately in the in the southern hemisphere and i'm saying that you know deliberately but there was a point where it's a southern hemisphere and the western hemisphere overlap with each other and there's i think a part of the explanation why the western hemisphere has become more important in um in geopolitics so we're already living i think in a world and we have been for some time where the geopolitics of oil and gas coexist with the geopolitics of decarbonized electricity on top of the geopolitics of uranium for nuclear power but what about the arctic because the interest in greenland is that greenland sits atop greenland which is huge i think it's the world's biggest island isn't it sits atop this huge amount of um rare earths is it the case today that as donald trump said again And this is a classic case of, you know, maybe Donald Trump, who's a man, how can we put this, known to be, even by supporters, known to be prone to exaggeration and, according to his critics, to deceit.

13:06Maybe he is asserting some uncomfortable truths. And he says, look, Russia and China are literally touring the Arctic with their tankers. And that's because they want the resources there. And we need a piece of it. So, in a sense, what's happening over the Arctic, not the southern hemisphere, but very much the northern hemisphere, that's also about resource wars, isn't it? It is. I mean, you can see that from the point, which I think was 2007, where Putin started to make quite a number of speeches about the Arctic and that it was elevated in Russian strategic thinking, that resources are at the core of that.

13:42and that what Putin was effectively asserting was that in resource terms that the Arctic is a Russian sphere of influence. And China has been trying to make commercial investments, particularly in Greenland mining companies, since probably some point in the early 2010s. It has described itself as a near-Arctic power, I think, is the language that it used. And that is why, you know, like China is there. The difficulty is, and this goes back to the point I was making about fracking, is that it may be the case that rare earth mining in Greenland is just too difficult. Certainly, given the conditions in which these rare earths have to be extracted.

14:35them extracted at the moment it's actually not possible to do it because there's a ban on uranium mining in greenland it's politically contested within greenland i think the ban has been there since like 2021 and it's not possible to extract rare earths without really extracting uranium as well at least most of the time that it's that it's um not now you could say well given that like do the resources of greenland really matter but i think that the difficulties don't get in the way of them mattering because even if you're thinking that the payoff for this is two three decades down the road yeah you still don't want the chinese or the russians to be taking it for you and if you go back to like the rare earths that china is using in its trade war with um or fighting the trade war with the united states those rare earths were first discovered like in the 1920s they didn't turn into something like an industry for China until the middle of the 1980s.

15:35There's a great deal of geopolitics in between, including when the Soviets think that they're going to be theirs before the Soviet Chinese split. So everything to do with resources does have a very long-term dimension to it. Thank you very much indeed for that question, Will. Massively appreciated. What a terrific answer. Right. Ben, final question. I think we should make this. This one's from Ben. it's a voice note here it goes hi amil hi helen my question is if you could force one uncomfortable truth into mainstream political debate what would it be great question ben i mean i wouldn't have a go at that but then no you go first no no what would i okay okay um i would inject the fact that 70 % of the four and a bit million people living in poverty in Britain are in families where people work.

16:28And I think that we don't talk about poverty nearly enough. It's one of my personal, not just bugbears, but obsessions. And I'm trying very hard to make sure we do give poverty its due because poverty today is very different to poverty in the past. We've, as we've often talked about this podcast, there is a sense in which the old working class, I mean I'm not saying for a minute it was great being working class in the 50s, 60s and 70s by any means in fact it was the opposite but there were routes out for them and opportunities that I think don't exist for the new precariat and I think there's a sort of 10 % of the population in this country that live in very geographically isolated patches often quite big patches of intense poverty and even where there is work their chances of escaping poverty are small and I think that that's a huge moral stain on the country really so the new nature of poverty and the fact that it affects so many people who are in work is one of them I mean I guess given that I go on about it so much I would have honestly to answer about energy and if I was going to reduce it to something like relatively simple I think I would say that the laws of physics govern energy and that means that it's not an appropriate place for wishful thinking or utopian ideas which to some extent i think that net zero hasn't is and that we cannot escape energy.

18:05It's kind of, in some sense, the universal currency of the universe. So we're dependent upon it for everyday life and that we cannot choose to consume it and produce it in whichever way suits our political purposes. And in that sense that it is an actual constraint, it's not just an imaginary constraint that can be overcome with political will. So one of the things I'm very, very keen to do on this podcast and everything I do anywhere really is to inject the benefit of doubt and shades of grey and nuance and so on. So I don't want to try and cast you as having a dogmatic position about net zero.

18:49But what did you mean there when you said that in some ways net zero is sort of trying to almost, I don't want to misrepresent you at all, but almost overcoming the laws of physics. What is net zero getting wrong in danger of getting... Well, I wouldn't say that it's trying to overcome the laws of physics directly. But what I would say is this, is that once you understand the significance of energy and the way in which the turn to fossil fuel energy, beginning with coal, actually, in this country, burning coal for industrial purposes anyway, that completely revolutionized the possibilities of human existence including the numbers of people who could live on the earth it was in that sense the energy sorry the industrial revolution was an energy like revolution i think that's how it should be understood so if we were then saying if we take the uk where the net zero legislation was passed in 2019 that in a period of 31 years we would be able to rework the energy foundations essentially of industrial civilisation over several centuries.

19:59That seems to me a fairly utopian hope, particularly once one considers that every energy transition hitherto and we leave nuclear power out of it is actually be moving from a less dense form of energy to a more dense form of energy. So that means that oil will do more work for you than coal will do. Coal will do more work for you than wood will do. Whereas the direction of travel with the energy transition away from fossil fuels is the opposite. So there is no precedent in human history for this. if we also then think that every energy transition that has taken place is actually only added energy.

20:46So the world still uses vast amounts of coal, more coal than it's ever used before. The age of oil didn't replace the age of coal. It added to it. And again, the point of zero is actually to remove energy in its present form from the picture. That does sound like an uncomfortable truth. and you've just injected it into mainstream political debate. Ben, thank you very, very much indeed for that question. Thank you so much, Helen, for being so generous with your time. I hope I've not deprived some of your students of hours of your brilliant teaching. No, the term doesn't start till next week. Oh, phew, thank goodness.

21:21Okay, but you're... What's a Cambridge academic doing pre-term? Other than doing great podcasts. I'm writing a book. About? I'm writing a book about England's long history, some of which is obviously about England's long resource and energy history. Wow. Maybe you could come back on the podcast and talk about that when that's out. When that's going to be out? I've got to finish it first. You've got to finish it first. That's the thing about books. You've got to write them first. I'll be back on Thursday, by which time Helen won't have written her new book. She will at some point. And I'll be talking on Thursday to the author and foster carer and all-round extraordinary human being, Louise Allen, about the state of fostering in this country and how to fix it.

21:58We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for your time. Goodbye.

22:10I'm Paul Kenyon, and for Radio 4 and the History Podcast, this is Two Nottingham Lads. When the invasion happened, it was completely hell on earth with the sounds. The sad thing about war is people lose their empathy and their humanity. I want to know how two men from Nottingham ended up on opposite sides in the war in Ukraine, and what became of them after a chilling encounter in a prison in Donetsk. Out of all the places in the world where I meet someone from Nottingham, it's in captivity on two sides of the conflict. It's a story about how and why you pick a side in a war that's not your own.

22:49You can listen to Two Nottingham Lads first on BBC Sounds.

22:58If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.