WTH Is Going On With the War on Fossil Fuels? Dan Yergin on Restoring America's Energy Dominance

Today’s episode with Dan Yergin explores America’s
shift away from fossil fuels, looking at the very real
domestic and geopolitical implications of shuttering coal
plants and transitioning to green energy. Pivoting away
from U.S. energy independence has not made the
country energy progressive; rather, it has set
Americans up for reliance on adversarial energy
sources, encouraging strategic allies to import from
Russia and China instead. Promoting wind and solar
alternatives does not dramatically lower resource usage; it
simply shifts from a world of big oil to a world of big shovels,
as an enormous quantity of rare earths and
minerals are required. Then there’s the fact that the
technology to store wind and solar energy does not yet exist. So,
how can we think about climate change, resources, geopolitical
strategy, and security… practically?


Yergin is the vice-chairman of S&P Global, a director of
the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of the Brookings
Institution. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for
his book The Prize. His newest book is The New
Map. 


Download the transcript here.