Preet Bharara:
From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Daniel Yergin:
Right now, I think we are in a crisis. I think World War II, think the Korean War, go back to 1956 Suez crisis, what you really need right now is government and industry working together to manage the logistics and complexities of 100-million barrel a day oil system in order to deal with the repercussions and the impact of Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Preet Bharara:
That’s Daniel Yergin. He’s a Pulitzer prize winning author who for decades has been regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the global energy market. His 1990 book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, is widely recognized as the definitive history of the oil industry. Not surprisingly, Yergin has more than a few incisive observations about the state of global energy in 2022. We discussed the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the price of gas at the pump, the U.S. Shale revolution over the last 20 years, the future of electric vehicles, and the time Vladimir Putin raised his voice and discontent at a question posed by Yergin. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Preet Bharara:
Hey folks, before I get to your questions, I have some exciting news. Stay Tuned is nominated for a Webby Award for the best individual podcast episode in the news and politics category. The episode features my conversation with the prosecutors who convicted former police officer, Derek Chauvin, for the murder of George Floyd. We discussed their decision making and perhaps one of the most high profile trials in U.S. history. Vote for Stay Tuned at cafe.com/webby. That’s cafe.com/W-E-B-B-Y. Thank you as always for your continued support of our work.

Preet Bharara:
Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from Twitter user @bidhar2021. It’s a simple question. Is the January 6th committee actually being effective? I think the January 6th committee is actually being quite effective. Now, the first thing you have to realize is what their purpose is, what their mission is, what their mandate is. Remember that the January 6th committee is not charged with bringing a criminal indictment against Donald Trump and others in his orbit with respect to January 6th. They’re not going to hold anyone accountable.

Preet Bharara:
Their mandate is to get information, put it out into the public ultimately with a final report that I believe will be very substantive and detailed and thorough, and in the interim, before too long, public hearings that will shed more light on what happened in the lead up to January 6th and on January 6th itself. So if you’re measuring them against a standard of holding someone accountable, they’re not able to be effective, because that’s not their job. But if you’re measuring them against the standard of bringing stuff to light, and showing the way for the Department of Justice and others to do a different job, then I think they’ve been quite effective.

Preet Bharara:
For among other things, although we on the show and Joyce Vance and I on the CAFE Insider spend a lot of time talking about people who are being intransigent and defiant of subpoenas and the fights about that defiance, the committee has interviewed hundreds of witnesses without problem and without fighting. We don’t know the details of all of that, but from the snippets we’ve seen that have been made public, we know that it’s a lot of depth, and it’s a lot of breadth, and it’s a huge amount of information.

Preet Bharara:
I think they’re making their decisions very deliberately. They’re making them in a unified way. It’s a bipartisan committee. There are two Republicans on it who have done a great job. They seem to be acting with solidarity and with purpose, and they seem to be acting with pretty decent speed, because they all know there’s a clock, and that the house may change hands, and the work of the committee will come to an end. I think they’ve handled the fights that they’ve had very well. I think that their messaging is excellent, and I really think they’ve been incredibly thorough in who they’ve asked to talk to and the people from whom they’ve requested documents.

Preet Bharara:
I think the actual effectiveness of the committee will really be on display and really be tested at the time that they have public hearings, which might be in the spring or early summer. Here’s a related question in a tweet from somebody who calls himself Deep State Dude, who asks, “What steps can we as members of the public take to convince the DOJ that they need to work more expeditiously #AskPreet?” Well, Deep State Dude, not withstanding your name, I don’t think you’re going to be super pleased with my answer.

Preet Bharara:
Part of the effectiveness of DOJ is its independence, and the way that DOJ is not supposed to put its finger up to the winds, and pay attention to what the public generally thinks and the public generally wants, and particularly advocates for or against one party or another. I think it’s perfectly okay, and I’ve done it myself, express skepticism from time to time or an opinion on the speed with which DOJ is handling a particular matter. In this case, I think you’re talking about the January 6th issues.

Preet Bharara:
But the Department of Justice, true to its mission, and its nature, and its history, and its legacy, as led by Merrick Garland, is just not going to, I think, be moved by impassioned private citizens saying, “Do something more. Do something more quickly.” I think they have a sense of urgency built into them. I think you saw that on January 5th when Merrick Garland gave a speech talking about the fact that the department will be looking at anybody no matter how high and whether they were present or not at the insurrection.

Preet Bharara:
I think they already have it in their heads that they need to do something, and they’ve committed to doing something. I think that your opinion and other people’s opinions should be expressed and are well expressed often, but I don’t think it has an influence really on the DOJ and nor should it.

Preet Bharara:
This question comes in the tweet from Ricos Mama who asks a very simple question. Are you going to have Bill Browder on soon? The answer to that question, which will be very satisfying, is yes. In fact, he’ll be on the podcast next week. I saw him this week for the first time since the pandemic at the launch of his book, Freezing Order, and so we had a nice chat. I’m looking forward to interviewing him next week about his new book. That is very timely. That happens to…

Preet Bharara:
He’s taken three years to write the book as he told me this week, and a lot of it has to do with Russian oligarchs, and how we can take money away from them, and how to deal with Vladimir Putin and his stifling of dissidents. What could be more timely than that at this moment? So very excited to talk to Bill, and happy you asked the question.

Preet Bharara:
So as you know, every week on the show, I answer your questions. I get some specific questions. I get some humorous questions. I get some general questions. And from time to time, I get asked some basic legal questions. I think that from time to time, I should talk about basic legal concepts. We have some lawyers obviously who listen to the show, but we have far more thoughtful citizens who are not experienced or educated or trained in the law. I think sometimes we just assume knowledge on the part of the public, and we shouldn’t always do that.

Preet Bharara:
Today, I’m going to answer a question about how a federal grand jury works. I’ve gotten that question before from thoughtful folks. We talked about the grand jury did this, and the grand jury did that, and then the question of subpoenas, but we seldom take a moment to say, “Here’s how it actually works. Here’s what it actually means. Here’s what the actual purpose of the grand jury is,” so let me do that for a minute, and maybe in the coming weeks, I can answer other basic legal questions. So first of all, my knowledge is about the federal grand jury, state grand juries, and grand juries and other jurisdictions operate somewhat differently, but I’m speaking just about the federal grand jury.

Preet Bharara:
The federal grand jury is made up of just ordinary citizens in the same way that a trial jury is, except the federal grand jury has a maximum of 23 members, odd number, 23. In order for the grand jury to consider an indictment or to hear testimony from someone, there has to be a quorum. A quorum requires 16 of the 23 to be present. In order for the grand jury to take some action, most commonly to vote up or down on a proposed indictment, you need a simple majority, so 12 of the 23. So unlike a trial jury where you need unanimity in a criminal case, on a federal grand jury, you only need 12.

Preet Bharara:
The other thing that’s important to remember is that unlike a trial jury, where the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt unanimously, in a grand jury, it’s a majority, and you only have to show probable cause that a crime has been committed on the part of the person identified. That’s a much lower standard. There are different kinds of grand juries in the federal system, at least in the Southern district of New York. There was a regular grand jury, which heard simpler, less complicated cases. They sat every day for a month.

Preet Bharara:
Then you had multiple special grand juries, which heard more complicated cases that might involve many witnesses or many documents, and they would sit typically two days a week for 18 months. That grand jury could be extended as needed and required. Why is the grand jury necessary? Well, with very limited exceptions, the only way you can charge a person ultimately so that they have their day in court before a federal district court judge who has life tenure is to get a grand jury to vote in the affirmative on a proposed indictment. You can charge people by criminal complaint that can be approved by a magistrate judge, but that only lasts for a certain period of time after which you must get an indictment from the grand jury.

Preet Bharara:
Now, there are people who plead guilty from time to time, and they accept charges that are filed by something that’s not called an indictment, but in the federal system is called an information, but that requires the person to voluntarily and knowingly waive the right to a grand jury. Everyone in the United States of America, before going to trial in a criminal charge, is absolutely entitled constitutionally to be indicted by a grand jury. What happens in the grand jury? Well, mostly, it’s the show for the prosecutor. Unlike other jurisdictions that sometimes allow defense lawyers to participate in the process, in the federal grand jury system, whether you like it or not, it’s really the prosecutor’s show.

Preet Bharara:
It depends on how complicated the case is, but you can literally go into the grand jury, have one summarizing witness, case agent, for example, in a particular matter. And because hearsay is allowed in the grand jury, that case agent through a Q&A with the prosecutor can present the basic facts of the case sufficient to support the elements of the crime after which the prosecutor presents a proposed indictment against one or more individuals, and that’s drafted by the prosecutor. It’s not drafted by the grand jury.

Preet Bharara:
The prosecutors do all the work, gives instruction on the legal meaning of certain terms and phrases and about what the elements of the crime are that the grand jury has defined probable cause to support, takes questions from the grand jurors if they have any, and then leaves the room, leaving the grand jury to deliberate and to vote. Now, there’s the famous phrase coined by a former court of appeals judge in New York, I think, that the grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, which is intended to mean that it’s very, very easy to get an indictment, and there’s not much of a process at all.

Preet Bharara:
That’s not fully true. One thing is, remember, it’s much easier to get an indictment than to get a conviction at trial in part, because the standard is lower. It’s just probable cause. It’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If you’ve listened to the show for any period of time, you know that most prosecutors would not be satisfied knowing that ultimately the case is going to trial with just having a quantum of proof that reaches the threshold of probable cause at. The time that you indict, you want to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt, because that’s ultimately the burden that you’re going to have to bear and to reach.

Preet Bharara:
So usually, it’s the case that you have far more evidence than probable cause, because you know you’re going to trial. The other thing to realize too is unlike in a criminal case, where you’re at trial and if your evidence is not great, you’re going to end up getting an acquittal on the case. In a grand jury proceeding, if you’re getting a lot of tough questions, and this is something you get trained on when you become a prosecutor, maybe you haven’t brought enough proof. Maybe you haven’t brought enough witnesses. Maybe you haven’t brought enough documents.

Preet Bharara:
Remember, the grand jury proceeding is a summary process. You’re not bringing to the attention of the grand jurors every bit of evidence, every bit of detail like you would in a regular trial. So if you’re finding that the grand jury is skeptical of your proposed indictment, all you have to do is just pull the proceeding. You don’t have them vote. If you think that the grand jury doesn’t think you have enough evidence, you leave. You end the proceeding, and you collect more evidence, and you bring that further evidence to the grand jury in the future. A good prosecutor, and most prosecutors I think are good, do not ask the grand jury to vote unless they have very great confidence that they will vote to approve the indictment.

Preet Bharara:
One other aspect of the grand jury, that get some attention from time to time, is the requirement of secrecy. Prosecutors are not allowed to talk about what happens in the grand jury. The grand jurors are obligated by oath to keep all the proceedings, and the testimony, and the documents they see absolutely secret. That’s per a rule that all prosecutors know very well, rule (6) e, which demands grand jury secrecy, but witnesses who come and testify before the grand jury are not obligated to be secretive about what they’ve said or what they were asked.

Preet Bharara:
That’s why from time to time, you get leaks about cases. I hope that’s helpful to the non-lawyers out there. I’m happy to answer other basic questions about the criminal law or civil law that you might have. Please keep sending them our way.

THE INTERVIEW

Preet Bharara:
What’s the future of the fossil fuel industry that has propelled modern life as we know it? Is the green energy revolution for real? When will gas prices go down? There is perhaps nobody better to think through these questions than the Pulitzer prize winning author and vice chairman of S&P Global, Daniel Yergin.

Preet Bharara:
Daniel Yergin, what a pleasure it is to have you on the show.

Daniel Yergin:
Thank you, glad to join you today.

Preet Bharara:
It’s a special pleasure, because I understand that your daughter is a fan of the podcast.

Daniel Yergin:
She is a big fan, and she found it… Not only is she a fan, she’s found it very helpful in her work.

Preet Bharara:
That’s always great to hear. So one of the reasons I’m excited to have you is on a lot of these issues that you are expert on, I am the opposite, whatever the opposite of expert is, ignoramus. We have a very well-read, educated audience, but I bet some folks who listen to this podcast are also ignorant about some of these issues of energy and gas and oil and climate. I don’t mean to speak for them, but at least I am ignorant about some things. The first question I want to ask you about, the first topic I want to address is something that’s a political football, no matter who’s in charge, whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans.

Preet Bharara:
I remember when I was a senate staffer back in 2006 and ’07, when there was a Republican president, and the price of gas at the pump seemed high, I remember standing with democratic senators who were doing press conferences to rail against the Bush administration for the high price of gas. We now see similar kinds of things being said about the Biden administration. Can you offer us a little bit of an explanation as to what leads to higher gas prices?

Daniel Yergin:
Sure. As you say, one administration gets blamed, or the other administration gets blamed, and then you get all these accusations that are these sound bites that get recycled about price gouging. Basically, oil is a global commodity, and it has a global price. When it goes up for whatever reason, because a disruption of one kind or another, either because demand outstrips supply, or because there’s actually physical disruption, the price of oil goes up in the global market. Therefore, it goes up at the gas station, which is the end of the line until the gasoline is put into your car.

Preet Bharara:
Is the market for gas at the pump an efficient market?

Daniel Yergin:
I think it’s a pretty efficient market. We have well over 100,000 gasoline stations in the United States. Most of them are owned by small operators. They buy their gasoline from one of the refiners or one of the other refiners, so it is pretty much a classic market actually as I think about it.

Preet Bharara:
It’s just odd to some people, at least to me, that the price of gas can be quite different from one station to another that’s just a few miles away. What accounts for those differences?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, it can be a few cents from between one station or another, and it depends when they bought the gasoline or which distributor they bought it for, or what kind of margin the gas station owner wants. But also, you’ll see a lot of disparity in gasoline between different states. A lot of that has to do with what kind of gasoline is required for environmental reasons. California gasoline prices are always much higher than they are in other parts of the country.

Daniel Yergin:
That is due to regulation that you have, what the blend of the gasoline is, and you go from winter blend to summer blend. It all has to do with air quality, and goes back basically to the issue of smog.

Preet Bharara:
What about this issue of the salience of a president’s or a party’s policies? Does that have something to do with the price of gas at the pump, nothing to do with it, or does it depend?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, it does. I mean, if the United States was still importing 60% of its oil, as it was in 2008, we would be looking at much higher prices than we are today. So policies that have allowed the U.S. to go from being the largest importer of oil in the world to being the largest producer of the world have been beneficial for consumers, because otherwise, prices would be a lot higher, because the market would be in a lot shorter supply.

Preet Bharara:
I guess what I’m asking is as a general matter, when political debates are unfolding and one party says about the other party, “You are the problem.” When the party responds, the party in power responds and says, “Presidents don’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with the price of gas at the pump.” Among other factors they point to is when the price of gas has gone up in the UK and in parts of Europe, that’s obviously not affected by Joe Biden’s domestic policies. Is that a fair retort?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think that is generally the case that it is a global market. Obviously, specific policies about whether you have more or less supply will affect the overall numbers, but gasoline prices are up everywhere in the world right now, because basically, we’re on the edge of a pretty major oil disruption because of the war in Ukraine, which comes on top of the oil market that was very tight in terms of the balance between supply and demand even before the war began, so it was already a crisis-prone market. Now, it’s basically in crisis.

Preet Bharara:
You mentioned something a few minutes ago, allegations of oil and gas companies engaging in price gouging or profiteering. I hear that a lot. Any truth to those arguments?

Daniel Yergin:
I think those are recycled. There have been… The first congressional hearing that I could find when I was writing the prize on investigating a high gasoline prices was in 1923. The language of those hearings ever since has been the same. When the FTC or others go back and examine what happens, it turns out that it was actually market forces that was at work, not price gouging, but it’s part of the political vocabulary. In the United States, when prices go up, people talk about price gouging.

Daniel Yergin:
What they should look at is the fact is that we have a really tight world oil market, and that’s what’s driving the prices up, and the war in Ukraine is what’s driving prices up. And if Europe puts us ban on the import of Russian oil, it will be more disruption, and prices will go up. What balances it out is if you have a breakout of COVID in China, as you do now, and less economic activity, less travel and less demand for oil, then the price eases off, or if you do as present Biden just did, you release 180 million barrels, about a million barrels a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and you put more oil into the market, price eases down.

Daniel Yergin:
It’s these global forces that really count. I actually think that the kind of… Right now, I think we are in a crisis. Think World War II, think the Korean War, go back to the 1956 Suez crisis, what you really need right now is government and industry working together to manage the logistics and complexities of 100 million barrel a day oil system in order to deal with the repercussions and the impact of Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Preet Bharara:
Going back to the complaints and allegations about the oil companies, is it reasonable for the average citizen to think, “Well, when there’s a shock to prices, that’s going to last for some period of time, but won’t be permanent, that rather than try to maintain the same level of profit, that the oil company should absorb it a little bit, keep prices low at the pump, and they’ll be fine because they’re very rich?”

Daniel Yergin:
Preet, the oil companies are not at the pump. The pump are… They’ve owned very few of the gasoline stations. They’re families, small companies. Secondly, let’s look at the… Go back to 2014. You’ve had two major price collapse, where oil prices at one actually went into this territory, people have never seen before negative prices. People are having to pay other people to take-

Preet Bharara:
Maybe you can explain that too, because negative prices are hard to cover.

Daniel Yergin:
I mean, the negative prices, when I first got it, you got to wrap your mind around it that you, Preet Bharara oil company, you’re producing oil, but you can’t find a… There’s not enough room in a pipeline to put it, so you pay somebody to come and trucks and pick up oil from your well. That’s what negative prices are. You’ve had two major price collapse, big cutbacks in a number of people, equipment and so forth. Then you go into this very never seen a… It’s a cyclical business, but we’ve never seen this degree of cyclicality that I’ve ever seen in such a short period of time from the COVID lockdowns, which led to those negative prices to where we are today.

Daniel Yergin:
You had these companies were not very profitable at all. They took on debt. Now, they’re making money, and they… What do they do with their money? They invest it back in their business, or they return it to their shareholders who happen to be the pension funds and the 401k of a lot of people. That’s the way the system works, but you see activity is increasing to produce more oil, but we had these congressional hearings the other day in which they said, “Why aren’t you producing more oil?”

Daniel Yergin:
If you pre-decided tomorrow, you’re going to start drilling in your lease, it would take because of the supply chain disruptions of equipment, because of shortage, not enough people, not enough truck drivers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It would take 12 to 18 months for you to see your first oil or natural gas.

Preet Bharara:
That’s very interesting. Just another word about the politics, what’s your advice given what you’ve said so far to the average citizen paying attention to the political debates? Is the stuff that gets said about Biden and about gas prices, is that mostly just bunk that gets, as you said, recycled from time to time, or how should they interpret what they hear?

Daniel Yergin:
I think on both sides, I think a lot of it is political posturing on both sides. It’s sound bites. Obviously, if you’re a congressperson, and your constituents is a nurse or a school teacher, who’s driving 25 miles a day to work, and 25 miles a day home, and you’re facing these costs, and you’re facing also the rising costs of food and all these other inflation we haven’t seen for decades in the United States, you’re going to want to be out there. You’re going to be out there with the soundbites. It’s completely understandable, but it doesn’t actually address what the real issues are, which is we have to…

Daniel Yergin:
I think we are really in a global crisis maybe in some ways worse than the crises of the 1970s, the iconic crisis of the ’70s, which people talk about, because this is not just about oil. It’s also natural gas is in short supply. Coal’s in short supply, and you have two nuclear superpowers who are increasingly arrayed against each other, and you didn’t even have that during the oil crises of the 1970s. I look at this in a global picture and say, “This…” Therefore, to me, the finger pointing on both sides really ought to be put aside.

Daniel Yergin:
What you really need is what we’ve had in previous decades, a collaborative war time almost system to manage the complexity so that you can get oil or gas, natural gas to where you need it to be. Right now, Europe, if it wasn’t for U.S. natural gas, LNG, if it were not for the growth of U.S. oil production, I don’t think Europe could have withstood the pressure they’re getting from Russia right now because of their dependence on Russian energy.

Preet Bharara:
Right. I want to talk about that in the effect, how we got to the level of dependence, how they can become independent in a moment. But one more thing about something you mentioned, and that’s President Biden’s decision to release significant amount of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, was that a wise thing to do?

Daniel Yergin:
Yes. I think it was a wise thing to do. I think that dribbling it out is not what we need. If you take a million barrels a day, which is what it is basically, well, that’s equivalent to about one quarter of the amount of oil that Russia exports every day to Europe. It is an offset. Right now, you’re looking for offsets. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in the 1970s for exactly this kind of emergency, not to manage price in some fine tuning way, but to deal with real risks, and real risks are here now.

Preet Bharara:
Do you think that when these kinds of things happen, it speeds up interest in and demand for electric vehicles?

Daniel Yergin:
Absolutely. I mean, I live in Washington, D.C. Boy, am I seeing a lot of Teslas on the streets. It’s really striking. I mean, it seems like, “Where have they all been hiding?” I think that definitely, when you get prices like this, people and electric cars, it’s an alternative that didn’t exist before. It’s a remarkable story. All of this started because of a lunch at a fish restaurant in Los Angeles in 2003, where a young electricity enthusiast named J.B. Straubel was trying to convince Elon Musk to do an electric airplane, and Musk said, “I’m not interested in that.”

Daniel Yergin:
He said, “Well, what about electric car?” Musk said, “I might be interested in that,” and that was the origin of Tesla.

Preet Bharara:
And the rest is history.

Daniel Yergin:
Yeah. J.B. became the technical director for 15 years at Tesla. It was an incredible entrepreneurial, visionary, really hard thing to do. At first, people thought it was ridiculous, but now you turn around, and every automobile maker… Just look at the commercials on television. They’re all about electric vehicles. They’re saying by 2030 or 2035, they’re just going to do electric vehicles. I think it’s a really… This is a very short timeframe for something like this to have happened, but there’s still constraints.

Daniel Yergin:
There’s still… The ability to produce electric cars is still a very small proportion, and there’s still something else that we may get into that you get away from oil and gas, but you become much more dependent upon minerals and metals.

Preet Bharara:
You know what, I’m pretty confident, it’s the case that Elon Musk did not create the first electric vehicle, right?

Daniel Yergin:
No, do you know who it was? It was Thomas Edison. He sunk a lot of his money into it. He was convinced it would work, but then along came Henry Ford and the model T. By the 19… Well, first, electric cars actually were called ladies cars, because they were not dirty, and you didn’t have to crank them. Then by the 1920s, they were known as doctors’ cars, because that’s what doctors… When they would make home visits in the United States, they were driving them, and then they just faded away, but it was not only as you say, Elon Musk.

Daniel Yergin:
Parallel to that, it was also unfolding in China, but there, it was very much driven by the government, by the state, a, because of pollution, b, climate, but c, competitive reasons, because China realized that it could not compete in the global automobile market with internal combustion engines or a normal car engine because it was too late, but sees electric cars as a way to leapfrog into the market. So by the way, half the world’s electric cars today are actually in China.

Preet Bharara:
I did not know that. It’s part of the reason that electric vehicles weren’t taking off, that they just weren’t cool.

Daniel Yergin:
Well, there was that problem. There was General Motors tried to do one in the 1990s, which became ungenerously known as the egg on wheels. It didn’t have much range, and it was really unattractive, and you’d have to cram yourself into it. But what made the difference was that J.B Straubel’s idea was that you could take the batteries that are used in cell phones, and string 5,000 of them together, and that’s how you could power an electric car. Nobody had ever thought of that before, or thought it was practical. That was the breakthrough concept, and so it was really taking the lithium ion battery, which, by the way, had been invented in an Exxon laboratory in 1976 when it was thought the world was going to run out of oil, didn’t get much commercial traction.

Daniel Yergin:
Sony adopted it in the 1990s for electronic goods, and then it became for computers and cell phones. Then J.B. said, “Well, let’s put 5,000 together in a battery pack, and run a car on.” People said, “That’s a crazy idea, but you know what, it worked.” That’s where the Tesla came from.

Preet Bharara:
How much of the success of Tesla in terms of its own sales and changing the public perception about electric vehicles, how much of it is technology that you just described versus aesthetic?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think that was a very key thing that Tesla decided we’re not going to make another egg on wheel.

Preet Bharara:
Eight. We’re going to make something super cool.

Daniel Yergin:
Let’s make something really cool. The fist thing, if you remember, was a sports car, a really… I remember driving one in, I don’t know, I want to say 2010, 2011. I mean, the acceleration was incredible, and so that was its entry was to come out with something, as you say, that was cool and attractive rather than looking like something that you want to keep locked in your garage.

Preet Bharara:
Do you drive an electric vehicle if that’s not too personal a question?

Daniel Yergin:
No. We drive a rapidly aging Volvo, which was what we bought a decade ago, but the pledge is next time we buy a car, it’s certainly going to be an electric car. We just don’t have very many miles on this one, and it has its scrapes and bumps on it, but it does adequate job. What about you? What do you drive?

Preet Bharara:
I drive… I don’t drive much. I take public transportation or Ubers. I drive the 2005 Honda Accord that I bought when I first had any car, because I moved out of the city of New York to D.C., and apparently in D.C., you need a car. What was then a brand spanking new 2005, nice Honda Accord is now my aging 17-year-old vehicle.

Daniel Yergin:
But it sounds like it’s still hanging in there.

Preet Bharara:
It is. In fact, the Accord is such… They don’t advertise with us, and put me up to this. This is not a product placement. Every once in a while when I drive the car, and go to the pump, that we’ve been talking about, or park in a garage in the city, sometimes people make an offer on the car, because they think it’s preserved pretty well.

Daniel Yergin:
It’s an antique value. That’s why it will become a collector’s item.

Preet Bharara:
Exactly. Can I ask you a couple of dumb questions?

Daniel Yergin:
No question is dumb, but go ahead.

Preet Bharara:
Can we run out of oil and coal on earth?

Daniel Yergin:
That’s not a dumb question. I mean, we’ve run out of oil at least five times. The first time, I think, was in the ’70s or ’80s. We thought we’d run out of oil. We thought in the 1970s the world was going to run out of oil. At the end of World War I, it was thought the world would run out of oil.

Preet Bharara:
How did we not?

Daniel Yergin:
What happened is technology, advanced understanding, new discoveries, new resources, so there’s clearly… Things depend upon cost, and they depend upon technology. So clearly, the Shale Revolution, it was thought that the America’s days as an oil producer were going rapidly disappearing until the Shale Revolution. New technology opened up resources. I’ve always thought there’s obviously going to be a constraint, or price will determine it, but we go through these cycles.

Daniel Yergin:
I mean, it’s a very interesting question now because as you look at renewable energy, it’s going to need a lot more copper. The question is, is copper readily available under the earth’s surface or not? So that question of run out of oil is a very… It’s a recurrent question, and it’s been a very important driver in public policy.

Preet Bharara:
And of technology.

Daniel Yergin:
Yes, absolutely. I mean-

Preet Bharara:
This thing that you talk about is fascinating to me, because I don’t think it’s well known, and it’s remarkable that it’s not well known given how big a deal it is, and given how, when I was growing up, there was so much concern about, as you mentioned, running out of oil and dependence on the Middle East and other places. Just to repeat the statistic you mentioned a moment ago, in 2008, the U.S. imported on a net basis 60% of its oil. It’s not that long ago.

Daniel Yergin:
Not that long ago.

Preet Bharara:
Now, we’re basically self-sufficient. You talked about the Shale… Can you explain more about the Shale Revolution, and then also, why is that a fact that it’s not more celebrated and acknowledged and known?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I do find it very interesting. I was in a conversation with a centrist democratic Senator, and he was talking about right sizing the U.S. commitment to them at least. That was his policy point of view. I thought, “Well, you wouldn’t be saying that if we were still importing 60% of our oil.” That was an example to me that it has gone unrecognized, but I think there’s been a change in the last three months actually, Preet, on that.

Daniel Yergin:
But again, it’s interesting how often big changes are results of a few individuals or one obsessive individual. Just as we were talking about the electric car, and it’s growing out of an obsession, there was a… Really, it was not an oil man. It was a natural gas producer in Texas who was convinced you could get this stuff called shale oil or shale gas, really, out of very dense rock in the textbooks. A petroleum engineer professor said, “It’s not possible.” By putting different technologies together, it was found that it is possible, and that’s what transformed the position of the United States.

Daniel Yergin:
It’s something that people like Vladimir Putin hate. They hate that the U.S. is in this position. They hate the fact that U.S. natural gas can now compete with Russian gas in Europe, which is so crucial. But I think it went unremarked, but around November, gasoline prices started going up. You had the Biden administration suddenly talking about, “Can you guys… You, companies, can you increase production?” First, they asked the Saudis too, and then they turned to the domestic industry.

Daniel Yergin:
U.S. production is going to increase this year. It’s going to increase in this country more than all the combined increases everywhere else in the world, but I think what’s really driven it home is the situation with Europe because Europe has had this high dependence on Russian gas. The major alternative to Russian gas is liquified natural gas, LNG. That typically has been imported from [inaudible 00:35:59], or Nigeria, or Australia. But now, the United States this year, having been really nowhere in this six years ago, is now going to be the world’s largest exporter.

Daniel Yergin:
I can tell you, tomorrow, I’m meeting with people coming from governments in Europe who are here basically seeing if they can get more U.S. LNG to reduce the reliance on natural gas from Russia. So for Europe now as well as the United States, U.S. LNG now, liquified natural gas, is now seen as a great geopolitical and very vital strategic asset. What a chain change.

Preet Bharara:
A huge change. Just to go back to the issue of where credit should be given, the very substantial move from being a very significant importer of oil to being self-sufficient over a period of a decade or so, can any of that credit be laid at the feet of a politician, or is it all technology?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I’ve been looking at this recently. There was the U.S. government in the 1970s started to provide some R&D research funding to try and understand better shales, and that continued for decades and decades. I think that research was important, but I think what happened was this was a group of entrepreneurs that called independence, not the major oil companies, who caught onto this and started to develop it. So from that point on, it was really driven by the private sector. But I think as in so many other things, spending money on research and development is really been one of the critical things, of course, that the federal government does, and that was very helpful.

Preet Bharara:
We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Daniel Yergin after this. This issue of self-sufficiency in recent times on the part of the United States, how would you characterize how important that is to U.S. National Security?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think it gives the U.S. a flexibility on foreign policy. I mean, I can give you two examples where I’ve seen its impact. One, I’m the only non-Indian on the think tank of the Indian Ministry of Petroleum. I can see that the relationship, although it’s complicated now, the fact that the U.S. is importing, exporting oil and natural gas to India has become one of the foundations in what has generally, at least until recently, been a much improving relationship between India and the United States.

Daniel Yergin:
Secondly, and the one that I do write about in the new map, is I was at this thing called the St. Petersburg International Energy Forum. Vladimir Putin had, as his guest that year, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. You could see how much they really detested each other. But I asked the… I had the opportunity to ask the first question, so I asked that question that one would always ask of Russia before all this started, what are you going to do to diversify your economies here not so dependent on oil and gas 40% of his budget?

Daniel Yergin:
By accident, I mentioned shale, and at that point, he started shouting at me and said, “This is barbaric. Shale should be stopped.” I realized-

Preet Bharara:
I’m sorry, just to be… Who’s shouting this?

Daniel Yergin:
A man named Vladimir Putin.

Preet Bharara:
Oh yeah. I’ve heard of him.

Daniel Yergin:
In front of 3,000 people. As you can imagine, I slumped down in my seat. I mean, it was really a little scary actually, but-

Preet Bharara:
Did you have a food taster after that?

Daniel Yergin:
I was very careful. I only ate canned food after that. No, but what struck me is that he saw that shale would do two things for the U.S. It would make U.S. competitive with his gas in Europe. He also saw that it would enhance the position of the United States in the world. It’d be another more flexibility in foreign policy. In a sense, he saw that earlier than a lot of other people saw it. I think there’s no question that this puts the U.S. in a stronger position, as well as it means instead of sending money overseas to go into somebody’s sovereign wealth on, the dollars that are earned basically stay in the United States and circulate in our economy.

Daniel Yergin:
It’s also been a big deal in our balance of payments improvement.

Preet Bharara:
Before the war in Ukraine began, what was the level of European dependence on those energy sources from Russia?

Daniel Yergin:
About 35% of Europe’s oil was coming from Russia, and roughly the same amount of Europe’s natural gas was coming through pipelines to Europe. That was the degree of the overall dependence. Some countries were more dependent like Germany.

Preet Bharara:
Why Germany is so dependent? Was that wise?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think that Germany saw… They believed in, I forgot the German phrase for it, but sort of peace through trade that if you buy from Russia, and they buy from you, you create an economic foundation that helps stabilize the relationship. Also, of course, it was a neighbor. It was convenient. I’ve always thought that in fact, the opening up of trade between Europe and the United States and the Soviet Union helped to erode the iron curtain by showing people there was life outside the iron curtain, but Germany looked on this as Russia’s a reliable supplier.

Daniel Yergin:
That was Russia’s brand. We’re a reliable supplier, and it was economic to do it that way. I think until recently, it was seen that this was part of a globalization, the integration of Russia into the global economy. I know the U.S. government had encouraged expanded energy relations with Russia too as a way to build economic foundations that would be separate from politics, but that worked until it didn’t work.

Preet Bharara:
So fair to say that in a relatively short period of time, a country like Germany went from 0% dependence on Russian oil to 35% to 40%.

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think it was over decades that Russia became, but Russia really recovered under Putin as an oil exporter, and became a major exporter. Then the natural gas pipelines really went back to the 1980s in a battle that involved the Reagan administration, but that’s right. There’s a picture in the new map of the first Nord Stream pipeline being built, and it shows Chancellor Merkel and the EU people, and then Russian president, Medvedev, with big smiles on their face, turning the knobs, the wheel to start the flow of gas into Germany. At that point, it was considered a positive. At that point, I emphasized.

Preet Bharara:
So what’s the future? It’s hard to predict, but what do you think is the future of European trade and importation of oil and gas from Russia?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think it is what the German Chancellor Scholz said, [inaudible 00:43:20], I think is the way it’s pronounced, a change of eras that Germany… I mean, I think that Europe is basically saying, “We’re done with Russia. At least we’re done with Putin’s Russia,” and that turning away… I mean, one of the things that Germany’s announced, it’s going to build three new terminals to receive LNG from the United States and other countries, which they had not bothered or thought about doing before, talked about it, but it didn’t…

Daniel Yergin:
There was no urgency. Now, there’s a high degree of urgency. I think that we’re going to… They’re pretty massive sanctions that have been put on Russia, and I think it’s going to isolate the Russian economy from the Western world, make Russia more of a dependency on China basically, a dependency of China, and that I think the revelations that have come out of Ukraine about what the Russian troops have done, what Russian missiles had done, Russian rockets have done, that I think that there’s moving towards greatly reducing, if not ending imports of energy from Russia, at least as long as Vladimir Putin is in power.

Daniel Yergin:
That will be a very big deal. It comes with economic costs. It comes with higher prices. It comes… There are politicians like Marine Le Pen in France who will exploit those higher prices to try and win political power. It’s not an easy decision to make, but it is… I think what’s happened is so shocking and so unbelievable in the 21st century that the impact is going to be very great.

Preet Bharara:
I think that’s right, but here’s what confuses me. Given the level of dependence that you say European countries had on Russian oil and gas, 35%, 40% in some places, higher than that, why is it not an absolute catastrophe in Europe? How are they making up for that oil and gas?

Daniel Yergin:
They’re not yet there, but what the Europeans are doing now is… President Biden has actually said the U.S. will provide more LNG, because he’s looking at what’s coming online. It’s running a big economic risk, and the Germans that I talk to say, “Well, is this a trade off between not passing hundreds of billions of dollars a year to Putin, but are we going to pay the price in the heavy recession, and who knows what the political impact at home of a heavy recession will be?” These are very momentous decisions, and they’re fraught with risk, whatever you do.

Preet Bharara:
Were you surprised given your deep understanding of the interconnectedness between Europe and Russia, and oil and gas that the Europeans have stood strong?

Daniel Yergin:
Yes. Well, I think one of the things that the Biden administration did, which was very wise, is they didn’t keep the intelligence to themselves. They communicated what was happening. I think that was that the Russians were building up, that the Russians were… This was not just an exercise they were going to invade. I think that helped build a consensus along the way. When I talk to Europeans, they’re shocked that just within a couple hundred kilometers of them, a couple hundred miles, you’ll have this massive war being fought in Europe.

Daniel Yergin:
But I think the person who may be the most surprised is, one, Vladimir Putin. Because if you go down the list of his miscalculations, one, he miscalculated how his own army would perform. Two, he miscalculated that the Ukrainians would not welcome them with flowers, but with resistance. Three, as you’re saying, that the Europeans would hang tough despite their dependence. Four, he assumed the U.S. was a very weak country, politically divided, January 6th, that the U.S. would not get its act together.

Daniel Yergin:
Then on top of that, he assumed, “Well, oil markets are very titled. Prices are high.” This is the time I ought to go. I have the high cards, and at least on all those other assumptions, there really turned out to be big miscalculations. You can see the fury and hatred with which he’s responded to, this recognition that he was wrong.

Preet Bharara:
Do you know what else was a big miscalculation on his part?

Daniel Yergin:
No. What?

Preet Bharara:
Yelling at you? I see all of this as karma.

Daniel Yergin:
Well, at the time, it’s something that I very vividly remember, and when you go through personal experiences like that, you think about what it means, and you certainly don’t forget.

Preet Bharara:
What are reasonable goals for not just the United States, but for the world in terms of halting climate change?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think directionally, it’s clear the direction the world’s going to go in. How easy or how hard it’s going to be? I mean, it’s one thing to do it on a PowerPoint. Another thing to do it in a world of real engineering. There are complexities there that are not really looked at. It’s one of the things that I’ve talked about. In the book, I talked about people… Going back to your politics, the phrase big oil, we hear a lot about that when gassing prices go up.

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I’m pretty convinced we’re going to be talking about big shovels, because it’s going to involve an enormous amount of mining to provide the materials that you need to… Whether it’s for electric car batteries or for wind turbines and so forth, I mean, the amount of… I mean, the sun and the wind are free, but not the materials that go into them. You’re going to need a lot, lot, lot more copper as we become more electrified, so I think that-

Preet Bharara:
How scarce is copper?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, it’s funny you say that, because we’re doing a study on it right now.

Preet Bharara:
Of course you are.

Daniel Yergin:
Well, no, I became really obsessed with this question, and because here’s the targets, but then you look at the copper supply, and you don’t see it now. It can take, according to the International Energy Agency, 16 or 20 years to open a new mine. Again, it’s an international business. It’s very hard to open new mines in the United States, because of the permitting process. It will mean being dependent on other countries, and then you see, “Oh, 70% of coppers melting is done in China,” and China has a strong position in that.

Daniel Yergin:
You start to see a new configured. I think there have been some really positive… The costs of solar have gone down 90%. A lot of that is because the solar panels are made in China, but it’s 90% drop. Wind has become… The wind turbines are much bigger. They’re much more efficient. So wind and solar, most of the new electric generating capacity in the United States, is going to be wind and solar, but you have your existing capacity. But for that, or if you really move to large scale electric cars, you’re going to need just a lot of materials.

Daniel Yergin:
One estimate is for 1,000-pound electric car battery, you have to move 500,000 pounds of earth to get-

Preet Bharara:
Oh my goodness.

Daniel Yergin:
… the stuff you need so-

Preet Bharara:
It’s almost as bad as crypto.

Daniel Yergin:
Well, crypto, by the way, is extremely energy intensive.

Preet Bharara:
Yes. No, that’s why I’m making the point.

Daniel Yergin:
Yes, exactly. Yes. I don’t know… In fact, I… That’s a very good question just… What is it? I mean, it’s a lot of electricity.

Preet Bharara:
You should do a graph of the relative energy consumption of creating a car battery versus Bitcoin.

Daniel Yergin:
Yes.

Preet Bharara:
You have pointed out something that is obvious, but it hadn’t really thought about it in this way. Because so many people’s minds are focused on climate change, and we talk about renewable energy like wind. I don’t know if you call it renewable energy, but there’s not a carbon issue with wind and solar, but those two sources of energy were not developed for the purpose of halting climate change. People just wanted something other than oil because of the over alliance of the U.S. on foreign oil. Is that correct?

Daniel Yergin:
It’s interesting that wind and solar are both about 50-year-old… Modern wind and solar are 50-year-old industries. They got their start in response to the oil crises of the 1970s, just, “We need alternatives.” New York city was burning oil for environmental reasons, so it wouldn’t use coal to generate its electricity back then. It wanted high-quality oil from Nigeria, and so it got started. But for 40 years, it didn’t get anywhere, but people kept after it. There were incentives to continue to develop it. The technology continued to improve substantially.

Preet Bharara:
Why did it not take off? Was it because it was just not cost efficient yet?

Daniel Yergin:
It was young technologies. You needed to get to scale, and then both wind and solar got to scale and got their costs down, and the technology is so much improved that around little over a decade ago is when they really started to take off. Then you would get these amazing drops in the cost of solar that have been just stunning to go down 90% in cost is amazing. But it took… What it tells you is that technologies take a long time. You think about, I don’t know, probably a lot of people listening to this podcast. Some got Johnson and Johnson, but a lot of them got Moderna or Pfizer.

Daniel Yergin:
You say, “Well, it was done in a year, operation warp speed,” but it was based upon maybe 30 years of scientific research and failures and successes and so forth to get to scale. I think that’s often the history of technologies. Once they take off, they really take off, but it can take decades to get to the takeoff point.

Preet Bharara:
What’s the role of government in… Are there particular success stories in government creating incentives for people to adopt this?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think there continue to be attractive incentives, tax incentives, and so forth for wind and solar, which I think have been important. I mean, if you want to get solar for your house, you get state and federal tax credits and support. But I think the biggest thing… During the Clinton administration, I headed a task force and energy R&D, research and development for the Department of Energy, and came away just such a believer that one of the great strengths of this country is the money that it spends on research and development on that early stage, the continuity that it creates for researchers so that they are not having to constantly be writing grant proposals, but they can spend their time on their projects and so forth.

Daniel Yergin:
That’s what really… The investment in research and development to me is what is really where the really big payoff is.

Preet Bharara:
Let’s talk about the more traditional sources of energy for a moment. What’s the future of coal?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, so here’s… You talked about energy-

Preet Bharara:
Easy questions.

Daniel Yergin:
Energy transition, let’s start with that, so oil gets discovered in Western Pennsylvania in 1859. It’s not till the 1960s that oil overtakes coal as the world’s number one resource, but guess what? The world is using three times more coal now than it did in the 1960s. I think coal’s going to be squeezed out of the United States and less natural gas. Other prices go up, but coal is the default for many developing countries for electric generation, because it’s cheap. It’s cheaper than the other sources, but there’s enormous pressure not to use coal.

Daniel Yergin:
But if you’re a developing country, you have different priorities than a developed country often.

Preet Bharara:
So you really think that coal will have full demise in the United States at some point?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I don’t know if full demise, because I think it will still be a backup when… I think it’s down to about 20% of our electric generation right now. Coal plants are being retired, and no one is building a new coal plant, so I think it will just continue to get squeezed down as plants are retired.

Preet Bharara:
Is the remaining attachment to coal in the U.S. mostly a vestige of nostalgia and political constituency, or is there any logic to it?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think it’s there. It has to do with cost and availability, and how you can’t just… People want electricity. In a time way, you can replace coal. The U.S. has had the biggest reduction of any country in its CO2 emissions over the… Our CO2 emissions now are back to the level of the 1990s and early 1990s, and our economy has, I think, doubled during that time. The biggest single reason actually has been natural gas pushing coal out of electric generation, because you just produce…

Daniel Yergin:
There’s less CO2 emissions from gas than coal. Ernie Moniz, who was the energy secretary under Obama’s the one who has pointed that out in a number of times.

Preet Bharara:
Now, here’s another energy source that gets more attention now, again, for reasons that we’re not part of the discussion some time ago. Is nuclear going to make a comeback in this country or other countries?

Daniel Yergin:
I think surprisingly, it looks like that. Obviously, the Fukushima disaster, which could have been averted if the sea wall had been five feet higher in Japan ended what was then seen as talked about as a nuclear Renaissance, and the experience of building new nuclear, traditional nuclear power plant in the United States has been very negative. The costs keep going up, the delays, the regulatory issues, the construction issues. But in other parts of the world… Well, there are two elements to it. I mean, Emmanuel macron came in as president of France saying, “We’re going to start to push out. We’re not going to be so dependent on nuclear, which is over 80% of France’s electricity.”

Daniel Yergin:
But now we’ve had this crisis, what has he done? He said, “We’re going to have six new nuclear plants reactors, and maybe another eight.” Britain just came out within recent days with an energy security strategy where nuclear plays a role. There are just more examples of that. But I think the other thing is that there’s a lot of focus on what are now called small modular nuclear reactors, which instead of being built on a site where you have thousands of working people, and you have to keep changing and so forth, and customize it, factory produced reactor is much smaller.

Daniel Yergin:
I was struck. We have an energy conference in Houston, and I just heard three of the CEOs, industrial CEOs, not energy company CEOs, talking about small nuclear reactors as though they expect they may indeed be commercial by the 2030. I think there is for those who are looking for a carbon-free electricity, that’s one way to get there, and what you get from that, one of the problems with wind and solar is they go up and down depending on the wind and the sun. Nuclear is what’s called base loads.

Daniel Yergin:
You could just have it run steadily, and so I think we may be at a point where nuclear starts to, maybe in a different form, come back again in a way that it seemed the door had seemed slammed shut. No one slammed the door shut more shut than Germany, which in a weekend, Chancellor Merkel decided, “No more shutting down our nuclear.” But now Germany, as it looks at its dependence, which has grown on Russian natural gas, you find Germans, even green Germans from the green party saying maybe we made a mistake.

Preet Bharara:
That’s very interesting, but you don’t think it’s making a comeback in the U.S.?

Daniel Yergin:
If it comes back in the U.S., I think it would be in the small nuclear reactors. I don’t think any… No utility is going to risk its balance sheet and its finances on trying to build a big traditional nuclear power plant to the kind that were built in the ’70s and ’80s in the United States.

Preet Bharara:
That’s because of what, actual risk or perception of risk?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I think it’s cost and regulatory delay. I think those are the two things. You start to build something, and instead of taking five years, it takes 10 years. Your cost triple, and there’s so many different regulatory. It’s just too complicated. I don’t think they feel they need to anymore, and so, as I said before, right now, the main thing utilities are building is wind and solar.

Preet Bharara:
Just for the record, nuclear is in fact better in terms of climate change issues?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, it’s carbon free. It doesn’t produce carbon.

Preet Bharara:
That’s a yes.

Daniel Yergin:
It is still about 20% of our electric. I think it’s still about 20% of our electricity supply, even though plants, as you know, are being shut down.

Preet Bharara:
Also, can we clarify once and for all, do windmills cause cancer?

Daniel Yergin:
Not to my knowledge.

Preet Bharara:
Didn’t Trump say that once?

Daniel Yergin:
Maybe he did say that living there. I mean-

Preet Bharara:
We’ll fact check that, and we’ll take this out of the-

Daniel Yergin:
I mean, it’s-

Preet Bharara:
I’m pretty sure he said windmills cause cancer.

Daniel Yergin:
I suspect that there is something less than zero evidence for that. We talked about… We’re talking about-

Preet Bharara:
It’s a negative.

Daniel Yergin:
We talked about negative price, and now we’ll talk about negative evidence.

Preet Bharara:
Negative evidence, negative [crosstalk 01:01:10].

Daniel Yergin:
Well, let’s put it this way. Let me put it in terms that would make sense to you. It wouldn’t stand up in court.

Preet Bharara:
Yes. Now you’re speaking language that I understand. Before we go, I want to ask you about something that I’ve been thinking about while we’ve been having this conversation. One thing this conversation brings home to me is just how important technology is and advancing technology, and solving problems that benefit people, and can actually benefit the earth. Some of these things are not expected, but I imagine some of the things for people who are in those circles with respect to mRNA, we talked about that relating to the COVID vaccine.

Preet Bharara:
My question to you as an expert is what are some things we don’t read about in the popular press that are promising technologies that could have this game changing effect in the future when it comes to energy?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, we actually did a report for Bill Gates Foundation on that. I don’t know that there are any secret things that aren’t being thought about, but the two things that loom there could be very significant if you have major breakthroughs on battery technology at scale, where you can store electricity generated by wind and solar, that’s a big game changer. The other one that’s out there is the thing that people didn’t take very seriously three or four years ago, as we talked about before, is hydrogen, and can you really shift to an energy system based much more on hydrogen?

Daniel Yergin:
That would be a big change. But what we don’t know is about the obsessed individual who’s out of sight, who has the resources and the staying power to carry things in a different direction that we don’t see right now. I mean, because I am… Surprises do keep happening. Sometimes it takes time for our minds to catch up with them, but I think in this area, as in other areas, it will be… Change is… Fusion, which people said was 50 years off, now, they’re saying, “Maybe it’s only 25 years off.”

Daniel Yergin:
I think one thing that I’ve learned as a student of energy, and its different ramifications is don’t get locked in on one view of the world, because in three or four or five years, it can change. What we’re seeing right now, this isn’t technology, but we’re seeing with Russia is dramatically reshaping the future of energy for the world. I think there’s still some turbulence to come.

Preet Bharara:
In terms of spending the time and energy and having patience to develop game changing technologies when it comes to energy, are the right governments and the right companies spending the time and the resources for that purpose?

Daniel Yergin:
Well, I’ve seen… We created this thing called the Agora, which is a meeting place for technological innovation at our conference that we do every year in Houston called CERAWeek. It started off with just almost as this little thing over in the corner. Now, it was huge. I would say looking at energy, if I just wandered through this whole area that we called the Agora, I would see that there’s more emphasis and interest in innovation and technology all across the energy spectrum than there’s ever been before. There are a lot of things to worry about in the world, but that’s one thing that makes one more optimistic.

Preet Bharara:
Final question and then I’ll let you go. You mentioned your book a few times, fairly recent book, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations. What’s your ultimate conclusion in that book?

Daniel Yergin:
The ultimate conclusion? Well, I think there were maybe two or three. One is that geopolitics is going to continue to interact with energy. I spent a lot of time in the book actually focused on Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and natural gas in Europe. The other thing I spent a lot of time in the book on was China and the U.S. and energy and geopolitics. The other is that we are in an energy transition, trying to do it in a more compressed time than in the past, and to be realistic about the the challenges and what has to be done.

Daniel Yergin:
It was interesting. I called the conclusion… I used the word disruption, and lo and behold, you could… In the book, I said that Ukraine was going to be the great issue between Russia and the United States, but I, of course, did not envision that it would become this horrible.

Preet Bharara:
More prescient than you realized.

Daniel Yergin:
No, exactly, just how significant it is, and just how tied up… I guess it’s really how tied up energy and geopolitics are, I guess, is what would be my real takeaway from the book.

Preet Bharara:
Daniel Yergin, it’s been a treat having you on the show. I appreciate it very much.

Daniel Yergin:
Thank you, and I much value this wide ranging conversation.

Preet Bharara:
Wide ranging is what we do.

Daniel Yergin:
Thank you.

Preet Bharara:
My conversation with Daniel Yergin continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:
Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Daniel Yergin.

Preet Bharara:
If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at preetbharara with the hashtag Ask Preet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore.

Preet Bharara:
The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Sean Walsh, and Namita Shah. Our music is by Andrew Doss. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.