Peter Zeihan

Let me give you the bad and then the good.

First, the bad.

We're very close and we have been very close for three years to a significant break in international energy markets, whether it's the Russian stuff going away or something happening in the Persian Gulf or something happening in Malacca or something happening to China.

The production of vast volumes of crude is going to fall away.

And the consumption of vast volumes of crude is going to fall away for demographic and geopolitical reasons.

And I can't tell you which one's going to happen first.

I can tell you that whichever one does happen first will then lead to the other one.

And shit will get real in a lot of places very, very quickly.

And for those of us who still want electricity, we will then basically have to fight to get access to the fossil fuels that will allow us to have it.

And that will look different in every part of the world.

Second thing, at some point in the next decade, our physical chemistry is going to improve to the point that we have a new idea that we will then want to apply, whether it's in generation, transmission, or storage.

I don't know.

One of the three, maybe more than one.

That will generate a completely new arms race in order to access that technology and apply it.

And whoever can figure that out leaves the old problems behind.

I mean, the petroleum age was a mess.

I understand why people would like to go beyond it.

The green age, if it happens with today's technologies, would be worse.

But that's not going to stop us from trying to invent something new.

And as soon as we do, maybe it's a capacitor, maybe it's a battery, maybe it's power beaming, I don't know.