‘Oil price volatility is crippling the energy transition’

PODCAST: With special guest Dan Dicker, oil market commentator and author

“Multinational and independent oil companies need to be made to understand that their ability to [maximise profitability] by haphazardly [extracting] vital natural resources needs to be stopped. There needs to be a more disciplined approach to regulating when, where and how fossil fuels come out of the ground.”

If you’re into leftfield ideas, have a listen to Dan Dicker, oil market commentator and author, talking about why he sees oil price volatility as a drag on the energy transition. He advocates profound market intervention to greatly reduce volatility and, potentially, reconcile the highly partisan debate over decarbonisation.

Dan’s thesis rests on the premise that the current approach is the worst of all worlds: damaging the fossil fuel industry, destroying jobs and wasting precious resources without meaningfully cutting climate emissions.

I won’t explain the whole idea here - best let Dan explain it in his own words (please forgive the poor audio quality, Callin are aware of the bug in their Android app and I am told it is being fixed):

If you haven’t time to listen to the full 45 minutes, here are a few highlights:

• ‘Stable oil prices are the only way to progress the transition’ — 1 min

• ‘Production by independent oil companies needs to be regulated and controlled’ — 1 min

• ‘Gas flaring is insane and should have been outlawed 10 years ago’ — 1 min

• ‘US government should be the oil buyer of last resort to support and tame prices’ — 1 min

• How to reconcile the political left and right, and ‘needs’ versus ‘wants’ — 1 min

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Thanks for reading and listening, have a great weekend.

Seb