Fatih Birol: Global Energy Under Pressure, Europe's Mistakes and the Age of Electricity

Hi, everybody, and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicolas Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Seward Wealth Fund. And today, we have a tremendous guest, doctor Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. And, wow, what a topical podcast this is going to be. So, big welcome, Fatih. Thank you very much, Nikolai. Now you have warned that markets and politicians are still underestimating the consequences of the crisis in The Middle East. What are they getting wrong? You know, Nikolai, we are a intergovernmental organization. We work for the, government's public institution. After, the war has started, since there are many market related, dynamics, I told my colleagues and myself, three weeks, we didn't make any public statements. The newspapers, with the journalists, even though we receive as usual lots of lots of requests, except for I made a statement about the oil release of the IEA. This other story. But I I saw that the the decision makers, governments in Europe, but around the world, didn't understand how big the problem, is and can be not for the energy sector, but for the global economy. So it is the reason I decided, I think it was a week ago or so, to come up with some numbers, make the people understand that this is a serious issue for all of us. And, the, the way to deal with this is, first, we recognize what a big problem it is, and I try to describe what the problem is. And, I think it was, in my view, a good move that, it was, give a a big, drive to policy makers to discuss more intensely about the situation. You've said that it's the greatest global energy security threat in history, and bigger than 73 and so on. Just what do you, what metrics are you looking at? So, you know, we have many energy crisis, unfortunately. But when we look at the last couple of decades, three of them, stand. One of them, the seventy three oil crisis, seventy nine oil crisis, and, 2022, Russia invasion of, Ukraine and gas. So where you'll get the oil crisis, 7379, in both of them, we lost each about 5,000,000 barrels per day of oil. So five plus five, it is about 10. And, we all know, that this, oil crisis led to global recession in many countries, developing countries, foreign debt spiral they fell into. And today, as it extend now, we lost 12,000,000 barrels per day. So two more than two of this oil crisis put together. In terms of natural gas, when, Russia cut the gas, we lost around 75, BCM of, gas. And now the amount of gas we lost now is higher than, the, the Russian, gas crisis, which means the current crisis is more than all these three crisis put together. Plus, if I may, in addition to this oil and gas, there are many vital commodities, very important for the global economy, …