The National Energy Policy Institute hosted a lecture by Roger Stern at The University of Tulsa on August 23. Stern is a research fellow of the Oil, Energy & the Middle East Program at Princeton University, where he teaches the program’s flagship course. His lecture, titled Peak Oil and Illusion: A Century of Energy Scarcity in U.S. Middle East Policy, gave insight into his current book project, Peak Oil, War and Illusion, which describes a syndrome of imagined resource scarcity in Western geopolitics since 1909. In “the scarcity syndrome,” great powers become convinced of a strategic threat based on an assumption of impending resource exhaustion, which in turn engenders militarization of resource supply. Serial obliteration of scarcity rationales by oil gluts of the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s has been ignored. Absence of learning facilitates reiteration of the syndrome.
Peak Oil and Illusion
A Century of Energy Scarcity in U.S. Middle East Policy
