Over the past year, we’ve been watching a geopolitical revolution get underway. It’s much bigger and more consequential than the Arab Spring, though the legacy media are giving it much less play. It will rearrange the global chessboard, improving the position of some powers, weakening others. While the chattering classes yammered on about American decline and peak oil, a quite different future is taking shape. A world energy revolution is underway and it will be shaping the realities of the 21st century when the Crash of 2008 and the Great Stagnation that followed only interest historians. A new age of abundance for fossil fuels is upon us. And the center of gravity of the global energy picture is shifting from the Middle East to… North America… If the US, Canada and Israel are the likeliest big winners, the biggest losers in the coming shift will be the Gulf petro-states and Russia. Their Gulf losses aren’t going to be economic; the Gulf will still have the world’s cheapest oil to produce and so its oilfields will be the most profitable at any given price point. Russia, on the other hand, is going to have a harder time. Its oil and gas are more expensive to produce and so Russia’s profit margins are likely to fall. Full essay here

(Dr. Benny Peiser)