Thompson, born in 1967 in Britain, has visceral childhood memory of the 1974 winter energy crisis—sitting in candlelit homes while her mother tried to cook in the dark—which gave her a profound understanding that energy could have major impacts on daily life.

Helen Thompson became seriously interested in energy around 2013, initially approaching it through the relationship between the post-2008 monetary environment—quantitative easing and zero interest rates—and the shale boom in the US, recognizing that the world economy needed shale oil.

Political science is largely energy blind, though political economy has a more complicated relationship to energy; political economy was energy aware in the 1970s but lost that awareness in the late 1980s or 1990s at the same time Western politicians lost awareness of energy's importance.

In the Suez Crisis of 1956, Britain took military action with France and Israel against Egypt because President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, but from Britain's perspective, this was justified action to guarantee oil security for Western European countries, as American presidents wanted largely Western Hemisphere oil and were unwilling to provide military support for Middle East energy security—that was Britain's responsibility.

When Nasser closed the Strait of Tiran in 1967 (Six Day War) and then closed the Suez Canal for eight years, ships had to go all the way around Africa, creating massive oil cost increases for countries importing through those routes and forcing Britain's withdrawal from the Middle East because it could no longer afford the energy costs of maintaining imperial presence.

After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iran (which had been Israel's primary oil supplier before the revolution) could no longer sell oil to Israel; Israel then began looking for other options and eventually got a guarantee from the Americans for emergency oil, but today Azerbaijan is Israel's number-one oil exporter, with oil coming via pipeline through Turkey, making Turkey's position a key vulnerability for Israel.

In January 2020, just as the pandemic was starting in China, Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, with the response from many credits being 'he's so mad, he's about to start World War III,' demonstrating the potential for Persian Gulf conflict to become incredibly destabilizing.

A benign outcome of the current Middle East situation would be that the American Navy's presence in the Mediterranean is sufficient deterrent to Iran to ensure Hezbollah doesn't take significant military action in Northern Israel, with Iran understanding there would be direct consequences for itself.

ISIS arrived during Obama's tenure, forcing him to put American troops back into Iraq in 2014 after withdrawing in 2012, undermining the narrative that the US could disengage from the Middle East.

The Tamar gas field, one of Israel's three main Eastern Mediterranean fields, is in the rocket range of Hamas, and production is now shut down, which means Egypt isn't getting liquid natural gas exports from Israel that it would usually do; Egypt also exports less because of reduced supplies, meaning less LNG exports to Europe where demand is higher due to Russia's war in Ukraine.

President Bush's Iraq War had a crucial purpose of removing sanctions from Iraq's oil exports, rebuilding the Iraqi oil industry, getting international oil companies back into Iraq, and turning Iraq into a large-scale oil producer (like 10-11 million barrels/day like the Saudis) rather than just medium-sized; but by 2005 it was clear this wasn't going to work.

By around 2011, the Obama administration bought the idea that shale was 'the fix,' believing shale would solve American energy dependence on the Middle East, which led to the decision to sanction Iran, believing they could afford to do so without oil prices spiking.

Shale is a partial fix, not a complete solution: it stops the 2010s from being more difficult economically than they would have been, but doesn't actually create a route out of Middle East oil dependence because of refinery constraints and continued need for oil imports.

One possible explanation is that Biden administration might understand there's a medium- to long-term oil problem and keeps some American production back while letting others take the strain, a 'drain America first' strategy.

OPEC+ is more important than BRICS for understanding energy power blocs, because among BRICS nations, India, China, and Brazil are in very different positions from Russia, and China has severe foreign oil/gas dependency constraints; OPEC+ (particularly the Saudi-Russian axis) is the relevant energy power bloc.

In spring 2020 (pandemic start), Saudi-Russian cooperation looked fragile when bin Salman tried to flood the oil market after failing to reach agreement with Putin, but Trump put OPEC+ back together by threatening military withdrawal unless Saudis cooperated, and OPEC+ has remained cohesive since.

Russia has been able to sell roughly the same amount of oil at lower prices than market price for a reasonable period and has increased liquid natural gas exports, which don't yet compensate for Nord Stream losses but could be expanded further.

The Biden administration will come under considerable pressure from domestic politics around the Israel-Hamas conflict, and with the 2024 election coming, this pressure will intensify regarding how far they can go supporting Israel without causing themselves political problems, with the energy situation not yet being particularly worrying since markets haven't seen serious crisis like immediately after Russia's Ukraine invasion.

In the 19th century, Britain's economic preeminence came with the Industrial Revolution, and Britain industrialized before any other country because it had abundant domestic coal and had been using coal for heating since at least the 13th century, creating incentive to extract deeper coal, leading to steam engine invention.

Germany was advantaged by having abundant coal like Britain, but unlike Britain it didn't have adjacent iron deposits—most iron was in Alsace-Lorraine (held by France), which lacked coal, explaining the Franco-German conflict from 1870 through WWII and the European Coal and Steel Community as a means of giving France access to West German coal.