During Spring 2014, I’m teaching a post-graduate seminar in Berlin on the USA and the global market-centered oil system (a.k.a.”The Global Barrel”)–the syllabus sketch is below here.
While I’ve often taught seminars on “the Geopolitics of Global Oil,” the JFK Institute at Berlin’s Freie Universität had a special request: they would like their students to learn “how these policies are decided in the USA.”
For an American energy “expert”, the how of the USA’s policy-decision process is fairly familiar. However, not only for German students, but also for most US citizens, this process–whose outcome has such a profound impact on the entire world– indeed seems at best rather opaque, and, at worst, like an unseemly, vested-interest-driven and hopelessly partisan process. Continue reading
The Global Barrel 