Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. This is the first of two

extra episodes this week, pre-election episodes. Today Helen Thompson and I are talking to the

Pulitzer Prize winning author Dan Jürgen. About his new book on the rise of China, the

Shale Revolution, Climate Change, the big themes of contemporary politics.

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We recorded this episode on Friday. I'm in Cambridge, Helen's in London, Downs in the United States.

We obviously don't know what's going to happen in the US presidential election, but as you'll hear,

we do speculate a bit. So now one part of the new map that you lay out so elegantly in the book is

the energy map that both confronted China and that in some sense now China has made for itself.

One more thinking about that will be to say that map that China confronted began in 1993 when

China started to import oil from abroad. As we know, what happened over the last decade was that

China replaced the United States as the world's largest oil importer. During say that two decade

period, the basic assumption in a lot of Western policy seemed to be that China's economic

rise, its spectacular economic return, perhaps we better worry about describing. It could be in some

sense geopolitically non-disruptive. Yet anybody reading your book, The Price, about the history of

the real industry in the geopolitical conflicts of the 20th century would have, I would say,

thought it absurd that a country like China, the size of China could become a major oil importer

...