Oil Wars in Myth and Reality, with Emily Meierding

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

During the past couple of months, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been several claims that Russia was invading its neighbor to seize its oil and gas resources. And even in the cases where pundits were claiming that Russia was not doing this, they would often phrase it as, “This is not yet another oil war.” But do oil wars happen at all?

David Priess sat down with the woman who has literally written the book on this: Emily Meierding, assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. She has argued that countries do not launch major conflicts to acquire hydrocarbon resources because the costs of foreign invasion, territorial occupation, international retaliation and damage to oil company relations deter even the most powerful countries from doing so. They talked about the myth of oil wars, about the logic behind why they will not happen and about why it is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine probably has very little to do with hydrocarbons at all.

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Transcript

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0:25.6	no bull and the aftermath.
0:34.0	And we see these incidents periodically, two countries disagree over ownership of usually
0:39.8	a maritime territory, and one country tries to explore for oil, the other country tries
0:45.3	to block it from exploring from oil.
0:48.3	These tensions flare up, there's a lot of very alarmist reporting saying, oh god, we're
0:52.9	going to have an oil war.
0:55.1	And then everything calms down, because both governments basically say this is not worth
0:59.6	it, we are putting a lid on this.
1:02.0	So if you think of confrontations that are related to oil and gas in the South China
1:05.6	see these days, these are all what I would call oil spats.
1:10.5	I'm David Priese, publisher of LawFair, and this is the LawFair podcast, May 16, 2022.
1:18.5	During the past couple of months since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been several
1:22.7	claims that Russia was invading its neighbor to seize its oil and gas resources.
1:28.4	And even in the cases where pundits were claiming that Russia was not doing this, they would
1:33.6	often phrase it as, this is not yet another oil war.
1:38.2	But do oil wars happen at all?
1:41.4	I thought it was important to sit down with the woman who has literally written the book
1:45.8	on this, Emily Meyerding, assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
	...

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