Hale Report

The assumption that carbon fuel will recede in the rear view mirror of our shiny new electric vehicles could be mistaken. I first began to question the concept of peak oil many years ago after speaking with experts Albert Bressand and Daniel Yergin, both past guests of this podcast.

My guest for the 43rd episode of the Hale Report is Daniel Yergin, Vice Chairman of IHS MARKIT and founder of CERAWEEK. He is an expert in the geopolitics of energy and the global economy. A Pulitzer-prize winning author, his best selling books include The Prize, The Quest, and Shattered Peace. He is the co-author of Commanding Heights, which became a PBS documentary series.

If we don’t grow up, and I don’t see much sign of it at the moment in either the West or in China, I think we are going to blow up the world. So in a way the book is a paean to praise democracy and capitalism, but it’s equally as much a plea for stepping back to say what we are fighting about isn’t important enough to blow up the world.

My guest for the 41st episode of the Hale Report is Brad Setser, an economist and Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’ve long admired Brad for his deep knowledge of global economic data, and his ability to interpret that information. I am sure you will soon hear what I mean. · Brad Setser is one of our country’s most highly respected analysts of global capital flows, national tax competition, and trade imbalances and sovereign debt restructuring.

Until recently, have we underestimated the threat posed by Russia, and overestimated China’s capabilities? How and when will the war in Ukraine end? What is Japan’s new role? How has the partnership between Australia and the US grown ever stronger?

Welcome to the Hale Report. My guest for our 39th episode is Shannon O’Neil of the Council on Foreign Relations, speaking with us from New York.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Henry Kissinger said that we are now living in a totally new era. The G20 meeting in Bali this week reflected that reality. Putin did not attend, but Xi Jinping and Joe Biden had a long meeting that seemed to offer some hope for lessening tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

Ali Wyne immediately confesses that he is a hopeless optimist. He is also the author of a new book America's Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition which is the perfect antidote to the current spate of election doomsaying in the US. A sample from our podcast, which I have been saving up for this week:

First and foremost is for us to avoid the 2027 scenario. Many people are saying that the PLA will have the capability and willingness to invade Taiwan in 2027. So for the next five years we will have to avoid that happening.