Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Art Berman.
With 46 years of expertise in petroleum geology and a unique background in Middle Eastern history, Art Berman combines academic rigor with market insight to navigate the complexities of energy.
A realist who bridges fossil fuels and renewables, he integrates energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior into actionable insights. Trusted by investors and global corporations alike, Art is a leading voice in the energy sector, known for data-driven truth and no-nonsense analysis.
A seasoned keynote speaker, he has authored more than 60 posts in 2024 alone, covering energy, geopolitics, earth systems, the environment, climate change, economics, and human behavior. He engages daily with a large audience through his website, 42,000+ followers on Twitter/X (@aeberman12), and thousands more on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Substack.
Oil defines our lives, but we actually understand so little about it—and moreover, so little about its role in driving what we call “progress.” The flip side of that, of course, is that we don’t grasp how utterly dependent modern civilization is on oil. Without it, everything we take for granted about energy, the economy, technology, agriculture, and medicine would change. We are, as he and his colleague Nate Hagens often say, “energy blind.”
This is why I wanted to bring Art Berman onto Urgent Futures. His expertise in energy, as well as his ability to synthesize these insights with the economy, human behavior, and climate change, illuminate this glaring blind spot in the status quo understanding of globalized society, especially for those of us in the West who are more insulated from the immediate impacts. We got into this and much more, so please enjoy this conversation with Art Berman.
Some other episodes you might like:
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with mass extinction expert Peter Brannen:
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