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If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, it’s probably become a torrential downpour of geopolitical hot takes. Stocks are down so yesterday’s market experts are today’s experts in economics, politics, and international relations.

I felt so much whiplash from all the contradicting opinions. I needed to somehow cut through the noise so I decided to do my own research and formulate my own point of view on what was actually happening.

Energy was at the center of every interesting question I wanted to answer for myself: What is happening in Europe? Why are we suddenly budding heads with China? Are we permanently screwed with inflation and climate change? What started as a truth-seeking exercise became a multi-month deep dive on energy policy.

Energy is clearly essential to how the world works, but it’s a total blackbox where we recognize the importance of its outputs but never think deeply about its inputs. By exploring this topic some more, I began to see how the way we procure energy, how we transport it, and how we regulate it determines living standards, influences geopolitics, and will ultimately decide the fate of this planet.

So think of this piece as “Energy 101” where I try to distill everything I’ve learned in the past couple of months into a hopefully fun-to-read Bookie article. After all, the best way to learn something is to try to teach it so here you go.

It’ll be worthwhile. Even cursory knowledge of the “basics” provides a much deeper understanding of how the world really works.

With energy as our lens, we’ll examine the headlines dominating our newscycle by exploring

How we got here: brief history of world energy markets

What’s happening today (specifically in Europe)

What happens next: the future is impossible to predict, but there are some harsh realities we’re guaranteed to face

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