Oil and gas sector is changing - and so is geopolitics

Book review of 'Windfall'

WINDFALL  

How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens American Power  

Meghan L. O’Sullivan  

Simon & Schuster

479 pages; $29

Geopolitics is power played out against geographical settings. In this battle, ideas and ideologies matter. But it is often the most technical and complex factors — the ones we least understand and therefore discount, according to Columbia University’s Robert Jervis — that carry the greatest weight. There may be no factor more influential in contemporary geopolitics and yet least understood by journalists and policymakers than the energy revolution, which is less about renewables like wind and solar power than about