Speaker

John M. Roberts is an energy security specialist with Methinks, focusing on the inter-relationship between energy, economic development, and politics. He is a member of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Group of Experts on Gas. He is a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute of Energy for South-East Europe (IENE) in Athens and a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Centre in Washington, DC. Roberts is one of Europe’s leading energy security specialists and has testified to UK parliamentary committees on Mideast, Russian, Caspian, Turkish and Kurdish energy security issues. He has a particular expertise in the development of energy in Central Asia and the Caucasus and in the pipelines designed to connect the Caspian to Europe, Russia, China and India. He is the author of Visions and Mirages: The Middle East in a New Era (Mainstream, 1995). His view on the current energy crisis is this. We face a paradox: we have never needed fossil fuels so much; we have never needed to get out of fossil fuels so much.