Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshadrati. This week, peaks, politics and predictions.

Today we are going to talk about oil.

Whether you love it or hate it, you cannot deny that the world needs it, at least right now.

And if you care about tackling climate change, then you also need to care about what happens to the demand for oil over the coming decades.

Growth in oil demand has so far been a close proxy for economic growth.

While it's clear some of that economic growth and the energy that powered it has been

responsible for climate change, it has also pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

As we transition to clean energy, there is now a real prospect of breaking that linkage.

If you're talking about structural decline in oil demand, until very recently you were talking

about structural decline in the global economy. I don't think we are talking about that now,

because we do have these quite effective substitutes and they're becoming more effective by the year.

That's David Fickling, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and my guest today.

He's joining me to talk about peak oil.

In a matter of mere decades, the world has gone from the specter of running out of oil

to soon being able to choose not to extract every last drop.

Or to put it another way, the world has gone from watching for the day that oil supply

peaks to trying to predict the day when oil demand peaks.

All this matters because burning oil contributes about a third of global emissions. And getting to net zero will mean finding ways to wean the economy off this still essential commodity.

There's also the tiny matter that oil commands the most attention in global geopolitics among all other commodities.

What happens to the major oil powers once the world starts wanting less oil?

This week is a good time to talk about it, because it's the 50th anniversary of the OPEC oil embargo

in 1973 and those powers showing how much of a stranglehold oil can have on the global economy.

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