How bad is the energy crisis really? Interview with Dr. Chris Martenson

29.09.2026 | www.kla.tv/42732

Interviewer: Greetings again from New York City at the Turning the Tide Conference, just across from Central Park here. We are with Dr. Chris Martenson. He has been a presenter at this conference. And Dr. Chris, what brings you to the conference? Tell us a little bit about your expertise. And your thoughts on the conference so far. Dr. Chris Martenson: So 9 -11 was obviously a huge moment in my country's history. And so I started studying it. And I'm a researcher, I'm an analyst. And as soon as I started scratching at it just a little bit, the whole story fell apart. And I'm a scientist by training. I have a background, a PhD in pathology. I've got an MBA, so I like numbers. You know, I like science. And 9 -11, the official story, they were asking me to have to suspend what I call physical laws. That would be like saying: Chris, just for today, gravity doesn't work, law of conservation of momentum doesn't work. And I have standards. I will not give up those laws for anybody, not even my government. Interviewer: So instead of suspend disbelief, it's: please disbelieve. Dr. Chris Martenson: Yeah, you have to. They're asking us to believe in something that's like literally Wile E. Coyote cartoon physics, you know? Interviewer: Yes. Dr. Chris Martenson: Yeah, it was a cartoon. So it really doesn't hold water. And so because of that, though, so many things got kicked off. So my main areas of research are in energy and the economy. And 9 -11 was used to completely disrupt the whole Middle East, which is an energy source and also to put my country trillions and trillions more into debt. And when you put those two pieces together, it's a really uncomfortable story. Interviewer: Yes, there were pretty sobering slides you put up yesterday about where we are in energy needs, energy availability and what's coming around the corner as far as you're concerned. Dr. Chris Martenson: Well, actually when you put it together, it's it's totally unsustainable. It's going to break at some point. Interviewer: Right. Dr. Chris Martenson: And I think local mileage will vary. I actually think the United States is going to break a little bit later. But Europe is in huge trouble right now. And when you understand the role of energy in the economy, if I could just very quickly. Interviewer: Sure. Dr. Chris Martenson: If you have energy, you can have an economy. If you don't have energy, you cannot have an economy. Interviewer: Tell us about that graph with the perfect upward line. Dr. Chris Martenson: Yeah, in economics you don't get that many perfect graphs, right? But here's a perfect graph. It shows on one axis how rich a country is, measured by GDP, say GDP per capita or however you want to measure it. And along the other axis is how much energy are they consuming? And you plot all the countries of the world on that. You would think it'd be a scatter chart, and it's not. It's a line. And it just says very simply, the richer countries consume more energy and poorer countries consume less energy. So the corollary to that is if you take a rich country and remove energy from it, it will become poorer. Interviewer: Right. And watching that presentation, I got the impression that there is no other factor that even comes close to letting you know what determines the riches of a country. Dr. Chris Martenson: Well, it's true. And, you know, we've grown up with so much abundant energy for the past 50, 60 years that it's become an ignorable sort of thing. Economists just sort of assume it into existence. And I think that's a terrible mistake. We've come through a really, really rich period of abundance. We've taken our eye off the ball and we've gotten this wrong idea that the economy delivers energy rather than its inverse. Interviewer: Right. OK. one of the things in that chart was what percentage of our energy comes from solar, what percentage of energy comes from wind, how that's not likely to save us. So let's say we gain an awareness from people at the severity of the situation and what's coming forward, what should be our mindset then? What should we be aiming towards? Dr. Chris Martenson: Every group of citizens in every country ought to be clamoring right now for stable, cheap, abundant energy. And there's different forms. So electricity is different from oil. So if we look at electricity: Yes, you can use some solar and wind at the margins. It's fine. I have it on my house. The solar is fine. What we really need is nuclear energy and we need a crash program in it. Now, there is a country undergoing that. That's China. Interviewer: Right. Dr. Chris Martenson: They have 40 reactors going in right now. The United States has zero. Germany just dismantled three. The last three, right? So that's what we really need for electricity. And that would be great. But we still need oil for all kinds of things. Interviewer: Right. Well, you bring up Germany. So let's let's speak to that specifically. It almost seems like there is a suicidal self sabotage of their energy sector that's going to kill their economy if they're not careful. You've got, like you say, that dismantling or closing down of the nuclear plants, them deciding that they're not going to buy oil from Russia. The Nord Stream pipeline. And it seems like they're not interested in finding out how that went down. They seem to be in almost one of the most precarious situations energy wise. Dr. Chris Martenson: Well, it's true. And by the way, that lack of interest in what happened to Nord Stream, like really crazy, right, because the Baltic Sea is this little tiny tub, it's full of full of sonotubes… Interviewer: What's a sonotube? Dr. Chris Martenson: They have these little like they're tracking all the sonar signatures down below, right? This thing is like really you can't get in and out of that thing without the U. S. military knowing, without Sweden knowing, without Europe knowing, right? Interviewer: So there's no excuse for us not to know who did Nord Stream? Dr. Chris Martenson: No. So Nordstrom blows up. We all see the pictures of it bubbling out of the water, right? It's amazing. Interviewer: Yeah. Dr. Chris Martenson: What we didn't see was boats going up there taking water samples because every explosive at manufacturers is given what's called the tagging. And you can just take that water sample and find out exactly where that explosive came from. And that should be like we should know that, oh, those explosives came from this plant. And then you can start from there. Nobody was interested in doing an investigation. So that's your first tell in a story like this. No investigation means we already know who did it. Interviewer: OK, yeah. Dr. Chris Martenson: The people who aren't conducting the investigation. Interviewer: Right. So would you agree with my hypothesis that there's actually a great deal of self -sabotage going on for Western nations? Dr. Chris Martenson: Well, in Germany particularly this is an very unusual case, because Germany is really the engine of Europe. And it has a lot of very energy intensive industries, glass, cement, steel manufacturing. These are all highly energy intensive. BASF, one of the largest petrochemical plants in the world. Interviewer: Right. Dr. Chris Martenson: And with taking out the Nord Stream plus other sources, natural gas costs are now ten times higher than they would have been otherwise. Ten times at this moment because natural gas is spiking currently because of the loss of LNG from Qatar and out of the Middle East at this point. So German industry is being absolutely eviscerated. It is down 24 percent from its recent peak, which is Great Depression levels. They're just shuttering plants like crazy. And at the same time, not making anything beyond sort of like, we'll do some subsidies to make up for this. You cannot print your way out of an energy deficit. What you do is you create inflation and you immiserate the people, everybody gets poorer. And this is really easily, obviously seen. And Merz, remember, he was on the on the board of BlackRock. This really feels to me like an almost intentional dismantling of the German economy. The idea that what's going to happen is, oh, we'll privatize, you know, publicize, you know, we're going to somehow harvest the actual energy intensive industries for pennies on the dollar. And we'll rebuild it all. What these people don't understand is that when you take that energy out and you cut it out, you break a system that it's not the plant, it's the plant plus the people plus the apprentices, plus the whole system. It's the ecosystem. You don't just shut something down and start it up again. It never works. Interviewer: Right. OK, let's get a little bit historical and conspiratorial here. Dr. Chris Martenson: All right. Interviewer: What about the idea that let's say let's go back 100 years more or more and let's say that the Anglo -American banking empire was afraid that Germany was getting too powerful, let's say at the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th. And part of the reasons for World War One, was to cut them down so that they didn't challenge, let's say, the British Empire at the time, and then they restructure during after the Weimar era, the Nazis rebuild the economy and then the same thing. Let's finish off the job in World War Two. Is this just part and parcel of a consistent theme that Germany cannot be allowed to be the dominant, powerful force in Europe? Dr. Chris Martenson: I think it could be, but the mistake we're going to be making this time, is that we don't have the energy in the story anymore to rebuild like we used to. So World War One, hey, we're still like figuring out even what oil is. You can still find horse and carts. Interviewer: Troops are on horses. Dr. Chris Martenson: Yes, horses. And, you know, a few steam engines and a little bit internal combustion engines. By World War Two, we figured out, oh, oil's the bomb, right? So we go out and we have to control the oil sources because that's the most energy dense thing you can conduct a military with. So I think they're just sort of carrying that thinking on and going, oh, that's the model: you smash and grab and you rebuild. This would be the mistake would be like saying, oh, I hurt my hamstring when I was 17 in the basketball court. I'm going to drive to the hoop as a 70 year old. You know, you don't have the energy for the rebuilding process anymore. Interviewer: Yes. Dr. Chris Martenson: And that's the thing that they don't understand. That's my work. I'm trying to get people to understand. It's not technically how many barrels of oil. It's the net energy you get out of those barrels of oil. We had so much abundance in World War One, so much abundance in World War Two, we were still going up the curve of abundance of net energy. We're sliding down that curve now. It's just a completely different story. Interviewer: OK, amazing. Well, I think your presentation yesterday was largely geared towards an American audience. We have a large European audience. We broadcast in many languages, but I would say about 80 percent of our listeners and viewers are in Germany. Can you think of anything, a last word that you might want to say specifically to the European or German speaking audience? Dr. Chris Martenson: Well, yes, absolutely. You have to understand what's going on. There is some sort of a play being acted out here. And the conclusion of it is probably going to be very disappointing to the powers that be. Interviewer: Is that right? Dr. Chris Martenson: Yeah. Because they're going to think they're grabbing control of everything. This is what's all it's about. Power and control. Power and control. If you want to know where a war is going to go, just watch where a pipeline went in two years ago. It's usually how this plays out. So it's been the story for a long time. Yes. But now the entire geopolitical chess board just got upset. China is going to be much more dominant in the Middle East now. The United States is going to be much less dominant in the Middle East. We're going to see large realignments around the Arab states right there. We've just as of this recording, seen like major developments in the Saudi production being absolutely destroyed recently by the Houthis. And those barrels that were coming out of that pipeline in Saudi Arabia principally went to Europe. So Europe is about to run into vast diesel shortages, shipping fuel, probably kerosene, probably not gasoline quite as much. But we're going to see these big shortages. So everybody's got to get ready for the shortages. And you have to be to the extent you can, you know, still got a grandma, an uncle on a farm. Get to know them. Say hi. Can I help? You know. I really preach what I in my work: resilience. I think people should build up buffers. You need to have, yes, a financial buffer if you can. Start saving if you can. I like saving in gold and silver myself personally. But hard assets of any stripe will do. You need to build up your actual what we call physical buffers, store a little bit of food. Maybe just, you know, just like grandma used to do pantry. Interviewer: Sure, sure. Dr. Chris Martenson: But the most important one is emotional. Most people are not prepared mentally for what's coming because they don't know what's coming. And they'll have to make a very sudden adjustment. And that's hard to do. So give yourself some runway. Start learning about what's actually happening so that you have as much time as possible to mentally prepare and emotionally prepare. Interviewer: Excellent. Dr. Martenson, how can our viewers access your work? Dr. Chris Martenson: My website is peakprosperity.com. My name is Chris Martenson. I use my real name online so you can find me on X or Instagram or any other place like that. Interviewer: OK, thank you so much for the interview. Dr. Chris Martenson: My pleasure. Interviewer: Excellent.

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