Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham, U.K., and author of Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (Pluto, 2018). He writes a blog at peoplenature.org and is on Twitter. As a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (2007-21), Pirani wrote many papers and book chapters on energy economics and the natural gas sector in Russia, Ukraine and the Caspian region. Prior to that, he wrote about the former Soviet Union as a journalist and historian.