graduate, they have been eliminating exactly the kind of language and area studies programs that are most crucial for producing the kind of expertise that Gazprom uses to advance its interests.  It is possible in the United States to have a first degree in European history without knowing foreign languages.  This is just dumb.  Corporations and university administrators need to understand that languages and cultures are systems for keeping secrets and generating confidence.  If everybody else knows English and American culture and we do not know their languages and cultures, it means that they know our secrets, but we do not know theirs and we cannot win their trust; and please spare me the fixers, they are not going to make anybody trust anybody.. Unless and until the corporations change this provincial culture, the cause of energy independence will need to be advanced by local political and social movements and by diplomats who do know languages and study foreign cultures.  Academics like me can try to help.  Here at the Energy Institute of the University of Texas in Austin, we try to communicate and instruct the latest results of scientific research about shale gas and hydraulic fracturing (and other forms of energy of course), advise about sound policy on the basis of good science.  I have been presenting some of this research in Bulgaria, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Poland.  I can say that my audience (composed of politicians, civil servants, NGOs and academics) has been very receptive.  But then