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Drilling Deep: The mental state of drivers dealing with the pandemic

· Friday, September 04, 2020

Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

On this week’s Drilling Deep, Michael Lemke talks about the mental strain on drivers who are keeping the U.S. supply chain afloat during the pandemic.

Lemke is a professor at the University of Houston-Downtown and he is a former driver. So he’s studied the profession from the inside and the outside. The pandemic has put a whole different sort of strain on those behind the wheel, and Lemke joins Drilling Deep to talk about it.

Also on Drilling Deep, host John Kingston discusses why the price of oil, though trending higher gradually since early June, may have reached a high point for now. There are lots of things that are suggesting prices may be trending lower.

John Kingston

John has an almost 50-year career as a journalist, most of them covering commodities and markets. The largest part of his career was spent at Platts, now part of S&P Global Energy. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment. He was awarded the 2020 Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah International Energy Award for Lifetime Achievement for the Advancement of International Energy Journalism.