July 31st, 2007 by John
The above heading has been seen many times over the last 60 years, but it as never been more true then it is today, nor has middle east instability ever been so dangerous to the rest of the world. We have allowed our entire way of life including our food production to become reliant on finite oil and natural gas and because these fuels have been so cheap, we have not developed technologies to use them sparingly, nor have we properly researched and developed efficient methods of collecting the abundant energy of the sun.
As a result, consumption in the west is so massive that we have squandered a large part of our own reserves and increasingly need more from unreliable countries such as Russia, Nigeria and Venezuela and the dangerously unstable region of the middle east. The middle east contains about 60% of the worlds remaining conventional oil and it’s supplies are absolutely vital for the continuation of our civilization and for life itself.
For that reason, the west has tried to stabilize the middle east by helping friendly governments, however dictatorial they have been, and in some cases sought regime change if it was thought to be needed.
In the case of Iraq, disposing of Saddam Hussain was fairly easy but it has not led to stability. The sunni’s and shi’ites are killing each other and only the presence of U.S. Troops is preventing for now, a full scale civil war that could spread to the entire region. It now looks as if the U.S. will soon reduce troop numbers and will come under pressure to pull out all together.
That alone would be bad enough but there are many other problems looming. Extreme Islamists are working hard to bring about an Islamic state encompassing the entire middle east and beyond. One way to bring this about would be to gain control of a nation just outside the middle east, Pakistan. President Musharraf’s support of the war on terror has helped al-Qaeda and other extreme groups to become stronger. If an islamic government eventually takes power, as seems likely, Pakistan’s atomic weapons will make it impossible for the U.S. to police the region and keep the oil flowing. In addition, terrorists now see the destruction of oil facilities as the most effective way of damaging the hated west.
We really should be taking urgent measures to cut our consumption of oil and gas so that we can survive when the flow from the middle east stops.
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July 30th, 2007 by John
Dubai is investing $14 billion in building The World (a collection of luxury tourist resorts and private estates built on man-made islands). They are diversifying because their oil is in decline and it is expected their oil revenues will run low in 2016. But is this a sensible plan? In the future when the world is short of energy, the associated air travel, water purification and shipping of supplies will become ever more expensive so only the super-rich will be able to afford to live or holiday there. I believe the present construction is a waste of finite resources and the resorts will be mostly deserted in the future.
Without cheap and plentiful supplies of fossil fuels, Dubai will not be a pleasant place to be. Under natural conditions it would only support a small population of people used to the harsh conditions. As Dubai’s oil goes in to decline, it is expected that the same thing will be happening to other oil suppliers, making oil very expensive as supply fails to keep up with demand.
So to build a massive resort in a place that will need extraordinary amounts of energy to fly in the visitors, desalinate the water, bring in the food and keep everyone and everything cool in the normally unbearable heat seems a strange way to prepare for the decline of oil.
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Putin, the President of Russia, is becoming more and more hostile to the West. In the near future Russia will have the greatest supplies of oil and natural gas in the world. As our food supply system in the West is totally dependent on oil an gas and would fail if those inputs were disrupted, western leaders, if they fully understand the implications, must be becoming increasingly alarmed at what is happening in the Middle East and Russia. Because the west, especially the U.S. has failed to take the actions that would have allowed us to manage mainly on our own energy resources, we will soon be in the uncomfortable position of being beholden to these regions to keep our civilization going and to prevent mass starvation.
There were great hopes that Russia would become fully democratic and a friend of the West. Under Putin and his henchmen, the opposite is happening. The increase in the price of oil and natural gas in the last few years has enabled the economy to grow strongly and made Putin popular despite his fascist tendencies. His youth camps where youngsters are subjected to state propaganda, his crackdown on opposition media and his anti-foreigner rhetoric are all reminders of Hitler’s pre-war Germany. In Putin’s Russia, even Stalin is praised as a great leader,even though 25 million people were starved or shot through his orders.
Russia is going to become the world’s energy superpower within a few short years, and is not going to be messed with. Other oil giants such as Saudi Arabia need western help to arm themselves and to keep their regimes in power. Putin has no such needs and in the recent spat with London over the murder of Littvenenko, he has shown that he cares little what others think of him.
Similarly, he has made it plain that the Russian government will keep full control over energy assets. The strategy seems to be to lure western oil companies in to use their expertise and billions of dollars to develop new oil or gas fields and then to force them to renew contracts on less favourable terms. They cannot walk away after investing so much money and so agree. They must wonder what will happen when oil becomes really scarce and Russia becomes even more belligerent towards the west.
Europe’s future energy security depends to a large extent on Russian oil and gas and so our future food supplies which cannot be grown and transported without sufficient oil and gas will depend on the good will of this most unreliable and unpredictable supplier.
Europe should change it’s tax system by replacing present taxes with a massive carbon tax, so that innovation would bring about changes quickly enough to make us much less reliant on imported energy. I don’t believe anything less will save us from eventual economic collapse and starvation.
I will shortly do another post updating the problems in the other region on which the west depends - the Middle East.
