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.