August 28, 2005
Paul J. Nyden
Oil, blood and the future
Oil may be achieving a new impact on daily news, people’s pocketbooks and world history — perhaps even the end of history and the world.
Cover stories in magazines this month include: “After Oil: Powering the Future” in National Geographic; “Crossroads for Planet Earth,” a special issue of Scientific American; and “The Beginning of the End of Oil?” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
The articles warn about dire consequences for humanity and life on earth if current energy policies are not changed in the immediate future.
Some people are paying far more dearly for oil than most of us are forced to pay at the gas pumps.
They are the soldiers wounded and killed every day fighting in Iraq in an increasingly irresponsible, and ultimately futile, effort to protect “our” supplies of oil in the Middle East.
Michael T. Klare, a sociologist and foreign affairs expert who teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., warns that we must change our energy policies dramatically in his readable new book, “Blood and Oil.”
We, the taxpayers, are already footing the bills to maintain military bases across the globe. But politicians and the news media rarely mention those bills as hidden costs for oil.
Part of those costs come from propping up corrupt, often brutal, regimes in “oil-besotted potentates” in the Persian Gulf to Central Asian republics, from Russia to Angola, from Nigeria to Colombia.
“Ultimately, the cost of oil will be measured in blood,” Klare writes. And it could get worse as nations like China and India industrialize and demand more and more fuel.
“The American military is being used more and more for the protection of overseas oil fields and the supply routes that connect them to the United States and its allies,” Klare writes. “Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.”
And it is becoming increasingly difficult, Klare argues, “to distinguish U.S. military operations designed to fight terrorism from those designed to protect energy assets.”
Our national addiction to oil and other fossil fuels, including coal, has grown since World War II. But our policies became disastrously worse after George W. Bush moved into the White House in 2001.
Disturbing statistics come from the administration’s own studies, such as the May 2001 report, National Energy Policy.
Between 2000 and 2020, domestic oil production will drop by 18 percent, from 8.5 million to 7.0 million barrels a day.
During those same years, U.S. oil consumption will grow by 31 percent, from 19.5 million to 25.5 million barrels a day.
Centcom Commander General Tommy Franks, now retired, testified in 2002 that 68 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf region and 43 percent of world petroleum exports pass through the Straits of Hormuz, between Iran and the United Arab Emirates.
Finite supplies of oil may be the biggest, but not the only, problem.
Continue 1 | 2 | 3
wvgazettemail.com |
