Out
Of Afghanistan And Iraq
And Into Kyoto
By Jeff Berg
23 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Let
me begin with a quotation.
“Who is Osama Bin Laden,
really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s
family secret. He is the American President’s dark Doppelganger.
The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized.
He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by
America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal,
its vulgarly stated policy of “full spectrum dominance”,
its chilling disregard for non-American lives its barbarous military
interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its
merciless economic agenda that has munched through poor countries like
a plague of locusts…. Now that the family secret has been spilled,
the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.”
These are the words of the author and political essayist Ahrundati Roy
of Kerala, India and they were published in the Guardian newspaper on
Sept. 27, 2001. Words, were they to hear them, I feel quite confident
in stating would strike most in North America as evincing no small amount
of prescience about the path that America was to take after 9/11. Oddly,
the person who would most strongly disagree with this perception is
the author herself who would and does claim that in the world where
she comes from these are observations so common place as to be saved
from banality not by their insight but their elegance.
So how is that? How is it
that a world I can assure you is nowhere near as wired as our own would
see these words as surpassingly obvious whereas we are struck by them
as if by the force of prophecy?
I’ve thought long on
this question and the best answer that I have come up with so far is
that the clarity of one’s perception are very much dependent upon
which side of the barrel one finds oneself. I.e. If one is being shot
at it is generally much easier to understand the motivations of the
ones doing the shooting and just what it is they may be after that best
explains their murderous behaviour. Whereas those who are doing the
shooting are far more prone to equivocation in their justifications.
Furthermore this tendency only gets more pronounced as those on the
“right” side of the barrel get further removed from the
killing fields. The net result of this being that those who are ordering
those who are doing the shooting and those whose sweat and brow support
them both are exponentially more likely to split moral, ethical, legal
and logical hairs when explaining the why of what is taking place.
The best and most recent
example of this of course comes from the assertion by Bush and Blair
that “This war has nothing to do with oil” and the even
more incredible to my mind remarkably lock-step unison that our media
and many of our intellectuals exhibited in airing their assertion that
anyone who thought that this was about oil was obviously a “conspiracy
nutter” or at best a not very deep thinker.
Deep thoughts here standing
in for the kind of intellectual spade work necessary for explaining
why it is that our unleashing of the dogs of war was done only with
the greatest of reluctance, and only after the most unacceptable of
provocations and how it was all for the good of the world generally
and most especially for the particular benefit of those we were invading.
And how all of this “sacrifice” on our part was just one
more of the many examples of the burden that we are willing to shoulder
in our collective defense of Freedom, Democracy and the latest addition
to the ‘White Man’s Burden’ canon of justifications:
The rights of women.
Unsurprisingly those being
shot at don’t quite see it this way. And at the risk of being
branded a “conspiracy nutter” or even worse in my eyes “a
shallow thinker” I would like to explore why I think our military
interventions in the Caspian and the Gulf have everything to do with
oil or at least why they have everything to do with hydrocarbon energy
and our heavy dependence on this fuel source. Not to mention our craving
for the truly mind boggling profits that flow from their distribution
and sale and the equally mind bogglingly expensive and extensive infrastructure
that we have built to distribute and consume these particular energy
sources. Aka. The tyranny of previous investment.
To put it as succinctly as
possible they are prima facie evidence that North America is on the
wrong end of the barrel for the first time in our history and this fact
is going to demand an unprecedented level of transparency and clarity
from our democracy and our institutions if we hope to meet this reality
with anything approaching the lofty motives and ideals that our leaders
all too easily ascribe to us. For an investigation of why this is true
a little historical context is needed.
Coming out of the Second
World War the U.S. had been for almost fifty years by far the largest
producer of oil in the world and far and away the greatest exporter
of oil as well with over 60% of the world market. A level of market
dominance far greater than anything the Saudis have ever had. Seven
out of eight barrels of oil in the First and Second World Wars were
American barrels of oil and our commanders after these wars had no reluctance
to conclude that we “Floated to victory on a sea of oil”.
The German Wermacht on the other hand having been reduced to coal liquefaction
and a ruinous military drive to the east to try and take Baku, Azerbaijan’s
oil whereas the Japanese Air Force was essentially grounded for the
last two months of the war. And it is quite frankly this extraordinary
one time gift from Mother Nature that best explains the incredibly energetic
N.A. economy and not our capital gains tax structure.
How the U.S. came to be the
world’s most incredible hyper power was quite literally from the
access it had to power in its most literal and physical sense. First
it was the gargantuan supplies of wood, then coal, then oil, then hydro,
natural gas and now uranium and the minerals and technology it takes
to create renewable energy. North Americans have long been by far the
world’s greatest consumer of energy which had a certain amount
of ethical legitimacy even in the eyes of the rest of the world because
we were at least consuming our own resources. Or at least that is the
story line I will stick to here. There are of course alternate ways
of looking at the creation of the U.S. and Canada and who was displaced
by that process that are extremely compelling and much less complimentary.
In any case even this veneer of legitimacy has been stripped away by
three principal factors.
The first being the North
American economy’s massive dependence today on other people’s
oil and our soon to be massive dependence on other people’s natural
gas if our leaders and elites get their way.
The second being what the
burning of fossil fuels is doing to the atmospheric chemistry of our
planet and how this is likely to affect the quality of life of we who
are bound to this planet for that life. (Aka. All of us)
Coming out of the Second
World War not only had North America’s economic competitors crashed
their economic systems we also had all the oil and gas we could use
right here at home. This is very much no longer the case. Today we in
North America import about 14 million barrels of oil per day. Now it
is true that problems of scale make understanding difficult in a great
many areas of thought but nowhere is this more so than in the world
of energy. To get a sense of what 14 million barrels of oil means you
have to understand that this is more than twice what China – the
world’s #2 - consumes in total.
What we consume in total
is 23 million barrels per day. This is 27% of the world’s total.
Impressive enough in and of itself given that we make up only 5% of
the world’s population. But nothing compared to the fact that
our consumption is greater than every country of world outside of the
top 20 COMBINED. i.e. The “bottom 192” countries of the
world combined or what I like to call the ROW, the rest of the world,
consume just over 18 million barrels a day to our 23. This despite the
fact that excluding the incredibly green house gas producing tarsands,
we in North America have less than 2% of the world’s reserves
of oil.
The natural gas situation
is little better. We consume 26 Tcf of natural gas per annum which is
again about 27% of the world’s total consumption of 94 Tcf and
our reserves are again less than 2% of the world’s reserves. Now
to date at least this has been our natural gas that we have been consuming
and so the world has paid little attention to this situation other than
to note the extraordinary abundance of our luck. This situation is about
to change and dramatically.
In September of this year
Post Carbon Toronto will be bringing to Toronto a man who demands listening.
His name is David Hughes and he is a senior geophysicist at Natural
Resources Canada. He has worked for the Canadian Geological Survey for
31 years and is today a senior analyst for the Canadian Gas Potential
Committee which is a committee of private and public sector physical
scientists charged with looking at Canada’s natural gas situation.
When we sat down with him at the Old Mill a few weeks ago he essentially
opened our dialogue with the following words. “If we do not manage
an 80% reduction we will have a 90% one forced on us.”
Canada and the U.S. have
peaked in terms of natural gas production. As a result of massive and
unprecedented levels of drilling, levels of drilling four times higher
than anything that we have seen before, and Coal Bed Methane gas production,
we have been able to plateau production this decade. But given that
the average decline rate for really existing Canadian natural gas wells
is 21% and for the U.S. it is 28%, and given the fact that the average
new well use to come in at 600 Mcf and today comes in at under 250 Mcf,
you can see we are on a treadmill of ever increasing speed. And like
Wile E. Coyote as long as we can keep our little drilling legs moving
fast enough we won’t start our drop to the canyon floor. But as
anyone with experience at falling off cliffs will be the first to tell
you if you absolutely have to fall off a cliff the lesser the height
the better.
So in short the good news
and the bad news are one and the same: We are running out of fossil
fuels. This is good news because if every region of our world had the
proper sedimentary basins and geological traps for hydrocarbons as they
do in Texas, Saudi Arabia and Alberta the only solution we ever would
have enacted for the many problems this power brings would have been
the one chosen by Thelma and Louise: i.e. Pedal to the metal and let
the chips and cars fall where they may.
For the first time in our history North America is uniquely disadvantaged
when it comes to fundamental resources. This fact combined with our
extraordinary level of accrued wealth and the sophistication of our
information systems gives us every opportunity and motive imaginable
to lead ourselves out of Afghanistan and Iraq and into Kyoto. And it
is fervently to be hoped that each and every citizen of this absurdly
fortunate continent does all they can to ensure that this happens. For
I am very much afraid that given the timelines presented to us by geology
and atmospheric chemistry as unlikely as such a collective outbreak
of sanity may be nothing less will do. Or to quote a more poetic friend
of mine: “Let us make haste, time she is doing terrible things.”
www.pledgeTOgreen.ca
www.postcarbontoronto.org
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