Energy Dependence And
Why we War-WarBy Jeff Berg
01 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Geoffrey Germany writes in a letter to the TomPaine.com editor, "However, and not to be pompous, but some of your information is inaccurate. India is now the leading consumer of oil in the world." It is difficult not to gape at such a stunningly inaccurate factoid being dispensed with such confidence but then if there is anything that the United States of Amnesia knows less about than its foreign policy history it is its energy vulnerability.For starters the U.S. is the largest consumer of oil in the world BY FAR, it's not even close, its been that way for a hundred years, and still this isn’t common knowledge. Today the U.S. is consuming 20 million barrels a day, 14 million of those barrels imported. India by contrast is sixth in the world in terms of oil consumption consuming about 2.5 Mmb/d (million barrels per day.) or just about exactly 1/8 of the U.S. amount. Oh and by the by while they do consume but 1/8 of what the U.S. does on a daily basis they have three times as many people meaning of course that they are consuming but 1/24th (4%) of the U.S. amount on a per capita basis.
Access to fossil fuel energy more than any other single factor accounts for the disparity of wealth between any two countries. It doesn’t have to be this way and Japan and Scandinavia are leading the way in trying to change this relationship. Nonetheless Japan still consumes more liquid fuel energy than every other country in the world excepting the U.S. and China.
No single country in the world comes close to the U.S. numbers, the two next greatest consumers of oil, China and Japan each consume about 1/4 of what the U.S. does. In fact in order to equal U.S. consumption you have to add China, Japan, Germany, Russia and India together. The population of these countries being about 2.75 billion to the U.S. 300 million (9.25 times greater.)
The U.S. leadership knows its extreme vulnerability and has known it for many decades. So well ingrained is this fact among America's Presidents, its intelligence agencies, the State Department and the Pentagon that even that "great Christian" Jimmy Carter announced to the world that nothing would stand in the way of the U.S. and its interests in the region. (Now referred to as 'The Carter Doctrine') Today we are seeing just exactly how seriously these words were meant.
The U.S. is a massive and insanely profligate energy hog recklessly dependent on the rest of the world for 2/3 of its liquid fuel needs. And what has its response been to this dangerous weakness and its “drunken sailor on leave” like spending of an extremely precious and finite resource? (not to mention the pollution, global warming, balance of payment, and, oh I don’t know, ethics angles) Well after the Carter Doctrine came Reagan’s declaration of “Morning in America” and his first symbolic act was to rip the solar panels off the White House roof when what he should have been doing was putting a windmill on its lawn. Then he relaxed the CAFE standards (car fuel efficiency standards) leading directly to an America running on SUV’s and Hummers and contributing, as if a further contribution was needed, to a development sprawl mistake, such an inadequate word, that will be ruinously expensive to try and correct. You think the Iraq war is expensive? Wait till the piper presents this bill of particulars.
Now more than ever America is dependent on other people’s oil and this is what the wars in the Middle East are about everything else by contrast is mere pretext. The one exception being water issues which are still a very distant second and something the U.S. elite and its people could give a flying flick about. (Finally a source of agreement!) Try to imagine if you will the U.S. Congress okaying this kind of spending because the Israeli’s or Kuwaiti’s or Iraqi’s are thirsty.
Einstein said it first and best in 1905: "Energy-Matters". Coincidentally this was the very same year that the British naval fleet switched over from coal to oil despite having no domestic oil and lots of coal thereby jump-starting the whole M.E. geopolitical "great game" tussle that has so grievously injured the region and its people.
Compounding the global impact of America’s extreme vulnerability is the highly problematic fact that the very same geological circumstances that have caused U.S. production to be halved since 1970, from 10 to 5 million barrels a day, are very much the same set of circumstances that apply to the entire planet as an oil producer. Oil is finite, production will peak and then inexonerably decline. 33 out of the top 48 producing nations like the U.S. have passed their peak in terms of production. It will take a minimum of twenty years to transition from liquid fuels. These are unalterable facts made all the more important by the fact that oil has traditionally been a buyers market and from here on out it will most definitively be a sellers one. This changes a great many things most especially for those made vulnerable by foreign oil dependence.
These are the facts and this is what these conflicts are about. All else is window dressing for the play in Peoria. Most especially the laughably cynical "democracy enhancement project". As the research of Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace rightly noted there is in point of demonstrable fact an inverse relationship between what the U.S. spends on enhancing democracy and how much democracy one actually gets. Perhaps the single greatest example of “less is more” in world history. And despite the direct evidence of so very many “facts on the ground” the idea of the U.S. as the world champion of freedom is a meme and a theme relentlessly echoed to massive cognitive dissonance effect by every sector of opinion makers in the country. If you want to talk about pomposity start there for it is their stock and trade.
Post Carbon Toronto
http://tinyurl.com/hhtnj
*All energy numbers stated here are numbers derived from data from either the American Petroleum Institute, the Department of Energy, the International Energy Agency or the Energy Information Agency.
