Out Of Afghanistan And Iraq
And Into KyotoBy Jeff Berg
23 June, 2007
Countercurrents.orgLet 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
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