Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
The New Geopolitics of Energy
Michael T. Klare, The Nation
While the day-to-day focus of US military planning remains Iraq and Afghanistan, American strategists are increasingly looking beyond these two conflicts to envision the global combat environment of the emerging period–and the world they see is one where the struggle over vital resources, rather than ideology or balance-of-power politics, dominates the martial landscape. Believing that the United States must reconfigure its doctrines and forces in order to prevail in such an environment, senior officials have taken steps to enhance strategic planning nd combat capabilities. Although little of this has reached the public domain, there have been a number of key indicators.
… Russia, too, is being viewed through the lens of global resource competition. Although Russia, unlike the United States and China, does not need to import oil and natural gas to satisfy its domestic requirements, it seeks to dominate the transportation of energy, especially to Europe. This has alarmed senior White House officials, who resent restoration of Russia’s great-power status and fear that its growing control over the distribution of oil and gas in Eurasia will undercut America’s influence in the region.
… Taken together, these and like moves suggest that a momentous shift has occurred. At a time when world supplies of oil, natural gas, uranium and key industrial minerals like copper and cobalt are beginning to shrink and the demand for them is exploding, the major industrial powers are becoming more desperate in their drive to gain control over what remains of the planet’s untapped reserves
… As George W. Bush tells it, the “war on terror” and rogue states are the contemporary equivalents of earlier ideological struggles against Fascism and Communism. Examine the issues closely, however, and it is impossible to disentangle the problem of Middle Eastern terrorism or the challenge posed by Iraq and Iran from the history of Western oil extraction in those regions.
Islamic extremism of the sort propagated by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda has many roots, but one of its major claims is that the Western assault on and occupation of Islamic lands–and the resulting defilement of Muslim peoples and cultures–has been driven by the West’s craving for Middle Eastern oil.
… These and other efforts by Russia and China, combined with stepped-up US military aid to states in the region, are part of a larger, though often hidden, struggle to control the flow of oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea basin to markets in Europe and Asia. And this struggle, in turn, is but part of a global struggle over energy.
The great risk is that this struggle will someday breach the boundaries of economic and diplomatic competition and enter the military realm. This will not be because any of the states involved make a deliberate decision to provoke a conflict with a competitor–the leaders of all these countries know that the price of violence is far too high to pay for any conceivable return. The problem, instead, is that all are engaging in behaviors that make the outbreak of inadvertent escalation ever more likely.
(1 May 2008)
Long article by Klare, one of several appearing in the media lately – in time for the release of his new book. -BA
Lester Brown on Reducing the US Carbon Footprint (video)
Energy Conversation via Energy Policy TV
Lester Brown, Author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, discusses the need for the United States to control its greenhouse gas emissions in order to ensure the security of the worldwide food supply. Brown outlines how market forces and societal pressure can encourage those reductions.
(28 April 2008)
Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free is getting an enthusiastic response, but several new nuclear facilities are planned.
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
Nothing I have done in 37 years of work on energy, environment, and nuclear weapons and power issues has caught on like this.
As evidence of serious and rapid climate change mounts and a price on carbon emissions looks more and more certain, companies’ coal-fired power plants are hard to justify and harder to finance. So the nuclear industry wants to ride into town as the savior. Having failed to deliver electricity “too cheap to meter” (promised in the 1950s by the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss), it now wants massive new government subsidies in the form of loan guarantees.
But it is a false choice. Those who oppose nuclear power as the “solution” to the global climate crisis are right: a combination of efficiency, renewable energy, combined heat and power, and emerging technologies such as plug-in hybrid cars can allow us to phase out all fossil fuels and nuclear power in 30 to 50 years.
(February 23, 2008)
Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D., Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
Recommendations: The Clean Dozen
The 12 most critical policies that need to be enacted as urgently as possible for achieving a zero-CO2 economy without nuclear power are as follows.
1. Enact a physical limit of CO2 emissions for all large users of fossil fuels (a “hard cap”) that steadily declines to zero prior to 2060, with the time schedule being assessed periodically for tightening according to climate, technological, and economic developments. The cap should be set at the level of some year prior to 2007, so that early implementers of CO2 reductions benefit from the setting of the cap. Emission allowances would be sold by the U.S. government for use in the United States only. There would be no free allowances, no offsets and no international sale or purchase of CO2 allowances. The estimated revenues – approximately $30 to $50 billion per year – would be used for demonstration plants, research and development, and worker and community transition.
2. Eliminate all subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuels and nuclear power (including guarantees for nuclear waste disposal from new power plants, loan guarantees, and subsidized insurance).
3. Eliminate subsidies for biofuels from food crops.
4. Build demonstration plants for key supply technologies, including central station solar thermal with heat storage, large- and intermediate-scale solar photovoltaics, and CO2 capture in microalgae for liquid fuel production (and production of a high solar energy capture aquatic plants, for instance in wetlands constructed at municipal wastewater systems).
5. Leverage federal, state and local purchasing power to create markets for critical advanced technologies, including plug-in hybrids.
6. Ban new coal-fired power plants that do not have carbon storage.
7. Enact at the federal level high efficiency standards for appliances.
8. Enact stringent building efficiency standards at the state and local levels, with federal incentives to adopt them.
9. Enact stringent efficiency standards for vehicles and make plug-in hybrids the standard U.S. government vehicle by 2015.
10. Put in place federal contracting procedures to reward early adopters of CO2 reductions.
11. Adopt vigorous research, development, and pilot plant construction programs for technologies that could accelerate the elimination of CO2, such as direct electrolytic hydrogen production, solar hydrogen production (photolytic, photoelectrochemical, and other approaches), hot rock geothermal power, and integrated gasification combined cycle plants using biomass with a capacity to sequester the CO2.
12. Establish a standing committee on Energy and Climate under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.
(August 2007)
book homepage
Summary (PDF)
Full 290-page PDF – posted March 2008.
IEER homepage
