Page 2 of 3 Petro-power and nuclear
renaissance By Michael T Klare
Russian Economy", he asserted that the
Russian state must oversee the utilization of the
country's mineral raw materials - including
oilfields in private hands - for the good of the
Russian people.
"The state has the right
to regulate the process of the acquisition and the
use of natural resources, and particularly mineral
resources, independent of on whose property they
are located," he wrote. "In this regard, the state
acts in the interests of society
as a
whole." No better justification for energo-fascism
can be imagined.
The most famous
expression of this outlook has been the so-called
Khodorkovsky Affair. In 2003, Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, the chief executive officer of
Yukos, then Russia's top oil producer, was
arrested on fraud and tax-evasion charges. He had
run afoul of Putin by pursuing all sorts of energy
deals independent of the state, including possible
joint ventures with ExxonMobil, and by supporting
anti-Putin political forces inside Russia - either
of which would have alone been sufficient to earn
him the Kremlin's wrath.
However, it is
now apparent that Putin's ultimate goal in
engineering the arrest was to seize control of
Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos' prime asset, accounting
for about 11% of Russia's oil output. With
Khodorkovsky and his top associates in prison
awaiting trial, the government auctioned
Yuganskneftegaz to a secretive shell company,
which then resold it to state-owned Rosneft at a
below-market price. In one fell swoop, Putin had
managed to dismember Yukos and turn Rosneft into
the country's leading oil producer.
The
Russian president has also sought to extend state
control over the distribution and export of oil
and gas by blocking any effort by private firms to
build pipelines that would compete with those
owned and operated by Gazprom, the state-owned
natural-gas monopoly, and Transneft, the state
oil-pipeline monopoly. The US and other consuming
nations have long pushed for the construction of
privatized oil and gas pipelines in Russia to
increase the outflow of energy to Europe and other
foreign markets as well as to dilute the power of
Gazprom and Transneft. The Kremlin has, however,
systematically foreclosed all such efforts.
If the concentration of ownership of
energy assets in the state's hands through legally
dubious means is one dimension of emerging
energo-fascism in Russia, a second is the
utilization of this power to intimidate have-not
states on Russia's periphery.
The most
notable expression of this was the cutoff of
natural-gas supplies to Ukraine on January 1,
2006. Ostensibly, Gazprom stopped the flow in a
dispute over the pricing of Russian gas, but most
observers believe that the action was also
intended as a rebuke to Ukraine's Western-leaning
president, Victor A Yushchenko. Remember, this was
in the dead of winter, and natural gas is the main
source of heat in Ukraine, as in much of Eastern
Europe and the former USSR.
Gazprom
resumed the flow after a last-minute pricing
compromise and vociferous complaints from Western
European customers who were suffering their own
losses (as the Ukrainians diverted Europe-bound
gas for their own use). This was the moment when
it became clear to all that Moscow was fully
prepared to open and close the energy spigot as a
tool of foreign policy.
Since then, Moscow
has employed this tactic on several occasions to
intimidate other neighboring states in what it
terms its "near abroad" (as the US used to speak
of Latin America as its "back yard"). Last July
29, claiming a leak, Transneft halted oil
shipments to the Mazeikiu refinery in Lithuania
after its owners announced its sale to a Polish
firm, not a Russian one. Observers of the move
speculate that Russians officials intended to
force a Russian takeover of the refinery.
In November, Gazprom threatened to more
than double the price of natural gas to the former
Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic from US$110 to
$230 per 1,000 cubic meters. The alternative
offered was a cessation of deliveries. Again,
political pressure was believed to be at least
part of the motive, as Georgia's pro-Western
government had defied Moscow on a wide range of
issues.
In December, Gazprom pulled the
same ploy on Belarus, demanding a major
readjustment of prices from a close (and
impoverished) ally that had recently been showing
mild signs of independence.
This, then, is
another face of energo-fascism in Russia: the use
of its energy as an instrument of political
influence and coercion over weak have-not states
on its borders. "It is not that energy is the new
atomic weapon," Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group
consultancy told The Financial Times, "but Russia
knows that petro-power, aggressively and cleverly
applied, can yield diplomatic influence."
Big Brother and the nuclear renaissance
The last face of energo-fascism to be
discussed here is the inevitable rise in state
surveillance and repression attendant on an
expected increase in nuclear power.
As oil
and natural gas become scarcer, government and
industry leaders will undoubtedly push for a
greater reliance on nuclear power to provide
additional energy. This is a program likely to
gain greater momentum from rising concerns over
global warming - largely a result of
carbon-dioxide emissions created during the
combustion of oil, gas and coal.
US
President George W Bush has repeatedly spoken of
his desire to foster greater reliance on nuclear
power, and the White House-backed Energy Policy
Act of 2005 already provides a variety of
incentives for electrical utilities to build new
reactors in the United States. Other countries,
including France, China, Japan, Russia and India,
also plan to up their reliance on nuclear power,
greatly adding to the global spread of nuclear
reactors.
Many problems stand in the way
of this so-called renaissance, not least the
mammoth costs involved and the fact that no safe
system has yet been devised for the long-term
storage of nuclear waste. Furthermore, despite
many improvements in the safety of nuclear power
plants, worries persist about the risk of
accidents like those that occurred at Three Mile
Island in 1979 in the US state of Pennsylvania and
Chernobyl in the Ukrainian SSR in 1986.
But this is not the place to weigh these
issues. Let me instead focus on two especially
worrisome aspects of the future growth of the
nuclear power industry: the possible
federalization of nuclear-reactor placement in the
US and the repressive implications globally of the
greater availability of nuclear materials open to
diversion to terrorists, criminals and "rogue"
states.
Currently, America's
municipalities, counties and states still exercise
considerable control over the issuance of permits
for the
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