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2 The post-abundance era
By Michael T Klare
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, foreign-policy analysts have struggled to
find a term to characterize the epoch we now
inhabit. Although "the post-Cold War era" has been
the reigning expression, this label now sounds
dated and no longer does justice to the particular
characteristics of the current period. Others have
spoken of the post-September 11, 2001, era as if
the attacks on New York's World Trade Center and
the Pentagon were defining moments for the entire
world. But this image no
longer possesses the power it
once wielded - even in the United States.
I propose instead another term that better
captures the defining characteristics of the
current period: the post-abundance era.
If
there is one thing that most inhabitants of the
late 20th century shared in common, it was a
perception of rising global abundance in virtually
all fields: energy, food, housing, consumer goods,
fashion, mass culture, and so on. Yes, there were
pockets of poverty in many areas, but most people
in most places around the world were seeing a rise
in their personal income and an increase in the
number of things in their possession, along with
the supply of energy with which to move or power
their many personal goods. At least some
strata of the global population will continue to
experience an increase in personal wealth in the
21st century, but the sense of abundance that
characterized the late 20th century is likely to
evaporate for the great majority of us. One day
now-affordable luxuries such as overseas vacations
and meals out will become unattainable, and even
basic necessities such as energy, electricity,
water and food are likely to become less plentiful
and more expensive. This global austerity will
produce great hardship for the poor and will force
even lower-middle-class families to choose from
among long car trips, restaurant meals,
air-conditioning in summer, and high thermostats
in winter.
Less supply, more demand Lying behind this historic shift in global
fortunes is a fundamental reversal in the balance
between resource supply and demand. For most of
the 20th century, global stockpiles of vital
materials such as oil, natural gas, coal and basic
minerals expanded as giant multinational
corporations (MNCs) poured billions of dollars
into exploring every corner of the Earth in the
drive to locate and exploit valuable deposits of
extractable materials. This permitted consumers
around the world to increase their consumption of
virtually everything, safe in the knowledge that
even more of these commodities would be available
next year and the year after that, and so on
infinitely into the future.
But this
condition no longer prevails. Many of the world's
most promising sources of supply have been located
and exploited, and all of the additional billions
spent by MNCs on exploration and discovery are
producing increasingly meager results.
Ever since the 1960s, the most fruitful
decade in the worldwide discovery of new
oilfields, there has been a steady decline in the
identification of new deposits, according to a
recent study by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Even more worrisome, the rate of oilfield
discovery fell below the rate of global petroleum
consumption in the 1980s, and since then has
fallen to about half the rate of consumption. This
means we are increasingly relying on deposits
found in previous decades to slake our insatiable
thirst for petroleum - a pattern that cannot
continue for much longer before we will begin to
experience an irreversible and traumatic decline
in the global supply of oil.
The same is
true of other vital resources, including natural
gas, uranium, copper, and many minerals. There may
be adequate stocks of these materials on global
markets today, but the MNCs are not finding enough
new deposits of these commodities to replace what
we're consuming. So future shortages are
inevitable.
Water is somewhat different,
in that we receive a fresh supply of it each year
through evaporation from the oceans and
precipitation on land - but even this precious
resource will become scarcer in the years ahead
because of population growth, urbanization,
industrialization, the over-exploitation of
underground aquifers, and global warming (through
persistent drought and the accelerated evaporation
of rivers and lakes).
This contraction in
the global supply of vital resources will affect
our lives in myriad ways. On a personal level, it
will force us to consume less - for example, by
buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars and
smaller, more energy-efficient homes. We will have
to make other accommodations as well: fewer
long-distance trips to the seaside or amusement
parks; fewer long-distance airplane rides; lowered
thermostats in winter; and so on. These cutbacks
will be minor inconveniences for some, but
significant hardships for others - especially the
poor, the elderly, and others on a fixed income.
Farmers will have a particularly hard time, as the
cost of virtually everything associated with
modern, mechanized agriculture - diesel fuel,
pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, food
supplements - will become far more expensive.
Less stuff, more conflict At
the national level, we can expect a significant
change in foreign policy. As supplies of energy
and other basic necessities become
