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4 The Pentagon's energy-protection
racket By Michael T Klare
a half. If, however, it is used to
replace oil (in various coal-to-liquid schemes),
it will disappear much more rapidly. This does
not, of course, address coal's disproportionate
contribution to global warming; if there is no
change in the way it is burned in power plants,
the planet will become inhospitable long before
the last coal mine is exhausted.
Natural
gas and uranium will outlast petroleum by a decade or
two,
but they, too, will eventually reach peak output
and begin to decline. Natural gas will simply
disappear, just like oil; any future scarcity of
uranium can to some degree be overcome through the
greater utilization of "breeder reactors", which
produce plutonium as a byproduct. This substance
can, in turn, be used as a reactor fuel in its own
right. But any increased use of plutonium will
also vastly increase the risk of nuclear-weapons
proliferation, producing a far more dangerous
world and a corresponding requirement for greater
government oversight of all aspects of nuclear
power and commerce.
Such future
possibilities are generating great anxiety among
officials of the major energy-consuming nations,
especially the United States, China, Japan and the
European powers. All of these countries have
undertaken major reviews of energy policy in
recent years, and all have come to the same
conclusion: market forces alone can no longer be
relied on to satisfy essential national energy
requirements, and so the state must assume
ever-increasing responsibility for performing this
role.
This was, for example, the
fundamental conclusion of the National Energy
Policy adopted by the Bush administration on May
17, 2001, and followed slavishly ever since, just
as it is the official stance of China's communist
regime. When resistance to such efforts is
encountered, moreover, government officials only
wield the power of the state more regularly and
with a heavier hand to achieve their objectives,
whether through trade sanctions, embargoes,
arrests and seizures, or the outright use of
force. This is part of the explanation for
energo-fascism's emergence.
Its rise is
also being driven by the changing geography of
energy production. At one time, most of the
world's major oil and natural-gas wells were in
North America, Europe and the European sectors of
the Russian empire. This was no accident. The
major energy companies much preferred to operate
in hospitable countries that were close at hand,
relatively stable, and disinclined to nationalize
private energy deposits. But these deposits have
now largely been depleted, and the only areas
still capable of satisfying rising world demand
are in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle
East.
The countries in these regions were
nearly all subject to colonial rule and still
harbor deep distrust of foreign involvement; many
also house ethnic separatist groups, insurgencies
or extremist movements that make them especially
inhospitable to foreign oil companies. Oil
production in Nigeria, for example, has been
sharply curtailed in recent months by an
insurgency in the impoverished Niger Delta.
Members of poor tribal groups that have suffered
terribly from the environmental devastation
wrought by oil-company operations in their midst,
while receiving few tangible benefits from the
resulting oil revenues, have led it; most of the
profits that remain in-country are pilfered by
ruling elites in Abuja, the capital.
Combine this sort of local resentment with
lack of security and often shaky ruling groups and
it's hardly surprising that the leaders of the
major consuming nations have increasingly been
taking matters into their own hands - arranging
preemptive oil deals with compliant local
officials and providing military protection, where
needed, to ensure the safe delivery of oil and
natural gas.
In many cases, this has
resulted in the establishment of oil-driven
patron-client relations between major consuming
nations and their leading suppliers, similar to
the long-established US protectorate over Saudi
Arabia and the more recent US embrace of Ilham
Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan.
Already, we have the beginnings of the
energy equivalent of a classic arms race, combined
with many of the elements of the "Great Game" as
once played by colonial powers in some of the same
parts of the world. By militarizing the energy
policies of consuming nations and enhancing the
repressive capacities of client regimes, the
foundations are being laid for an energo-fascist
world.
The Pentagon: A global
oil-protection service The most significant
expression of this trend has been the
transformation of the US military into a global
oil-protection service whose primary function is
the guarding of overseas energy supplies as well
as their global delivery systems (pipelines,
tanker ships and supply routes).
This
overarching mission was first articulated by
president Jimmy Carter in January 1980, when he
described the oil flow from the Persian Gulf as a
"vital interest" of the United States and affirmed
that the country would employ "any means
necessary, including military force", to overcome
an attempt by a hostile power to block that flow.
When Carter issued this edict, quickly
dubbed the Carter Doctrine, the US did not
actually possess any forces capable of
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