The Future Is Now
You have to read this for its eminently readable and lucid explanation of the full economic and existential threat that the current confluence of economics, geology and sociology – exacerbated by untramelled war in the Middle East – poses to the Western status quo.
This is the text of a talk given by Chris Sanders at the 5th International Conference on Oil and Gas Depletion (ASPO-5) in Pisa:
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Now the prospective end of the first half of the Age of Oil is most commonly addressed as a financial and engineering problem. Financial, so the argument goes, insofar as two or three decades of underinvestment in commodities has resulted in too little supply. Engineering, inasmuch as the necessity of finding alternatives is basically a matter of first finding adequate investment capital after which it is simply a matter of the market and scientific progress doing their work to create alternatives to oil and gas.
There is valid precedent underlying this point of view, of course. After all, the transitions from wood to coal and from coal to oil were managed against a backdrop of what appears to the collective memory to have been a linear march of progress onwards and upwards.
Viewed through the lens of geopolitics though, things look different. The transition from wood to coal initially favoured newly industrialising Britain thanks to her abundant coal resources. The transition that followed from coal to oil at the dawn of the twentieth century was, from financial and scientific point of view fairly straightforward perhaps. But two world wars were fought in the first half of the 20th century largely because one alliance was trying to get access to oil and the other was trying to deny that access. The deniers won.
The point here is that what looks straightforward from the perspective of the market trading floor, the scientific laboratory or the wellhead is something else altogether when the human element and the will to power are introduced. For the millions who died in the two world wars the transition from coal to oil was a major discontinuity. It is neither a coincidence nor insignificant that the fighting in the current world war to control the world energy net has been in the Balkans and latterly in Afghanistan and Iraq. In each case, what is at issue is control of energy supply and distribution.
The reason for this is simple enough, and is made abundantly clear from the oil and gas clocks showing world oil and gas reserve distribution. It is in the Persian Gulf and the former Soviet Union, mostly Russia, that the world?s remaining gas and oil reserves lie. This represents a substantial shift in the fulcrum of world power. For the first time in the history of the oil age the marginal barrels of crude oil and cubic feet of natural gas are not directly controlled by the Anglo-American powers.
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Sanders comes to the view that all this leaves Putin sitting in the catbird seat, a conclusion I blogged about the other day.
