The Ties That Bind China, Russia and Iran

By Jephraim P Gundzik

The military implementation of the George W Bush administration's unilateralist foreign policy is creating monumental changes in the world's geostrategic alliances. The most significant of these changes is the formation of a new triangle comprised of China, Iran and Russia.

Growing ties between Moscow and Beijing in the past 18 months is an important geopolitical event that has gone practically unnoticed. China's premier, Wen Jiabao, visited Russia in September 2004. In October 2004, President Vladimir Putin visited China. During the October meeting, both China and Russia declared that Sino-Russian relations had reached "unparalleled heights". In addition to settling long-standing border issues, Moscow and Beijing agreed to hold joint military exercises in 2005. This marks the first large-scale military exercises between Russia and China since 1958.

The joint military exercises complement a rapidly growing arms trade between Moscow and Beijing. China is Russia's largest buyer of military equipment. In 2004, China was reported to have signed deals worth more than $2 billion for Russian arms. These included naval ships and submarines, missile systems and aircraft. According to the head of Russia's armed forces, Anatoliy Kvashnin, "our defense industrial complex is working for this country [China], supplying the latest models of arms and military equipment, which the Russian army does not have". Russia's relations with China are not limited to military trade. In the past five years, non-military trade between Russia and China has increased at an average annual rate of nearly 20%. Moscow and Beijing have targeted non-military trade to reach $60 billion by 2010, from $20 billion in 2004. One of the key components of commercial trade is Russian energy exports to China.

In early 2005, Moscow agreed to more than double electricity exports to China, to 800 million kilowatt hours (kWh), by 2006. Officials at Russia's electricity monopoly, Unified Energy Systems, are also courting Chinese investment in the development and renovation of Russia's electricity system. In October 2004, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Russia's Gazprom signed a series of agreements intended to study how Russia can best supply natural gas to China. At the same time, Russia signed specific agreements with China on oil exports.

Russia's oil shipments to China are slated to reach 10 million tons in 2005, increasing to 15 million tons in 2006. All of these shipments will be made by rail. However, this agreement was overshadowed by talks concerning the construction of an oil pipeline from Siberia to northern China. Russia has been pondering an oil pipeline to China for nearly 10 years. In 2002, plans for this pipeline received a boost when Moscow pledged to invest $2 billion in an oil pipeline running from the Siberian city of Angarsk to Daqing in northeastern China.

At the end of 2004, Russian officials announced that rather than running into China, the new mega pipeline would terminate in Russia's Pacific port of Nakhodka. Japan lobbied Moscow hard for this configuration, offering to finance the entire construction project, the cost of which is estimated to exceed $10 billion. In addition to a readily available financing source, the Nakhodka pipeline will remain entirely in Russian territory, allowing Moscow complete control over the oil flow.

Many analysts viewed Moscow's decision as a blow to relations with China. Though the pipeline does not terminate in China, it does pass within 40 miles of Russia's border with China. A spur from this pipeline to China would be inexpensive, while further diversifying the market for annual oil flows expected to reach 80 million tons. In other words, why should either Moscow or Beijing finance an eastern oil pipeline when Tokyo is bending over backwards to provide such financing?

More indicative of Russia's deepening energy relations with China are the circumstances surrounding the renationalization of Russian oil major Yukos. Yukos was the only Russian company exporting oil to China. Russia's government effectively renationalized Yukos in late 2004 when it seized the company's primary production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, and auctioned it off to the highest bidder. Yuganskneftegaz, located in Siberia, is Russia's second-largest oil producer.

Through somewhat twisted means, Russia's state-owned oil company, Rosneft, acquired Yuganskneftegaz for $9.3 billion. In December 2004, Russia's Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko offered the CNPC a 20% stake in Yuganskneftegaz. In February 2005, Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin revealed that Chinese banks provided $6 billion in financing for Rosneft's acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz. This financing was secured by long-term oil delivery contracts between Rosneft and the CNPC.

It is unclear whether the CNPC owns a portion of Yuganskneftegaz. However, in March, Russian authorities approved a merger between state-owned gas company Gazprom and Rosneft. This merger excludes Yuganskneftegaz, which will remain a separate state-owned company. It is possible that Yuganskneftegaz was left a stand-alone unit to facilitate China's investment in the company.

China's involvement in the renationalization of Yukos represents the most significant foreign participation in Russia's highly guarded oil sector. The CNPC is also involved in several joint ventures with Russia's state-owned gas company, Gazprom. These include ventures to develop energy reserves in Iran, the home of China's largest energy-related investments.

Beijing and Moscow warm to Tehran.
In March 2004, China's state-owned oil trading company, Zhuhai Zhenrong Corporation, signed a 25-year deal to import 110 million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Iran. This was followed by a much larger deal between another of China's state-owned oil companies, Sinopec, and Iran, signed in October 2004. This deal, worth about $100 billion, allows China to import a further 250 million tons of LNG from Iran's Yadavaran oilfield over a 25-year period. In addition to LNG, the Yadavaran deal provides China with 150,000 barrels per day of crude oil over the same period.

This huge deal also enlists substantial Chinese investment in Iranian energy exploration, drilling and production as well as in petrochemical and natural gas infrastructure. Total Chinese investment targeted toward Iran's energy sector could exceed a further $100 billion over 25 years. At the end of 2004, China became Iran's top oil export market. Apart from the oil and natural gas delivery contracts, the massive investment being undertaken by China's state-owned oil companies in Iran's energy sector contravenes the US Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. This law penalizes foreign companies for investing more than $20 million in either Libya or Iran.

Side-stepping US laws is nothing new for China. Beijing, as well as Moscow, has supplied Tehran with advanced missiles and missile technology since the mid-1980s. In addition to anti-ship missiles like the Silkworm, China has sold Iran surface-to-surface cruise missiles and, along with Russia, assisted in the development of Iran's long-range ballistic missiles. This assistance included the development of Iran's Shihab-3 and Shihab-4 missiles, with a range of about 2,000 kilometers. Iran is also reportedly developing missiles with ranges approaching 3,000 kilometers.

In late 2004, former secretary of state Colin Powell asserted that Iran was working to adapt its long-range ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads. China was also believed to be producing several new types of guided anti-ship missiles for Iran in 2004. China's and Russia's sales of missiles and missile technology as well as missile development assistance contravenes the US-Irannon-proliferation act of 2000. This act specifically states that sanctions will be "imposed on countries whose companies provide assistance to Iran in its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems".

In the past several years a number of Chinese and Russian companies have faced US sanctions for selling missiles and missile technology to Iran. Rather than slowing or stopping such sales, the pace of missile acquisition and development in Iran has accelerated. Like relations between China and Russia and China and Iran, Russia's relations with Iran have also advanced considerably in the past 18 months. In addition to increased investment in Iran by Russia and burgeoning arms trade between the two countries, Russia has been heavily involved in Iran's nascent nuclear energy industry.

After much wrangling and repeated US intervention, Russia and Iran finally signed, in February, a deal clearing the way for the shipment of Russian nuclear fuel to Iran's nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Washington's primary concern about Bushehr is the intended use of the plant's spent nuclear fuel. This fuel can be discarded, reprocessed, or used in the manufacture of weapons-grade plutonium. In an effort to assure Washington that the last of these three possibilities will not come to pass, Moscow has promised that all the spent fuel from Bushehr will be returned to Russia.

Nonetheless, Washington continues to believe that Bushehr's start-up will advance Tehran's supposed nuclear weapons program. Though evidence of an Iranian weapons program is sparse, the US remains convinced that Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons with Russian assistance.

The new geostrategic alliance
Along with energy trade, investment and economic development, the China-Iran-Russia alliance has cultivated compatible foreign policies. China, Iran and Russia have identical foreign policy positions regarding Taiwan and Chechnya. China and Iran fully support the Putin government's war against the Chechen separatists (Iran's self-described status as an "Islamic republic" notwithstanding). Russia and Iran support Beijing's one-China policy. The recent promulgation of China's anti-secession law, aimed at making Beijing's intolerance of Taiwanese independence explicit, was heartily commended in both Moscow and Tehran.

The most compelling aspect of this alliance is revealed in China's and Russia's support for Iran's much-maligned nuclear energy program. The Putin government has consistently maintained that Russia would not support UN Security Council resolutions that condemn Iran's nuclear energy program or apply economic sanctions against Iran. In February, Putin said he was convinced Iran was not seeking to develop nuclear weapons and announced plans to visit the country, in support of Tehran, just prior to his summit with President Bush.

Beijing has echoed Moscow's opposition to UN action against Iran. After concluding the historic gas and oil deal between China and Iran in October 2004, China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing announced that China would not support UN Security Council action against Iran's nuclear energy program. Opposition in Moscow and Beijing to UN action against Iran is significant because both countries hold UN Security Council veto power.

The endorsement of Tehran's nuclear energy program by Moscow and Beijing reveals the primary impetus behind the China-Iran-Russia axis - to counter US unilateralism and global hegemonic intentions. For Beijing and Moscow, this means minimizing US influence in Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. For the regime in Tehran, keeping the US at bay is a matter of survival.

The joint statement issued at the conclusion of Putin's state visit to China in October 2004 was a clear indication of Beijing's and Moscow's abhorrence of the Bush administration's unilateral foreign policy. The statement noted that China and Russia "hold that it is urgently needed to [resolve] international disputes under the chairing of the UN and resolve crisis [sic] on the basis of universally recognized principles of international law. Any coercive action should only be taken with the approval of the UN Security Council and enforced under its supervision..."

Two weeks after this statement was released, and just prior to the US presidential election, Beijing's position against US unilateralism was again made explicit by China's former foreign minister Qian Qichen - arguably China's most distinguished diplomat.

In an opinion piece published in the state-controlled China Daily, Qian ripped Washington's unilateralism: "The United States has tightened its control of the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia." He noted that this control "testifies that Washington's anti-terror campaign has already gone beyond the scope of self defense". Qian went further, stating that: "The US case in Iraq has caused the Muslim world and Arab countries to believe that the superpower already regards them as targets [for] its ambitious democratic reform program."

To China and Russia, Washington's "democratic reform program" is a thinly disguised method for the US to militarily dispose of unfriendly regimes in order to ensure the country's primacy as the world's sole superpower. The China-Iran-Russia alliance can be considered as Beijing's and Moscow's counterpunch to Washington's global ambitions. From this perspective, Iran is integral to thwarting the Bush administration's foreign policy goals. This is precisely why Beijing and Moscow have strengthened their economic and diplomatic ties with Tehran. It is also why Beijing and Moscow are providing Tehran with increasingly sophisticated weapons.

Jephraim P Gundzik is president of Condor Advisers, Inc. Condor Advisers provides emerging markets investment risk analysis to individuals and institutions globally. Please visit us for further information.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.

Tomgram: Jonathan Schell on Crossing Nuclear Thresholds

Call it Star Wars, parts VII-XXII; but last week, just as Revenge of the Sith was opening galaxy-wide -- multiplexes on Tatooine alone were expected to pull in billions -- reporter Tim Weiner revealed on the front page of the New York Times that a new presidential directive will soon essentially green-light the future U.S. militarization of space. (When, in December 2001, the administration withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which forbade the weaponization of space, it opened the way for exactly the kind of Pentagon R&D that now threatens to come to mutant fruition in the heavens.) Just three days before Weiner's piece appeared, military analyst William Arkin reported in the Washington Post that "[e]arly last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret 'Interim Global Strike Alert Order,'" preparing the way for devastating attacks against hostile powers developing weapons of mass destruction, air strikes that could be carried out more or less on demand anywhere on the planet and, if so desired, included a "nuclear option."

These two actions don't represent separate worlds of planning. One of the imagined future weapons for Rumsfeld's "global strike" force, for instance, turns out to be a CAV (Common Aero Vehicle) which, from space, could theoretically hit any target on Earth with a massive dose of conventional munitions on half an hour's notice. Of this weapon, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus wrote, "The first-generation CAV, expected to be ready by 2010, will have ‘an incredible capability to provide the warfighter with a global reach capability against high payoff targets,' Gen. Lance W. Lord, commander of Air Force Space Command, told the House Armed Services Committee… The system could, Lord said, ‘deliver a conventional payload precisely on target within minutes of a valid command and control release order.'"

Such "global strike" space weaponry, while not (yet) nuclearized, would not be far off in impact. For instance, according to Weiner, one such weapon, Hypervelocity Rod Bundles (nicknamed "Rods from God"), aims "to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon." In this way, the boundaries between the previously almost unusable nuclear option and more conventional war-fighting options are slowly -- and quite consciously -- being blurred by the Bush administration.

Let's put a label on these developments: Proliferation. In space as on Earth, the Bush strategists have an almost primal urge to cross strategic and weapons barriers and thresholds of all sorts, and head into uncharted territory; or, as an old TV space opera used to put it, "boldly to go where no man has gone before." (On Star Trek, though, the voyages of the USS Enterprise were, at least theoretically, peaceful in nature, and the announcement of the next destination didn't automatically end with an explosion.)

Perhaps there's another label that might capture even better the administration's primal global urge -- in this case, a label much beloved by the Air Force Space Command, those "Guardians of the High Frontier" (as they so flatteringly like to call themselves): "dominance" or "space superiority." ("Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," [Space Command's General Lord] told an Air Force conference in September. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.") In the old Army Air Corps anthem, airmen sang of taking off "into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sun"; now I suppose it should be "the wild, black yonder."

There has been much on-line controversy lately about whether the new Star Wars movie is an attack on the Bush administration. One thing can certainly be said: Where Star Wars went long ago, Bush administration fantasies are now heading. After all, what is a CAV, but a little "Death Star," that terrible, planet-destroying instrument of the on-screen Evil Empire. As Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information pointed out in a recent article, "[O]rbiting 'death stars' to attack ground targets are being considered. Pete Teets, the former acting secretary of the U.S. Air Force has said: 'We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space - nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities.'"

In fact, "thinking" turns out to be something of a euphemism, given that the first tests of parts of the CAV program are to be carried out later this year. Of course, the Bush high-frontiersmen and the high-frontiersmen of the military-industrial complex (into which so many space-based tax dollars are already flowing) are just dying to test new generations of threshold-busting weapons (can't wait!). And yet, most of these bizarre weapons are technologically daunting and deficit-bustingly expensive. As Weiner points out: "Richard Garwin, widely regarded as a dean of American weapons science, and three colleagues wrote in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum, the professional journal of electric engineering, that 'a space-based laser would cost $100 million per target, compared with $600,000 for a Tomahawk missile.'"

In addition, based on past history, such futuristic dream-weaponry is likely to be about as successful as our $100 billion (so far) Star Wars anti-missile system which has proved incapable of intercepting anything smaller than the Queen Mary or faster than a tractor; and -- irony of ironies -- the decision to test, and then try to deploy, such systems is likely not only to start a space arms race, but to make us all (and the satellites we now depend on for so much) far more vulnerable than at present. According to Demetri Sevastopulo of the British Financial Times, the Russian answer to the news in the New York Times piece was instantaneous and grim: "Russia would consider using force if necessary to respond if the US put a combat weapon into space, according to a senior Russian official."

Space domination -- meaning war-fighting in space -- is a form of Earthly madness. But the path of proliferation, once started down has its own mad logic. Bush's top officials have been stuck on global dominance since they took power. Dominance has just turned out to be a little harder to come by on Earth than advertised… but, ah, space… All those boys who grew up on sci-fi movies and moon shots, now have their moment. And a boy can always dream, can't he?

The only problem is that Bush's dreamers, having swallowed their inside-the-beltway global-power fantasies whole, turn out to play the dominance game like the global klutzes they are. Admittedly, they've been in their Darth Vader outfits breathing hard for quite a while -- every day another threat (and if John Bolton makes it to the UN, change that to a threat a second) -- but they seem to lack the power effectively to demand a pizza delivery for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

None of this makes what they're doing any less dangerous. As Jonathan Schell points out below (in his latest "Letter from Ground Zero" in the new issue of the Nation magazine), the new "global strike" plans revealed by Arkin represent part of a revolution in what passes for nuclear policy-making in this country.

So, proliferation planet? Sure, that's on the way. Now, though, we're intent on proliferating in the heavens as on Earth. Think of it as a package deal. Tom

A Revolution in American

Nuclear Policy

By Jonathan Schell

A metaphorical "nuclear option" -- the cutoff of debate in the Senate on judicial nominees -- has just been defused, but a literal nuclear option, called "global strike," has been created in its place. In a shocking innovation in American nuclear policy, recently disclosed in the Washington Post by military analyst William Arkin, the administration has created and placed on continuous high alert a force whereby the President can launch a pinpoint strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with a few hours' notice. The senatorial "nuclear option" was covered extensively, but somehow this actual nuclear option -- a "full-spectrum" capability (in the words of the presidential order) with "precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations)" -- was almost entirely ignored.

The order to enable the force, Arkin writes, was given by George W. Bush in January 2003. In July 2004, Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated to Adm. James Ellis Jr., then-commander of Stratcom, "the President charged you to ‘be ready to strike at any moment's notice in any dark corner of the world' [and] that's exactly what you've done." And last fall, Lieut. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, stated, "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes."

These actions make operational a revolution in US nuclear policy. It was foreshadowed by the Nuclear Posture Review Report of 2002, also widely ignored, which announced nuclear targeting of, among others, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. The review also recommended new facilities for the manufacture of nuclear bombs and the study of an array of new delivery vehicles, including a new ICBM in 2020, a new submarine-launched ballistic missile in 2029, and a new heavy bomber in 2040. The review, in turn, grew out of Bush's broader new military strategy of pre-emptive war, articulated in the 2002 White House document, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which states, "We cannot let our enemies strike first." The extraordinary ambition of the Bush policy is suggested by a comment made in a Senate hearing in April by Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who explained that the Defense Secretary wanted "bunker buster" nuclear bombs because "it is unwise for there to be anything that's beyond the reach of US power."

The incorporation of nuclear weapons into the global strike option, casting a new shadow of nuclear danger over the entire planet, raises fundamental questions. Perhaps the most important is why the United States, which now possesses the strongest conventional military forces in the world, feels the need to add to them a new global nuclear threat. The mystery deepens when you reflect that nothing could be more calculated to goad other nations into nuclear proliferation. Could it be that the United States, now routinely called the greatest empire since Rome, simply feels the need to assert its dominance in the nuclear sphere?

History suggests a different explanation. In the past, reliance on nuclear arms has in fact varied inversely with reliance on conventional arms. In the very first weeks of the nuclear age, when the American public was demanding demobilization of US forces in Europe after World War II, the U.S. monopoly on the bomb gave it the confidence to adopt a bold stance in postwar negotiations with the Soviet Union over Europe. The practice of offsetting conventional weakness with nuclear strength was soon embodied in the policy of "first use" of nuclear weapons, which has remained in effect to this day. The threat of first use under the auspices of the global strike option is indeed the latest incarnation of a policy born at that time.

This compensatory role for nuclear weapons emerged in a new context when, after the protracted, unpopular conventional war in Korea, President Eisenhower adopted the doctrine of nuclear "massive retaliation," intended to prevent limited Communist challenges from ever arising. And it was in reaction to the imbalance between local "peripheral" threats and the world-menacing "massive" nuclear threats designed to contain them that, in the Kennedy years, the pendulum swung back in the direction of conventional arms and a theory of "limited war" to go with them. Meanwhile, nuclear arms were officially assigned the more restricted role of deterring attacks by other nuclear weapons -- the posture of "mutual assured destruction."

Today, though the Cold War is over, the riddle of the relationship between nuclear and conventional force still vexes official minds. Once again, the United States has assigned itself global ambitions. (Then it was containing Communism, now it is stopping "terrorism" and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.) Once again, the United States is fighting a limited war -- the war in Iraq -- and other limited wars are under discussion (against Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc.). And once again, nuclear arms appear to offer an all too tempting alternative. Arkin comments that a prime virtue of the global strike option in the eyes of the Pentagon is that it requires no "boots on the ground." And Everett Dolman, a professor at the Air Force School at Maxwell Air Force Base, recently commented to the San Francisco Chronicle that without space weaponry, "we'd face a Vietnam-style buildup if we wanted to remain a force in the world."

For just as in the 1950s, the boots on the ground are running low. The global New Rome turns out to have exhausted its conventional power holding down just one country, Iraq. But the 2000s are not the 1950s. Eisenhower's overall goal was mainly defensive. He wanted no war, nuclear or conventional, and never came close to ordering a nuclear strike. By contrast, Bush's policy of preventive war is inherently activist and aggressive: The global strike option is not only for deterrence; it is for use.

A clash between the triumphal rhetoric of global domination and the sordid reality of failure in practice lies ahead. The Senate, on the brink of its metaphorical Armageddon, backed down. Would the President, facing defeat of his policies somewhere in the world, do likewise? Or might he actually reach for his nuclear option?

Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books.

Copyright 2005 Jonathan Schell

US, NATO Nuclear Policies 'Immoral' - McNamara

    By Louis Charbonneau
    Reuters

    Tuesday 24 May 2005

    United Nations - U.S. and NATO nuclear policies are immoral, dangerous and destructive for the global nuclear non-proliferation regime, a former Defense Secretary from the Vietnam War era, Robert McNamara, said on Tuesday.

    McNamara, who spoke at a conference taking stock of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, was defense secretary in the 1960s under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was the architect of early U.S. policy in the Vietnam War.

    "If I were to characterize U.S. and NATO nuclear policies in one sentence, I would say they are immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, very, very dangerous in terms of the risk of inadvertent or accidental launch and destructive of the non-proliferation regime that has served us so well," he said.

    McNamara said the monthlong conference should strengthen the treaty and "ensure that North Korea and Iran do not become nuclear powers."

    But he added, "I believe there is a high probability that the conference will fail to achieve those objectives."

    He said it was dangerous to believe that countries without the bomb and which face serious security risks would ignore the nuclear option while Washington continues to regard a large atomic arsenal as vital to its own defense.

    The conference, which ends Friday, bogged down in wrangling over the agenda and then the allocation of work among committees. While the disputes played out behind the scenes, nuclear activists and diplomats blamed the delays squarely on Iran and the United States.

    The United States spent the first two weeks of the conference quietly seeking to block discussions of nuclear disarmament-related commitments and decisions reached at 1995 and 2000 NPT review conferences.

    Iran sought to block discussion of its nuclear enrichment program, which it insists is intended to produce fuel for nuclear power plants while the United States, Britain, France and Germany fear it may be intended for bombs.

    U.S. arms expert and former senior diplomat Thomas Graham, who helped negotiate every major arms control agreement during the last 30 years, said that with more than 40 countries capable of making atom bombs, it was vital to revive the NPT.

    "In a world with nuclear weapons so widespread, every conflict would run the risk of going nuclear and it would be impossible to keep nuclear arms out of the hands of terrorist organizations," Graham said.

    North Korea says it has the bomb. If Iran joins Pyongyang, others may follow, McNamara said.

    "In Asia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are likely to follow suit. And in the Middle East, Egypt, Saudia Arabia and Syria may well follow," he said.

    This, experts say, would wreck the NPT.

    By signing the 1970 NPT, the United States and the four other nuclear weapons states -- the Soviet Union, China, France and Britain -- agreed to work on disarming.

    The other 183 signatories pledged not to seek nuclear weapons or help other states acquire them.

New Environmentalism, Or Backdoor to Nuclear Power?

Bill Berkowitz

OAKLAND, USA, May 24 (IPS) - Mainstream U.S. environmental groups, injured by political defeats, public indifference and budget cuts, are weighing alliances with neo-conservatives -- improbable rightwing bedfellows in the struggle to rein in global warming who want to reduce U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. In the process, some greens are reconsidering their longstanding opposition to nuclear power.

This realignment comes at a time when environmental-friendly initiatives of the administration of former U.S. President Bill Clinton have been reversed, enforcement of environmental regulations has been stymied, and privatisation of U.S. public lands is proceeding apace.

Further, the administration of President George W. Bush appears to have seized the initiative in the environmental debate with such slogans as ''common sense environmentalism'', ''Healthy Forests'', and ''Clear Skies'' to describe its key positions and programmes.

''The Death of Environmentalism,'' written by political pollster Ted Nordhaus and public relations consultant Michael Shellenberger and originally released at an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association of U.S. philanthropies that support green causes, credited the movement with a number of successes. These included enactment of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air and Clean Waters Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

But the assessment said there was ''strikingly little to show'' for the ''hundreds of millions of dollars poured into combating global warming,'' charged the movement with being out of touch with the public, and challenged it to ''rethink everything'' -- alliances, strategies, positions, messages -- and come up with new, imaginative and public-friendly ways to solve the global warming crisis.

And for all their earlier successes, recent times have brought budget cuts, public indifference, and a string of political defeats. These include legislation opening up parts of the Alaska wilderness to oil exploration and rollbacks on environmental regulations.

All of which has caused consternation.

Several leading environmentalists, including Fred Krupp, executive director of Environmental Defence, Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, and James Gustave Speth, dean of Yale University's school of forestry and environmental studies, are encouraging research into the economic, safety and security, waste storage, and proliferation issues surrounding nuclear power.

In a piece published this month's issue of the journal Technology Review, entitled ''Environmental Heresies,'' Stewart Brand, the longtime environmentalist who founded the ''Whole Earth Catalogue -- a telephone directory-type consumer guide to the goods and services needed to forge an alternative lifestyle -- argued that perhaps the only solution to global warming, a reality the Bush administration has not openly embraced, is nuclear power.

Earlier in the year, Robert Bryce, the author of ''Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate'', reported in the online publication Slate on a developing alliance between greens and neo-conservatives. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, president of the ultra-right Centre for Security Policy, two big-time advocates for President Bush's war with Iraq, enthusiastically advocate fuel-efficient vehicles as a way of reducing dependence on Middle East oil.

The coupling of such top ''neo-cons'' -- the architects of the Iraq war -- with environmentalists -- many of whom have voiced concern about the devastating effects the war has had on the Iraqi environment -- materialised sometime late last year when they backed a proposal from the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based think tank tracking energy and security issues. The neo-cons are ''going green for geopolitical reasons, not environmental ones,'' Bryce concluded.

A bill that would give ''significant financial incentives for the development of three new nuclear technologies,'' sponsored by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and Connecticut Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman is being circulated in draft form.

''As the world approaches peak oil and a future of rapidly escalating energy costs, increasing support for nuclear power amongst some environmentalists was predictable,'' Scott Silver, executive director of the Oregon-based grassroots environmental group Wild Wilderness, said in an interview.

''The unwritten mission of many organisations is 'sustainable growth' which translates into supporting economic growth while minimising associated ecological damage,'' Silver told IPS. ''In keeping with this mission, the fight against global warming will not be waged by attempting to decrease the ecological footprint of man or by reducing the demands we put upon this planet, but by growth.

''By tightly framing the issue in terms of 'too much carbon dioxide', nuclear power becomes an obvious solution,'' Silver added. ''For industry and the neo-cons, the problem has nothing to do with climate. For the neo-cons, the problem is one of sustaining economic growth during a period of energy scarcity.''

In a May 16 Pacific News Service commentary entitled ''Why I Am Not an Environmentalist,'' Orson Aguilar brought the contentious issue of ''economic development'' to the table.

Aguilar, associate executive director of The Greenlining Institute, which works to persuade banks and other financial institutions to invest in low-income and minority communities, especially in inner cities, said that for far too long, top-tier environmental groups neglected urban concerns.

Aguilar, who grew up in East Los Angeles, said that his community worried more about ''the lack of good housing and jobs, scraping together money for groceries, failing schools and all-too-common police brutality,'' than about ''air pollution'' or ''the smells coming from the incinerator directly south of our housing complex.''

Environmentalists, Aguilar charged, were preoccupied with ''preserving places most of us will never see.'' When the movement finally became conscious of the toxic nightmare plaguing the inner cities in America, he added, it ''avoided addressing my community's desperate need for economic development.''

In the late 1990s, Aguilar's organisation was deeply involved in trying secure legislation aimed at making it easier to revitalise inner city ''brownfields,'' or polluted plots of land. They met opposition from major environmental groups including the Sierra Club, he recalled.

By contrast, the idea of making it easier to revitalise brownfields had been kicking around at right-wing think tanks for several years, and it became a central theme of Bush's environmental agenda --albeit primarily because it meant enabling corporations to sidestep environmental regulations.

So, Aguilar said, he is not dismayed by the ''death of environmentalism''; he sees it as an opportunity: ''While there are many who feel sadness and anger that environmentalism is dead, I am optimistic that in dying, environmentalism might give birth to a new politics that offers a better future to both my community and the planet. Those environmentalists who are ready to evolve will find many new allies like me ready to join them in building a new and more expansive movement on the other side.''

Silver was not so quick to rhapsodise. This campaign ''appears to have been invented for the purpose of killing off traditional, naturally-evolved, grassroots-based environmentalism and replacing it with a synthetic, pro-development, focus-group tested collaborative partnership between 'new environmentalists,' industry, and those who hope to collect crumbs thrown off from unfettered growth,'' he said.

Israeli Arsenal Vexes Nuclear Negotiators

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, May 20 (IPS) - The U.S. administration has sought to keep a tight focus on the suspected nuclear activities of Iran and North Korea at month-long talks here on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But other countries also have highlighted the impact of Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal on efforts to establish a Middle East nuclear-free zone.

To be sure, diplomats from Arab and developing countries said they share some of U.S. President George W. Bush's concerns about Iran's and North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

During open debate that has lasted for the past two weeks, however, speaker after speaker also has urged the international community to help set up a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East by urging Israel to give up its nuclear weapons programme.

''The presence of nuclear arms is an impediment to peace not only in the region, but in the world,'' Qatari diplomat Nasr Al Ali told delegates at the talks, held every five years.

''These weapons are a major obstacle to peace and security in the region,'' Saudi representative Naif Bin Bandar Al-Sudairy said in a statement.

Demands to establish a zone free of nuclear weapons in the Middle East stem from a number of U.N. General Assembly resolutions and recommendations made by consensus at past NPT review conferences.

Armed with an estimated 200-300 nuclear bombs, Israel has said that it is willing to join the treaty but only after a comprehensive peace agreement has been reached with its Arab neighbours, many of whom it has described as ''hostile'' nations.

''A Middle East nuclear weapons free zone will be viewed very favourably by Israel once we have a comprehensive peace in the area,'' said Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon recently, ''and there are no dangers of attacks or delegitimisation by any other country.''

Israeli officials said their nuclear arms do not pose a threat to other countries and that they serve as a deterrent against invasion by larger neighbours.

''The real risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East emanates from countries that, despite being parties to the international treaties, do not comply with their relevant international obligations,'' said Alan Bar, director of the Israeli foreign ministry's arms control department.

''These countries,'' Bar added, ''are engaged in ongoing efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile efforts that have a destabilising effect on not only in the region, but on a global scale as well.''

Bar said Israel has ''never threatened its neighbours nor abrogated its obligations under any disarmament treaty.''

Arab diplomats rejected those assertions.

''Peace is not based on possession of weapons of mass destruction,'' said Sudairy. ''Real peace must be founded on confidence, trust, and good intentions. It is based on freeing the region from injustice, occupation, and aggression.''

Pro-Israel policy advocates specialising in nuclear issues, however, said Iran stood out as the greatest potential source of nuclear destabilisation in the Middle East.

''The question now is whether the whole NPT regime is threatened by Iran and not whether a nuclear free zone is immediately feasible,'' said Ariel Cohen, a senior analyst at the U.S.-based Heritage Foundation.

''It may be feasible at some point, but right now you see a threat to the NPT regime coming in the aftermath of both India and Pakistan and North Korea delivering blows to non-proliferation,'' Cohen told IPS.

Both India and Pakistan, which tested nuclear weapons in 1998, have refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty. North Korea, defying U.S. pressure to abandon its nuclear programme, opted out of the treaty about two years ago.

''If Iran violates NPT,'' said Cohen, ''there will be a domino effect that may involve Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, at which point Israel may go hot. Meaning Israel may not just hide behind creative ambiguity as it did so far, but will put its nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, and that will be Iran's contribution to a more unstable Middle East.''

Cohen's fear about nuclear instability in the Middle East is something that many US-based independent-minded researchers and analyst also share -- but from a radically different perspective.

''The world does well to remember that most Middle East weapons programmes began as a response to Israel's nuclear weapons,'' said Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the liberal think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-author of its recent study, ''Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security.''

''Everyone already knows about Israel's bombs in the closet,'' he said. ''Bringing them out into the open and putting them on the table as part of a regional deal may be the only way to prevent others from building their own bombs in their basements.''

Cirincione said it would not be easy to create such an agreement but nevertheless insisted there is no time to lose.

Seeing current diplomatic trends in the Middle East as being favourable to the Bush administration, Cirincione said ''this is precisely the time'' to intensify efforts to rid the Middle East of nuclear weapons.

''It should be obvious that Israelis are better off in a region where no one has nuclear weapons than in one where many nations have them,'' he said. Interviews with the U.S. diplomatic sources did not indicate significant movement in such a direction.

''Our position has been the same,'' an official from the U.S. permanent mission to the United Nations said. ''We have urged Israel to join the treaty. We have a long-standing concern over its safeguard facilities.''

The official's response suggested that while Washington recognises the need for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, it has no public intention as yet of convincing Israel to sign the NPT.

In the 1990s, the United States, Israel, and Arab nations all had supported the goal of non-proliferation but they failed to make any progress toward it after the Palestinian-Israeli peace process collapsed.

Numerous delegates, citing what they described as U.S. attempts to make Iran the focus of international debates on proliferation while turning a blind eye to Israel's illegal possession of nuclear weapons, said they were compelled to dub the U.S. nuclear policy as based on double standards and hypocrisy.

''Some states which are waging war against nuclear weapons are defending Israel and thwarting initiatives to establish a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East,'' said Syrian Ambassador Fayssal Mekdad, in an obvious reference to the United States, which has accused Syria of supporting terrorist groups.

Even so, while voicing disappointment with the U.S. role, Arab diplomats are actively participating in the review conference negotiations. Egypt has emerged in a leadership role. Representing the Non-Aligned Movement of 115 developing countries, the Egyptian delegation is urging the conference to set up a subsidiary body to implement its past resolutions on nuclear weapons free zones.

''This conference should establish a practical roadmap that guarantees the establishment of nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East,'' Egyptian envoy Ahmed Fathallah told delegates.

This month's talks are scheduled to wind down on May 27. Few if any diplomats said they expect significant progress on the Middle East or any other major items on their agenda. But that will not stop them from pressing the case.

''Israel has to be brought in,'' Mekdad said. ''We are not going to give up. We'll be there talking about it.''

After The Oil Is Gone

By Katharine Mieszkowski
www.salon.com
May 14, 2005
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/14/kunstler/index.html

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Say goodbye to your suburban house, yoke up that horse, and stand by to repel pirates! Author James Howard Kunstler talks about the dire world of his new book, "The Long Emergency."

Suburbs will collapse into slums. Farmhand will be a more viable career choice than public relations executive. And avoiding starvation will replace avoiding boredom as the national pastime.

Those are just a few of the predictions that James Howard Kunstler makes in his new book. "The Long Emergency" paints a dystopic view of the United States in the wake of what Kunstler dubs the "cheap oil fiesta." It's a future the author insists is not apocalyptic. Calling it the end of the world [would] be too easy.

No, Kunstler believes the human race will survive as we slip down the other side of Hubbert's Oil Peak. But the high standard of living we've built by gorging on cheap oil will not. America, as a political entity, will be history too.

When will the doom begin? It already has. "There have been no significant discoveries of new oil since 2002," Kunstler says. And the Saudis have screwed up their super-giant Ghawar oil field, long a fossil-fuel font for the U.S. "They have damaged it by pumping enormous amounts of salt water into it; in fact, the field itself may be entering depletion," he says.

A former journalist turned novelist turned social critic, Kunstler is best known for his book excoriating the suburbs, "Geography of Nowhere." Now he foresees the end of the entire artifice of American life, from the suburbs to the interstate highway to Wal-Mart and the global supply chain that supports it.

In Kunstler's world, a teenager will be better off learning how to yoke up a horse-drawn buggy than how to change the oil in a car. Woodshop will be more important than computer literacy. Among Kunstler's predictions: The South will devolve into agricultural feudalism and the Pacific Northwest will be beset by a plague of pirates from Asia. Forget about sleek hydrogen-powered cars coming to the rescue. For that matter, quit tilting your hopes toward wind power.

Kunstler displays a kind of macabre wit about the unpleasantness and strife that await us all. Talking to him is like trying to argue with a prophet. His assertions have a neat way of doubling back to anticipate your critiques. If you express doubt about his views, then you may well be among the deluded masses too addicted to your McSUV and McSuburb to accept the reality that lies ahead.

Salon spoke to Kunstler at his home in upstate New York, mindful that in the future such an hour-long, cross-country telephone call, undertaken so casually, could be a remote luxury, a quaint remnant of a bygone era rich in the splendors of oil.

Plenty of analysts are confident that in coming decades we'll switch from oil to another form of energy, like Europeans switching from burning wood to burning coal when forests became scarce. Why aren't you?

That's been a pattern in the last several hundred years, but it has followed a supply of mineral resources that we've exploited to their logical end. When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.

There are at least two major mental disturbances in the collective American mind these days that can be described with some precision. One is the Jiminy Cricket syndrome -- the idea that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. This is largely a product of the technological achievements of the last century, which were themselves a product of cheap energy: namely, things like our trip to the moon, combined with the effects of advertising, Hollywood and pop culture.

We have now become a people who believe that wishing for things makes them happen. Unfortunately, the world just doesn't work that way. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or so-called renewables will allow us to run the U.S.A. -- or even a substantial fraction of it -- the way that we're running it now.

There's another mental disturbance that Americans are suffering from. It's the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing -- unearned riches, free energy, perpetual motion -- and it's exemplified by Las Vegas. Combine the Jiminy Cricket syndrome and the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing and you end up with a population that's thoroughly deluded and unable to deal with reality. That's precisely where we're at.

You point out that there are all sorts of ways that we're dependent on oil that we don't think about.

We have evolved a cheese-doodle agriculture system run by large corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, which grow immense amounts of corn by using fossil fuels to produce immense amounts of corn-based junk food. The prospects are poor that we will continue living this way. The implications are enormous. We will have to grow much more of our food closer to home.

Also, our national retail chain system -- otherwise known as Wal-Mart and Co., Wal-Mart and wannabes, Wal-Mart and imitators -- is unlikely to survive both the rising costs of oil and far more volatile price fluctuations. Their economic equation requires them to predict the cost of transport because their margins are so razor thin. And they won't be able to anymore.

Remember: These immensely hypertrophic organisms like Wal-Mart are products of the special economic growth of the late 20th century, namely an unusually long period of relative world peace and extraordinarily cheap energy. If you remove those two elements, all large-scale enterprises --corporate farming, big-box shopping, big government, professional sports -- are going to be in trouble.

So, the collapse of the cheap oil fiesta is going to...

I wouldn't call it "collapse." That's the cause of a lot of misunderstanding. What we're talking about is the process of heading down the arch of depletion, not the catastrophic cutoff of oil. Heading down the arch implies that we will not have the normal growth of industrial economies anymore. And that has tremendous implications for capital-finance instruments to produce wealth, namely securities and bonds. All the financial paper in the world is essentially based on the increasing accumulation of wealth.

You argue that we won't know we've hit the global oil peak until a few years after it's happened. There will be hangover.

The rearview-mirror effect.

What will be the first signs of the long emergency?

We're already seeing them. The two clearest signs are serious geopolitical friction and the volatility in the oil markets. A third one, which hasn't quite gotten traction, will be disruptions in the financial markets. But that could happen at any moment.

And the real estate bubble?

Absolutely. The housing bubble is a perverse form of financial behavior. It's a consequence of capital desperately seeking a way to increase in an industrial economy that has ceased to grow. America is no longer producing wealth in the conventional sense. And so the housing bubble is a way for residual capital to produce wealth. But like all bubbles, it's a delusional thing that will probably end in tears.

You write that even the educated minority in the U.S. is clueless about its role in geopolitical problems, like the family in your neighborhood that had a sign in their yard that said, "War Is Not the Answer," and two SUVs in the garage.

Or all my politically progressive friends who drove their SUVs to the peace rallies of 2003.

Why do you think that there's such a disconnect?

Because we haven't been challenged for such a long time. The last challenge we experienced was the OPEC oil disturbances of the 1970s, which thundered through our economy and caused a lot of problems. But they were short-lived and the cheap oil fiesta was able to continue because the final great discoveries of the oil age came online in the 1980s, namely the North Sea and the Alaska North Slope. And that allowed us to go back to sleep for another two decades.

Does the Iraq war presage the kind of resource wars that you see in the future?

The Iraq war is not hard to understand. It wasn't an attempt to steal Iraq's oil. If that was the case, it would have been a stupid venture because we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars occupying the place, not to mention the lives lost. It was not a matter of stealing the oil; it was a matter of retaining access to it. It was an attempt to stabilize the region of the world that holds two-thirds of the remaining oil, namely, the Middle East.

We opened a police station in the Middle East, and Iraq just happened to be the best candidate for it. They had a troublesome dictator. They were geographically located between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So we went to Iraq to moderate and influence the behavior of the two countries --Iran and Saudi Arabia -- that are so important to us. We desperately wanted the oil supplies to continue coming out of them in a reliable way. So the Iraq venture was all about stabilizing the Middle East. It raises the obvious question: How long can the U.S. hope to occupy unfriendly nations? The answer is, not forever.

Why do you skewer Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who promotes the idea of a futuristic hypercar, which would get 100 miles per gallon?

I regard Lovins' hypercar venture as a stupid distraction, if for no other reason [than] that it tends to promote the idea that we can continue being a car-dependent society. Clearly we can't, no matter how good the gas mileage is. I wrote three other books about the fiasco of suburbia before I even got a bug up my ass about the energy issues.

What's wrong with trying to make a more efficient car?

I'm not against efficient cars. I'm against the idea that somebody in Amory's position would focus on cars at the expense of something else like promoting walkable communities. The New Urbanist movement, for example, was campaigning for a much more intelligent response to suburbia at around the same time. And the solutions that they were promoting made a lot more sense than underwriting the continuation of the suburban fiasco. I think that this was perhaps an unintended consequence of Lovins' venture. It shows the limits of our imagination.

Is your basic critique of renewable energy that wind, solar and biomass all depend, to some extent, on fossil fuels?

That's one critique. I'm not trying to militate against them. We are going to use them. But we're not going to run the interstate highways and Disney World on them. Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel. The point I would repeat is this: We don't know whether we can fabricate the components for these things absent a fossil-fuel economy.

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale. As far as I can tell, we're much more likely to use these things on a very small neighborhood or town basis.

We're going to have to make tremendous readjustments in every aspect of how we live. Let me give you an example. One of the main characteristics of the suburbs is that everyone can lead an urban life in a rural setting. But land is simply not going to be available for suburban development anymore. So what we're going to see in the years ahead is the return of a much firmer distinction between what is urban and what is rural, between what's the town and what's the country. Because we're going to have to grow so much more of our food close to home, we're going to have to value rural land differently than we have for the past half century.

How will this affect our livelihoods?

We will no longer be a nation of public relations executives living 38 miles away from town. The future that I see tells me that the larger cities will be in big trouble and the action will be in the smaller cities and smaller towns. They will have resilience. It will be very important to live close to places that have viable agriculture, and the places where this is not possible are going to be in trouble.

The huge suburban metroplexes like New York and Chicago are not going to function very well. They're products of the oil age. They are oversupplied with skyscrapers and mega-structures that have poor prospects in a society with scarce energy. We will see a painful contraction in these places.

The Southwest is going to be real trouble. And the problem of contracting big cities will be real. I would also hasten to point out that many of them have already entered an advanced state of contraction: Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Louisville and Cincinnati. The list is very long of cities that have been in contraction for quite a bit of time. The difference, of course, is that they have been enjoying hyper-mega-growth in their suburbs, and that's going to stop.

What kind of reaction have you been getting when you say we're better off learning how to operate a horse-drawn plow than becoming a P.R. executive?

To put it mildly, a lot of people have trouble processing these ideas.

What if you put it not so mildly [sic]?

It tends to conflict with their picture of reality.

Do they take you seriously?

There is a good term for this and I hasten to point out that I did not invent it, although I couldn't tell you who did. It's really what's called "an outside context problem." It's so far from our normal realm of experience that we are collectively having a hard time processing it. In fact, we can't process it. Talking about these things tends to induce waves of denial, fear, ridicule.

But a great philosopher said new ideas are often greeted in three stages. First, they're ridiculed. Second, they're violently opposed. And finally they're accepted as self-evident.

What stage do you think that you're in?

I think we're in the ridicule stage, for sure. One thing that I'm predicting is that there will be a vigorous and futile defense of suburbia and all its entitlements, no matter what reality is telling us to do. And this will translate into a lot of political mischief. You can quote me: Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar.

If there is such a massive threat to the American way of life, why are our government and civic institutions unable to foresee it and make any changes to address it?

You will now be enlightened: The dirty secret of the American economy for more than a decade now is that it is largely based on the continued creation of suburban sprawl and all its accessories and furnishings. And if you remove that from our economy there isn't a whole lot left besides hair cutting, Colonel Sanders' chicken, and open-heart surgery.

So it would take down the American economy?

If we had to actually reform the way that we live, or let go of some of it, the losses would be politically untenable. No politician, whether it is the gallant John Kerry or George W. Bush, will go near the issue. They know that if the suburban-sprawl economy is challenged there isn't a whole lot left behind it.

But we're going to have to let those things go, whether we like it or not. Just don't expect to be led through this in an orderly way. The key to understanding what we face is turbulence. We're going through big changes attended by a lot of turbulence, disorder and hardship.

The reason that I called this book "The Long Emergency" is precisely because it describes an interval of trouble. I'm not saying that the world is coming to an end. I'm saying we're going to pass through a period of history that's going to be very difficult. There's a distinction between calling something the apocalypse and calling something an epochal discontinuity.

But won't the political landscape change in reaction? If the lights aren't coming on because natural gas is scarce, don't you think that a lot of the barriers to, say, nuclear power, will drop pretty quickly?

They will shift the political landscape, and the shift will include a great deal of turbulence and mischief. That's precisely why the quixotic attempt to defend suburbia will probably produce a lot of political trouble. Politically, we will try to save it. We will try to take measures, whether that means engaging in more overseas adventures…

What I don't understand is why you're so confident that any political change will be futile.

I think that we've overshot our window of opportunity to have an orderly transition.

It's too late to invest heavily in nuclear energy?

No, we may do that. If we want to keep the lights on after 2020, we may have to seriously consider building more nuclear power plants. But even under the best circumstances, it would take five or 10 years to get them built.

Here is my talk show question: What do you think people should do?

People have to ask themselves about where they're living, whether that place has a viable future. If I was living in the Atlanta suburbs, I would give serious consideration to relocating, ditto Las Vegas or Tucson. If I was a young person, I would rethink my expectations to make public relations my career, or indeed have a corporate future at all. If I was a local politician, I would think very seriously about stopping the sprawl-approval system in my town. And I would turn my attention to local self-sufficiency. The bottom line is this: All these things point to the fact that we're going to have to live a lot more locally and profoundly in the years ahead.

The end of the cheap oil fiesta is going to destroy the suburbs and create a simpler, community-based future?

Let me draw a parallel for you. A lot of people point out that the kind of predictions I've made about the post-oil world seem to resemble the Pentecostal Christian scenario about apocalypse. It happens that I'm not a born-again Christian. My view of the future is no more a matter of anti-suburban religion than it is a matter of being a Christian. It was simply self-evident that the American way of life was moving into a kind of terminal stage, whether you liked it or not. And I think that there will be a lot of benefits for us.

What are the benefits?

I think that we will return to many social relations and social enactments that we lost and that were of great value to us, such as working closely with other people on things that really matter to us.

Like farming, so we can eat?

I'm not saying everybody is going to be a farmer. In the book, I think that I went to great pains to say that we were going to have to reconstruct whole networks of local economic relations and interdependences.

As opposed to the globalized situation we have now?

Yeah. People are working for large entities that they don't care about and that don't care about them. I think that people will be working on things that will tend to be more meaningful, that will tend to have meaning for their neighbors and the places that they live.

One of the great tragedies of the Wal-Mart fiasco has been the destruction of the social and economic roles of businesses in communities. Those roles were pretty complex and created deep webs of culture that we've allowed to be systematically dismantled and destroyed. We're going to get some of them back.

I also think we will cease to be a nation of TV zombies who are merely entertaining ourselves to avoid being bored.

So, much as we may resist, there will be upsides?

Yes. It's possible to boil them down to the idea that we will not be living in the kind of narcissistic isolation that was so pervasive in recent decades. Geopolitically, the world is going to be a larger place. But our individual worlds may become smaller places. American life will be much more about staying where you are than about ceaseless and endless and pointless mobility.

And that will resonate. We're afflicted by so many places that are simply not worth caring about anymore. This is having a tremendous effect on us. It's corroding our spirits. And, if pressed, I would have to say that it's led directly to the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing and if you wish upon a star your dreams come true.

Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression. If we happen to let it go, we won't miss it that much. Very few people are going to feel nostalgic about the parking lot between the Chuck E. Cheeses and the Kmart.

Why do you think we resist this transition?

I think the notion behind your question is that we've become so accustomed to leisure and comfort that we're afraid to let them go and enter a world of less comfort and greater toil. I myself am a fairly cheerful person. I made certain choices years ago that have led me to lead a rewarding and purposeful life. At 56 years old, I've already outlived Babe Ruth and Mozart. I've enjoyed the cheap oil fiesta. I barely made a living until I was over 40 years old as a professional writer. I've experienced a moderate amount of hardship myself. And I'm not afraid of it. But I also feel fortunate.

Fortunate for what?

I feel fortunate that I enjoyed the blandishments of modernity. I had hip replacement and root canal. I was able to travel on airplanes. I was able to take cheap food for granted. I went to the movies. I enjoyed rock 'n' roll. And now I'm ready to move on.