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.

The Intensifying Global

Struggle for Energy

By Michael T. Klare

From Washington to New Delhi, Caracas to Moscow and Beijing, national leaders and corporate executives are stepping up their efforts to gain control over major sources of oil and natural gas as the global struggle for energy intensifies. Never has the competitive pursuit of untapped oil and gas reserves been so acute, and never has so much money as well as diplomatic and military muscle been deployed in the contest to win control over major foreign stockpiles of energy. To an unprecedented degree, a government's success or failure in these endeavors is being treated as headline news, and provoking public outcry when a rival power is seen as benefiting unfairly from a particular transaction. With the officials of numerous governments coming under mounting pressure to satisfy the needs of their individual countries -- at whatever cost -- the battle for energy can only become more inflamed in the years ahead.

This struggle is being driven by one great inescapable fact: the global supply of energy is not growing fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing demand, especially from the United States and the developing nations of Asia. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), global energy consumption will grow by more than 50% during the first quarter of the 21st century -- from an estimated 404 to 623 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) per year. Oil and natural gas will be in particular demand. By 2025, global oil consumption is projected to rise 57%, from 157 to 245 quadrillion BTUs, while gas consumption is projected to have a 68% growth rate, from 93 to 157 quads. It appears increasingly unlikely, however, that the world's energy firms will actually be able to deliver such quantities of oil and gas in the coming decades, whether for political, economic, or geological reasons. With prices rising all over the world and serious shortages in the offing, every major consuming nation is coming under increasing pressure to maximize its relative share of the available energy supply. Inevitably, these pressures will pit one state against another in the competitive pursuit of oil and natural gas.

Frenzied Search

In the past, such zero-sum contests between major powers over valuable resources have often led to war. Whether that will prove to be true in the case of oil and gas remains to be seen. But the pressure to maximize supplies is already shaping the foreign policy decisions of many states and generating fresh international tensions. Consider, for example, the following recent developments:

* A decision by Japan to initiate natural gas production in a disputed area of the East China Sea sparked massive anti-Japanese protests in China on April 16, the worst outpouring of such animosities in over 30 years. Although leaders of both countries sought to diffuse the crisis by promising fresh efforts at reconciliation, neither side has backed off its claims to the offshore territories. While other issues also fed into Chinese popular discontent, notably Japan's reluctance to express regret for atrocities committed by its forces in China during World War II, Tokyo's unilateral move to extract natural gas from the East China Sea was the precipitating factor. At stake potentially is the ownership of a vast undersea gas field in disputed waters lying between China's central coast and Japan's Ryukyu island chain. Because the offshore boundary between China and Japan has not been established, neither side is willing to countenance the extraction of gas by the other in the disputed "national territory." Thus, when Tokyo announced on April 13 that it would allow drilling by Japanese companies in waters claimed by China, Beijing had no compunctions about allowing an unprecedented, weekend-long display of nationalistic fervor.

* During her first visit to India as Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice called on New Delhi to back away from a plan to import natural gas by pipeline from Iran, claiming that any such endeavor would frustrate U.S. efforts to isolate the hard-line clerical regime in Tehran. "We have communicated to the Indian government our concerns about the gas pipeline cooperation between Iran and India," she said on March 16 after meeting with Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh in New Delhi. But the Indians let it be known that their desire for additional energy supplies trumped Washington's ideological opposition to the Iranian regime. Declaring that the proposed pipeline will be necessary to meet India's soaring energy needs, Singh told reporters, "We have no problem of any kind with Iran."

* One month after her meetings in New Delhi, Rice flew to Moscow and pressured President Vladimir Putin to open up Russia's energy industry to increased investment by American firms. Noting that Moscow's crackdown on the privately-owned energy giant, Yukos, along with proposed restrictions on foreign investment in Russian energy projects would discourage U.S. companies from collaborating in the development of Russia's vast oil reserves, Rice implored Putin to adopt a more inviting posture. "What Russia can do is to adopt policies in its energy sector in terms of the development of its energy sector that will increase the supply of oil both in the short term . . . and the long term," she avowed. But while embracing Rice's call for enhanced U.S.-Russian relations, Putin evinced no inclination to back off from his plans to bolster state control over Russian energy companies and to use this authority to advance Moscow's geopolitical objectives.

* On April 25, President George W. Bush met with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and exhorted him to substantially expand Saudi petroleum output so as to bring down American gasoline prices. "The Crown Prince understands that it is very important to make sure that the price is reasonable," Bush observed before the meeting. "A high oil price will damage markets, and he knows that." Bush and Abdullah also discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the continuing threat of terrorism, but it was oil demand that dominated the Crawford summit.

Highlighting the degree to which energy issues had come to overshadow more traditional security concerns, both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley emphasized the importance of boosting world oil output in their comments on the meeting. "Obviously, with the states like China, India, and others coming on line, there is concern about demand and supply," Rice observed. "And these issues have to be addressed."

Developments like these, and Rice's comments on the Bush-Abdullah meeting, capture the essence of the current energy equation: Demand is rising around the world; supplies are not growing fast enough to satisfy global requirements; and the global struggle to gain control over whatever supplies are available has become more intense and fractious. Because the first and second of these factors are not likely to abate in the years ahead, the third can only grow more pronounced.

Insatiable Demand

Economies -- all economies -- run on energy. Energy is needed to produce food and manufacture goods, power machines and appliances, transport raw materials and finished products, and provide heat and light. The more energy available to a society, the better its prospects for sustained growth; when energy supplies dwindle, economies grind to a halt and the affected populations suffer.

Since World War II, economic growth around the world has been fueled largely by abundant supplies of hydrocarbons -- that is, by petroleum and natural gas. Since 1950, worldwide oil consumption has grown eightfold, from approximately 10 to 80 million barrels per day; gas consumption, which began from a smaller base, has grown even more dramatically. Hydrocarbons now satisfy 62% of the world's total energy demand, approximately 250 quadrillion BTUs out of a total supply of 404 quads. But no matter how important they may be today, hydrocarbons are sure to prove even more critical in the future. According to the Department of Energy, oil and gas will account for 65% of world energy in 2025, a larger share than at present; and because no other source of energy is currently available to replace them, the future health of the global economy rests on our ability to produce more and more of these hydrocarbons.

The future availability of oil and gas also affects another key aspect of the global economic equation: the growing challenge to the older industrialized nations posed by dynamic new economies in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America. At present, the industrialized countries account for approximately two-thirds of total world energy use. Because these countries, for the most part, possess mature and efficient economies, their demand for energy is expected to increase by a relatively modest 35% between 2001 and 2025, a conceivably manageable rate. But demand in the developing world is soaring. By 2025, developing countries are projected to hold a startling half-share in total world energy consumption. When their added demand is combined with that of the industrialized countries, the net world increase jumps 54% over the same set of years, a far more demanding challenge for the global energy industry.

The competition for hydrocarbon supplies will be particularly intense. According to the Department of Energy, oil consumption by the developing world will increase by 96% between 2001 and 2025, while consumption of natural gas will rise by 103%. For China and India, the rate of growth is even more dramatic: China's oil consumption is projected to jump by 156% over this period and India's by 152%. The struggle these countries, and other developing powerhouses like South Korea and Brazil, face in obtaining additional oil and gas for their growing economies will naturally pit them against the older industrialized countries in the competitive pursuit of energy. As suggested by Rice, "with the states like China, India, and others coming on line, there is concern about demand and supply."

Questionable Supply

Accommodating the growing Chinese and Indian demand would not be a significant problem if we had great confidence that the energy industry is capable of generating the necessary additional amounts. In fact, the Department of Energy wants us to believe that this is indeed the case. Future oil and gas supplies, DoE claims, will be more than adequate to satisfy anticipated world demand. But many experts dispute this view. World oil and gas supplies, they argue, will never achieve such elevated levels. This is true because much of the world's known hydrocarbon reserves have already been exhausted and not enough new fields have been discovered in recent years to make up for the depletion of older reservoirs.

Take the case of oil. The DoE predicts that global petroleum output will reach 120.6 million barrels per day in 2025 -- 44 million barrels more than at present and just a tad shy of the anticipated world demand of 121 million barrels per day. For this to occur, however, the major oil firms must discover massive new reserves and substantially increase their output from existing fields. However, few new large fields have been discovered during the past 40 years, and only one, the Kashagan field in the Caspian Sea, has been found in the past decade. At the same time, many older fields in North America, Russia, and the Middle East have experienced significant declines in daily production. As a result, many geologists now believe not only that the global petroleum industry will not be capable of rising to the 120 million barrel level but will fall far below it.

Predictions that global oil output will peak between now and 2025, far short of the DoE's projections, are highly controversial. This is not the place to consider clashing assessments in detail. But one way to get at this issue is to consider the all-important case of Saudi Arabia, the world's leading supplier and the most likely prospect for higher production in the future. According to the DoE, Saudi Arabian oil output will more than double between 2001 and 2025, jumping from 10.2 to 22.5 million barrels per day. If Saudi Arabia could, in fact, raise its output by this amount we would have some degree of confidence that total world supplies could satisfy anticipated demand even at the end of this period. But there are growing indications that Saudi Arabia is not capable of coming anywhere close to that figure. In a much-discussed 2004 article in the New York Times, business analyst Jeff Gerth reported that "[o]il executives and government officials in the United States and Saudi Arabia... say capacity will probably stall near current levels, potentially creating a significant gap in the global energy supply."

In response to Gerth's assertions, Saudi officials insisted that their country is fully capable of boosting daily production by a sufficient amount to satisfy anticipated world requirements. "Should [higher world demand] actually materialize... we're going to be ready to meet it," Saudi Oil Minister Ali I. Al-Naimi declared in February 2004. In particular, "we have looked at scenarios of 12 million [barrels per day] capacity, we have looked at 15 million capacity, and those are all feasible." Such pronouncements have provided some relief to those alarmed by Gerth's report. But note that Al-Naimi spoke only of "scenarios" for reaching 12 to 15 million barrels per day -– hardly an ironclad guaranty -- and even an increase of that size would fall far short of the 22.5 million barrels projected by the Department of Energy. Many energy analysts have suggested, moreover, that any drive by Saudi Arabia to boost its daily output above 10 million barrels for any length of time will cause irreparable harm to its fields and result in an inevitable long-term drop in production. As noted by one senior Saudi oil executive, an attempt to reach 12 million barrels per day would "wreak havoc within a decade."

The question of Saudi Arabia's future oil output is terribly important to this discussion because it is highly unlikely that any other supplier, or combination of suppliers, can make up the difference between Saudi Arabia's sustainable yield of 10-12 million barrels per day and the DoE's 22.5 million-barrel goal for Saudi output in 2025. Other big suppliers -- Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Nigeria, Russia, and Venezuela -- are expected to have a hard enough time maintaining their own output at current levels, let alone filling in for the "missing" Saudi oil. This being the case, it appears highly unlikely that the global oil industry will be capable of satisfying anticipated world demand in the years ahead; instead, we should expect chronic petroleum shortages, higher prices, and persistent economic hardship.

Precisely because of this prospect, many national leaders are now placing greater emphasis on the acquisition of increased natural gas supplies. Because gas was developed later in the industrial cycle than oil, its principal sources of supply have not yet been fully exhausted, and new fields -- such as those in Iran and the East China Sea -- await full-scale development. Like oil, natural gas will eventually reach a global peak in output, but this is not likely to occur for a decade or so after oil has peaked. As petroleum output declines, therefore, natural gas is expected to take up some of the slack -- but only some, because there is not enough gas in the world to fully replace petroleum in all its myriad uses. And it is for this reason that many governments seek to gain control over or access to major gas reserves now, before they are locked up by someone else.

Intensifying Struggle

What can we expect from this intensifying struggle over valuable energy resources? Certainly, national leaders are placing ever greater emphasis on the competitive pursuit of energy as Condoleezza Rice made clear in her recent jaunts around the world. Whether in India, Russia, or Latin America, she has raised the energy issue at every turn, pressing America's allies and business partners both to supply us with more oil and to ignore the appeal of "rogue" producers like Iran and Venezuela. Other world leaders like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Junichiro Koizumi of Japan have behaved in a similar fashion. Striking, in fact, is the degree to which the quest for energy has been elevated into the realm of national security, on an equal plane with efforts to combat nuclear proliferation and international terrorism. Thus, it was the President's adviser for national security affairs, Stephen Hadley, who briefed reporters on the outcome of the Crawford summit between Bush and Abdullah. "The news that came out of the meeting today ought to be good news for the [energy] markets," he declared on April 25 -- not good news in the war against terror or in the drive to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Secretary of State Rice, however, offered the most telling observations after the April 25 meeting. The problems arising from insufficient supply to meet rising world oil demand, she said, "have to be addressed, not by jawboning, but by having a strategic plan for dealing with the problem." Anyone familiar with the Bush administration lexicon cannot help but be troubled by this call for a "strategic plan" to obtain additional energy, redolent as it is of the administration's bellicose, pre-emptive strategy for dealing with terrorism, "rogue states," and weapons of mass destruction. Just exactly what Rice means is not yet entirely clear, but it certainly suggests that energy issues will be paramount in U.S. foreign and military policy in a Bush second term.

And what is true for the United States is also likely to prove the case for other major oil-importing countries. Warning that China has outperformed India in the pursuit of new oil and gas reserves, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared in January that New Delhi would have to accelerate its efforts in this area. "I find China ahead of us in planning for the future in the field of energy security," he told a convention of Indian oil and gas executives. "We can no longer be complacent and must learn to think strategically, to think ahead, and to act swiftly and decisively."

Japanese leaders, too, have stressed the need for decisive action. Energy-poor Tokyo's decision to proceed with drilling in contested areas of the East China Sea is just one indication of this outlook. Equally striking is Japan's effort to convince the Russians to extend a new Siberian oil pipeline to Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan. Originally, Moscow had expected to terminate the pipeline at Daquing in China as part of a plan to strengthen Sino-Russian energy cooperation. But after Prime Minister Koizumi flew to Moscow and offered billions of dollars in additional aid and technology to Russia, President Putin indicated a preference for the Nakhodka route, which will, of course, facilitate oil deliveries to Japan. This has not deterred Chinese leaders from seeking a reversal of this decision, claiming that the "strategic partnership" between Moscow and Beijing outweighs the purely mercantile interests of Japan.

So far, none of these efforts has led to more than verbal sparring -- "jawboning," to use Rice's term -- along with high-stakes bidding wars and the occasional outbreak of street protests, as in Shanghai and Beijing. But if history is any guide, such friction -- when combined with other sources of animosity like China's smoldering resentments over Japanese atrocities during World War II -- can lead to more violent forms of competition. This is certainly the case in the East China Sea, where Chinese and Japanese planes and gunboats have already made threatening passes at one another.

Tensions are sure to rise, moreover, if Japan actually commences drilling in waters claimed by China. "If real exploration starts, we cannot totally exclude the possibility of Japanese private company ships having to face Chinese military ships," Junichi Abe, an analyst at the Kazankai Foundation in Tokyo, told a reporter for the New York Times. And if this were to occur, the Japanese government would come under enormous political pressure to protect those private vessels with planes and warships of its own, thereby setting the stage for an armed confrontation with China, whether intended or not.

Similar escalation could occur in other cases of disputed energy claims. In the Caspian Sea, for example, Iran seeks control over offshore oil and gas fields also claimed by Azerbaijan, an ally of the United States. In July 2001, an Iranian gunboat steamed into the contested area and chased off an oil-company exploration vessel operating there under Azerbaijani auspices. In response, the United States has pledged to help Azerbaijan build a small Caspian navy, to better protect its offshore energy claims. On April 11, John J. Fialka of the Wall Street Journal revealed that the U.S. Department of Defense will spend $100 million over the next few years to establish the "Caspian Guard," a network of police forces and special-operations units "that can respond to various emergencies, including attacks on oil facilities." Russia is also expanding its Caspian Fleet, as it too presses its claims to offshore fields in the region. Under such circumstances, it is all too easy to imagine how a minor confrontation could erupt into something much more serious, involving the U.S., Russia, Iran, and other countries.

Territorial disputes of this sort with significant energy dimensions can be found in the Red Sea, the South China Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Guinea, and the Bakassi Peninsula (a narrow stretch of land claimed by both Nigeria and Cameroon) among other regions. In each of these areas, opposing claimants have employed military force on occasion to assert their control or to drive off the forces of a challenger. None of these incidents has led to a full-scale conflict, but lives have been lost and the risk of renewed fighting persists. As the global struggle for energy intensifies, therefore, the danger of escalation will grow.

It is important to recognize that energy-related pressures are bound to increase as global demand continues its upward course and the supply of oil and natural gas fails to keep pace. The Bush administration, in particular, is aware of these pressures, having analyzed the global energy equation in its May 2001 report on U.S. energy requirements. While administration officials have repeatedly denied that oil played any role in the 2003 decision to invade Iraq, they clearly believed that control of the country would provide the United States with enormous advantages in any coming struggle with competitors like China over Persian Gulf energy.

Indeed, once a problem like energy security has been tagged as a matter of national security, it passes from the realm of economics and statecraft into that of military policy. Then, the generals and strategists get into the act and begin their ceaseless planning for endless "contingencies" and "emergencies." In such an environment, small incidents evolve into crises, and crises into wars. Expect a hot couple of decades ahead.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Oil (Metropolitan Books) among other works.

Copyright 2005 Michael T. Klare

U.S. Inventing Threats to Justify Nuclear Build-up

RICHARD GWYN

The United States' anti-missile defence program has to be the most idiotic military decision since the Trojans allowed the Greeks to wheel a large wooden horse through the gates of Troy. The Trojans, after all, didn't know what was inside the horse — and getting it cost them no money.

At a cost so far of close to $100 billion, America's anti-missile system suffers from two consequential defects:

It can't knock down incoming missiles even when the co-ordinates of their flight paths are programmed into it.

No nation-state dictator, no matter how paranoid, is going to condemn himself (and his people) to instant, total obliteration for the satisfaction of lobbing at the U.S. a nuclear-tipped missile that almost certainly will miss anyway.

Americans have the right to waste their own money — up to a point. The rest of the world has a considerable interest at stake when the anti-missile system is considered as part of the U.S.'s overall nuclear policy.

"Overkill" (an unfortunate word in this context) is the best way to describe U.S. nuclear policy. It's a larger version of the anti-missile program. Today, a decade-and-a-half after the end of the Cold War and therefore after the end of any serious nuclear threat to its territory and people, the U.S. has 5,300 "operationally deployed" nuclear weapons.

To understand the scale of that armoury, Britain, France and China, all well-established nuclear powers, each have between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads. Russia does have a lot more. But most of them are rusting and antiquated.

American apologists keep saying that under a deal (in 2001) with Russia, the U.S. will reduce its warheads to around 2,000. Except that the deactivated warheads won't be scrapped but will be put into a "responsive reserve," from which they can be retrieved quickly if necessary.

The objective — as with the missile-defence system — isn't arms reduction or arms control or nuclear security. It's nuclear supremacy, absolute and unchallengeable.

As part of this continued drive for supremacy, the U.S. has announced it will not ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and, although no decision to test has yet been made, Washington has ordered the national nuclear laboratories to start research on new atomic weapons.

While all this is going on, the U.S. is trying to convince Iran and North Korea to halt their minuscule nuclear programs. If Washington was out, instead, to provoke these two nations into developing nuclear weapons, it is impossible to imagine policies and practices that would more certainly produce that result. It's all madness. But clever, cynical, Machiavellian madness.

To justify its own nuclear program, from the anti-missile system to the dismissal of international controls, Washington needs a threat. Iran and North Korea, thus, are doing exactly what Washington wants them to do. And they are doing it because Washington is provoking them into doing it.

As the latest example, at the huge United Nations conference on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty now going on in New York, the U.S. signalled its indifference by sending as its delegation leader an unknown, mid-rank official. Iran's representative rose to the bait by declaring in his speech that Iran would go back to developing enriched uranium.

It remains madness. The U.S. is achieving its objective of maintaining nuclear supremacy all right. But it is paying itself back in nuclear insecurity.

"I have never been more fearful than now," former U.S. defence secretary William Perry said recently. "There is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade."

The rest of us should be as fearful.

---

Richard Gwyn's column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. gwynR@sympatico.ca.

Chemical Time Bombs
           
A small stretch of northern New Jersey running between Newark Airport and Port Elizabeth has been called the most dangerous two miles in America by terrorism experts, and for good reason. It holds a chlorine plant that could threaten some 12 million people, and it has more than a dozen other chemical plants, two port complexes and a plethora of oil storage tanks, refineries and pipelines, intermingled with rail and highway links that provide easy access to more than 100 potential targets in all.

Federal, state and local officials have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this lethal landscape to erect gates, roadblocks and security cameras and beef up patrols and surveillance. Yet as an article in Monday's Times by David Kocieniewski makes clear, the area remains frighteningly vulnerable. At the chlorine plant, trucks and cars drive by a scant 100 feet from storage tanks. A Times reporter and photographer found the plant only loosely guarded as they drove back and forth for five minutes snapping photos.

Their experience echoed an incident last year when Senator Jon Corzine, a New Jersey Democrat, went with a "60 Minutes" crew to a chemical plant outside Pittsburgh. They had no trouble entering and gaining access to deadly chemicals like anhydrous ammonia and boron trifluoride. This sort of lax security is all too common, and it makes these plants inviting terrorist targets. The Environmental Protection Agency has identified 123 chemical plants in 24 states where a terrorist act or accident could threaten a million or more people. Yet shockingly little has been done to upgrade their defenses.

Senator Corzine's persistent efforts to upgrade chemical plant security have been thwarted by the chemical industry and by the Bush administration's lack of support. He is now working on a new bill, in collaboration with Senators Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman, that is likely to make some concessions to the chemical industry to improve its chances of passage. If Congress and the White House are serious about protecting the nation, they will make sure that his bill becomes law in the strongest possible form. There is an urgent need for greater security at the plant sites. The industry should also be required to replace dangerous chemicals with safer alternatives. These steps may sound like common sense, but they have run into entrenched political opposition. The Bush administration's antiregulatory philosophy makes it reluctant to impose rules on private industry. And the chemical industry, a major campaign donor, seems intent on not spending the money that a strong safety law would cost it. Christie Whitman, the former E.P.A. administrator, became so frustrated by her inability to make any progress that she asked to be relieved of responsibility for chemical plant safety.

There may be room for compromise in a new bill. Plants in low-population areas might be exempted from the need to replace dangerous chemicals with substitutes that would be safer but more costly. The industry might also be granted leeway to develop its own safety codes. But unless those rules are tougher than the government's would be, they should not be a substitute.

Chemical plant safety has had a troubled history, but there is reason for cautious optimism. In the Senate, jurisdiction has shifted to the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, where the chairwoman, Senator Collins, a Maine Republican, seems serious about getting a good bill passed. Michael Chertoff, the new homeland security secretary, also appears committed to making chemical plants safer. There are few steps the government could take that would do more to protect Americans.

An Insecure Nation: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/insecurenation.

Global Competition for

Future Energy Supplies

Heats Up

By Kevin G. Hall

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Soaring demand for crude oil in China, India and other developing nations has set off a scramble to secure future energy supplies that could undermine the economic and national security of the United States.

The United States, Europe and Japan increasingly will be forced to compete with developing nations, especially China and India, the world's two fastest growing major economies, which comprise more than a third of the world's population.

"The center of gravity in world oil is shifting," said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and an author of "The Prize," an award-winning history of oil.

"Last year, Asia consumed more oil than North America," Yergin said. He predicts an oil supply shift, too, as Africa, Russia and former Soviet republics compete with the Middle East to fill the growing demand for oil.

The developing world's growing appetite for oil is one reason gasoline prices have shot up for Americans. Over time, these emerging economies will also shape not just global oil flows and prices but also world events, said Anne Korin, the co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, an energy security think tank.

"A third of humanity doesn't want to ride bikes anymore," she said. "That has profound geopolitical implications."

China and India already have moved aggressively to strengthen their relations with two oil-rich countries - Sudan and Iran - undermining U.S. sanctions against Sudan's regime and undercutting U.S. efforts to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions.

"We are in a situation right now where the energy consumption of the developing world is having an impact on the foreign policy options of the United States," said Korin.

For now, the United States remains well positioned, at least when it comes to energy supplies. The proven reserves in the Middle East make it the expected primary global supplier of crude oil. Iraq, where the United States has forcefully established a beachhead, has proven oil reserves of between 78 and 112 billion barrels.

But political instability, increased terrorism and the spread of fundamentalist Islam make it unlikely that today's oil-production map will look the same 20 years from now.

What's clearly changing is demand. The Paris-based International Energy Agency, a research arm of the world's most developed nations, projected last year that oil demand will grow by 45 million barrels a day to 120 million barrels a day by 2030. More than $3 trillion will be invested to find and produce that oil, and more than half of that investment will serve the needs of emerging economies.

The scramble to find and develop new oil fields and natural gas wells will occur in places such as eastern Siberia and West Africa, as hungry nations hedge their bets should leading producers such as Saudi Arabia or Iraq falter.

"You need energy to develop an economy, so there's a great strategic value in securing energy assets," said Antoine Halff, an oil expert with the risk-management company Eurasia Group in New York.

One likely winner is Russia, along with some of the now independent states that formerly made up the Soviet Union. They have proven reserves of 78 billion barrels but the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there may be 171 billion barrels of estimated undiscovered oil in the region.

"Russia is virtually unexplored. Their potential is enormous," said Gary Swindell, an independent petroleum engineer in Dallas whose business is estimating reserves.

Africa is another winner. It's got 87 billion barrels of proven reserves and estimated undiscovered reserves of 125 billion, mainly in West Africa. Central and South America have roughly the same, but, as in Russia, many are in prohibitively remote areas.

Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, Canada and Mexico are expected to remain the second and third largest U.S. oil suppliers. But smaller oil players are courting Washington's competitors.

In Venezuela, the fourth largest U.S. oil supplier, President Hugo Chavez, a self-described protege of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, is trying to rewrite concessions to U.S. oil companies and has invited China and India to participate in oil exploration. Ecuador and Colombia are negotiating oil deals with China, too.

China, the world's fastest-growing economy, is also making heavy diplomatic and energy investments in Africa. It needs to: China is projected to consume within 20 years what the U.S. consumes today - 21 million barrels a day.

Although China is the world's second largest oil consumer after the United States, it's only the fifth largest importer because of its own oil reserves. That's changing, however, because China is rapidly exhausting wells in Manchuria and the South China Sea. Soon its reliance on foreign oil will rival America's.

China's President Hu Jintao in mid-April cemented a "strategic" partnership with Nigeria during a state visit to Beijing by President Olusegun Obasanjo. Nigeria is West Africa's biggest producer and a major U.S. supplier. China's already trading development loans for energy development participation in Chad, Gabon and Angola.

In Sudan, China ignored evidence of genocide in the country's long-running civil war to entrench itself. It also effectively voided unilateral U.S. sanctions imposed because Sudan sheltered Osama bin Laden before he moved on to Afghanistan.

Sudan's widely reported human rights violations also sparked protests in Canada and Sweden that drove oil companies from those countries out of Sudan in 2002 and 2003. China, which now gets as much as 10 percent of its imported oil from Sudan, has repeatedly blocked U.N. efforts to impose anti-genocide sanctions against its trading partner.

Data from the federal Energy Information Administration help explain China's moves. The EIA predicts that China will import about two-thirds of the oil it consumes by 2025, up from the current figure of one third.

India, which has almost none of its own oil, is equally hungry. The EIA expects India to more than double its oil consumption to 5.3 million barrels a day by 2025.

Both China and India are investing billions in Iran despite President Bush's attempt to isolate the Persian Gulf nation because of its nuclear ambitions. The money is a lifeline for the world's fourth biggest oil producer, which also sits atop the world's second largest natural gas reserves. Both are off limits to U.S. companies.

Iran - already China's largest oil supplier - earlier this year signed long-term oil and natural gas contracts worth tens of billions of dollars with both China and India. Iran gave India's state oil company a 20-percent ownership stake in the development of a key Iranian oil field.

In strictly economic terms, it doesn't hurt the United States when developing countries promote oil drilling, extraction and production. That increases world supply, slakes demand and drives down prices. But access to ample energy is a prerequisite to world power.

That's a lesson not lost on Russia, the world's second largest exporter of crude oil and holder of the world's largest reserves of natural gas. The United States, Europe, India and China have each carved out stakes in Russia's energy future, while, for its part, Russia has sought to control strategic pipelines for oil and natural gas flowing from or through former Soviet republics.

President Bush travels to Russia in early May and is expected to lobby President Vladimir Putin for a multi-billion dollar pipeline deal to take natural gas to the Russian seaport of Murmansk. There, it would be liquefied and transported for sale in the United States.

Putin seems intent on using Russia's energy supplies to boost his influence at home and abroad. He's meddled in neighboring countries like the Ukraine and Georgia in hopes of securing greater control over how oil flows in and out of the region. And he has broken apart the country's largest private oil company, OAO Yukos, which had ties big U.S. oil interests, and is creating a new and massive state oil company from the ruins.

Putin has been friendliest to Western Europe, which now buys from Russia about a quarter of the natural gas it uses to fuel power plants and factories.

Russia's leader favors Western Europe because the dependency it promotes restores some of the international influence that Moscow lost following the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Clifford Gaddy, an expert on the Russian economy at the Brookings Institution.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/world/11514427.htm