Behold the Rise of
Energy-Based Fascism
By Michael T. Klare
02/10/07 "Tomdispatch"
-- -- It has once again become fashionable for the
dwindling supporters of President Bush's futile war
in Iraq to stress the danger of "Islamo-fascism" and
the supposed drive by followers of Osama bin Laden
to establish a monolithic, Taliban-like regime -- a
"Caliphate" -- stretching from Gibraltar to
Indonesia. The President himself has employed this
term on occasion over the years, using it to
describe efforts by Muslim extremists to create
"a totalitarian empire that denies all political and
religious freedom." While there may indeed be
hundreds, even thousands, of disturbed and suicidal
individuals who share this delusional vision, the
world actually faces a far more substantial and
universal threat, which might be dubbed: Energo-fascism,
or the militarization of the global struggle over
ever-diminishing supplies of energy.
Unlike Islamo-fascism,
Energo-fascism will, in time, affect nearly every
person on the planet. Either we will be compelled to
participate in or finance foreign wars to secure
vital supplies of energy, such as the current
conflict in Iraq; or we will be at the mercy of
those who control the energy spigot, like the
customers of the Russian energy juggernaut
Gazprom in
Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia; or sooner or later we
may find ourselves under constant state
surveillance, lest we consume more than our allotted
share of fuel or engage in illicit energy
transactions. This is not simply some future
dystopian nightmare, but a potentially
all-encompassing reality whose basic features,
largely unnoticed, are developing today.
These include:
The transformation
of the U.S. military into a global oil
protection service whose primary mission is
to defend America's overseas sources of oil and
natural gas, while patrolling the world's major
pipelines and supply routes.
The transformation
of Russia into an energy superpower with
control over Eurasia's largest supplies of oil
and natural gas and the resolve to convert these
assets into ever increasing political influence
over neighboring states.
A ruthless
scramble among the great powers for the
remaining oil, natural gas, and uranium reserves
of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and
Asia, accompanied by recurring military
interventions, the constant installation and
replacement of client regimes, systemic
corruption and repression, and the continued
impoverishment of the great majority of those
who have the misfortune to inhabit such
energy-rich regions.
Increased state
intrusion into, and surveillance of, public and
private life as reliance on nuclear power
grows, bringing with it an increased threat of
sabotage, accident, and the diversion of
fissionable materials into the hands of illicit
nuclear proliferators.
Together, these and
related phenomena constitute the basic
characteristics of an emerging global Energo-fascism.
Disparate as they may seem, they all share a common
feature: increasing state involvement in the
procurement, transportation, and allocation of
energy supplies, accompanied by a greater
inclination to employ force against those who resist
the state's priorities in these areas. As in
classical twentieth century fascism, the state will
assume ever greater control over all aspects of
public and private life in pursuit of what is said
to be an essential national interest: the
acquisition of sufficient energy to keep the economy
functioning and public services (including the
military) running.
The Demand/Supply
Conundrum
Powerful, potentially
planet-altering trends like this do not occur in a
vacuum. The rise of Energo-fascism can be traced to
two overarching phenomena: an imminent collision
between energy demand and energy supplies, and the
historic migration of the center of gravity of
planetary energy output from the global north to the
global south.
For the past 60 years,
the international energy industry has largely
succeeded in satisfying the world's ever-growing
thirst for energy in all its forms. When it comes to
oil alone, global demand jumped from 15 to 82
million barrels per day between 1955 and 2005, an
increase of 450%. Global output rose by a like
amount in those years. Worldwide demand is expected
to keep growing at this rate, if not faster, for
years to come -- propelled in large part by rising
affluence in China, India, and other developing
nations. There is, however,
no expectation that global output can continue
to keep pace.
Quite the opposite: A
growing number of energy experts believe that the
global output of "conventional" (liquid) crude oil
will soon reach a
peak -- perhaps as early as 2010 or 2015 -- and
then begin an irreversible decline. If this proves
to be the case, no amount of inputs from Canadian
tar sands, shale oil, or other "unconventional"
sources will prevent a catastrophic liquid-fuel
shortage in a decade or so, producing widespread
economic trauma. The global supply of other primary
fuels, including natural gas, coal, and uranium is
not expected to contract as rapidly, but all of
these materials are finite, and will eventually
become scarce.
Coal is the most
plentiful of the three; if consumed at current
rates, it can be expected to last for perhaps
another century and a half. If, however, it is used
to replace oil (in various coal-to-liquid schemes),
it will disappear much more rapidly. This does not,
of course, address coal's disproportionate
contribution to global warming; if there is no
change in the way it is burned in power plants, the
planet will become inhospitable long before the last
coal mine is exhausted.
Natural gas and uranium
will outlast petroleum by a decade or two, but they
too will eventually reach peak output and begin to
decline. Natural gas will simply disappear, just
like oil; any future scarcity of uranium can to some
degree be overcome through the greater utilization
of "breeder reactors," which produce plutonium as a
byproduct; this substance can, in turn, be used as a
reactor fuel in its own right. But any increased use
of plutonium will also vastly increase the risk of
nuclear-weapons proliferation, producing a far more
dangerous world and a corresponding requirement for
greater government oversight of all aspects of
nuclear power and commerce.
Such future
possibilities are generating great anxiety among
officials of the major energy-consuming nations,
especially the United States, China, Japan, and the
European powers. All of these countries have
undertaken major reviews of energy policy in recent
years, and all have come to the same conclusion:
Market forces alone can no longer be relied upon to
satisfy essential national energy requirements, and
so the state must assume ever-increasing
responsibility for performing this role. This was,
for example, the fundamental conclusion of the
National
Energy Policy adopted by the Bush administration
on May 17, 2001 and followed slavishly ever since,
just as it is the official stance of China's
Communist regime. When resistance to such efforts is
encountered, moreover, government officials only
wield the power of the state more regularly and with
a heavier hand to achieve their objectives, whether
through trade sanctions, embargoes, arrests and
seizures, or the outright use of force. This is part
of the explanation for Energo-fascism's emergence.
Its rise is also being
driven by the changing geography of energy
production. At one time, most of the world's major
oil and natural gas wells were located in North
America, Europe, and the European sectors of the
Russian Empire. This was no accident. The major
energy companies much preferred to operate in
hospitable countries that were close at hand,
relatively stable, and disinclined to nationalize
private energy deposits. But these deposits have now
largely been depleted and the only areas still
capable of satisfying rising world demand are
located in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the
Middle East.
The countries in these
regions were nearly all subject to colonial rule and
still harbor deep distrust of foreign involvement;
many also house ethnic separatist groups,
insurgencies, or extremist movements that make them
especially inhospitable to foreign oil companies.
Oil production in Nigeria, for example, has been
sharply curtailed in recent months by an
insurgency in the impoverished Niger Delta.
Members of poor tribal groups that have suffered
terribly from the environmental devastation wrought
by oil-company operations in their midst, while
receiving few tangible benefits from the resulting
oil revenues, have led it; most of the profits that
remain in-country are pilfered by ruling elites in
Abuja, the capital. Combine this sort of local
resentment with lack of security and often shaky
ruling groups, and it's hardly surprising that the
leaders of the major consuming nations have
increasingly been taking matters into their own
hands -- arranging preemptive oil deals with
compliant local officials and providing military
protection, where needed, to ensure the safe
delivery of oil and natural gas.
In many cases, this has
resulted in the establishment of oil-driven,
patron-client relations between major consuming
nations and their leading suppliers, similar to the
long-established U.S. protectorate over Saudi Arabia
and the more recent U.S. embrace of
Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan.
Already we have the beginnings of the energy
equivalent of a classic arms race, combined with
many of the elements of the "Great Game" as once
played by colonial powers in some of the same parts
of the world. By militarizing the energy policies of
consuming nations and enhancing the repressive
capacities of client regimes, the foundations are
being laid for an Energo-fascist world.
The Pentagon: A
Global Oil-Protection Service
The most significant
expression of this trend has been the transformation
of the U.S. military into a
global oil-protection service whose primary
function is the guarding of overseas energy supplies
as well as their global delivery systems (pipelines,
tanker ships, and supply routes). This overarching
mission was first articulated by President Jimmy
Carter in January 1980, when he described the oil
flow from the Persian Gulf as a "vital interest" of
the United States, and affirmed that this country
would employ "any means necessary, including
military force" to overcome an attempt by a hostile
power to block that flow.
When President Carter
issued this edict, quickly dubbed the
Carter Doctrine, the United States did not
actually possess any forces capable of performing
this role in the Gulf. To fill this gap, Carter
created a new entity, the
Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), an
ad hoc assortment of U.S-based forces designated
for possible employment in the Middle East. In 1983,
President Reagan transformed the RDJTF into the
Central Command
(Centcom), the name it bears today. Centcom
exercises command authority over all U.S. combat
forces deployed in the greater Persian Gulf area
including Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. At
present, Centcom is largely preoccupied with the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has never given
up its original role of
guarding the oil flow from the Persian Gulf in
accordance with the Carter Doctrine.
The greatest danger to
the Persian Gulf oil flow is now said to emanate
from
Iran, which has threatened to choke off all oil
shipments through the vital Strait of Hormuz (the
narrow passageway at the mouth of the Gulf) in the
event of an American air assault on its nuclear
facilities. In possible anticipation of such a move,
the Pentagon recently ordered additional air and
naval forces into the Gulf and replaced
General John Abizaid, the Centcom Commander, who
favored diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria,
with
Admiral William Fallon, the Commander of the
Pacific Command (Pacom) and an expert in combined
air and naval operations.
Fallon arrived at Centcom just as President
Bush, in a nationally televised
speech on January 10, announced the deployment
of an additional
carrier battle group to the Gulf and warned of
harsh military action against Iran if it failed to
halt its support for insurgents in Iraq and its
pursuit of uranium-enrichment technology.
When first promulgated
in 1980, the Carter Doctrine was aimed principally
at the Persian Gulf and surrounding waters. In
recent years, however, American policymakers have
concluded that the United States must extend this
kind of protection to every major
oil-producing region in the developing world. The
logic for a Carter Doctrine on a global scale was
first spelled out in a bipartisan task force report,
"The Geopolitics of Energy," published by the
Washington-based
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
in November 2000. Because the United States and its
allies are becoming increasingly dependent on energy
supplies from unstable overseas suppliers, the
report concluded, "[T]he geopolitical risks
attendant to energy availability are not likely to
abate." Under these circumstances, "the United
States, as the world's only superpower, must accept
its special responsibilities for preserving access
to worldwide energy supply."
This sort of thinking --
embraced by senior Democrats and Republicans alike
-- appears to have governed American strategic
thinking since the late 1990s. It was President
Clinton who first put this policy into effect, by
extending the Carter Doctrine to the Caspian Sea
basin. It was Clinton who originally declared that
the flow of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea to the
West was an American security priority, and who, on
this basis, established military ties with the
governments of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. President Bush has
substantially upgraded these ties -- thereby laying
the groundwork for a permanent U.S. military
presence in the region -- but it is important to
view this as a bipartisan effort in accordance with
a shared belief that protection of the global oil
flow is increasingly not just a vital function, but
the vital function of the American military.
More recently, President
Bush has extended the reach of the Carter Doctrine
to West Africa, now one of America's major sources
of oil. Particular emphasis is being placed on
Nigeria, where unrest in the Delta (which holds most
of the country's onshore petroleum fields) has
produced a substantial decline in oil output.
"Nigeria is the fifth largest source of U.S. oil
imports," the State Department's Fiscal Year 2007
Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign
Operations declares, "and disruption of supply
from Nigeria would represent a major blow to U.S.
oil security strategy." To prevent such a
disruption, the Department of Defense is providing
Nigerian military and internal security forces with
substantial arms and equipment intended to quell
unrest in the Delta region; the Pentagon is also
collaborating with Nigerian forces in a number
of regional patrol and surveillance efforts aimed at
improving security in the Gulf of Guinea, where most
of West Africa's offshore oil and gas fields are
located.
Of course, senior
officials and foreign policy elites are generally
loath to acknowledge such crass motivations for the
utilization of military force -- they much prefer to
talk about spreading democracy and fighting
terrorism. Every once in a while, however, a hint of
this deep energy-based conviction rises to the
surface. Especially revealing is a November 2006
task force report from the
Council on Foreign
Relations on
"National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil
Dependency." Co-chaired by former Secretary of
Defense James R. Schlesinger and former CIA Director
John Deutsch, and endorsed by a slew of elite policy
wonks from both parties, the report trumpeted the
usual to-be-ignored calls for energy efficiency and
conservation at home, but then struck just the
militaristic note first voiced in the 2000 CSIS
report (which Schlesinger also co-chaired): "Several
standard operations of U.S. regionally deployed
forces [presumably Centcom and Pacom] have made
important contributions to improving energy
security, and the continuation of such efforts will
be necessary in the future. U.S. naval protection of
the sea-lanes that transport oil is of paramount
importance." The report also called for stepped up
U.S. naval engagement in the Gulf of Guinea off the
coast of Nigeria.
When expressing such
views, U.S. policymakers often adopt an altruistic
stance, claiming that the United States is
performing a "social good" by protecting the global
oil flow on behalf of the world community. But this
haughty, altruistic posture ignores crucial aspects
of the situation:
-
First, the United
States is the world's leading gas guzzler,
accounting for one out of every four barrels of
oil consumed daily around the world.
Second, the
pipelines and sea lanes being protected by
American soldiers and sailors at risk of life
and limb are largely those oriented toward the
United States and close allies like Japan and
the NATO countries.
Third, it is often
specifically American-based corporations whose
overseas operations are being protected by U.S.
forces in turbulent areas abroad, again at
significant risk to the military personnel
involved.
Fourth, the Pentagon
is itself one of the world's great oil guzzlers,
consuming 134 million barrels of oil in 2005, as
much as the entire nation of Sweden.
So while it is true that
other countries may obtain some benefits from the
activities of the American military, the primary
beneficiaries are the American economy and giant
U.S. corporations; the primary losers are the
American soldiers who risk their lives every day to
protect the pipelines and refineries, the poor of
these countries who see little or no benefit from
the extraction of their natural resources, and the
global environment as a whole.
The cost of this immense
undertaking, in both blood and treasure, is enormous
and it's still on the rise. There is, first of all,
the war in Iraq, which may have been sparked by a
variety of motives, but cannot in the end be
separated from the historic mission first laid out
by President Carter of eliminating any potential
threat to the free flow of oil from the Persian
Gulf. An assault on Iran would also have a number of
motives, but it, too, would be tied to this mission
in the final analysis -- even if it had the perverse
effect of closing off oil supplies, driving up
energy prices, and throwing the global economy into
a tailspin. And there are sure to be more wars over
oil after these, with more American casualties and
more victims of American missiles and bullets.
The cost in dollars will
also be great. Even if the war in Iraq is excluded
from the tally, the United States spends about
one-fourth of its defense budget, or some $100
billion per year, on Persian Gulf-related expenses
-- the approximate annual price-tag for enforcement
of the Carter Doctrine. One can argue about what
percentage of the approximately
$1
trillion cost of the war in Iraq should be added
to this tally, but surely we are minimally talking
about many hundreds of billions of dollars with no
end in sight. Protection of pipelines and tanker
routes in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, the Gulf of
Guinea, Colombia, and the Caspian Sea region adds
additional billions to this figure.
These costs will
snowball in the future as the United States becomes
predictably more dependent on energy from the global
south, as resistance to Western exploitation of its
oil fields grows, as an energy race with newly
ascendant China and India revs up, and as American
foreign-policy elites come to rely increasingly on
the U.S. military to overcome this resistance.
Eventually, the escalation of these costs will
require higher domestic taxes or diminished social
benefits, or both; at some point, the growing need
for manpower to guard all these overseas oil fields,
refineries, pipelines, and tanker routes could
entail resumption of the military draft. This will
generate widespread resistance to these policies at
home -- and this, in turn, may trigger the sorts of
repressive government crackdowns that would throw an
ever darkening shadow of Energo-fascism over our
world.
Petro-Power
and the Nuclear Renaissance
Two Faces of
an Emerging Energo-fascism (Part 2)
By Michael T. Klare
Not "Islamo-fascism"
but "Energo-fascism" -- the heavily
militarized global struggle over diminishing
supplies of energy -- will dominate world
affairs (and darken the lives of ordinary
citizens) in the decades to come. This is so
because top government officials globally
are increasingly unwilling to rely on market
forces to satisfy national energy needs and
are instead assuming direct responsibility
for the procurement, delivery, and
allocation of energy supplies. The leaders
of the major powers are ever more prepared
to use force when deemed necessary to
overcome any resistance to their energy
priorities. In the case of the United
States, this has required the conversion of
our armed forces into a
global oil-protection service; two other
significant expressions of emerging Energo-fascism
are: the arrival of Russia as an "energy
superpower" and the repressive implications
of plans to rely on nuclear power.
Energy Haves
and Have-nots
With global
demand for energy constantly rising and
supplies contracting (or at least failing to
keep pace), the world is being ever more
sharply divided into two classes of nations:
the energy haves and have-nots. The haves
are the nations with sufficient domestic
reserves (some combination of oil, gas,
coal, hydro-power, uranium, and alternative
sources of energy) to satisfy their own
requirements and be able to export to other
countries; the have-nots lack such reserves
and must make up the deficit with expensive
imports or suffer the consequences.
From 1950 to
2000, when energy was plentiful and cheap,
the distinction did not seem so obvious as
long as the have-nots possessed other forms
of power: immense wealth (like Japan);
nuclear weapons (like Britain and France);
or powerful friends (like the NATO and
Warsaw Pact countries). Needless to say, for
poor countries possessing none of these
assets, being a have-not state was a burden
even then, contributing mightily to the debt
crisis that still afflicts many of them.
Today, these other measures of power have
come to seem less important and the
distinction between energy haves and
have-nots correspondingly more significant
-- even for wealthy and powerful countries
like the United States and Japan.
Surprisingly,
there are very few energy haves in the world
today. Most notable among these privileged
few are Australia, Canada, Iran, Kazakhstan,
Kuwait, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Saudi
Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq (if it were
ever free of conflict), and a few others.
These countries are in an envious position
because they do not have to pay
stratospheric prices for imported oil and
natural gas and their ruling elites can
demand all sorts of benefits -- political,
economic, diplomatic, and military -- from
the foreign leaders who come calling to
procure copious quantities of their energy
products. Indeed, they can engage in the
delicious game of playing one foreign leader
against another, as Kazakhstan's President,
Nursultan Nazarbayev -- a regular guest
in Washington and Beijing -- has become so
adept at doing.
Pushed even
further, this pursuit of favors can lead to
a quest for political domination -- with the
sale of vital oil and natural gas supplies
made contingent on the recipient's
acquiescing to certain political demands set
forth by the seller. No country has embraced
this strategy with greater vigor or
enthusiasm than Vladimir Putin's Russia.
The Rising
Energy Superpower
At the end of
the Cold War, it appeared as if Russia was a
forlorn, wasted ex-superpower, impoverished
in spirit, treasure, and influence. For
years, it was treated with disdain by
American officials. Its leaders were forced
to swallow humiliating agreements like the
expansion of NATO to Moscow's former
satellites in Eastern Europe and the
abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty. To many in Washington, it must have
seemed as if Russia was little more than a
relic of history, a has-been never again
slated to play a significant role in world
affairs.
Today, Moscow,
not Washington, seems to be enjoying the
last laugh. With control over Eurasia's
largest reserves of natural gas and coal as
well as enormous supplies of petroleum and
uranium, Russia is the new top dog -- an
energy superpower rather than a military
one, but a superpower nonetheless.
First, a look
at the big picture.
Russia is the absolute king of natural
gas producers. According to BP (the former
British Petroleum), it alone possesses 1.7
quadrillion cubic feet of
proven gas reserves, or 27% of the total
world supply. This is even more significant
than it might appear because Europe and the
former USSR rely on natural gas for a larger
share of their total energy -- 34% -- than
any other region of the world. (In North
America, where oil is the dominant fuel,
natural gas accounts for only 25% of the
total.) Because Russia is by far the leading
supplier of Eurasia's gas, it enjoys a
position of supply dominance unmatched by
any energy provider -- except Saudi Arabia
in the petroleum field. Even in that realm,
Russia is the planet's second leading
producer, falling just 1.4 million barrels
short of Saudi Arabia's 11.0 million barrels
per day at the start of 2006. Russia also
possesses the world's second largest
reserves of coal (after the United States)
and is a major consumer of nuclear energy,
with 31 operational reactors.
Soon after
assuming power as president in 1999,
Vladimir Putin set out to convert this
superabundance of energy -- the economic
equivalent of a nuclear arsenal -- into the
sort of political clout that would restore
Russia's great-power status. By controlling
the flow of energy to other parts of Eurasia
from Russia and former Soviet republics like
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan (whose energy is
exported through Russian pipelines), he
reasoned, he could exercise the sort of
political influence enjoyed by Soviet
officials during the heyday of the Cold War.
To accomplish this, however, he would have
to reverse the wide-ranging privatization of
the oil and gas industry that occurred in
the early 1990s after the breakup of the
USSR and bring vital elements of Russia's
privately-owned energy industry back under
state control. Since there was no legitimate
way to do this under Russia's post-Communist
legal system, Putin and his associates
turned to illegitimate and authoritarian
methods to de-privatize these valuable
assets. Here, we see another emerging face
of Energo-fascism.
Remarkably,
Putin himself had long before
spelled out the rationale for
concentrating control over Russia's energy
resources in the state's hands. In a 1999
summary of his Ph.D. dissertation on
"Mineral Raw Materials in the Strategy for
Development of the Russian Economy," he
asserted that the Russian state must oversee
the utilization of the country's mineral raw
materials -- including oil fields in private
hands -- for the good of the Russian people.
"The state has the right to regulate the
process of the acquisition and the use of
natural resources, and particularly mineral
resources, independent of on whose property
they are located," he wrote. "In this
regard, the state acts in the interests of
society as a whole." No better justification
for Energo-fascism can be imagined.
The most famous
expression of this outlook has been the
so-called Khodorkovsky Affair. In 2003,
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the CEO of Yukos,
then Russia's top oil producer, was arrested
on fraud and tax-evasion charges. He had run
afoul of Putin by pursuing all sorts of
energy deals independent of the state,
including possible joint ventures with Exxon
Mobil, and by supporting anti-Putin
political forces inside Russia -- either of
which would have alone been sufficient to
earn him the Kremlin's wrath.
However, it is
now apparent that Putin's ultimate goal in
engineering the arrest was to seize control
of Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos' prime asset,
accounting for about 11% of
Russia's oil output. With Khodorkovsky
and his top associates in prison awaiting
trial, the government auctioned
Yuganskneftegaz to a secretive shell
company, which then resold it to state-owned
Rosneft
at a below-market price. In one fell swoop,
Putin had managed to dismember Yukos and
turn Rosneft into the country's leading oil
producer.
The Russian
president has also sought to extend state
control over the distribution and export of
oil and gas by blocking any effort by
private firms to build pipelines that would
compete with those owned and operated by
Gazprom,
the state-owned natural gas monopoly, and
Transneft, the state oil-pipeline
monopoly. The United States and other
consuming nations have long pushed for the
construction of privatized oil and gas
pipelines in Russia to increase the outflow
of energy to Europe and other foreign
markets as well as to dilute the power of
Gazprom and Transneft. The Kremlin has,
however, systematically
foreclosed all such efforts.
If the
concentration of ownership of energy assets
in the state's hands through legally dubious
means is one dimension of emerging
Energo-fascism in Russia, a second is the
utilization of this power to intimidate
have-not states on Russia's periphery. The
most notable expression of this to date was
the cutoff of natural gas supplies to
Ukraine on January 1, 2006. Ostensibly,
Gazprom stopped the flow in a dispute over
the pricing of Russian gas, but most
observers believe that the action was also
intended as a rebuke to Ukraine's
Western-leaning president,
Victor A. Yushchenko. Remember, this was
in the dead of winter, and natural gas is
the main source of heat in Ukraine, as in
much of Eastern Europe and the former USSR.
Gazprom resumed the flow after a last-minute
pricing compromise and following vociferous
complaints from Western European customers
who were suffering their own losses (as the
Ukrainians diverted Europe-bound gas for
their own use). This was the moment when it
became clear to all that Moscow was fully
prepared to open and close the energy spigot
as a tool of foreign policy.
Since then,
Moscow has employed this tactic on several
occasions to intimidate other neighboring
states in what it terms its "near abroad"
(as the U.S. used to speak of Latin America
as its "backyard"). On July 29, 2006,
claiming a leak, Transneft halted oil
shipments to the Mazeikiu refinery in
Lithuania after its owners announced its
sale to a Polish firm, not a Russian one.
Observers of the move
speculate that Russians officials
intended to force a Russian takeover of the
refinery.
In November,
Gazprom threatened to more than double the
price of natural gas to its former Georgian
SSR from $110 to $230 per 1,000 cubic
meters. The alternative offered was a
cessation of deliveries. Again, political
pressure was believed to be at least part of
the
motive as Georgia's pro-Western
government has defied Moscow on a wide range
of issues. In December, Gazprom pulled the
same sort of trick on Belarus, demanding a
major readjustment of prices from a close
(and impoverished) ally that had recently
been showing mild signs of independence.
This, then, is
another face of Energo-fascism in Russia:
the use of its energy as an instrument of
political influence and coercion over weak
have-not states on its borders. "It is not
that energy is the new atomic weapon," Cliff
Kupchan of the Eurasia Group consultancy
told the Financial Times, "but Russia
knows that petro-power, aggressively and
cleverly applied, can yield diplomatic
influence."
Big Brother
and the Nuclear Renaissance
The last face
of Energo-fascism to be discussed here is
the inevitable rise in state surveillance
and repression attendant on an expected
increase in nuclear power. As oil and
natural gas become scarcer, government and
industry leaders will undoubtedly push for a
greater reliance on nuclear power to provide
additional energy. This is a program likely
to gain greater momentum from rising
concerns over global warming -- largely a
result of carbon-dioxide emissions created
during the combustion of oil, gas, and coal.
President Bush has repeatedly
spoken of his desire to foster greater
reliance on nuclear power and the
administration-backed
Energy Policy Act of 2005 already
provides a variety of incentives for
electrical utilities to build new reactors
in the United States. Other countries
including France, China, Japan, Russia, and
India also plan to up their reliance on
nuclear power, greatly adding to the global
spread of nuclear reactors.
Many problems
stand in the way of this so-called
renaissance, not least the mammoth costs
involved and the fact that no safe system
has yet been devised for the long-term
storage of nuclear wastes. Furthermore,
despite many improvements in the safety of
nuclear power plants, worries persist about
the risk of nuclear accidents such as those
that occurred at
Three Mile Island in 1979 and
Chernobyl in 1986. But this is not the
place to weigh these issues. Let me instead
focus on two especially worrisome aspects of
the future growth of the nuclear power
industry: the possible federalization of
nuclear reactor placement in the U.S. and
the repressive implications globally of the
greater availability of nuclear materials
open to diversion to terrorists, criminals,
and "rogue" states.
Currently,
America's municipalities, counties, and
states still exercise considerable control
over the issuance of permits for the
construction of new nuclear power plants,
giving citizens in these jurisdictions
considerable opportunity to resist the
placement of a reactor "in their backyard."
For decades, this has been one of the
leading obstacles to the construction of new
reactors in the U.S., along with the costly
and time-consuming legal process involved in
winning over state legislatures, county
boards, and environmental agencies. If this
practice prevails, we are never likely to
see a true "renaissance" of nuclear power
here, even if a few new reactors are built
in poor rural areas where citizen resistance
is minimal. The only way to increase
reliance on nuclear power, therefore, is to
federalize the permit process by shunting
local agencies aside and giving federal
bureaucrats the unfettered power to issue
permits for the construction of new
reactors.
Unlikely, you
say? Well consider this: The Energy Policy
Act of 2005 established a significant
precedent for the
federalization of such authority by
depriving state and local officials of their
power to approve the placement of natural
gas "regasification" plants. These are
mammoth facilities used to reconvert
liquified natural gas, transported by ship
from foreign suppliers, into a gas that can
then be delivered by pipeline to customers
in the United States. Several localities on
the East and West coasts had fought the
construction of such plants in their harbors
for fear that they might explode (not an
entirely far-fetched concern) or become
targets for terrorists, but they have now
lost their legal power to do so. So much for
local democracy.
Here's my
worry: That some future administration will
push through an amendment to the Energy
Policy Act giving the federal government the
same sort of placement authority for nuclear
reactors that it now has for regasification
plants. The feds then announce plans to
build dozens or even hundreds of new
reactors in or near places like Boston, New
York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Denver, and so on, claiming an urgent need
for additional energy. People protest en
masse. Local officials, sympathetic to the
protestors, refuse to arrest them in droves.
But now we're speaking of defiance of
federal, not state or municipal, ordinances.
Ergo, the National Guard or the regular Army
is called up to quell the protests and
protect the reactor sites -- Energo-fascism
in action.
Finally,
there's another danger in the spread of
nuclear power: that it will require a
systematic increase in state surveillance of
everyone even remotely connected with
commercial nuclear energy. After all, every
uranium enrichment facility, nuclear
reactor, and waste storage site -- and any
of the linkages between them -- is a
potential source of fissionable materials
for terrorists, black-market traffickers, or
rogue states like Iran and North Korea. This
means, of course, that all of the personnel
employed in these facilities, and all their
contractors and sub-contractors (and all
their families and contacts) will have to be
constantly vetted for possible illicit ties
and kept under strict, full-time
surveillance. The more reactors there are,
the more facilities and contractors who will
have to be subjected to this sort of
oversight -- and the more the security staff
itself will have to be subjected to ever
higher levels of surveillance by state
security agencies. It's a formula for Big
Brother on a very large scale.
And then
there's the special problem of
"breeder reactors." These plants produce
("breed") more fissionable material than
they consume, often in the form of
plutonium, which can, in turn, be burned in
power reactors to generate electricity but
can also be used as the fuel for atomic
weapons. Although such reactors are
currently banned in the United States, other
countries, including
Japan, are building them so as to
diminish their reliance on fossil fuels and
natural uranium, itself a finite resource.
As the demand for nuclear energy grows, more
countries (even, possibly, the USA) are
bound to build breeder reactors. But this
will vastly increase the global supply of
bomb-grade plutonium, requiring an even
greater increase in state supervision of the
nuclear power industry in all its aspects.
The State's
Iron Grip
All the
phenomena discussed in this two-part series
-- the transformation of the U.S. military
into a global oil-protection service, the
growth of the energy equivalent of a
major-power arms race, the emergence of
Russia as an energy superpower, and the need
for increased surveillance over the nuclear
power industry -- are expressions of a
single, overarching trend: the tendency of
states to extend their control over every
aspect of energy production, procurement,
transportation, and allocation. This, in
turn, is a response to the depletion of
world energy supplies and a shift in the
locus of energy production from the global
north to the global south -- developments
that have been under way for some time, but
are bound to gain greater momentum in the
years ahead.
Many concerned
citizens and organizations -- the
Apollo Alliance, the
Rocky Mountain
Institute, and the
Worldwatch Institute, to name but a few
-- are trying to develop sane, democratic
responses to the problems brought about by
energy depletion, instability in
energy-producing areas, and global warming.
Most government leaders, however, appear
intent on addressing these problems through
increased state controls and a greater
reliance on the use of military force.
Unless this tendency is resisted, Energo-fascism
could be our future.
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 Dependence on Imported
Petroleum (Owl Books).
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