No country could survive economically if its goods and people could not
move from place to place. Highest priority should be given to replacing
oil as the main transport fuel in view of the unstable nature of the
regions where most of the world's supplies are found.
Editor's Note: this paper was written in
October 2002, before the Anglo - American
invasion of Iraq.
If oil, the raison d'être of a large part of the
Western military complex since the Soviet
Union collapsed, could be removed from its
central role in economic life, then that would
have a very significant positive political effect
on the international situation. At present, half
the United States' military is devoted to and justified
by potential wars to do with oil in North-
West Asia.
To bring about a reduction in oil's importance,
we need to establish a new set of coalitions and
alliances between the security community, the
traditional disarmament community, which hasn't
quite got the message yet, and the green
community that is downloading it rapidly. As
these alliances can only be successful if there is
a powerful, objective, real case for energy security,
that is what this paper will discuss,
focussing on oil and transportation.
The energy security issue as it confronts us
today is a very old one. It probably stretches
back beyond the eighteenth century, but just as
an illustration, Frederick the Great, as part of
what led to the destruction of Poland, moved in
to occupy Polish Silesia to gain access to its
coal. By World War Two, oil had become a
strategic issue, not least because Winston
Churchill had decided that the Royal Navy
should not rely on coal because of the difficulties
of maintaining coaling stations and supplying
them. Accordingly, in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, he moved the
Royal Navy to oil.
A quick few points to illustrate our vulnerability.
The tax on oil is very high in Western Europe
- between $50 and $100 a barrel on top of the
purchase price, which is currently $25-$30 a
barrel. These exact numbers may be wrong, but
the scale is not. In addition to this there is the
continuing high cost of securing, or that is to
say, not securing, the oil in the Gulf right now.
Plus or minus, I think that around 150 plus billion
dollars a year are spent by the US and the
West and the western-orientated Gulf states
themselves to try to secure the production of
some 6 or 7 billion barrels a year. This gives us
a per-barrel price of policing the petrol supply
of between 15 and 25 dollars a barrel. On top of
this, of course, is the cost in democratic values
of deciding to prop up all sorts of extremely
unsavoury regimes that we wouldn't otherwise
particularly care for. That's a year-on-year cost,
and it doesn't actually secure the supply.
Some right-wing commentators, notably
Samuel Huntingdon, have long proposed that
we are faced with a clash of civilizations
between the West and Islam. Personally I don't
subscribe to that view but with people like
Samuel Huntingdon in charge, we may yet
experience such a conflict despite its lack of
inevitability. At the other end of the spectrum
we have the radical Islamists who have
launched some kind of global guerrilla war -
probably the first we have seen historically.
Their intention is clearly to try to incite a global
civil war. They look at Islam's high point in
the ninth and tenth centuries, see that it hasn't
come much further since the early Middle
Ages, and would like to see that go very much
further. So there are plenty of people out for a
scrap.
Whether or not we are able to contain the situation
is an open question. Is this risk small enough to ignore? Well, we're
all accustomed to risks of one sort of another
and the conventional wisdom plays down the
risks both from those that dream of the seventh
century and those from Bush and Sharon. But
we downplayed other risks in the past and were
proved to be quite wrong. So far, the best we
can say is that the doom-mongers have not been
proved right, yet.
Coming to Iraq, well, the war might be a pushover
like the last one in the Gulf, and I think it
probably will be, but the political and longer-term
ramifications, particularly of an American
general managing a US oil cartel on the Basra
and Mosul oil fields, may have further knock-on
effects beyond that of those who carry out
the action.
The risk from the West's perspective is regime
change. We have, I think, quite short memories.
Remember that in the fifties, sixties, and
into the seventies, military coups were very
frequent in many parts of the world and certainly
in the Arab part. I find it interesting that
much of the discussion is in terms of Muslim
public opinion, but I would be more concerned
about a group of junior officers carrying out a
Ghadaffi- or Nasser-ite style coup. And while
we look with great complacency at the fall of
the Warsaw Pact over the course of not much
more than a year at the end of the 1980s, we
may face a situation in which from Ankara
through to Jakarta we see a similar collapse of
western-orientated, police-state-reliant regimes.
Now, I haven't got much time for those
regimes, and I haven't got much time for a policy
that supports them, but without a more
enlightened policy, the risk of such a major
change seems to me a bit too real to set aside.I
was a journalist at NATO when the NATO
Secretary General came out one day, about
twelve years ago, in the middle of a defence
ministers' meeting and said, 'Well we've got
news today, we got a fax from Boris Yeltsin. He
just sent us a fax to say the Soviet Union no
longer exists.' That would have been quite
unthinkable a few years previously. So can anyone
guarantee that we are not going to get an email
one day from Tehran, Baghdad or Riyadh
saying 'Well actually we are going back to the
desert, we have a Cambodian Pol Pot approach
to the middle class, we don't care about selling
the oil to sustain our national economy, what
we do care about is completely messing your
societies and destroying them.'
Now, I think that's very unlikely. But the point
is that our existing response to that risk is simply
more investment in the current approach. Now think about what that sort of money could
achieve if military-style resourcing was applied
to developing renewable energy sources in
order to remove our strategic oil dependency.
Where could that leave us strategically in ten or
fifteen years' time? We simply have no Plan B
at present, which from the perspective of elementary
military strategy is not a good position
to be in. If you are having to fight wars in the
petrol station you have to be very careful
because if things go seriously wrong, then
things go wrong at home very quickly too.
Of course there are some strategic petrol
reserves but these are all extremely short-term
measures. None of them has the prospect of
lasting more than a year on the most generous
of estimates. And we, I think, need to learn how
different our societies are today compared with,
let us say, the societies that faced the oil crisis
of '73 or indeed that of '56. Seventy-three feels
almost moderately recent but remember we've
become a just-in-time economy since then. As a
result, the tanker-driver dispute in the UK two
years ago brought the country close to a very
serious national emergency.
The drivers weren't unionised so there was no
one to talk to. The managers were in Milan -
what do you do? We had no surplus capacity, no
infrastructure to enable us to cope. And, as one
of my colleagues in government pointed out,
there's no point in giving petrol coupons to the
doctor to get to the hospital if the boiler man is
a forty-minute car drive away. Railway men no
longer live in railway cottages now, other people
do and commute to some other city while
the railway men live somewhere else again.
And they're all using cars. The vulnerability is
vastly greater even than in the 1970s.
So, while we don't have a Plan B, we do know
that there is a risk of unquantifiable size that
Plan A will fail because some people have a
very great capability to exploit our very great
vulnerability at a very high cost to us.
If you open up any car magazine you'll see that
a whole range of hybrids and alternative-fuel
vehicles are now becoming commercially available
because of the environmental concern, the
environmental push. What this means is that
there is a technology that is in a state to be
picked up and brought into service. It isn't a
question of the position we were in, in the
1970s. And if we decided to switch our
resources from the airborne-laser simulation
preparation budget into fuel cells we might see
things happen a little bit faster.
The prize for us in Europe is not just to greatly
reduce our strategic risk and our dependence on
the United States, but also to create greater freedom
to choose where to send what troops we
have. I'll ask you to start thinking about the role
that Ireland might play when, in a year or so, it
takes the presidency of the European Union
again, and what possibilities might be taken up
by a very well-organised internationalised civil
society focussed on that presidency, because
Ireland's presidencies in the past have achieved
a fair amount. We shouldn't think that a rapid
transition to renewable energy sources is without
precedent. The history of technology is full
of very rapid transitions and developments,
unfortunately mostly during times of war. To
pick some at random - the landing craft used by
the Americans to liberate Europe was essentially
an obscure oilrig tender from the Gulf of
Mexico. Commercial long-range air travel
came out of the World War II bomber. The
advantages of satellite technology came first of
all from a military use and of course in peacetime
we have brought about the
stagecoach/canal/rail/private car transition.
I would argue that one can take to established
politics a very hardcore security argument that
in traditional military strategic terms there is an
imperative to develop renewable energy for
transportation. We could build on that strategic
imperative by using the technical resources and
lobbying power of the green movement along
with those of people in the political/military
world who aren't really aware of the technological
possibilities. I think it would be a nice idea
if Feasta could do it. I jumped at the invitation
to this conference because the construction of
the alliance I spoke about ealier should perhaps
focus on the EU (and Mr Prodi, the
President of the European Commission who
has just created a hydrogen advisory group,
with which we should become rather more
closely associated, I think).
The European Union as such does not have an
energy policy but nevertheless the development
of a presidency agenda could move the security
issue forward far more rapidly than it might
otherwise happen. After all, there are plenty of
people sipping espressos in Europe who have
great distaste for the current American administration
but can't see a way out of the current
strategic dependency. We are offering one, vastly
more practical than establishing a European
army, of which the least said the better, I think.
It is also, I have to say, a more realistic,
realpolitik, approach to the security problem,
because a European army is not going to make
this problem go away, it just adds competition
between a European military and an American
military to the equation. And draws a hell of a
lot more money into the trap that perhaps Mr
Bin Laden and his friends are setting for us. The
present response is no more a strategy than the
bull charging the red rag is a strategy. I think we
can offer to produce a good deal more security
for an awful lot less money.
I'll close with one final point. It is not about the
fact that there isn't enough oil in the ground.
There is, and there is going to be enough oil in
the ground for quite a long time to come. The
price may get higher, we may find more, though
we probably won't find very much more, but for
twenty, thirty years from now, we will probably
have enough oil. Now, planning long term, of
course we need to be thinking about the transition
to renewables. The point is, the risk of an
oil supply disruption makes the need for that
transition much more immediate. Of course, if
oil was as available as water, then we wouldn't
be shelling out all this cash to try and secure it.
Clearly, shortage of supply and concentration of
supply are already critical issues, and will get
worse, particularly with the growth of Chinese
demand coming on stream. But, being entirely
shameless about it, the security issue provides
environmentalists with another powerful argument
for getting to where they already want to
go.
This is one of almost 50
chapters and articles in the 336-page large format book, Before the Wells
Run Dry. Copies of the book are available for £9.95 from Green Books. Continue to Panel 2 of section 4: Grim energy security scenario developed for the US
What we do know is
that if we get it wrong, we are enormously vulnerable
and there are groups with the capability
to exploit our vulnerabilities. Look at this nice
little Landsat image of the Kuwaiti oil-field fires. One or two nuclear weapons, perhpas from the Pakistani nuclear programme, loosed off in thse fields might make our futre slightly more complicated.
At
various points around the world, where people
on the receiving end aren't stupid, they see the
signs of our desperation to diversify our oil
sources. You only have to open a copy of The
Financial Times to find out how we are busily
trying to extract more oil from Africa or Central
Asia, or some other far-flung place where it's
very difficult to get the oil out for technical and
strategic reasons. Or ponder this nice little picture
of a beefed-up 747 which is a prototype for
an American airborne laser system. Well, they
are shelling out $1.3 billion just for programme
definition on that.