From competition among hunter-gatherers for
wild game to imperialist wars over precious minerals, resource wars have
been fought throughout history; today, however, the competition appears
set to enter a new—and perhaps unprecedented—phase. As natural
resources deplete, and as the Earth’s climate becomes less stable, the
world’s nations will likely compete ever more desperately for access to
fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water.
Nations need increasing amounts of energy and raw materials to
produce economic growth, but the costs of supplying new increments of
energy and materials are burgeoning. In many cases, lower-quality
resources with high extraction costs are all that remain. Securing
access to these resources often requires military expenditures as well.
Meanwhile the struggle for the control of resources is re-aligning
political power balances throughout the world.
This game of resource “musical chairs” could well bring about
conflict and privation on a scale never seen before in world history.
Only a decisive policy shift toward resource conservation, climate
change mitigation, and economic cooperation seems likely to produce a
different outcome.
America’s Resource Geopolitics
The United States—the world’s current economic and military
superpower— entered the industrial era with a nearly unparalleled
endowment of natural resources that included an abundance not only of
forests, water, topsoil, and minerals, but also of oil, coal, and
natural gas. Like all other nations, the U.S. has approached resource
extraction using the low-hanging fruit principle. Today its giant
onshore reservoirs of conventional oil are largely depleted, and the
nation’s total oil production is down by over 40 percent from its peak
in 1970—despite huge discoveries in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Its
total coal resources are vast, but rates of extraction probably cannot
be increased significantly and will likely begin to decline within the
next decade or two. Unconventional hydrocarbon resources (such as
natural gas liberated by the hydrofracking of shale deposits) are
beginning to be commercialized, but come with high investment costs and
worrisome environmental risks. U.S. extraction rates for many minerals
have been declining for years or decades, and currently the nation
imports 93 percent of its antimony, 100 percent of its bauxite (for
aluminum), 31 percent of its copper, 99 percent of its gallium, 100
percent of its indium, over half its lithium, and 100 percent of its
rare earth minerals.
[1]
America has much to lose from any substantial reshuffling of global
alliances and resource flows. The nation’s leaders continue to play the
game of geopolitics by 20th century rules: they are still
obsessed with the Carter Doctrine and focused on petroleum as the
world’s foremost resource prize (a situation largely necessitated by the
country’s continuing overwhelming dependence on oil imports, due in
turn to a series of short-sighted political decisions stretching back at
least to the 1970s). The ongoing war in Afghanistan exemplifies U.S.
inertia: most geostrategic experts agree that there is little to be
gained from the conflict, but withdrawal of forces is politically
unfeasible.
The United States maintains a globe-spanning network of over 750 military bases
[2]
that formerly represented tokens of security to regimes throughout the
world—but that now increasingly provoke resentment among the locals.
This enormous military machine requires a vast supply system originating
with American weapons manufacturers that in turn depend on a prodigious
and ever-expanding torrent of funds from the Treasury. Indeed, the
nation’s yawning budget deficit largely stems from its
trillion-dollar-per-year, first-priority commitment to maintain its
military-industrial complex.
The U.S. currently engages in “special operations” in 120 countries
[3],
using elite commando units skilled in assassination, counterterrorist
raids, foreign troop training, and intelligence gathering. These teams
can be deployed to support U.S. geopolitical interests in a variety of
ways, including influencing elections or supporting factions within
revolutions. The U.S. also maintains the world’s most lavishly funded
($80 billion in 2010) intelligence bureaus, the CIA and NSA, which
conduct electronic and human information gathering activities in
virtually every country on the planet.
[4]
Yet despite America’s gargantuan expenditures on intelligence
gathering and high-tech weaponry, and its globe-spanning ability to
project power and to influence events, its armed forces appear to be
stretched to their limits having continuously fielded around 200,000
troops and even larger numbers of support personnel in Iraq and
Afghanistan for the past decade, where supply chains are both vulnerable
and expensive to maintain.
In short, the United States remains an enormously powerful nation
militarily, with thousands of nuclear weapons in addition to its
unparalleled conventional forces, yet it suffers from declining
strategic flexibility. The nation still retains an abundance of natural
resources, but its consumption rates of many of those resources have
grown to nearly insatiable levels, necessitating growing flows of
resource imports from other nations. Meanwhile, its ability to pay for
those imports is increasingly in question as its domestic economy
shrinks due to financial system volatility, government spending
cutbacks, high unemployment, an aging workforce, and shrinking average
household net worth. For all of these reasons, the U.S. is widely
characterized as “an empire in decline.”
The Global Geopolitical Resource Landscape
China is the rising power of the 21st century, according
to many geopolitical pundits, with a surging military and plentiful
cash with which to buy access to resources (oil, coal, minerals, and
farmland) around the planet. Yet while it is building an imperial-class
navy that could eventually threaten America’s, Beijing suffers from
domestic political and economic weaknesses that could make its turn at
the center of the world stage a brief one. These include limits to
available coal resources, a domestic real estate bubble, weakness in its
banking sector, falling demand for Chinese exports in the U.S. and
Europe, and widespread local political corruption.
Even as countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua
reject American foreign policy, the U.S. continues to exert enormous
influence on resource-rich Latin America via North American-based
corporations, which in some cases wield overwhelming influence over
entire national economies. However, China is now actively contracting
for access to energy and mineral resources throughout this region, which
is resulting in a gradual shift in economic spheres of interest.
Africa is a site of fast-growing U.S. investment in oil and other
mineral extraction projects (as evidenced by the establishment in 2009
of Africom, a military strategic command center on par with Centcom,
Eucom, Northcom, Pacom, and Southcom), but the continent also a target
of Chinese (and European) resource acquisition efforts. Proxy conflicts
there between and among these powers may intensify in the years ahead—in
most instances, to the sad detriment of African peoples.
[5]
The US still maintains a dominant position in the Middle East, but
the region is is characterized by extreme economic inequality, high
population growth rates, political instability, and the need for
importation of non-energy resources (including food and water). The
revolutions and protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and
Yemen in early 2011 can be interpreted as showing the inability of
young, growing, and largely unemployed populations to tolerate sharply
rising food, water, and energy prices in the context of autocratic
political regimes.
[6]
As economic conditions worsen, many more countries—including democratic
nations outside the Middle East, the U.S included—could become
destabilized in much the same way.
America’s best shot at expanding its oil interests lie in the deep oceans and the Arctic.
[7] However,
both military maneuvering and engineering-mining efforts will see
diminishing returns as costs rise and payoffs diminish.
Climate
change is likely to exacerbate geopolitical rivalry with China,
although it's important to recognize that climate risks will not be
evenly apportioned. Unstable states will become more unstable, poor
nations poorer. Many of the areas of greatest geopolitical risk are also
most at risk for impacts from climate change. Equatorial regions are
most likely to suffer from extreme drought and occasional catastrophic
flooding, while some northern temperate regions may see some transitory
benefit from warming—though unpredictable weather will plague nearly
every region. With the melting of Arctic ice, new mineral and energy
resources in the northernmost portions of the planet will become
accessible, as will new trade routes; this may lead to a “Cold Rush” of
economic and military exploitation and open a new theater for
international conflict.
[8]
Which raises the question: Can such consequences be
averted, and how? The answer may hinge on whether, and in what ways,
humanity chooses to compete or cooperate in response.
Competition versus cooperation
The
world’s governments engage continually in both cooperative and
competitive behavior, though sometimes extremes of these tendencies come
to the fore—with all-out conflict exemplifying unbridled competition.
Geopolitics typically involves both cooperative and competitive
strategies, with its long-term goal centering on the furtherance of
national interest (including increased control of territory and access
to resources). Recent decades have generally seen increasing
international cooperation, showing up in the expansion of trade, the
proliferation of treaties and conventions, and the development of
international institutions for justice and conflict resolution. The UN,
WTO, World Bank, International Criminal Court, as well as regional
economic (e.g., Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO) and military
(e.g., NATO) cooperation groups exemplify this trend. While some of
these efforts appear to be geopolitically motivated, others seem to be
genuine attempts to reduce both international tensions and global
environmental problems while advancing human rights.
This trend toward increasing international cooperation could see a
reversal in coming years and decades. As noted above, history is replete
with instances of resource scarcity fomenting conflict.
[9] In
such cases, competitive advantage typically resides either with nations
that have domestic resources and the ability to defend them; or with
nations that develop a vigorous, flexible, and motivated military force
able to take advantage of other nations’ weaknesses in order to seize
control of their resources.
In addition to international conflict, a failure of human
cooperation in the face of resource scarcity may also manifest as
increasing conflict
within nations. Since 1945, three-quarters of
all wars have occurred within nations rather than between them, with
most occurring in the world’s poorest countries.
[10]
About as many people may have died as a result of civil strife since
1980 as were killed in the First World War. Civil conflicts devastate
poor nations by destroying essential infrastructure, driving human and
capital flight, diverting scarce financial resources toward military
spending, undermining social trust, aggravating existing food shortages,
and spreading disease.
If the path toward increasing competition leads to both internal
and external conflict, then the result—for winners and losers alike, in a
“full” world seeing rapid resource depletion—will most probably be
economic and ecological ruin accompanied by political chaos.
Yet this is not the only outcome available to world leaders and
civil society. A cooperative strategy is at least theoretically
feasible—and its foundations already exist in institutions and practices
developed during recent decades.
The world has seen successful efforts to rein in commercial
whaling, to ban the use of CFCs, and to respond to natural disasters. If
we are to avert deadly resource competition in the future, further
agreements on climate change mitigation and non-renewable resource
conservation will be needed, along with cooperative efforts to stabilize
population and engineer a comprehensive global energy transition. Some
of these agreements are already under discussion.
For many years, the UN has led cooperative scientific efforts to
understand climate change (via the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, or IPCC) and governmental efforts to combat it (via the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC). In
international meetings beginning with the Kyoto Climate Change
Conference of 1997, nations have discussed politically acceptable ways
to cap global carbon emissions.
A potential international mechanism for conserving non-renewable resources is outlined in the present author’s book
The Oil Depletion Protocol.
An agreement along these lines would require nations each year to
reduce oil production and imports by the annual global depletion rate
(about 2.5 percent).
[11]
Cooperatively capping and diminishing both petroleum production and
consumption in this way would reduce oil price volatility, promote
energy conservation and conversion to alternative energy sources, and
head off geopolitical struggle over dwindling petroleum supplies. Such a
plan would likely work best in combination with national quota
rationing programs for individuals and businesses; if annually shrinking
quotas were tradable, energy misers would benefit financially while
energy gluttons would have to pay extra.[12]
The Oil Depletion Protocol has been endorsed by several city councils
in the U.S. and by the Portuguese Parliament. Similar protocols could be
applied to other internationally traded non-reFrom competition among hunter-gatherers for
wild game to imperialist wars over precious minerals, resource wars have
been fought throughout history; today, however, the competition appears
set to enter a new—and perhaps unprecedented—phase. As natural
resources deplete, and as the Earth’s climate becomes less stable, the
world’s nations will likely compete ever more desperately for access to
fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water.
Nations need increasing amounts of energy and raw materials to
produce economic growth, but the costs of supplying new increments of
energy and materials are burgeoning. In many cases, lower-quality
resources with high extraction costs are all that remain. Securing
access to these resources often requires military expenditures as well.
Meanwhile the struggle for the control of resources is re-aligning
political power balances throughout the world.
This game of resource “musical chairs” could well bring about
conflict and privation on a scale never seen before in world history.
Only a decisive policy shift toward resource conservation, climate
change mitigation, and economic cooperation seems likely to produce a
different outcome.
America’s Resource Geopolitics
The United States—the world’s current economic and military
superpower— entered the industrial era with a nearly unparalleled
endowment of natural resources that included an abundance not only of
forests, water, topsoil, and minerals, but also of oil, coal, and
natural gas. Like all other nations, the U.S. has approached resource
extraction using the low-hanging fruit principle. Today its giant
onshore reservoirs of conventional oil are largely depleted, and the
nation’s total oil production is down by over 40 percent from its peak
in 1970—despite huge discoveries in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Its
total coal resources are vast, but rates of extraction probably cannot
be increased significantly and will likely begin to decline within the
next decade or two. Unconventional hydrocarbon resources (such as
natural gas liberated by the hydrofracking of shale deposits) are
beginning to be commercialized, but come with high investment costs and
worrisome environmental risks. U.S. extraction rates for many minerals
have been declining for years or decades, and currently the nation
imports 93 percent of its antimony, 100 percent of its bauxite (for
aluminum), 31 percent of its copper, 99 percent of its gallium, 100
percent of its indium, over half its lithium, and 100 percent of its
rare earth minerals.
[1]
America has much to lose from any substantial reshuffling of global
alliances and resource flows. The nation’s leaders continue to play the
game of geopolitics by 20th century rules: they are still
obsessed with the Carter Doctrine and focused on petroleum as the
world’s foremost resource prize (a situation largely necessitated by the
country’s continuing overwhelming dependence on oil imports, due in
turn to a series of short-sighted political decisions stretching back at
least to the 1970s). The ongoing war in Afghanistan exemplifies U.S.
inertia: most geostrategic experts agree that there is little to be
gained from the conflict, but withdrawal of forces is politically
unfeasible.
The United States maintains a globe-spanning network of over 750 military bases
[2]
that formerly represented tokens of security to regimes throughout the
world—but that now increasingly provoke resentment among the locals.
This enormous military machine requires a vast supply system originating
with American weapons manufacturers that in turn depend on a prodigious
and ever-expanding torrent of funds from the Treasury. Indeed, the
nation’s yawning budget deficit largely stems from its
trillion-dollar-per-year, first-priority commitment to maintain its
military-industrial complex.
The U.S. currently engages in “special operations” in 120 countries
[3],
using elite commando units skilled in assassination, counterterrorist
raids, foreign troop training, and intelligence gathering. These teams
can be deployed to support U.S. geopolitical interests in a variety of
ways, including influencing elections or supporting factions within
revolutions. The U.S. also maintains the world’s most lavishly funded
($80 billion in 2010) intelligence bureaus, the CIA and NSA, which
conduct electronic and human information gathering activities in
virtually every country on the planet.
[4]
Yet despite America’s gargantuan expenditures on intelligence
gathering and high-tech weaponry, and its globe-spanning ability to
project power and to influence events, its armed forces appear to be
stretched to their limits having continuously fielded around 200,000
troops and even larger numbers of support personnel in Iraq and
Afghanistan for the past decade, where supply chains are both vulnerable
and expensive to maintain.
In short, the United States remains an enormously powerful nation
militarily, with thousands of nuclear weapons in addition to its
unparalleled conventional forces, yet it suffers from declining
strategic flexibility. The nation still retains an abundance of natural
resources, but its consumption rates of many of those resources have
grown to nearly insatiable levels, necessitating growing flows of
resource imports from other nations. Meanwhile, its ability to pay for
those imports is increasingly in question as its domestic economy
shrinks due to financial system volatility, government spending
cutbacks, high unemployment, an aging workforce, and shrinking average
household net worth. For all of these reasons, the U.S. is widely
characterized as “an empire in decline.”
The Global Geopolitical Resource Landscape
China is the rising power of the 21st century, according
to many geopolitical pundits, with a surging military and plentiful
cash with which to buy access to resources (oil, coal, minerals, and
farmland) around the planet. Yet while it is building an imperial-class
navy that could eventually threaten America’s, Beijing suffers from
domestic political and economic weaknesses that could make its turn at
the center of the world stage a brief one. These include limits to
available coal resources, a domestic real estate bubble, weakness in its
banking sector, falling demand for Chinese exports in the U.S. and
Europe, and widespread local political corruption.
Even as countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua
reject American foreign policy, the U.S. continues to exert enormous
influence on resource-rich Latin America via North American-based
corporations, which in some cases wield overwhelming influence over
entire national economies. However, China is now actively contracting
for access to energy and mineral resources throughout this region, which
is resulting in a gradual shift in economic spheres of interest.
Africa is a site of fast-growing U.S. investment in oil and other
mineral extraction projects (as evidenced by the establishment in 2009
of Africom, a military strategic command center on par with Centcom,
Eucom, Northcom, Pacom, and Southcom), but the continent also a target
of Chinese (and European) resource acquisition efforts. Proxy conflicts
there between and among these powers may intensify in the years ahead—in
most instances, to the sad detriment of African peoples.
[5]
The US still maintains a dominant position in the Middle East, but
the region is is characterized by extreme economic inequality, high
population growth rates, political instability, and the need for
importation of non-energy resources (including food and water). The
revolutions and protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and
Yemen in early 2011 can be interpreted as showing the inability of
young, growing, and largely unemployed populations to tolerate sharply
rising food, water, and energy prices in the context of autocratic
political regimes.
[6]
As economic conditions worsen, many more countries—including democratic
nations outside the Middle East, the U.S included—could become
destabilized in much the same way.
America’s best shot at expanding its oil interests lie in the deep oceans and the Arctic.
[7] However,
both military maneuvering and engineering-mining efforts will see
diminishing returns as costs rise and payoffs diminish.
Climate
change is likely to exacerbate geopolitical rivalry with China,
although it's important to recognize that climate risks will not be
evenly apportioned. Unstable states will become more unstable, poor
nations poorer. Many of the areas of greatest geopolitical risk are also
most at risk for impacts from climate change. Equatorial regions are
most likely to suffer from extreme drought and occasional catastrophic
flooding, while some northern temperate regions may see some transitory
benefit from warming—though unpredictable weather will plague nearly
every region. With the melting of Arctic ice, new mineral and energy
resources in the northernmost portions of the planet will become
accessible, as will new trade routes; this may lead to a “Cold Rush” of
economic and military exploitation and open a new theater for
international conflict.
[8]
Which raises the question: Can such consequences be
averted, and how? The answer may hinge on whether, and in what ways,
humanity chooses to compete or cooperate in response.
Competition versus cooperation
The
world’s governments engage continually in both cooperative and
competitive behavior, though sometimes extremes of these tendencies come
to the fore—with all-out conflict exemplifying unbridled competition.
Geopolitics typically involves both cooperative and competitive
strategies, with its long-term goal centering on the furtherance of
national interest (including increased control of territory and access
to resources). Recent decades have generally seen increasing
international cooperation, showing up in the expansion of trade, the
proliferation of treaties and conventions, and the development of
international institutions for justice and conflict resolution. The UN,
WTO, World Bank, International Criminal Court, as well as regional
economic (e.g., Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO) and military
(e.g., NATO) cooperation groups exemplify this trend. While some of
these efforts appear to be geopolitically motivated, others seem to be
genuine attempts to reduce both international tensions and global
environmental problems while advancing human rights.
This trend toward increasing international cooperation could see a
reversal in coming years and decades. As noted above, history is replete
with instances of resource scarcity fomenting conflict.
[9] In
such cases, competitive advantage typically resides either with nations
that have domestic resources and the ability to defend them; or with
nations that develop a vigorous, flexible, and motivated military force
able to take advantage of other nations’ weaknesses in order to seize
control of their resources.
In addition to international conflict, a failure of human
cooperation in the face of resource scarcity may also manifest as
increasing conflict
within nations. Since 1945, three-quarters of
all wars have occurred within nations rather than between them, with
most occurring in the world’s poorest countries.
[10]
About as many people may have died as a result of civil strife since
1980 as were killed in the First World War. Civil conflicts devastate
poor nations by destroying essential infrastructure, driving human and
capital flight, diverting scarce financial resources toward military
spending, undermining social trust, aggravating existing food shortages,
and spreading disease.
If the path toward increasing competition leads to both internal
and external conflict, then the result—for winners and losers alike, in a
“full” world seeing rapid resource depletion—will most probably be
economic and ecological ruin accompanied by political chaos.
Yet this is not the only outcome available to world leaders and
civil society. A cooperative strategy is at least theoretically
feasible—and its foundations already exist in institutions and practices
developed during recent decades.
The world has seen successful efforts to rein in commercial
whaling, to ban the use of CFCs, and to respond to natural disasters. If
we are to avert deadly resource competition in the future, further
agreements on climate change mitigation and non-renewable resource
conservation will be needed, along with cooperative efforts to stabilize
population and engineer a comprehensive global energy transition. Some
of these agreements are already under discussion.
For many years, the UN has led cooperative scientific efforts to
understand climate change (via the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, or IPCC) and governmental efforts to combat it (via the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC). In
international meetings beginning with the Kyoto Climate Change
Conference of 1997, nations have discussed politically acceptable ways
to cap global carbon emissions.
A potential international mechanism for conserving non-renewable resources is outlined in the present author’s book
The Oil Depletion Protocol.
An agreement along these lines would require nations each year to
reduce oil production and imports by the annual global depletion rate
(about 2.5 percent).
[11]
Cooperatively capping and diminishing both petroleum production and
consumption in this way would reduce oil price volatility, promote
energy conservation and conversion to alternative energy sources, and
head off geopolitical struggle over dwindling petroleum supplies. Such a
plan would likely work best in combination with national quota
rationing programs for individuals and businesses; if annually shrinking
quotas were tradable, energy misers would benefit financially while
energy gluttons would have to pay extra.[12]
The Oil Depletion Protocol has been endorsed by several city councils
in the U.S. and by the Portuguese Parliament. Similar protocols could be
applied to other internationally traded non-renewable resources.
The protocol in itself is not likely to be enough. Measures are
also needed to limit population growth, and to convert existing
infrastructure to a low carbon future, especially in developing
countries, where efforts can be made to bypass fossil fuel-dependent
transport and food system altogether.
All of the required effort need not come from governments.
Grassroots conservation and cooperation efforts have already sprung up
in the form of groups like Transition Initiatives, which have sprung up
in hundreds of towns and cities around the world. Transition Initiatives
got their start in 2005 in Britain through the work of a Permaculture
teacher named Rob Hopkins. In his
Transition Companion, Hopkins tells how he came up with the strategy, and sets forth a range of useful guidelines for groups.
[13] Nearly all of Rob’s prose is saturated with irrepressible optimism:
Transition Initiatives are not the only response to peak oil
and climate change; any coherent national response will also need
government and business responses at all levels. However, unless we can
create this sense of anticipation, elation and a collective call to
adventure on a wider scale, any government responses will be doomed to
failure, or will need to battle proactively against the will of the
people. . . . Rebuilding local agriculture and food production,
localizing energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local
building materials in the context of zero energy building, rethinking
how we manage waste, all build resilience and offer the potential of an
extraordinary renaissance—economic, cultural and spiritual.[14]
Taken together, current cooperative efforts toward resource
conservation, climate mitigation, and population stabilization are
woefully insufficient—as exemplified by failed climate talks, continued
global population growth, and ever-heightening international competition
for access to dwindling fossil fuels supplies. There are plenty of
justifications for pessimism: after all, won’t the first nations to
engage in resource conservation lose economic advantage to those that
engage in conquest and consumption maximization? Wouldn’t even one major
national holdout undermine a worldwide cooperative effort at climate
protection?
Dramatically expanding international and domestic cooperation at
this worrisome moment in history may seem like a tall order. The only
advantage to doing so is that it is the only path going forward that
doesn’t end in a global tragedy in which the fate of the “winners” is
hardly preferable to that of the “losers.”
Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow-in-Residence of Post Carbon Institute and a member of the Editorial Board of Solutions. He is the author of ten books including The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Portions of this article are adapted from The End of Growth.
References
[5] Michael Klare,
Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), chapter 6.
[6] Vicken Cheterian, “The Arab Crisis: Food, Energy, Water, Justice,”
Energy Bulletin, Posted January 26, 2011
[7] Brice Pedroletti, “China Seeks to Mine Deep Sea Riches,”
The Guardian, December 7, 2010.
[8] Naval Postgraduate School, “
Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom,” publication announcement for the second volume in the Arctic Security Project
.
[9]
Philippe Le Billon, "The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources
and Armed Conflicts." Political Geography 20 (2001), 561–584
[11] Richard Heinberg,
The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse (Canada: New Society Publishers, 2006).
[12]
A proposal for tradable energy was proposed in the UK by the late
economist David Fleming, and has drawn significant interest from
government. See
TEQs.
[13] Rob Hopkins,
Transition Companion (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2011).
[14] Hopkins,
Transition Handbook, (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008), p.15.
Image credits: US military vehicles - Morning Calm News/flickr; Arctic map - BBC
The protocol in itself is not likely to be enough. Measures are
also needed to limit population growth, and to convert existing
infrastructure to a low carbon future, especially in developing
countries, where efforts can be made to bypass fossil fuel-dependent
transport and food system altogether.
All of the required effort need not come from governments.
Grassroots conservation and cooperation efforts have already sprung up
in the form of groups like Transition Initiatives, which have sprung up
in hundreds of towns and cities around the world. Transition Initiatives
got their start in 2005 in Britain through the work of a Permaculture
teacher named Rob Hopkins. In his
Transition Companion, Hopkins tells how he came up with the strategy, and sets forth a range of useful guidelines for groups.
[13] Nearly all of Rob’s prose is saturated with irrepressible optimism:
Transition Initiatives are not the only response to peak oil
and climate change; any coherent national response will also need
government and business responses at all levels. However, unless we can
create this sense of anticipation, elation and a collective call to
adventure on a wider scale, any government responses will be doomed to
failure, or will need to battle proactively against the will of the
people. . . . Rebuilding local agriculture and food production,
localizing energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local
building materials in the context of zero energy building, rethinking
how we manage waste, all build resilience and offer the potential of an
extraordinary renaissance—economic, cultural and spiritual.[14]
Taken together, current cooperative efforts toward resource
conservation, climate mitigation, and population stabilization are
woefully insufficient—as exemplified by failed climate talks, continued
global population growth, and ever-heightening international competition
for access to dwindling fossil fuels supplies. There are plenty of
justifications for pessimism: after all, won’t the first nations to
engage in resource conservation lose economic advantage to those that
engage in conquest and consumption maximization? Wouldn’t even one major
national holdout undermine a worldwide cooperative effort at climate
protection?
Dramatically expanding international and domestic cooperation at
this worrisome moment in history may seem like a tall order. The only
advantage to doing so is that it is the only path going forward that
doesn’t end in a global tragedy in which the fate of the “winners” is
hardly preferable to that of the “losers.”
Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow-in-Residence of Post Carbon Institute and a member of the Editorial Board of Solutions. He is the author of ten books including The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Portions of this article are adapted from The End of Growth.
References
[5] Michael Klare,
Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), chapter 6.
[6] Vicken Cheterian, “The Arab Crisis: Food, Energy, Water, Justice,”
Energy Bulletin, Posted January 26, 2011
[7] Brice Pedroletti, “China Seeks to Mine Deep Sea Riches,”
The Guardian, December 7, 2010.
[8] Naval Postgraduate School, “
Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom,” publication announcement for the second volume in the Arctic Security Project
.
[9]
Philippe Le Billon, "The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources
and Armed Conflicts." Political Geography 20 (2001), 561–584
[11] Richard Heinberg,
The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse (Canada: New Society Publishers, 2006).
[12]
A proposal for tradable energy was proposed in the UK by the late
economist David Fleming, and has drawn significant interest from
government. See
TEQs.
[13] Rob Hopkins,
Transition Companion (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2011).
[14] Hopkins,
Transition Handbook, (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008), p.15.
Image credits: US military vehicles - Morning Calm News/flickr; Arctic map - BBC
