The growing oil crunch: your life is in whose hands?
Share your Thoughts
Posted on March 12, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality, Ecology of war and peace
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
I just want to share an article with you from today’s Financial Times. It certainly caught my attention. It’s about the oil industry and how the so-called ’seven sisters,’ now merged into the big oil companies we’ve all grown to know and love — ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell — have been basically shoved aside by upstarts around the world, oil companies nationally owned, whose power now dominates the oil industry:
Saudi Aramco, Gazprom (Russia), CNPC of China, NIOC (Iran), PDVSA (Venezuela), Petrobas (Brazil), and Petronas (Malaysia).
Overwhelmingly state-owned, they control almost one-third of the world’s oil and gas production and more than one-third of its total oil and gas reserves. In contrast, the old seven sisters — which shrank to four in the industry consolidation of the 1990s – produce about 10 per cent of the world’s oil and gas and hold just 3 per cent of reserves.
Wow! That’s some shift, and certainly puts a framework around many of the international tensions of recent years, doesn’t it? It’s not the state-owned part that especially bothers me, it’s what kind of states these are and whether or not they have the best interests of the planet in mind. A few of these countries are not exactly models of democracy and respect for human rights or the environment.
Two-thirds of the oil we use here in the US comes from imports. US oil production peaked long ago, back in the 70s. Rather than use that moment to begin shifting to alternative forms of energy, especially the ecologically sustainable renewables like solar and wind, we continued to grow the economy with oil and gas fueling its engine.
We have grown, all right. And now we have an even more oil and gas dependent economy — affecting virtually every aspect of our lives — and an economy even more dependent on the international politics of oil.
[One more time — why did we invade and occupy Iraq?]
Russia and China have already shown the potential of the new oil power they wield, and it ain’t a pretty picture. China, for example, is investing hugely in Sudan’s oil industry, right in the midst of one of the world’s worst human rights debacles. Meanwhile, a couple of months ago Europe found itself cut off from oil supplies from Russia over a dispute with Belarus about Gazprom’s oil pricing.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, the oil picture is especially grim. As the FT article notes, income from Pemex accounts for 40% of Mexico’s budget — and its aging oil fields are rapidly depleting. Some say that country is a decade away from a major economic crisis, with no plan yet in site to deal with it. By that point, the country will have shifted from being an oil exporter to an oil importert. If you think we have an immigration crisis now…
To add to the picture, Mexico is the US’s third largest oil supplier.
These are just a couple of slices of the larger picture that this article holds up to us. It is more evidence that this world is moving rapidly towards a global oil crisis, with profound economic and political implications — guaranteeing an era of grave instability and upheaval.
How are we going to handle this? The Bush administration is in the hands of energy industry people — Bush’s failed oil companies in Texas, Condie Rice once on Chevron’s board, Cheney and Halliburton (which, by the way, is moving its headquarters from Houston to Dubai – sign of the times). Then there’s the Carlyle Group, which includes US power-brokers like George H.W., James Baker, former defense secretaries and others. They invest in things like munitions and military contracts and have made a bloody, a very bloody, fortune on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And there is going to be a lot of war, a lot of conflict, if we decide to deal with the coming oil-supply crisis by going to war for it, setting up military bases around the world (as we are already doing) to protect our ’strategic interests,’ using military threats and occupations, rather than weaning ourselves quickly from an oil/gas-based way of life.
The stakes are huge here, and they are about what kind of world we want to live in.
So, read, learn, get armed with knowledge and facts. We have a lot of work to do to turn this thing around.
Technorati Tags: oil industry, oil dependency, war for oil, politics of oil
Comments
Leave a Reply
