Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, by Michael Klare

Michael Klare is a professor of Security Studies and has a lifetime of experience in analysing energy trends and their connection to conflict. In this latest book, ‘Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: how scarce energy is creating a new world order’, Klare takes a broad look at who has resources and who wants them. What he finds is not pretty.

There are essentially four main resource pools, and Klare explores each of these in turn in a series of chapters. A number of competing powers are engaged in all of them, or desperately seeking to be engaged in them, knowing that their economies rely on the continued supply of oil and gas, as well as uranium, copper and other minerals. Guaranteeing those supplies is becoming increasingly difficult.

Those four key regions are the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait), the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Kazahkstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekhistan), Africa (Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, Libya, Sudan), and Russia’s vast gas fields, which hold 26% of the world’s gas.

Competing for the oil and gas are the US, the EU, Russia, Japan, and the increasingly thirsty India and China, with the rest of the world hoping to pick up some scraps along the way. The big players are the oil companies that we know as household names, Exxon, Shell, BP, Total and so on, but also the hugely powerful national oil companies: Russia’s Gazprom and Rosneft, only recently maneuvred back out of the hands of the oligarchs, China’s Sinopec and PetroChina. Most of the Middle East’s oil is controlled by national companies, including Iran and Iraq. And Saudi Arabia of course, which is why world leaders are always approaching, Oliver-like, to ask for more from the House of Saud.

This makes resource competition distinctly political. Despite the talk of liberal economics, resources as important as oil and gas are not left to the market to provide, and ‘energy security’ is high on every government’s agenda. The potential for conflict is very high, and with oil supplies dwindling, the likelihood of increased tension is unavoidable.

To make matters worse, the remaining reserves of oil and gas are clustered in unstable places and unsavoury regimes. This is no coincidence – it’s natural to take the easy stuff first. As demand increases, we are all forced to do business with people we don’t like. Unfortunately, countries have different ideas of which countries are suitable trading partners. For example, the US considers Iran a threat, and has sought to isolate it internationally. But because Iran has huge gas reserves, there’s still a queue at the door. India, China and Russia all do business with Mahmood Ahmejinedad. This has caused such intense frustration to the US that they even offered a highly controversial nuclear energy deal, passed just today in the House of Representatives, to support India’s nuclear energy plans as an alternative to a gas pipeline to Iran.

Iran is not an isolated flash-point. Because late-comer countries to the oil feast can’t be choosy, China is involved in Sudan, exploiting oil fields in Darfur, and has dealt with Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Both deals have involved weapons supplies. China and Japan are deeply divided over offshore gas fields that both claim lie within their sovereign territory. Russia has planted a flag on the seabed under the Arctic, a move that upset Canada: (“This isn’t the 15th Century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory'” said Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay.) Russia supplies natural gas to most of Eastern Europe, and they’re not afraid to use that in energy blackmail, as the Ukraine discovered when the pipeline was shut off in January 2006.

It is more obvious than ever that we need to reduce our dependency on oil, to reduce the threat of armed conflict as much as the threat of climate change. Unnumbered people die for our oil already in Iraq, Colombia, Burma, Sudan. Can we carry on driving and flying with a clear conscience, knowing this, and knowing that the risk of human rights abuses and all-out war gets worse every year?

“If we continue to extract and consume the world’s resources in the same improvident fashion as in the past,” writes Klare in his conclusion, “we will, sooner rather than later, transform the earth into a barely habitable scene of desolation. And if today’s Great Powers behave like those of previous epochs – relying on military instruments to achieve their primary objectives – we will witness unending crisis and conflict over what remains of value on our barren wasteland.”

MIchael Klare explores the dirty dance of blood and oil with encyclopedic knowledge, and he approaches it from the point of view of international relations, not ranting environmentalism or anti-globalisation rhetoric. It’s rare to find such obvious expertise in such an accesssible style, and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet should be required reading for every global leader today.