#michael klare

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On March 13th, buried in the New York Times’s coverage of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss ami

The Leadership Team from Hell on a Hell of a Planet

How Trump’s Incompetence and Looming Global Catastrophes May Intersect

BY MICHAEL KLARE

[tibaert]

Vloeibaar goud regeert de wereld

Vloeibaar goud regeert de wereld

zonder titel   Is het nog nodig de lof te zingen over al de gevoerde oorlogen die zorgen droegen voor een steeds lopende oliekraan? Op haar beurt zorgde die ervoor dat de militaire machinerie in beweging kon blijven en een infrastructuur uitgebouwd kon worden die ook in vredestijd pure winst opleverde. De mensheid werd bevrijd van het juk dat natuur heet.   De mensheid? Die kan nu op volkomen…

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[thearbourist]

Micheal Klare - Saving the World From Climate Armageddon

Micheal Klare – Saving the World From Climate Armageddon

Well I’d like to change the channel from the Pandemic Gloom & Doom to the similarly depressing and helplessness inducing topic of climate change. The actors in feel similar in both channels, for instance, the vaccinated can only sit by and watch as the ignorant anti-vax crowd spreads Covid-19 to each other and fills the ICU wards past capacity. Concomitantly we can observe China and the US vie…

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[zeroground]

[indizombie]

Looking into the future, the demise of petro-states as we’ve known them could have a profound impact on the struggle to avert catastrophic climate change. Although these states are not primarily responsible for the actual combustion of fossil fuels - that’s something we in the oil-importing countries must take responsibility for - their pivotal role in fueling the global petroleum economy has made them largely resistant to international efforts to curb emissions of carbon dioxide. As they try to repair their busted business model or collapse under the weight of its failures, we can only hope that the path they follow will entail significantly less dependence on oil exports as well as a determination to speed up the conclusion of the fossil fuel era and so diminish its legacy of climate disaster.

Michael T. Klare, 'The Desperate Plight Of Petro-States', TomDispatch

[indizombie]

Unlike the Venezuelans or the Nigerians, the Saudi royals socked away enough money in the country’s sovereign wealth fund to cover deficit spending for at least a couple of years. It is now, however, burning through those funds at a prodigious rate, in part to finance a brutal and futile war in Yemen. At some point, it will have to sharply curtail government spending. Given the youthfulness of the Saudi population - 70% of its citizens are under 30 - and its long dependence on government handouts, such moves could, in the view of many analysts, lead to widespread civil unrest.

Michael T. Klare, 'The Desperate Plight Of Petro-States', TomDispatch

[tomdispatch]

In his latest striking post, Michael Klare begins his survey of a world floating on a flaming sea of oil this way: “Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts.  At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances.  But look more closely and they share several key characteristics -- notably, a witch’s brew of ethnic, religious, and national antagonisms that have been stirred to the boiling point by a fixation on energy.

“In each of these conflicts, the fighting is driven in large part by the eruption of long-standing historic antagonisms among neighboring (often intermingled) tribes, sects, and peoples.  In Iraq and Syria, it is a clash among Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkmen, and others; in Nigeria, among Muslims, Christians, and assorted tribal groupings; in South Sudan, between the Dinka and Nuer; in Ukraine, between Ukrainian loyalists and Russian-speakers aligned with Moscow; in the East and South China Sea, among the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and others.  It would be easy to attribute all this to age-old hatreds, as suggested by many analysts; but while such hostilities do help drive these conflicts, they are fueled by a most modern impulse as well: the desire to control valuable oil and natural gas assets.  Make no mistake about it, these are twenty-first-century energy wars.”

In the rest of this wide-ranging post, Klare looks in some detail at four global conflicts – Iraq/Syria, South Sudan, the Crimea/Ukraine, and the South China Sea, revealing the role of oil and natural gas in each of them.  And he concludes this way:

“In a fossil-fuel world, control over oil and gas reserves is an essential component of national power.  ‘Oil fuels more than automobiles and airplanes,’ Robert Ebel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told a State Department audience in 2002.  ‘Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics.’  Far more than an ordinary trade commodity, ‘it is a determinant of well being, of national security, and international power for those who possess this vital resource, and the converse for those who do not.’

“If anything, that’s even truer today, and as energy wars expand, the truth of this will only become more evident.  Someday, perhaps, the development of renewable sources of energy may invalidate this dictum.  But in our present world, if you see a conflict developing, look for the energy.  It’ll be there somewhere on this fossil-fueled planet of ours.”

[the-lone-pamphleteer]

"Evidently, as the U.S. Energy Information Agency reports, the U.S. will surpass Russia as the leading combined producer of oil and natural gas this year.  For the time being, Saudi Arabia remains the globe’s number one oil producer.  And, according to a new study in the journal Nature, sometime around the year 2047 (give or take the odd decade), the world will hit a “climate takeoff point.”  Think of it as the moment when, according to the researchers, “the old maximum average temperatures become the new minimum temperatures, extending beyond any climate we have experienced since 1860,” that is, when systematic records first began being kept.

So for the U.S., we may be talking record fossil fuel production, while for the globe we are going to be talking record heat, record storms -- of which a preview could be seen in the monstrous cyclone “half the size of India” that just came out of the warming waters of the Bay of Bengal -- and record weather disruptions as the new norm on planet Earth.  The connection, of course, is record emissions of carbon dioxide from the record burning of all those fossil fuels.  It couldn’t be a nastier combo, something potentially straight out of Dante’s inferno.  And, as always, TomDispatch has Michael Klare, author most recently of The Race for What’s Left, on the case."

-Tom Engelhardt's introduction to Michael Klare's most recent dispatch (which is well worth a read)