Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Blood for oil?

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13563460600841066

1469-9923

Simon Bromley,

Natural Resources and Economic Development

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Michael Klare, ‘Blood For Oil: The Bush–Cheney Energy Strategy’, in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2004 (Merlin Press, 2003), p. 180. 2. Ibid., p. 181. 3. Michael Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency (Hamish Hamilton, 2004), pp. 7 and 72. 4. Ian Rutledge, Addicted to Oil: America's Relentless Drive For Energy Security (I. B. Tauris, 2005). 5. Ibid., p. 65. In fact, Rutledge goes so far as to suggest that the administration was prepared to conduct the Iraq adventure as a net loss, because the large social costs are paid for by all tax payers whereas the smaller benefits accrue to private companies. 6. A point that is well made by Ran Goel, ‘A Bargain Born of a Paradox: The Oil Industry's Role in American Domestic and Foreign Policy’, New Political Economy, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2004), pp. 467–92. 7. There is now something of a consensus on this across the political spectrum. On the left, see, for example, Alex Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power: The Bush Administration's Plan for the World (Polity Press, 2003); Peter Gowan, ‘The American Campaign For Global Sovereignty’, in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2003 (Merlin Press, 2002), pp. 1–27; David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003); and, on the right, George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy (Phoenix, 2004). There are dissenting voices: it is asserted that the neo-conservatives who influenced policy after 9/11 have little interest in economics and that oil was not a major part of their thinking about Iraq. Stefan Halper & Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, University Press, 2004). 8. Rutledge, Addicted to Oil, pp. 205–6. 9. Ibid., p. 2. 10. Edward Porter, ‘U.S. Energy Policy, Economic Sanctions and World Oil Supply’, Policy Analysis and Statistics Department of the American Petroleum Institute, June 2001, quoted from the Executive Summary, http://www.api.org (accessed June 2003). 11. On the role of oil in relation to US hegemony in the post-war, Cold War epoch, see Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil (Polity Press, 1991). 12. Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 85. 13. Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (Basic Books, 2003), p. 87. 14. Rutledge, Addicted to Oil, p. 19. 15. Edward Shaffer, The United States and the Control of World Oil (Croom Helm, 1983). 16. Reserves to production ratios – that is, the lifetime of existing proven reserves at current rates of production – are typically an order of magnitude higher in the Middle East OPEC states than in the USA. 17. International Energy Agency, Oil Market Report, 12 April 2006, Paris. 18. International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2004, Paris. 19. To be sure, many industry experts believe these kinds of increases in output to be infeasible and many economists question the assumptions underling the specific predictions about increasing demand but these are the policy statements of the US government and the principal coordinating body of the main oil consuming nations. 20. Porter, ‘U.S. Energy Policy’, p. 7. 21. National Energy Policy Development Group, National Energy Policy, The White House, May 2001, ch. 8, pp. 3–4. 22. Robert Vitalis, ‘The Closing of the Arabian Oil Frontier and the Future of Saudi-American Relations’, Middle East Report, No. 204 (Summer 1997), p. 16; for a more detailed discussion, see Simon Bromley, ‘Oil and the Middle East: The End of US Hegemony?’, Middle East Report, No. 208 (Fall 1998), pp. 19–22. 23. Michael Renner, ‘The New Oil Order: Washington's War on Iraq is the Lynchpin to Controlling Persian Gulf Oil’, Foreign Policy in Focus, 14 February 2003, http://www.fpic.org (accessed March 2003). 24. Rutledge, Addicted to Oil, p. 194. 25. Ibid., p. 200. 26. Daniel Yergin, ‘Ensuring Energy Security’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 2 (2006), p. 75. 27. I have explained what I think the real rationale was elsewhere, see Simon Bromley, ‘The United States and the Control of World Oil’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2005), pp. 225–55. 28. That earlier, post-war oil diplomacy was much more exclusive and was designed to contest British interests in the region, but that was in a context where there was indeed a rival imperialism and the USA was concerned that the Middle East might be tied into the Sterling bloc. The point is that the very success of the USA in Saudi Arabia (and later in Iran) meant the defeat of British imperialism in the Middle East as part of the creation of a unified international capitalist economy under US hegemony. 29. One alternative to these existing arrangements would be a network of more or less direct bilateral deals between state-owned or state-supported companies in the producing and consuming countries, thereby displacing essentially economic competition among firms in international markets by geopolitical competition among states. Elements of China's forays into Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia have something of this character. Another possibility is a collective agreement over investment, production and pricing negotiated between the key consuming countries and the main producing states – not so much geopolitical competition as cooperation. There have been some influential voices in OPEC in the past and in Congress more recently raising this latter possibility, including the idea that the major powers may need to create an organisation to deal directly with the key oil-producing states, but this kind of thinking has not had any influence on the Bush administrations. Whether it will come to the fore as the G8 begins to engage with questions of oil prices and energy security remains to be seen. If it does, the G8 will have to expand to include, at least, China and India for it to produce any worthwhile results. 30. See John E. Hartshorn, Oil Trade: Politics and Prospects (Cambridge University Press, 1993). 31. BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2005, p. 4, emphasis added. 32. Mark Jaccard, Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 155. 33. Morris Adelman, ‘The Real Oil Problem’, Regulation, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2004), p. 18. 34. Jaccard, Sustainable Fossil Fuels, p. 154. 35. Ibid., p. 14 36. Matthew R. Simmons, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (John Wiley, 2005). 37. Jeremy Leggett, Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis (Portobello Books, 2005). 38. See Leonardo Maugeri, ‘Two Cheers for Expensive Oil’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 2 (2006), pp. 149–61. 39. See http://energy.er.usgs.gov/ (accessed May 2006). 40. Rutledge, Addicted to Oil, p. 201. 41. Jaccard, Sustainable Fossil Fuels, p. 158. 42. For example, Canada's oil sands, with currently proven reserves of 175 billion barrels (i.e. some two-thirds the size of total declared Saudi reserves), have production costs of around US$15–20 per barrel. At US$50 per barrel, deeper and more dispersed formations may be economically exploitable, raising reserves to as much as 314 billion barrels. 43. ‘Steady as she goes’, The Economist, 22 April 2006, p. 82. 44. Of course, this does not solve the global warming problem, for as Jaccard observes: ‘None of the major ways of producing oil and its refined petroleum products (from conventional oil, unconventional oil, coal or natural gas) ha[s] a cost of production in excess of [US]$40/barrel. … This suggests that consumption of refined petroleum products must be constrained by policy; it is not resource depletion and the resulting high prices that will save the world from oil-related pollution’. Sustainable Fossil Fuels, p. 222. 45. While the current price of oil (in excess of US$70 per barrel at the time of writing, April 2006) is very likely damaging for the world economy, there is no reason to suppose that a long-run real price around US$40–50 per barrel is anything to worry about.