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Anthropocentric Global Warming As New Geopolitics Of Energy

Edward Turner - 11/25/2007

Al Gore has an Oscar and a Nobel Peace prize. The British Conservative Party has changed its logo from a fiery torch to a green tree. The Independent newspaper has frequent front page splashes on melting Arctic ice. This article outlines three reasons why carbon emissions are being reduced in the West. None of them have anything to do with the theory of anthropocentric global warming. Because the axis on which all this public and political discussion - and an international legal treaty - spins, the idea of anthropocentric global warming, is itself in orbit around the geopolitics of oil and gas.

First, and uncontroversially, the drive to reduce carbon emissions is an attempt to reduce use of a probably finite resource, specifically oil and gas. Demand for oil and gas eventually will exhaust supply. By 2050 the world population will likely have increased by a third while present oil reserves will have been more than halved. States now have no choice but to diversify toward alternatives for their future energy security. Rising oil prices – approaching $100 barrel – have given economic impetus to this. Concern over carbon emissions is a specifically a proxy for oil and natural gas emissions because coal, which provides 40% of the world's electricity, is in sufficient quantity to last 150 years.

The US Energy Information Administration estimates coal consumption will increase 74% by 2030, vastly more than a 30% rise for oil; increase its share of world energy used, and overtake oil as the largest human source of carbon dioxide emissions as early as 2010. If all that mattered were Carbon emission reductions policymakers would reduce coal use rather than increase its use so dramatically.

The second, again fairly obvious, reason for the move to reduce carbon emissions is geology. About two-thirds of world oil and gas reserves are not anywhere nice: under Russia and the Middle East. Consequently, modern transport, petrochemical and energy dependency on hydrocarbons have put a lot of money into the coffers of rotten states. A reduction in carbon emissions is also a proxy for the reduction of wealth transfers to illiberal, authoritarian governments that have squandered wealth on terrorism, corrupt bureaucracies, extremist ideologies, and war – in their own states and in the West. This is particularly true in the Persian Gulf, which contains 55% of world oil reserves, and has cooked up such regimes as Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Revolutionary Shiite Iran and Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, and an international side dish called Al Qaeda.

The problem of rogue states beefed up on the steroids of hydrocarbon profits has since the 1980s required the United States base a costly naval presence in the region and since 1990 an even more costly American army. To mitigate the fiat of geology 70% of American oil imports now come from the Western Hemisphere and West Africa (Nigeria and Angola). Other states are not as able to diversify as easily as America. Consider the Western states at both ends of Eurasia – Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and states of the European Union – have close to zero oil and gas deposits and are very dependent on Middle East and Russian fuel.

The European Union for one has a 400 million population and the world's second largest economy but only 0.5%, 2% of world oil and gas reserves (Algeria trumps both).

Lack of domestic supply and reliance on imports is alone reason to reduce carbon emissions. These regions ratified the flagship 1997 Kyoto Protocol and have slated billions for alternative and nuclear energy research, green transport, industry eco-subsidies, and have long introduced laws and taxes to reduce their citizens' carbon footprints.

Conversely carbon-fuel rich Western states such as Canada (oil), Australia (coal) and the United States (oil, gas, coal) have behaved differently. They've not ratified Kyoto. (Or in the case of Canada and the Athabasca tar sands; ratified then got taken to court by Friends of the Earth because they announced an intention to ignore Kyoto.)

Yet carbon control measures and climate research is in place to some extent in these carbon rich Western states too. The United States has spent $37 billion on climate change projects since 2001 including eco-tax and eco-energy policies. So, while enormous hydrocarbon consumption brings the railroad to resource exhaustion closer for all, issues of national security are another huge reason for interest in carbon control.

The third reason then is that carbon emission reductions assist the Western world in the geopolitics of energy security.

Organisations like OPEC (established 1960) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO, established 2001) threaten a future in which the carbon fuel market is under anti-Western military and economic control.

OPEC was an economic alliance of producers that sought to influence the price of oil sold to the West with the turn of the spigot. The SCO threatens to become a military alliance that challenges control of oil transport to the West.

The SCO, known in the media as Warsaw Pact II, allies Russia with China, and the oil rich Central Asian states. Add Iran – a guest at the recent SCO summit to the team - and Iran's own Syrian and Venezuelan alliances, the world's major energy chokepoints for pipelines and oil tanker traffic would be in a united enemy's backyard.

The new "OPEC with teeth" would span important oil and gas tanker routes worldwide: the South China Sea to East Asia; south of Iran through the Straits of Hormuz; the Panama Canal connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific; the spider web of pipelines from Russia into Europe; and the Caspian-Mediterranean pipeline through the Caucasus.

Where the actual threat is a long way off the goal of local hegemony is unmistakable. Chinese and Russian army and fleets train together. China has agreed $100bn worth of oil and gas deals with Iran. A pipeline is under construction linking Kazakhstan to China.

In Europe the threat has already arrived: in both January 2006 and 2007 Russia cut off oil supplies to Europe. First to Ukraine; then, again at the height of winter, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Germany went dry for a few days before a right price was "negotiated".

A measure of the importance of the Central Asian hydrocarbon deposits, Russia attempted to block the Ceyan-Baku pipeline which by-passed Russia to the Mediterranean. Georgia and the Caucasus have become a new "Fulda Gap" - one reason why Turkey's 900'000 man army is increasingly valuable to NATO and the resource barren European Union.

While Venezuela's military is not troublesome to the Panama Canal it could occupy more US naval assets in the Western Hemisphere weakening defence of other chokepoints.

A reduction in greenhouse gases that would lead to a reduction in oil and gas shipments would make these transport routes less significant and the SCO alliance less powerful. The geopolitical facts put a new slant on the suggestion our economies are on a "war footing for climate change."

Fear of planetary overheating has is a minor casual factor over political decisions to reduce carbon emissions. Anthropocentric Global Warming, if nothing else, is a convenient truth that motivates masses individualistic Westerners to act for the greater good of their state's energy security.