Week 5: April 29. THE GLOBAL RESOURCE CRUNCH:

The Dynamics of Mineral Depletion in a Multi-Polar International System

Highly Suggested Reading: 
  Terry Karl: The Paradox of Plenty, Oil Booms and Petrol States
Discusses rentier state and how Venezuela and society at large has become dependent on a capital intensive industry - oil.

Overview: Today we are going to conceptualize what we are doing.

Why is the oil resource crunch so different from others?

• Almost the whole world is dependent on it, so it is a more universal crisis
• It is so vital that it can lead to wars

Easy Oil vs Tough Oil

Easy Oil

• Large reservoirs
• Comes out easily
• Good quality
• In stable regions

Tough oil

• Difficult
• Distance
• Dangerous
• Expensive

Unconventional Oil

• Shale
• Oil sands

Old Wars vs New Wars

This generation has lived with the cold war – where ideology is important. Now resources will become a more important driver of war.

Old Wars

• Old wars: entire country mobilizes to fight.
• Defined not by full draft, but by percent of GDP going to finance the war
• Between states where the decisive encounter between armed forces

WWII

• Italians rushed to war in Africa, Germans in ?, Japanese in Asia: all were about gaining resources
• Japanese were cut-off from oil and steel shipments by the U.S. because of their aggressive actions in China
• Large reason to bomb Pearl Harbor was to cripple our Navy so that we couldn’t blockade oil shipments to Japan from Indonesia and other locations
• Russia grabbed Czechoslovakia, Poland and Caspian for coal and other resources

South Africa

• Well developed harbors
• South of this becomes difficult to navigate
• Once Suez Canal was closed, oil needed to go through Mozambique channel hugging the shoreline of South Africa – called the Cape Route
• In 80s it was in our interest to keep South Africa “white” in order to insure a friendly country that wouldn’t impede oil shipments, even though it was authoritarian and racist government.

Cold War

• Korean
• Vietnam: big, long and costly war, but ultimately irrelevant. “You can’t really lose a war like this anymore than you can win it.”

New Wars

• Takes place between failing states
• Fought by networks of state and non-state actors

Asymmetrical and Irregular Warfare

• Asymmetric: Where size of forces or comparative force capacity is highly different – old war
• Irregular: The way the conflict is conducted also called terrorism, i.e. bombings in market, changing the method of war and the targets – new war
• Where one side is asymmetric (more powerful) the other side needs to resort to irregular war

Seeking More and Finding Less

Klare points out how oil is are being depleted:

• Rapid decline of existing oil fields
• Few than expected new fields
• The end of easy oil era

Saudi Arabia

• Saudi Arabia is our main trough of oil
• In 2005 they were producing 10.7 mbd, was supposed to be 15 mbd by now, but they are telling us they can only do 12 mbd
• Barry believes that price of oil will keep going higher averaged year-after-year
• Saudi probably can’t pump any more
• Saudis are concerned about the Wahabi influence – the “deal with the devil”
• 10 to 20% of their population is Shia
• They are concerned about Iran and don’t want the region destabilized, but probably are more concerned about Iran nuclear capability than we are
• Saudi royal family only rules because of oil and are passed their peak “peak rule”
• King Abdullah is in his 80s and there is no other first generation princes coming up

Natural Gas

• Is literally and figuratively not as substantial as petroleum
• Benefit is that it has less emissions than petroleum
• You find natural gas the same places that you find oil
• Sometimes you pull it out at the same time as oil and sometimes after you extract the oil
• Russia has the most reserves, U.S. is sixth
• CA has only 1 LNG facility and no plans to build others. Several proposals have been turned down and one reason is that they can be terrorist targets because they are very explosive.
• Shipping by LNG is very expensive, the only economic way of getting natural gas is through a pipeline

Coal

• Has a greater supply than any of the other fossil fuels
• US has most coal follow by Russia, China and India
• Highest users: China, US, India
• Coal produces more CO2 and noxious emissions than any other fossil fuel
• Also mining it produces a lot of environmental damage
• Coal is also getting tougher to pull out

Uranium

• Is not renewable
• Doing serious uranium mining in Niger now

Copper, Cobalt, Platinum and Other metals

• Non fossil elements that are being depleted and are getting more difficult to mine
• Africa is loaded with these elements
• Mining copper in Afghanistan
• China is going into areas we aren’t like and “helping” production