THe Future is Now - the End of Cheap Oil

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By Jim Miles (about the author) Page 2 of 7 page(s)

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II Klare vs Kunstler

Short-term, soft landing

Michael Klare's latest work, Rising Powers Shrinking Planet is the 'softest' of the various books, using academic-political-corporate lenses to examine the situation. As such, it is a well written but dry interpretation of recent current events with a focus on the geopolitical manipulations that are ongoing or need to be considered in order to avoid the great crash. It is not a strident or scary work, readily acceptable to academia and the political corporate world, and sees a solution that in my thinking does not match the problem. It does not touch on the life of the consumer or on the changes that will be forced upon the economy and personal lifestyles by expensive oil and the changing climate. The solution for Klare is pretty much the status quo: the United States remains dominant militarily and politically, and the economy will continue its consumer based ways and continue to grow. It has much too much of a Disneyesque happy ending to be realistic.

That solution arises from Klare's examination and postulation of how the United States does and should interact particularly with China, but also with India and Russia. Klare does recognize that natural resources of all kinds, but in particular oil, are limited, but his only strongly worded warning is quite modest:

"To sum up, if global energy behavior continues along its current trajectory, the risk of crisis, economic trauma, and conflict on a staggering scale will increase....Averting catastrophe requires efforts to demilitarize energy procurement policies and radically speed the development of climate-friendly alternatives."

That sounds quite serious, but he does not develop the ideas much further than that, and in a sense is somewhat contradictory of himself.

Along with the possibility of a new Cold War, or even a new hot one (bigger or expanding if Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iran are considered in the equation), Klare foresees "a global expansion of the power of the state...to the detriment of democracy; severe economic trauma; and the acceleration of global climate change with its attendant disasters." Democracy is already being severely limited in many areas, including the changes to power by the neocon Bush executive that is unlikely to change under the next government, and the revival of Russian power under Alexander Putin. Global climate disasters are underway and severe economic trauma appears to also be underway (it has certainly been underway for the majority of the world as the wealth of western society is strongly based on the extraction of resources from other areas).

Klare's main fear is the destruction of globalization, and the decrease in American supremacy. He talks of swinging "the balance of power back in their [energy-poor states e.g. the U.S.] favor." Globalization in his terms means the survival of the corporation in its current form as a means of extracting wealth. That extraction, in the Thomas Friedman School of Economics thought, is protected by the 'hidden fist' of the military.

He is afraid "The adoption of statist measures...will occur at the expense of both corporate and societal autonomy." To many, that would be the good news: corporate autonomy is what has brought us to this state in the first place and corporations and their superstructures (the WTO, World Bank, OECD, IMF) are far from democratic; and societal autonomy could be considered a euphemism to allow the continued willful ignoring of humanity's responsibilities to other humans through social services (medical care, worker protection, retirement benefits, women's rights, education) and to the environment in which they live.

Most catastrophically to his argument (while speaking about catastrophes) is his final answer that incredibly continues to argue for growth. Michael, if you have not noticed yet for all your academic arguments and intelligence, we live on a finite world with finite resources and far too many people wanting to use them. Klare sees the "process of collaboration" with China as "spurring long-term economic growth." He had better get started on that immediately as China is currently allowing the U.S. a soft economic landing as it learns how to deal with all the American debt it owns. He continues with the idea of a "new industrial paradigm" that somehow will "consume fewer resources while stimulating economic growth." Changing industry is one thing, but that new paradigm seems to ignore the actual economic pattern of the U.S., that of debt laden consumption. It will not be possible to keep the "Chinese and American economies humming" as you wish.

Klare then sees the world not quite as fraught with change as other authors do. His is an examination of current events and what might transpire within the next five to ten years in geopolitical terms, but not to the average citizen. It maintains the status quo of American supremacy, corporate control, a growing still consuming economy, backed by the military's still powerful but perhaps more discreet 'hidden fist'. In a sense, Klare is concerned about his survival and his class survival more than that of the common citizen or the environment. His arguments become self-contradictory when what is needed is a truly larger paradigm change, either by our choice (not likely) or by the course of events caused by increasingly more expensive and difficult to obtain oil (more than likely).

The Long Emergency

The other books that provided my summer holiday entertainment (as in reading the script of a horror movie) are much more strident, much more hard-hitting, much more pessimistic than Klare's Pollyannish work. Their central theme, reiterated frequently, emphasizes how serious this change could be if positive action is not started now. Cheap fuel is over and we had better become used to a more minimalist agrarian style of existence without the luxuries of today's consumptive super-fest.

The hardest and most direct of the works is James Kunstler's The Long Emergency. His statements on the seriousness of our future are very direct:
"The long emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race."

"...a lot is at stake and the prospects are rather dark...the Long Emergency will be well under way and the United States itself may be in a state of political turmoil."

"It ought to be pretty obvious that the social systems, subsystems, and institutions necessary to run advanced societies would be weakened, perhaps beyond repair, by the multiple calamities of the Long Emergency."

"The moment that the world recognizes the passing of the oil production peak as a reality, globalism will be dead both in theory and practice. [if Kunstler means Washington consensus globalism, then, hey, there is some good news among all this]"

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www.jim.secretcove.ca

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles. His interest in this topic stems originally from an (more...)

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