Why does South Africa, a country which endures frequent energy blackouts, intend to ship its coal inheritance, on carbon-burning container-ships to countries like Germany while it makes long term plans to provide nuclear energy for its own population?
Why does the German government, so concerned about global warming when it signed the Kyoto Protocol, intend to exempt their next generation coal-fired power stations from the European Union carbon emissions trading system? Rather than invest in nuclear energy, as their neighbours the French already have done successfully?
Answer in both cases: power politics.
Like South Africa, Libya and Iran, though they are rich in oil and gas, want electricity the nuclear way they could easily and more quickly get if they burned their own fossil fuel reserve. Again, the explanation is power politics.
It may not surprise everyone, the idea of global warming is simply a means of population control which states have used to maximise their self-interest in the sphere of energy security. This is fact that should be obvious both for carbon-fuel importers, like Germany, and exporters, like Libya.
A reduction in carbon emissions requires less use of oil and gas which, for the importer, will minimise dependency on foreign carbon fuels. For the exporter a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, which they possess in abundance, means they can maximise the earning potential of an extremely valuable commodity.
The European Union (EU) is a region which has, from childrens’ books to international treaties, promoted the idea of global warming, and has sought to limit carbon emissions to further its interests perhaps more than any other.
This is not because the EU cares especially about the weather but because the region has a 400 million population and the world’s second largest economy but next to zero carbon energy wealth.
Two-thirds of the world’s oil and gas reserves are under Russia and the Middle East but only 0.5% of world oil and 2% of gas reserves are under Europe (most of that isolated to the North Sea). To put this in perspective, just a few miles south of Europe on the North African coast, Algeria alone more than trumps the European Union’s oil and gas reserves.
Europe’s extraordinary dependency on imported fuel means international oil and gas transit routes (pipelines, canals, sea lanes) and the reserves of oil-producing countries are of tremendous economic and military importance to European Union energy security.
The threat to European energy suppliers is not even in the future but now. In January 2006 and 2007 Russia cut oil supplies to two states on the European periphery, Ukraine and Belarus, This had a knock-on effect to supplies in the Union.
In the height of winter, supplies to Poland and Germany went dry for a few days, and all across the continent gas prices were affected.
The prospect of Russia holding Europe as an energy hostage makes the European Union especially nervous of Russian activity near the Ceyan-Baku pipeline. Central Asian oil and gas reserves are expected to flow to Europe through this route using Georgia, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to circumvent Russia.
This region is now of such strategic importance that Georgia has become known to specialists as the "Fulda Gap" of a potential Carbon War – where Russia has a knife held to Europe’s jugular vein.
Why is Turkey’s 900’000 man army so valuable to NATO? The EU sees it as a potential force to defend energy supplies through the Caucasus.
Just last month a new organisation concerned with energy security came into existence: the Union for the Mediterranean. It was an alliance established with the EU on 13 July 2008 at the behest of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
One of its main aims, to assist peace between Israel and its neighbours, will incidentally help maintain European access to Middle Eastern oil and safeguard European access to North African oil and gas.
Not coincidentally, five days before, on 8th July 2008, the French signed an agreement to help Libya develop nuclear energy, which in turn should ensure France retains preferential access to Libyan fossil fuels.
The inclusion of states which do not border the Mediterranean coast in this sister Union – Jordan and Mauritiana – suggests the strategic Caucasus region, which also does not border the warm sea, may one day be explicitly within the European Union’s sphere of influence.
The European Union does not have the military to back-up its massive economic, cultural and diplomatic pull to do this now. Enforcement is a dirty job that has to be done by the United States.
Like the European Union, the idea of global warming in American politics cannot realistically be divorced from discussion of the United States’ strategic dependency on imported oil.
While America has not ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol the United States government has done a lot to promote the idea of global warming. Since 2001 it has spent an enormous sum of money – $37 billion – on climate change projects including tax and eco-energy initiatives.
In June 2002 the US government under the George W. Bush’s administration told the world global-warming was ‘man-made’ – which implied prudent action by Americans could change the world’s climate.
But, just like Europe, the United States has promoted nuclear energy research, green transport, funded vast subsidies as well as laws and taxes to reduce their citizens’ carbon footprints not because of real fears of rising sea levels and polar bears on melting ice caps but because of the increasing strategic economic and military costs of American dependency on imported fuel.
To mitigate just this addiction to foreign oil, in 2008, 70% of American oil imports came not from Central Asia or the Middle East, where so much American military hardware is stationed, but from the Western Hemisphere (Canada, Mexico, Venezuela) and West Africa (Nigeria and Angola).
Power politics underpins this subtle choice of energy suppliers, and suggests the United States’ already is preparing for a world where they do not have a significant military presence in the Middle East.
With organisations like OPEC and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, established in 2001, it is increasingly easy to imagine scenarios where America’s military could retreat because of overstretch.
At some point it may become too expensive for America to simultaneously defend world oil routes and reserves on behalf of allies while maintaining credible defense commitments to the European mainland and East Asia. This in addition to neutralising terrorist threats to the homeland the world over.
While the historical influence of OPEC is well known the threat to the west of the SCO is not. A security organisation dubbed ‘Warsaw Pact II’, it allies oil and gas giant Russia with coal-burning China and the oil rich Central Asian states.
A measure of the cooperation, Chinese and Russian army and fleets have already begun to train together.
In short, the organisation threatens a future in which the carbon fuel market is under anti-Western military and economic control to a greater extent than it already has been with OPEC, and the price of a barrel of oil, which recently peaked at $147.
Of particular concern is the relationship of these big powers, Russia and China, with Iran – a guest at the last SCO summit and touted as a possible future member.
China has agreed $100bn worth of oil and gas deals with the regime in Tehran. Meanwhile Russia maintains an active interest in Iran the spheres of nuclear energy and arm sales.
Iran, which borders Afghanistan, Iraq and the Caucasus and the Persian Gulf – one of the world’s most import energy chokepoints – is a strategic locus that would be an active geopolitical fault-line even were its firey and irrational opposition to Israel not considered.
Add Iran’s alliance with Venezuela and General Chavez’s proximity to the Panama Canal an anti-Western, totalitarian alliance, if motivated, could project influence worldwide: from the shipping lanes of the South China Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, the Panama Canal, pipelines from Russia to Europe, and the Caspian-Mediterranean pipeline through the Caucasus.
Clearly, a reduction in greenhouse gases that would lead to a reduction in oil and gas shipments would make these transport routes less significant and any potential anti-Western energy alliance less meaningful. The geopolitical facts makes one read anew one European bureaucrat’s suggestion we should put our economies "on a war footing for climate change".
The new political language of Global Warming is simply a mask for old Power Politics. Sooner or later politicians like Al Gore may have to admit to the people that Global Warming was not an inconvenient truth but a convenient falsehood.
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