It’s nice to think that we can ween ourselves off our “addiction to oil” (to use George W. Bush’s phrase), that we can power our society off the sun and the wind, grabbing energy straight from nature. And since no one can own the breeze or light, then world will be a more peaceful place.
But of course it’s not simple. Those hands that grab nature’s energy have to be built from something, and some of those things are quite scarce.
Foreign Policy‘s energy issue from last summer has a good run down of the ways that resource scarcity could put the squeeze on green energy, and give us new things to fight over in the post-oil age.
First of all, there’s still trade to bicker over. Any kind of workable deal on climate change will have to somehow get the world to stop burning fossil fuels before they’re all burnt up. (We might use up most of the cheap oil, and even the cheap gas, but there will still be cheap coal we need to keep in the ground if we’re going to keep the planet from cooking.)
To keep some countries from cheating on the world and using cheap, dirty energy while everyone else is moving toward more expensive, cleaner energy, it will likely take some kind of trade rules. And if they’re going to have teeth, there have to be the threat of sanctions to back them up. But if someone actually does get sanctioned, they might not be too happy about it.
Second, countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and perhaps Russia could become fodder for a modern-day Gibbon, who could write a tome called The Rise and Fall of Oil Empires. These countries are likely to rake in the money as oil prices soar (although their production costs will rise as well). But if they don’t use this money wisely to move “beyond petroleum” (following BP’s motto), then they could face a big crash as their oil runs out. Think Yemen, times 100.
And as Stephen Colbert taught us all, if you rearrange the letters in Yemen, it spells enemy. If these oil countries start to collapse, then the world could wind up fighting over the remaining oil—or to keep unrest from spreading.
Then there are other resources that we could fight over, which could become more dear in coming years—both because of growing populations and rising standards of living, but also because green energy could require a lot of resources.
A big nuclear ramp-up would make uranium something to fight over. Water could become “the new oil” if we grow a lot more biofuels, or even because of electric cars.
And if we want to store our green energy for when the sun don’t shine (or the wind don’t blow), then we’ll need batteries—and barring some kind of breakthrough in using viruses to build nanostructured batteries, or something like that—then we’ll probably need a lot more lithium. Will the handful of countries that hold most of the world’s lithium reserves—Chile, Bolivia, Russia—become new battlegrounds?
Read all about it in FP‘s “Is a Green World a Safer World?”
Related posts:
- “What Resource Wars?” by David Victor in The National Interest, 2007-11-12...
- “Relative to the risks of coal mining and oil exploration, the downsides of offshore wind turbines seem minor.” —USA Today editorial on approval of the Cape Wind offshore wind farm...
- Big Oil now a small fry, Enormous Oil gaining power The share of the world's oil produced and controlled by private companies like Exxon and Chevron has shrunk a lot...
