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george mitchell
The Composition of Kerry's Negotiating Team in Israel-Palestine
Mar 02, 2014
A few weeks back, the Guardian ran an article profiling the team that John Kerry has assembled to carry out his plan for bringing peace to Israel-Palestine. According to the story it includes some 10-12 people under the direction of the British-born and Australian-raised Martin Indyk, who for several decades has earned a living switching back and forth between in the influence-peddling sector as a major lobbyist-advocate for Israel, and in the US government, as a so-called "expert" on Middle
Indyk's devotion to the overall geo-strategic prerogatives of the Zionist state are so evident that he is often referred to in Washington policy circles as "Israel's lawyer."
According to the Guardian, the rest of the people on his team are: Ilan Goldenberg, Frank Lowenstein, David Makovsky, Julie Sawyer, Hady Amyr, Michael Yaffe, Laura Blumenfeld, Jonathan Schwartz, Phil Gordon, and Jon Allen.
While it is always a dicey proposition to impute the ethnic or religious background of someone from their name and/or online information, it would appear (and I am glad to proven wrong if it is not the case) that at least 7 of the 10 people on his team are Jewish. And of the people on the team whose names and/or available biographies provide somewhat less guidance in this regard, two, Hady Amr and Julie Sawyer, have held important appointments at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, the intellectual nerve center of so-called "liberal Zionism" in the US, which is to say, Zionism with almost all the same expansionist and ethnocratic goals as the Likudite brand, but with a less brutish and apocalyptical rhetoric.
Is it realistic to expect that a team of this particular makeup can or will serve as anything remotely resembling honest broker in the negotiations underway?
To state what I have just stated is, I know, to enter into what many consider to be scurrilous territory. I am aware--as my professor of Jewish Studies told me in no uncertain terms decades ago-- that to even raise the question of "dual-loyalty" in regard to the comportment of Jewish Americans is, for some, to engage in a contemporary form of "blood libel".
That's pretty strong stuff.
But if there is anything we have learned--or should have learned--in recent years it is that people and groups with entrenched positions of power (witness the serial and, at this point, frankly comical threats issued by James Clapper and his fellow fulminators to keep Dorothy and Toto--that's you and me--from looking at what is going on "behind the curtains" of the security state) will use any means of intimidation at their disposal to prevent public discourse from going to places where they do not want it to go.
So, the real question becomes, is it, in fact, a grave mental crime redolent of anti-Semitism to suspect that Jewish-Americans might be less than impartial when it comes matters concerning Israel?
This being the US, where there can be no differential treatment for any sub-group under our system of governance, we can resolve the question by asking, "What are the suppositions that have attended to the issue of dual-loyalty in other national and ethnic groups in the recent history of the US? "
During the last decades of the 19th century first third of the 20th century, the US was a key site of organization and financing for groups devoted to catalyzing nationalist movements in other places. The contributions of foreign-born US citizens and their offspring were absolutely essential to the consolidation of the Cuban, Czech, Slovak, Polish and Irish drives for national liberation during these times.
Did these people have dual loyalties? Of course they did! And very few people who know anything about this history would deny it.
It was against the backdrop of this then still quite recent history (obviously not without its strong xenophobic elements) that John Kennedy was forced to famously speak to the question of his Catholic identity.
Though the suspicions about his possible dual loyalty were quite vague, contrived and, had they been true, relatively trivial in terms of their possible impact on the US's geopolitical standing (Can we say the same about Indyk and company's role in Israel-Palestine?), he nonetheless felt the need to address them before the American people.
So, what has been the governmental approach to this issue in this country of immigrants?
In general, it has tacitly acknowledged the probable existence of partisan sympathies in regard to the country of origin within such activist groups, and this being the case, has--without openly condemning this very natural and generally benign phenomenon--nonetheless tended to shy away from having such people overly represented in operations or negotiations with a heavy bearing on the fate of their "other" country of spiritual allegiance.
For example, while the head of Bill Clinton's Northern Irish negotiating team, George Mitchell, was of Irish Catholic birth, he had quite little on his record--especially when compared to other Irish-American legislators--as an advocate for Ulster's Catholics before being named to his post on the President's negotiating team. If he was known for any ethnic identity, it was more for his Lebanese one.
Moreover, none of the three people running the policy shop behind him on the negotiations--Tony Lake, Nancy Soderberg and Jane Holl Lute--appear to have been Irish Catholics (as before, ready to stand corrected on this) or to have had any previous interest in the plight of Ulster's Catholics, or Unionists for that matter.
But let's imagine if Clinton had decided instead to appoint someone like NY Representative Peter King, a long-time advocate of the IRA's "right to defend itself" through violent means against the region's historically dominant Protestant Unionists, as the head of the negotiating team? And what if he then allowed him to put together a staff composed almost entirely of Irish Catholics?
Would it be a smear against the Irish Catholics in America, and throughout the world-wide Irish diaspora, to suggest that forming a team of these characteristics might not be a good idea, nor a particularly strong way of demonstrating this country's seriousness about arriving at a fair and just solution (a opposed to an unfair and imposed one) in that part of the world?
I don't think so. Rather, I think it would be seen as a fairly clear-cut case of exercising common sense.
And yet, if the US media silence on the issue is any indication, we are supposed to pretend that the make-up of the team that Kerry has put together, analogous in many ways to the King group I imagined in the case above, is of no real importance.
The case for respecting the media's injunction on this issue is further undermined by two other realities.
The first is the tendency among some of Israel's more high profile advocates in the US--Lawrence Summers comes most immediately to mind--to suggest that criticizing Israel is tantamount to engaging in anti-Semitism.
Indeed, this is one of the core assertions--in both its implied and explicit forms--of those who promote the notion that the world currently in the grip of a "New Anti-Semitism".
And this position is no longer just a matter of mere rhetoric among the televised class. In August of 2012, the California Legislature embedded this line of reasoning in law when it passed its HR 35, which holds, among other things, that suggesting that Israel is a racist or apartheid state, or that Israel has committed ethnic cleansing can and should be classified under the rubric of Anti-Semitism.
It's worth taking a moment to unpack the structure of that argument.
I may be wrong, but the belief here seems to be that criticism of Israel's acts is constitutes a slander upon the lives of the worldwide community of Jews. The underlying premise, then, would seem to be that all Jews are, in some way, morally or spiritually connected to the state of Israel, and from there, to each other.
If we accept that proposition, then doesn't it follow under the basic principles of reciprocal logic that all Jewish-Americans, including the ones on Kerry's negotiating team, are per se non-neutral and fundamentally biased parties when it comes to matters involving Israel?
I should make clear that I do not for a moment accept the premise that undergirds the school of thought I have just outlined, which to repeat, is that there is a moral umbilical cord that joins all Jews to Israel and, from there, to each other.
My sense is that Jews in America are, like everyone else under our system government, individuals first and foremost, people whose degree of devotion to particular foreign states and/ or the sub-culture they were born into is essentially unknowable.
Indeed, to embrace the underlying reasoning of HR 35 would force me, as someone who believes that any argument applied to a Jew and his ethnic milieu can be applied to me and mine, to also accept the absurd notion that a similar device of ethnic transitivity binds me morally, as a fellow Irish-American, to Peter King's boorish support of IRA violence.
The point here is that you can't have it both ways.
You can't make arguments that rest on the presumption of a seamless connectivity between Israel and the world-wide community of Jews, while simultaneously resisting the idea--and having the accusation Anti-Semitism hang like a Sword of Damocles over the heads of those who might deign to bring it up--that having a team headed by a prominent advocate for Israel, and made up largely of American Jews, might not be a really honest or effective way of "brokering" peace in the Israel-Palestine region.
The second undermining factor here is that, since September 11th, neither our government nor our media establishment has had much compunction about spreading the suspicions of "dual loyalty" in regard US-based Muslims in general, and Arabs in particular. Just ask a friend from one of these groups about what it is like to pass through airport security or to apply for a job in our government.
If it is outrageous to even think about the possible dual loyalty of Jews, isn't it also outrageous, in this country where it is patently illegal to grant or deny legal rights on the basis of ethnic identity, to contemplate, never mind institutionalize into an entire array of harassing and prosecutorial practices, the idea of Muslim and/or Arab dual loyalty?
Of course it is.
But I am not holding my breath waiting for the Pamela Gellers and David Horowitzes of the world, and important neo-cons in our government who regularly allege the same things in in somewhat subtler tones, to stop promoting this class of suspicions, suspicions that, if they were directed at Jews, would provoke loud cries about discrimination and/or Anti-Semitism.
Dual loyalties have been a ubiquitous part of the American experience.
For the most part, however, they have been harmless to the overall health of this country.
One reason for this is that public officials, aware of the potentially corrosive nature of such things, have generally been prudent about embedding people with highly-divided loyalties too deeply within policy-making structures with a direct bearing on what could be perceived as such people's secondary country of allegiance.
This prudence has long-since been abandoned in the case of US involvement in Israel-Palestine.
To suggest that it is Anti-Semitic to point this out, is rather mendacious, especially when high profile American supporters of Israel regularly advance arguments--some of which have now been written into US law--that presume the existence of a seamless moral bond between all US Jews and the geo-strategic prerogatives of the state of Israel. Or who regularly and quite zealously impute malignant "dual-loyalties" to millions of Muslim Americans and encourage our government to treat them in way that differ sharply from the ways it treats people of other national or ethnic backgrounds.
Post Script: Two days ago, Mahmoud Abbas, the man who is paid handsomely to serve a as Israel's ever-pliable Palestinian "negotiating partner" described Kerry's peace plan as "madness". Should we be surprised given the composition of Kerry's negotiating team?
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Oil, Azerbaijan and the Strange Case of Rick Bourke
Oil is the source of so much pain in the world. Around the globe, wherever oil is extracted, people suffer a constellation of injuries, from coups and dictatorship to pollution, displacement and death. Pipelines leak, refineries explode, tankers break up and deep-sea drill rigs explode. The thirst for oil disrupts democracies and the climate. Not far from the burgeoning fracking fields of Colorado, Frederic "Rick" Bourke sits in a minimum-security federal prison.
Oct 17, 2013
Oil is the source of so much pain in the world. Around the globe, wherever oil is extracted, people suffer a constellation of injuries, from coups and dictatorship to pollution, displacement and death. Pipelines leak, refineries explode, tankers break up and deep-sea drill rigs explode. The thirst for oil disrupts democracies and the climate. Not far from the burgeoning fracking fields of Colorado, Frederic "Rick" Bourke sits in a minimum-security federal prison. His crime: blowing the whistle on corruption and bribery in the oil-rich region of the Caspian Sea.
Rick Bourke is perhaps best known for founding the luxury handbag company Dooney and Bourke. He is a philanthropist, and has invested his wealth into ventures seeking novel cures for cancer. In the mid-1990s, he met a Czech national named Viktor Kozeny, dubbed "The Pirate of Prague," who reaped tens of millions of dollars through controversial deals during the privatization of Czech national assets. Kozeny sought greater fortunes by recruiting investors for the takeover of SOCAR, the state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic on the western shore of the Caspian Sea.
Kozeny promised unprecedented returns on the investments. Serious investors vetted the opportunity and sank huge sums into the enterprise, including Columbia University's investment fund, the insurance giant AIG, legendary hedge-fund manager Lee Cooperman, a longtime executive at Goldman Sachs, and former Senate majority leader George Mitchell. Bourke's attorney, Michael Tigar, summed up the result on the "Democracy Now!" news hour: "Kozeny was a crook. He stole every bit of Rick Bourke's money and all of the other investors' money. He bribed Azeri officials. He lives today happily unextradited in the Bahamas."
Kozeny paid huge sums to the president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev. Like Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Aliyev was a former top-level KGB official. He gained control of the country shortly after the Soviet breakup. His son, Ilham, during the period of Kozeny's scheme, was the head of SOCAR. Kozeny employed a Swiss lawyer named Hans Bodmer to coordinate the complex scam. An American named Thomas Farrell, who runs a bar in St. Petersburg, Russia, became the bagman, ferrying duffel bags of cash to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
The investment tanked, and Kozeny absconded with the remaining funds. Rick Bourke went to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, which has a history of going after white-collar crime. He spoke with Assistant District Attorney Mariam Klipper, an expert on privatization in Eastern Europe. The DA's office indicted Kozeny, who skirted the prosecution and is enjoying relative immunity in the Bahamas.
As the lone whistle-blower, Bourke also cooperated with federal prosecutors. Nevertheless, they decided to set their sights on him. He eventually was found guilty under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, not for bribing anyone, but for alleged knowledge of the bribes, even though the entire case rested on testimony of the Swiss lawyer, Bodmer, and Farrell. At sentencing, former assistant district attorney Klipper wrote to federal Judge Shira Scheindlin, seeking a lenient sentence for Bourke: "He was extremely helpful," she wrote. He "came to my office voluntarily and spoke candidly and with conviction about the case. We did not offer anything in return. ... I never had reason to doubt him." While Bodmer and Farrell also were indicted, they received very favorable plea deals. They both quickly left the U.S.
Much of the court record is sealed, likely because of the involvement of intelligence agencies. In a remarkable twist in the case, the former head of Britain's intelligence service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, and the former deputy director of operations at the CIA, James Pavitt, both sought to testify on Bourke's behalf. They were reportedly denied the opportunity, perhaps to protect the intelligence value of both Bodmer and Farrell. In the murky world of petroleum geopolitics, it is very difficult to know.
The son of Heydar Aliyev, Ilham Aliyev, succeeded his father as president of Azerbaijan, ruling the country with dictatorial control. He just won his third term as president last week, with the initial election results being reported the day BEFORE voting began. Human Rights Watch issued a report in September, "Tightening the Screws: Azerbaijan's Crackdown in Civil Society and Dissent."
Rick Bourke sits in the federal prison in Englewood, Colo., sentenced to a year and a day. Former Washington Post reporter Scott Armstrong, who founded the National Security Archive and chaired the Government Accountability Project, spent years investigating the case. As a senior investigator on the Senate Watergate Committee, Armstrong uncovered the existence of President Richard Nixon's secret taping system. He knows corruption when he sees it, and considers Bourke a genuine whistle-blower. He summed up the case: "This elaborate set of frauds that Kozeny was involved in were in essence covered up by the United States government, who chose instead to bring the full weight of their investigative enthusiasm against the whistle-blower. And that just shocks the conscience."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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How to Fry a Planet
The Third Carbon Age: Don’t for a Second Imagine We’re Heading for an Era of Renewable Energy
Aug 08, 2013
Many other experts share this view, assuring us that increased reliance on "clean" natural gas combined with expanded investments in wind and solar power will permit a smooth transition to a green energy future in which humanity will no longer be pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. All this sounds promising indeed. There is only one fly in the ointment: it is not, in fact, the path we are presently headed down. The energy industry is not investing in any significant way in renewables. Instead, it is pouring its historic profits into new fossil-fuel projects, mainly involving the exploitation of what are called "unconventional" oil and gas reserves.
"Humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas."
The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas.
That we are embarking on a new carbon era is increasingly evident and should unnerve us all. Hydro-fracking -- the use of high-pressure water columns to shatter underground shale formations and liberate the oil and natural gas supplies trapped within them -- is being undertaken in ever more regions of the United States and in a growing number of foreign countries. In the meantime, the exploitation of carbon-dirty heavy oil and tar sands formations is accelerating in Canada, Venezuela, and elsewhere.
It's true that ever more wind farms and solar arrays are being built, but here's the kicker: investment in unconventional fossil-fuel extraction and distribution is now expected to outpace spending on renewables by a ratio of at least three-to-one in the decades ahead.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumulative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion. In these years, investment in oil alone, at an estimated $10.32 trillion, is expected to exceed spending on wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, hydro, nuclear, and every otherform of renewable energy combined.
In addition, as the IEA explains, an ever-increasing share of that staggering investment in fossil fuels will be devoted to unconventional forms of oil and gas: Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy crude, shale oil and gas, Arctic and deep-offshore energy deposits, and other hydrocarbons derived from previously inaccessible reserves of energy. The explanation for this is simple enough. The world's supply of conventional oil and gas -- fuels derived from easily accessible reservoirs and requiring a minimum of processing -- is rapidly disappearing. With global demand for fossil fuels expected to rise by 26% between now and 2035, more and more of the world's energy supply will have to be provided by unconventional fuels.
In such a world, one thing is guaranteed: global carbon emissions will soar far beyond our current worst-case assumptions, meaning intense heat waves will become commonplace and our few remaining wilderness areas will be eviscerated. Planet Earth will be a far -- possibly unimaginably -- harsher and more blistering place. In that light, it's worth exploringin greater depth just how we ended up in such a predicament, one carbon age at a time.
The First Carbon Era
The first carbon era began in the late 1800s, with the introduction of coal-powered steam engines and their widespread application to all manner of industrial enterprises. Initially used to power textile mills and industrial plants, coal was also employed in transportation (steam-powered ships and railroads), mining, and the large-scale production of iron. Indeed, what we now call the Industrial Revolution was largely comprised of the widening application of coal and steam power to productive activities. Eventually, coal would also be used to generate electricity, a field in which it remains dominant today.
This was the era in which vast armies of hard-pressed workers built continent-spanning railroads and mammoth textile mills as factory towns proliferated and cities grew. It was the era, above all, of the expansion of the British Empire. For a time, Great Britain was the biggest producer and consumer of coal, the world's leading manufacturer, its top industrial innovator, and its dominant power -- and all of these attributes were inextricably connected. By mastering the technology of coal, a small island off the coast of Europe was able to accumulate vast wealth, develop the world's most advanced weaponry, and control the global sea-lanes.
The same coal technology that gave Britain such global advantages also brought great misery in its wake. As noted by energy analyst Paul Roberts in The End of Oil, the coal then being consumed in England was of the brown lignite variety, "chock full of sulfur and other impurities." When burned, "it produced an acrid, choking smoke that stung the eyes and lungs and blackened walls and clothes." By the end of the nineteenth century, the air in London and other coal-powered cities was so polluted that "trees died, marble facades dissolved, and respiratory ailments became epidemic."
For Great Britain and other early industrial powers, the substitution of oil and gas for coal was a godsend, allowing improved air quality, the restoration of cities, and a reduction in respiratory ailments. In many parts of the world, of course, the Age of Coal is not over. In China and India, among other places, coal remains the principal source of energy, condemning their cities and populations to a twenty-first-century version of nineteenth-century London and Manchester.
The Second Carbon Era
The Age of Oil got its start in 1859 when commercial production began in western Pennsylvania, but only truly took off after World War II, with the explosive growth of automobile ownership. Before 1940, oil played an important role in illumination and lubrication, among other applications, but remained subordinate to coal; after the war, oil became the world's principal source of energy. From 10 million barrels per day in 1950, global consumption soared to 77 million in 2000, a half-century bacchanalia of fossil fuel burning.
Driving the global ascendancy of petroleum was its close association with the internal combustion engine (ICE). Due to oil's superior portability and energy intensity (that is, the amount of energy it releases per unit of volume), it makes the ideal fuel for mobile, versatile ICEs. Just as coal rose to prominence by fueling steam engines, so oil came to prominence by fueling the world's growing fleets of cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships. Today, petroleum supplies about 97% of all energy used in transportation worldwide.
Oil's prominence was also assured by its growing utilization in agriculture and warfare. In a relatively short period of time, oil-powered tractors and other agricultural machines replaced animals as the primary source of power on farms around the world. A similar transition occurred on the modern battlefield, with oil-powered tanks and planes replacing the cavalry as the main source of offensive power.
These were the years of mass automobile ownership, continent-spanning highways, endless suburbs, giant malls, cheap flights, mechanized agriculture, artificial fibers, and -- above all else -- the global expansion of American power. Because the United States possessed mammoth reserves of oil, was the first to master the technology of oil extraction and refining, and the most successful at utilizing petroleum in transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and war, it emerged as the richest and most powerful country of the twenty-first century, a saga told with great relish by energy historian Daniel Yergin in The Prize. Thanks to the technology of oil, the U.S. was able to accumulate staggering levels of wealth, deploy armies and military bases to every continent, and control the global air and sea-lanes -- extending its power to every corner of the planet.
However, just as Britain experienced negative consequences from its excessive reliance on coal, so the United States -- and the rest of the world -- has suffered in various ways from its reliance on oil. To ensure the safety of its overseas sources of supply, Washington has established tortuous relationships with foreign oil suppliers and has fought several costly, debilitating wars in the Persian Gulf region, a sordid history I recount in Blood and Oil. Overreliance on motor vehicles for personal and commercial transportation has left the country ill-equipped to deal with periodic supply disruptions and price spikes. Most of all, the vast increase in oil consumption -- here and elsewhere -- has produced a corresponding increase in carbon dioxide emissions, accelerating planetary warming (a process begun during the first carbon era) and exposing the country to the ever more devastating effects of climate change.
The Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas
The explosive growth of automotive and aviation travel, the suburbanization of significant parts of the planet, the mechanization of agriculture and warfare, the global supremacy of the United States, and the onset of climate change: these were the hallmarks of the exploitation of conventional petroleum. At present, most of the world's oil is still obtained from a few hundred giant onshore fields in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Venezuela, among other countries; some additional oil is acquired from offshore fields in the North Sea, the Gulf of Guinea, and the Gulf of Mexico. This oil comes out of the ground in liquid form and requires relatively little processing before being refined into commercial fuels.
But such conventional oil is disappearing. According to the IEA, the major fields that currently provide the lion's share of global petroleum will lose two-thirds of their production over the next 25 years, with their net output plunging from 68 million barrels per day in 2009 to a mere 26 million barrels in 2035. The IEA assures us that new oil will be found to replace those lost supplies, but most of this will be of an unconventional nature. In the coming decades, unconventional oils will account for a growing share of the global petroleum inventory, eventually becoming our main source of supply.
The same is true for natural gas, the second most important source of world energy. The global supply of conventional gas, like conventional oil, is shrinking, and we are becoming increasingly dependent on unconventional sources of supply -- especially from the Arctic, the deep oceans, and shale rock via hydraulic fracturing.
In certain ways, unconventional hydrocarbons are akin to conventional fuels. Both are largely composed of hydrogen and carbon, and can be burned to produce heat and energy. But in time the differences between them will make an ever-greater difference to us. Unconventional fuels -- especially heavy oils and tar sands -- tend to possess a higher proportion of carbon to hydrogen than conventional oil, and so release more carbon dioxide when burned. Arctic and deep-offshore oil require more energy to extract, and so produce higher carbon emissions in their very production.
"Many new breeds of petroleum fuels are nothing like conventional oil," Deborah Gordon, a specialist on the topic at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in 2012. "Unconventional oils tend to be heavy, complex, carbon laden, and locked up deep in the earth, tightly trapped between or bound to sand, tar, and rock."
By far the most worrisome consequence of the distinctive nature of unconventional fuels is their extreme impact on the environment. Because they are often characterized by higher ratios of carbon to hydrogen, and generally require more energy to extract and be converted into usable materials, they produce more carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy released. In addition, the process that produces shale gas, hailed as a "clean" fossil fuel, is believed by many scientists to cause widespread releases of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
All of this means that, as the consumption of fossil fuels grows, increasing, not decreasing, amounts of CO2 and methane will be released into the atmosphere and, instead of slowing, global warming will speed up.
And here's another problem associated with the third carbon age: the production of unconventional oil and gas turns out to require vast amounts of water -- for fracking operations, to extract tar sands and extra-heavy oil, and to facilitate the transport and refining of such fuels. This is producing a growing threat of water contamination, especially in areas of intense fracking and tar sands production, along with competition over access to water supplies among drillers, farmers, municipal water authorities, and others. As climate change intensifies, drought will become the norm in many areas and so this competition will only grow fiercer.
Along with these and other environmental impacts, the transition from conventional to unconventional fuels will have economic and geopolitical consequences hard to fully assess at this moment. As a start, the exploitation of unconventional oil and gas reserves from previously inaccessible regions involves the introduction of novel production technologies, including deep-sea and Arctic drilling, hydro-fracking, and tar-sands upgrading. One result has been a shakeup in the global energy industry, with the emergence of innovative companies possessing the skills and determination to exploit the new unconventional resources -- much as occurred during the early years of the petroleum era when new firms arose to exploit the world's oil reserves.
This has been especially evident in the development of shale oil and gas. In many cases, the breakthrough technologies in this field were devised and deployed by smaller, risk-taking firms like Cabot Oil and Gas, Devon Energy Corporation, Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation, and XTO Energy. These and similar companies pioneered the use of hydro-fracking to extract oil and gas from shale formations in Arkansas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Texas, and later sparked a stampede by larger energy firms to obtain stakes of their own in these areas. To augment those stakes, the giant firms are gobbling up many of the smaller and mid-sized ones. Among the most conspicuous takeovers was ExxonMobil's 2009 purchase of XTO for $41 billion.
That deal highlights an especially worrisome feature of this new era: the deployment of massive funds by giant energy firms and their financial backers to acquire stakes in the production of unconventional forms of oil and gas -- in amounts far exceeding comparable investments in either conventional hydrocarbons or renewable energy. It's clear that, for these companies, unconventional energy is the next big thing and, as among the most profitable firms in history, they are prepared to spend astronomical sums to ensure that they continue to be so. If this means investment in renewable energy is shortchanged, so be it. "Without a concerted policymaking effort" to favor the development of renewables, Carnegie's Gordon warns, future investments in the energy field "will likely continue to flow disproportionately toward unconventional oil."
In other words, there will be an increasingly entrenched institutional bias among energy firms, banks, lending agencies, and governments toward next-generation fossil-fuel production, only increasing the difficulty of establishing national and international curbs on carbon emissions. This is evident, for example, in the Obama administration's undiminished support for deep-offshore drilling and shale gas development, despite its purported commitment to reduce carbon emissions. It is likewise evident in the growing international interest in the development of shale and heavy-oil reserves, even as fresh investment in green energy is being cut back.
As in the environmental and economic fields, the transition from conventional to unconventional oil and gas will have a substantial, if still largely undefined, impact on political and military affairs.
U.S. and Canadian companies are playing a decisive role in the development of many of the vital new unconventional fossil-fuel technologies; in addition, some of the world's largest unconventional oil and gas reserves are located in North America. The effect of this is to bolster U.S. global power at the expense of rival energy producers like Russia and Venezuela, which face rising competition from North American companies, and energy-importing states like China and India, which lack the resources and technology to produce unconventional fuels.
At the same time, Washington appears more inclined to counter the rise of China by seeking to dominate the global sea lanes and bolster its military ties with regional allies like Australia, India, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. Many factors are contributing to this strategic shift, but from their statements it is clear enough that top American officials see it as stemming in significant part from America's growing self-sufficiency in energy production and its early mastery of the latest production technologies.
"America's new energy posture allows us to engage [the world] from a position of greater strength," National Security Advisor Tom Donilon asserted in an April speech at Columbia University. "Increasing U.S. energy supplies act as a cushion that helps reduce our vulnerability to global supply disruptions [and] affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals."
For the time being, the U.S. leaders can afford to boast of their "stronger hand" in world affairs, as no other country possesses the capabilities to exploit unconventional resources on such a large scale. By seeking to extract geopolitical benefits from a growing world reliance on such fuels, however, Washington inevitably invites countermoves of various sorts. Rival powers, fearful and resentful of its geopolitical assertiveness, will bolster their capacity to resist American power -- a trend already evident in China's accelerating naval and missile buildup.
At the same time, other states will seek to develop their own capacity to exploit unconventional resources in what might be considered a fossil-fuels version of an arms race. This will require considerable effort, but such resources are widely distributed across the planet and in time other major producers of unconventional fuels are bound to emerge, challenging America's advantage in this realm (even as they increase the staying power and global destructiveness of the third age of carbon). Sooner or later, much of international relations will revolve around these issues.
Surviving the Third Carbon Era
Barring unforeseen shifts in global policies and behavior, the world will become increasingly dependent on the exploitation of unconventional energy. This, in turn, means an increase in the buildup of greenhouse gases with little possibility of averting the onset of catastrophic climate effects. Yes, we will also witness progress in the development and installation of renewable forms of energy, but these will play a subordinate role to the development of unconventional oil and gas.
Life in the third carbon era will not be without its benefits. Those who rely on fossil fuels for transportation, heating, and the like can perhaps take comfort from the fact that oil and natural gas will not run out soon, as was predicted by many energy analysts in the early years of this century. Banks, the energy corporations, and other economic interests will undoubtedly amass staggering profits from the explosive expansion of the unconventional oil business and global increases in the consumption of these fuels. But most of us won't be rewarded. Quite the opposite. Instead, we'll experience the discomfort and suffering accompanying the heating of the planet, the scarcity of contested water supplies in many regions, and the evisceration of the natural landscape.
What can be done to cut short the third carbon era and avert the worst of these outcomes? Calling for greater investment in green energy is essential but insufficient at a moment when the powers that be are emphasizing the development of unconventional fuels. Campaigning for curbs on carbon emissions is necessary, but will undoubtedly prove problematic, given an increasingly deeply embedded institutional bias toward unconventional energy.
Needed, in addition to such efforts, is a drive to expose the distinctiveness and the dangers of unconventional energy and to demonize those who choose to invest in these fuels rather than their green alternatives. Some efforts of this sort are already underway, including student-initiated campaigns to persuade or compel college and university trustees to divest from any investments in fossil-fuel companies. These, however, still fall short of a systemic drive to identify and resist those responsible for our growing reliance on unconventional fuels.
For all President Obama's talk of a green technology revolution, we remain deeply entrenched in a world dominated by fossil fuels, with the only true revolution now underway involving the shift from one class of such fuels to another. Without a doubt, this is a formula for global catastrophe. To survive this era, humanity must become much smarter about this new kind of energy and then take the steps necessary to compress the third carbon era and hasten in the Age of Renewables before we burn ourselves off this planet.
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