BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

If you have any doubt that we are fighting in Iraq to control its oil fields -- or that Cheney and Bush want to force Iran into submission for the same reason -- read this book. The "great game" of this new century is war over dwindling oil supplies as industrial growth in countries other than the U.S., particularly China, force conflicts over natural resources.

Just look at China and Sudan -- and Bush's recent interest in Africa. It's about the oil.

Klare believes that only international cooperation can avoid ruinous and disastrous military confrontation.

From the Publisher:

From the author of the now-classic Resource Wars, an indispensable account of how the world�s diminishing sources of energy are radically changing the international balance of power

Recently, an unprecedented Chinese attempt to acquire the major American energy firm Unocal was blocked by Congress amidst hysterical warnings of a Communist threat. But the political grandstanding missed a larger point: the takeover bid was a harbinger of a new structure of world power, based not on market forces or on arms and armies but on the possession of vital natural resources.

Surveying the energy-driven dynamic that is reconfiguring the international landscape, Michael Klare, the preeminent expert on resource geopolitics, forecasts a future of surprising new alliances and explosive danger. World leaders are now facing the stark recognition that all materials vital for the functioning of modern industrial societies (not just oil and natural gas but uranium, coal, copper, and others) are finite and being depleted at an ever-accelerating rate. As a result, governments rather than corporations are increasingly spearheading the pursuit of resources. In a radically altered world� where Russia is transformed from battered Cold War loser to arrogant broker of Eurasian energy, and the United States is forced to compete with the emerging �Chindia� juggernaut�the only route to survival on a shrinking planet, Klare shows, lies through international cooperation.

�If you want to understand the future of international relations, worry less about ideology and more about oil reserves. Michael Klare's superb new book explains, in haunting detail, the trends that will lead us into a series of dangerous traps, unless we muster the will to transform the way we use energy in this country. As illuminating as it is unsettling.�

�Bill McKibben, author The Bill McKibben Reader

From an online reviewer:
"Rising Powers Shrinking Planet." should be read by every candidate seeking the Presidency in the 2008 election. It is work not to be dismissed or ignored.

The geopolitical issues of oil in general, and the terrible concept of trading "blood for oil" are matters that should be of the greatest interest to every American. This book is superbly written and researched.

Excerpt from "Rising Powers":

At the same time, the competition for energy has never been so intense. Since World War II, the major industrialized powers�the United States, Japan, and the Western European countries�have jointly consumed the lion�s share of the global energy supply. Because the energy industry was generally successful in boosting supplies to satisfy rising demand, the world was spared the cutthroat competition that had characterized the Eurasian energy race prior to World War II and helped launch the war in the Pacific in 1941. In the past few decades, however, a new class of contenders has entered the fray�rising economic dynamos like China, India, and Brazil�and it is not at all apparent, looking into the future, that the energy industry can satisfy both the surging needs of these new consumers and the already elevated requirements of the mature industrial powers. �Energy developments in China and India are transforming the global energy system by dint of their sheer size and their growing weight in international fossil-fuel trade,� the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in its World Energy Outlook for 2007. Despite huge investment in new oil-production capacity additions, �it is very uncertain whether they will be sufficient to compensate for the decline in output at existing fields and keep pace with the projected increase in demand.�7 Hence, an intense and sometimes brutal competition for untapped supplies has erupted.

Every nation with a significant need for imported energy is contributing to the intensity of this struggle, but there can be no ignoring the dramatic impact of China�s soaring growth rates. As recently as 1990, China accounted for a mere 8 percent of global energy consumption while the United States was absorbing 24 percent of the available supply and the Western European nations 20 percent. But China�s growth in the past decade and a half has been so vigorous that, by 2006, its net energy use had jumped to 16 percent of total world consumption. If its growth continues at this torrid pace, China will hit the 21 percent mark by 2030�exceeding all other countries, including the United States.8 The challenge for China, of course, will be to procure all that additional energy. To succeed, the Chinese leadership will have to oversee a substantial increase in the yield of its domestic energy production while obtaining staggering quantities of imported fuels, especially oil. By the nature of things, this can only happen at the expense of other energy-starved nations. No wonder the rise of China has produced such alarm among older industrial powers.

What makes all this even more anxiety provoking is another worrisome factor in the energy-squeeze equation: intimations of future scarcities of vital fuels, especially petroleum. An increasing body of evidence suggests that the era of �easy oil� is over and that we have entered a new period of �tough oil.� Each new barrel added to global reserves, experts suggest, will prove harder and more costly to extract than the one before; it will be buried deeper underground, farther offshore, in more hazardous environments, or in more conflict-prone, hostile regions of the planet. A similar scenario is likely to play out when it comes to most other existing fuels, including coal, natural gas, and uranium. Given this, the future adequacy of global energy stocks is in serious doubt.9

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