Jihad vs. McWorld (10 page)

M
ANY MINERAL RESOURCES
can be recycled or replaced by technological surrogates, but energy resources—above all fossil fuels—on the scale they are currently being consumed around the globe surely cannot. There is a little hope to be had from renewable resources. These include solar power obtained from photovoltaic cells, whose production grew an average of 15 percent a year from 1981–91 even as their price fell dramatically; geothermal power—the tapping of the earth’s hot fluids and gases—which in 1950 produced only 239 megawatts of electricity but today produces nearly 10,000 megawatts or enough to meet the energy needs of 6 million energy-guzzling Americans; wind power, which in just eleven years has gone from 15 to 2,652 megawatts; hydroelectric power, which satisfies as much as a third of the power needs of many developing countries and has grown from under 50,000 to well over a half million megawatts since 1950; and nuclear power—although the environmental dangers have brought it to a virtual standstill in the last few years after reaching a high in 1990 of 328,000 megawatts or less than half of hydroelectric.
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Yet all of these resources together have made only a small dent in world petroleum consumption—considerably less than the dent made by the oil crises and recessions of the seventies and eighties.
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Global production after peaking in 1979 at almost 63 million barrels a day has settled at between 59 and 60 million barrels a day since 1989: this represents a full 40 percent of the total energy globally consumed each day, and while production is well under its peak potential today, long-term prospects grow dimmer as the time frame
grows longer. The advanced economies that are creating McWorld depend on the automobile, a zealously petroleum-dependent mode of transportation that symbolizes both prosperity and the individualism and mobility associated with liberal democratic societies: how then can developing countries be dissuaded from striving to automobilize their societies as China now wishes to do?
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The world still spins on the energy of fossil fuels—nonrecyclable and irreplaceable. The United States represents an especially foreboding case study, for here is one of the world’s richest fossil fuel producers using up its own resources in an orgy of consumption that is reflected neither in elevated living standards nor in a proportionately larger GDP. Nor have we learned much from two major crises in supply and our ever more debilitating dependency on foreign oil: gas prices remain absurdly low, taxes (even after the Clinton administration’s budget initiative added 4.3 cents) are insignificant, and strategic stockpiles unimpressive.

Even more than with minerals, energy resources represent a form of power that seems to shrink as it grows. That is the irony of modernization, described by modernity’s first incisive critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau had seen that the power given us by science and technology to gratify our needs actually compounds and multiplies them so that as our power increases our satisfaction diminishes. If happiness is a function of needs in harmony with our capacity to satisfy them, “progress” will always mean that power, however fast it grows, will be outstripped by needs, which grow faster. Hence, modern man’s conundrum: the more powerful he becomes, the more miserable he feels. All that we have only serves to make us “need” more, and the more we have the more we need in order to protect what we have. Like the proverbial landowner who yearns only for the land adjacent to his, our modern consumer needs only products that are proximate to products he already possesses. The TV “needs” the VCR, which “needs” a laser disc player, which “needs” a computer, which “needs” endless software. The automobile first “needs” theft protectors and radar detectors and cassette players and onboard computers, and then it needs places to go and drive-in facilities, then parking lots and strip malls and pretty soon it needs all of what passes for modern civilization—goods that a person must slave for over a lifetime to begin to be able to afford. And then of course she will
complain that she has no leisure to enjoy the “possessions” that turn out to feel more like her owners than her property.

What Hobbes called the quest for power after power that ends only in death has become the quest for oil wellhead after oil wellhead that ends only in economic and environmental bankruptcy. In America, it hardly seemed possible that supply could ever be overtaken by demand. From the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania just before the Civil War—a discovery that would make John D. Rockefeller’s fortune—right down to the 1930s, exploration seemed to uncover new reserves far faster than an industrializing world used them up. Yet within a few years of the end of World War II, America found itself sliding into dependency, though reliance on imports was at first thought to be nothing more than a matter of convenience and efficiency.

Why pump expensive domestic petroleum when foreign oil was so cheap? In the century’s first three quarters, oil use in America had grown by about 3 percent a year, while real Gross National Product (GNP) was growing at an average 4 percent a year.
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Domestic production, peaking in 1970, managed to keep up to need, with 88 percent of consumption still being met from domestic American sources in 1970.
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But as a result of the 1973 Mideast War and oil embargo, the one-tenth or less of our fuel needs that depended on foreign imports in the sixties nearly tripled by 1974, creating for the first time a vivid sense of national jeopardy. Imports in 1974 had grown to 28 percent of consumption while oil prices had spiraled up from $1.73 a barrel in 1970 to $10.89 at the end of 1974.
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By 1980, imports had risen to 38 percent of domestic consumption and by 1990 to 42 percent.
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Today, despite a lingering business turndown and roller-coaster consumption patterns that have kept world oil production under the peak production levels reached in the seventies, American import dependency has remained well above 40 percent and in 1994 went, for the first time, above 50 percent.

These long-term rising figures for imports reflect both a very gradual decline in domestic production and an appetite for energy that, though it moderated in the late seventies as prices rose, has continued to grow. While domestic energy consumption fell from an alltime high of 11.30 million barrels per day in 1970 (for crude oil and natural gas), to around 9 million barrels per day in 1990, consumption
rose from less than 15 million barrels per day to an all-time high of nearly 18 million barrels in the late seventies (although since then consumption has fallen, risen, and fallen again, leaving it only slightly higher today than it was fifteen years ago). If prices stay low, experts at the Energy Information Administration predict that domestic production may fall to about 6 million barrels per day by 2010, while consumption could rise to nearly 24 million barrels per day, a deficit of 17 or 18 million barrels that could add up to a dependency on imports of nearly 75 percent of consumption by 2010.

The American story is every developed nation’s energy nightmare. If we exclude those OPEC nations like Qatar and Bahrain with minuscule populations and gargantuan production surpluses,
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almost all of the industrial nations are import-dependent, in many cases almost completely so. With roughly one-half of the world’s GDP between them (27 percent for the United States, 16 percent for Japan, and 7 percent for Germany), America, Japan, and Germany import far more than half of their energy—under 50 percent for the United States but more than 90 percent for Japan and somewhere in between for Germany.
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Because it has gone nuclear, France produces most of its own energy, but when we look at consumption rather than production, it too remains import-dependent.
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Among OECD nations, only Canada and Australia, and with their North Sea oil, Norway and the United Kingdom, turn out to be net energy producers—which has allowed Norway to stay out of Europe. On the other hand, the world’s five largest economies are the world’s largest energy importers. The stronger the nation, the more fragile its independence.

There also lurks in this welter of statistics a powerful element of injustice that illuminates a darker side of McWorld. Even as nations are superseded by transnational markets, their populations remain the producers and consumers of the global market. The unequal distribution of world resources skews and unbalances affairs, and turns McWorld—its virtues and its vices—into a playground for some and a cemetery for others. If we look at energy consumption in the rich nations where America is again the archetype we get a disturbing take on fairness. Not only is there less and less to go around, but what is left is being more and more unfairly and inefficiently allocated. Unfairness thus turns out to be a crucial trait of McWorld, and
although it is not our primary focus here it cannot be ignored.
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(See
Appendix A
.)

W
ITH RESPECT TO
McWorld, the clearest conclusion that can be drawn from this review is that the integrating forces of interdependence associated with globalism actually reinforce the fragmenting tendencies of Jihad they seem to combat. For mineral and energy use patterns seem both to enhance interdependence by reinforcing the imperative for global cooperation
and
to underscore divisiveness, injustice, and weakness, disclosing the susceptibility of the new world economy to the forces of Jihad. The vulnerability of the developed countries’ emerging McWorld is thrown into sharp relief by asking how many of the world’s primary energy producers outside the OECD are likely candidates for Jihad and its associated pathologies: that is, how many seem ripe for episodes of internal turmoil, political instability, civil war, or tribal fragmentation. (See risk tables) Among Jihad-prone producers, we can surely count Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Libya, Nigeria, and ex-Yugoslavia as high-risk; moderate-risk nations—would you invest your children’s savings in any of the following?—include Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Albania, Romania, the republics of the former USSR, Angola, Cameroon, the Congo, Gabon, China, India, Malaysia, and Mexico, and of course the rest of the Middle East including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Egypt, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. In 1991, the high-risk group accounted for almost 8 million barrels per day of 60 million worldwide; that is about 13 percent of the world’s oil production.