Jihad vs. McWorld (51 page)

  3.
Vital World Statistics
, pp. 36–38.

  4.
There are a few odd cases like Albania, which have fallen from Second to Third World status as a consequence of the collapse of communism.

  5.
Paul Kennedy,
Preparing for the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 193.

  6.
Christopher J. Schmitz,
World Nonferrous Metal Production and Prices: 1700–1976
(Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1979), pp. 48–53. France had been the number one producer in the early years of industrialization, and more recently Jamaica, Surinam, and Guyana, and then Australia, took the lead.

  7.
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970
, Parts 1 and 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census), 1975.

  8.
Post-1970 statistics are from
Metal Statistics Annual Reports (19933–1960)
, (Frankfurt: Metallgesellschaft AG, 1993), and are calculated not in metric tons but in tI’s, units of one thousand tons.

  9.
Schmitz,
World Nonferrous Metal
, p. 53. Three American firms are thus still among the six dominant global aluminum companies. However, environmental concerns and high labor costs are slowly driving processing plants abroad as well, increasing American dependency still further. For more on American companies, see Steven Kendall Holloway,
The Aluminum Multinationals and the Bauxite Cartel
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); for more
detailed statistical information on American production, see U.S. Bureau of Mines,
Aluminum, Alumina and Bauxite Annual Reports
(Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1994).

10.
The story is the same for most metallurgical refining; e.g., “The cost of complying with federal environmental regulations is about six cents per pound of lead and between nine and fifteen cents per pound of copper—about 20 percent of the price of each metal in 1986, although rising metal prices have reduced this fraction to more like 10 percent today.” National Research Council, Committee on the Competitiveness of the Minerals and Metals Industry, 1990, p. 14.
  Recycling can make a difference. Over half the trash in many community dumps can be incinerated (after sorting) and used to produce energy (see Barry Meier, “Finding Gold, of a Sort, in Landfills,”
The New York Times
, September 7, 1993, p. A 14). In their use of minerals, Americans have in recent years secured as much as 25 percent of consumption from recycled materials. But in many cases, as with lead, environmental and safety considerations make recycling difficult. See
Lead Annual Review: 1993
(Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1994).

11.
Rocco Michael Paone,
Strategic Nonfuel Minerals and Eastern Security
(Lanham: University Press of America, 1992), p. 57.

12.
Clyde S. Brooks,
Metal Recovery from Industrial Wastes
(Chelsea: Lewis Publishers, 1991), p. 5. There are limits, however. Manganese, for example, essential to iron and steel production, cannot be recovered from waste; nor have viable substitutes been found. See
Manganese Annual Report: 1991
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1992), p. 3.

13.
Where once only precious metals were recycled, today we recycle copper and copper alloys, chromium, cobalt, cadmium, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, lead, titanium, and zinc, though in vastly different amounts. With cadmium, manganese, and molybdenum, for example, the amounts are negligible, while for titanium (crucial for major aerospace structural elements such as wing skins and supports, compresser blades, and rotor parts for helicopters) up to 80 percent of the metal form is recycled. In its mineral form, where it is used to produce pigments that appear in a wide diversity of goods including paints, papers, plastics, textiles, and such common commodities as Twinkies and toothpaste, no recycling is possible and as a result we are totally import-dependent. See Paone,
Nonfuel Minerals
.

14.
Aluminum, whose story of diminishing returns we told above, has in recent decades become something of a recycling success. As recently as 1975, we derived significantly less than 10 percent of our consumption from recycling. Today the figure is up to 42 percent of consumption, mainly as a consequence of garbage recycling. It turns out that 2 million tons of aluminum show up annually in municipal waste so that the excessive consumption habits that produced our dependency are happily producing byproduct wastes that are reducing the costs of that dependency. See Brooks,
Metal Recovery
.

15.
Paone,
Nonfuel Minerals
, p. 227. Of course, substitution is not always a simple matter. Chromium and cobalt, for example, are metals absolutely essential to modern technology. Stainless steel (corrosion-resistant steel) can be made without nickel, but not without chromium, and efforts for chromium have yet to produce results. Although it takes “years of intensive research and development to discover replacements and produce them on meaningful levels,” research and development efforts in the United States, Japan, and other advanced industrial nations are producing synthetic metals, high-performance plastics and ceramics, and advanced alloys and other composites that may eventually replace traditional natural metals in the world’s new technologies.

16.
Estimates suggest the nodules lying on the Pacific Ocean floor alone contain 359 times more cobalt, 83 times more nickel, and 9 times more copper than the world’s other known reserves. Deep-sea diving, high-pressure-withstanding submersibles are being developed by several national teams, and a consortium of Japanese companies including Hitachi, Sumitomo, and Mitsubishi expects to have its deep-sea robotic vacuums in place by 1996. Tony Emerson with H. Takayama, “Into the Challenger Deep,”
Newsweek
, July 5, 1993, pp. 62–63.

17.
The precise figures are offered with a useful narrative in
Vital Signs
, pp. 46–63.

18.
The United States, for example, derives nearly 75 percent of its electricity from coal, oil, and gas, 17 percent from nuclear, 9.5 percent from hydroelectric, and only 0.5 percent from geothermal. Only a handful of nations derive the majority of their electricity from nonfossil fuels. France and Belgium are heavily dependent on nuclear (over 60 percent each), while New Zealand, Canada, Austria, and Switzerland all derive a majority from hydroelectric. Meanwhile, literally dozens of countries (especially in Africa and the Middle East) derive virtually 100 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels (see
Vital World Statistics
, pp. 80–81).

19.
Until recently, bikes outnumbered cars in China 250 to 1; however, although it continues to use bicycles as a primary transportation vehicle, reducing dependency on petroleum, steel, rubber, aluminum, and matériel and at the same time sparing the planet additional environmental pollution, it is now planning to expand automobile production radically.
Vital Signs
, p. 21.

20.
C. A. S. Hall, C. J. Cleveland, and R. Kaufmann,
Energy and Resource Quality: The Ecology of the Economic Process
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1986), p. 1
61
.

21.
The Energy Information Administration,
Annual Energy Review: 1991
(Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1991).

22.
Figures from R. Samuelson, “The Global Village,” introductory essay to
Vital World Statistics
, no page.

23.
The Energy Information Administration,
Annual Energy Reports
(Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1992).

24.
In 1989, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman ranked, respectively, numbers one, two, three, eight, and nine in per capita
energy consumption in the world; whatever else their bad consumption habits bred, dependency was not among them.

25.
Some Western nations without fossil fuels have moved to alternative sources: alpine nations like Switzerland and Austria get most of the energy they use (other than in their autos) from hydroelectric and the rest from nuclear (37.7 percent). France, with the most developed nuclear industry in Europe, derives 64.2 percent of its domestic energy production from nuclear fuels, and Belgium is not far behind. South Korea (49 percent) and Japan (27.2 percent) are also significantly nuclear.
Vital World Statistics
, p. 81.

26.
About seven-eighths of its total energy consumption derives from imports—the French too love to drive! Despite its nuclear production, because it exports much of what it produces it must still import to satisfy domestic demand.

27.
See
Appendix A
.

28.
International Petroleum Encyclopedia
(Tulsa: Penwell Publishing, 1993), pp. 284–285.

29.
Jane Perlez, “Ukraine Miners Bemoan the Costs of Independence,”
The New York Times
, July 17, 1993, pp. A
I
,5.

  1.
Paul Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
(New York: Random House, 1988); and Kennedy,
Preparing for the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Vintage Books, 1993); David P Calleo,
Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance
(Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987).

  2.
Along with China,
The Economist’s
favorites for 1993 as reported in
The World in 1993
.

  3.
The Economist Book of Vital World Statistics
(New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 39. The list might also include nations like Puerto Rico, Cuba, Sweden, Portugal, Uruguay, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Brazil, and Turkey that devote at least a quarter of their GNPs specifically to manufacturing. I have not included Eastern European nations in the eighties, even though they rank high, because the importance of the industrial sector there is overstated by virtue of the fact that services (mostly undertaken by the state under communism) are excluded.

  4.
Joseph Nye, paraphrasing Stephen D. Krasner’s
International Regimes
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983) in Nye’s
Bound to Lead: The Changing Character of American Power
(New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 33.

  5.
Nye and Huntington and others believe that the prospects for American decline have been overstated. If the emergent service economy in its new age information/communication contours—the infotainment telemar-ket—is to be the new standard for growth, then countries like China and Japan are less threatening than they seem. In Nye’s portrait, Japan is a “one-dimensional economic power” despite its industrial might. It lacks the global cultural and institutional resources—the soft power resident in the new service sector—to maintain its current leadership. Nye, ibid., p. 166.

  6.
It is important to remember, in gauging America’s twentieth-century journey, that its wartime hegemony in world manufacturing and industrial production represented an artificially heightened profile as a result of the rest of the world’s artificially diminished potential. Nye suggests that with 1938 rather than 1945 as the historical marker, there is
no
American decline even in the manufacturing sector—only a decline from the artificially high wartime prominence. See Nye, ibid., pp. 5–6. Today the top eight banks are Japanese and the United States has only two in the top fifty—Citicorp at number 25 and Chemical at number 42.

  7.
The heavy industrial sectors remain important, of course. American steel production, which as recently as 1970 was still 20 percent of the world total, had fallen to 11 percent by 1985, but has remained stable or risen slightly since then.
Statistical Abstract of the United States
—
1992
, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census), p. 751, table 1266.

  8.
IBM is at number 7 and General Electric at number 9. Thirty of the top 100 remain American. Japan is next with 128 of the top 500, followed by Britain with 40, Germany with 32, and France with 30.
Fortune
, July 26, 1993, p. 188.

  9.
Business America
, April 6, 1992, p. 5.

10.
These figures are all from Gary Hoover,
Hoover’s Handbook of World Business
(Austin: Reference Press, 1994), pp. 158–161.

11.
Just as America conducts the bulk of its trade with its immediate NAFTA neighbors, so the Common Market and the Pacific Rim countries conduct over 60% of their trade within their own blocs.
Vital World Statistics
, p. 152. These figures for intra-European trade have increased regularly since the early seventies.

12.
The historical time comment is by former Nigerian President General Olusegun Obasanjo and the others are from reports also cited by Kennedy,
Preparing for the Twenty-First Century
, p. 210.

13.
Forbes
, July 19, 1993, pp. 182–184.

14.
All the figures in this section are from Gary Hoover,
Hoover’s Handbook of American Business
(Austin: Reference Press, 1994), and the
Hoover’s Handbook of World Business
.

15.
Richard W. Stevenson, “IKEA’s New Realities,”
The New York Times
, April 25, 1993, p. F 4.

  1.
Bill Keller, “Transition in Africa,”
The New York Times
, September 25, 1993, Section
I
, p.
I
.

  2.
Fortune
, July 26, 1993, pp. 188–204. Estimates vary so widely because they reflect different media—print, broadcast, billboard, and direct mail.

  3.
Ben H. Bagdikian,
The Media Monopoly
, fourth edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 246.