The Resource wars

A 30-year war for energy pre-eminence? More oil wars like Iraq are likely to follow. But that's where we're headed, and there's no turning back according to this article. The struggle for energy resources is guaranteed to grow ever more intense for a simple reason: there is no way the existing energy system can satisfy the world's future requirements. It must be replaced or supplemented in a major way by a renewable alternative system

Why 30 years? Because that's how long it will take for experimental energy systems like hydrogen power, cellulosic ethanol, wave power, algae fuel, and advanced nuclear reactors to make it from the laboratory to fullscale industrial development. Some of these systems (as well, undoubtedly, as others not yet on our radar screens) will survive the winnowing process. Some will not. And there is little way to predict how it will go at this stage in the game. At the same time the use of existing fuels like oil and coal, which spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is likely to plummet, thanks both to diminished supplies and rising concerns over the growing dangers of carbon emissions.
This will be a war because the future profitability, or even survival, of many of the world's most powerful and wealthy corporations will be at risk, and because every nation has a potentially life-or-death stake in the contest. For giant oil companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell, an eventual shift away from petroleum will have massive economic consequences. They will be forced to adopt new economic models and attempt to corner new markets, based on the production of alternative energy products, or risk collapse or absorption by more powerful competitors. In these same decades new companies will arise, some undoubtedly coming to rival the oil giants in wealth and importance.

The fate of nations, too, will be at stake as they place their bets on competing technologies, cling to their existing energy patterns, or compete for global energy sources, markets, and reserves. Because the acquisition of adequate supplies of energy is as basic a matter of national security as can be imagined, struggles over vital resources – oil and natural gas now, perhaps lithium or nickel (for electric-powered vehicles) in the future – will trigger armed violence.

Thirty years from now, for better or worse, the world will be a far different place: hotter, stormier, and with less land (given the loss of shoreline and low-lying areas to rising sea levels). Strict limitations on carbon emissions will certainly be universally enforced and the consumption of fossil fuels, except under controlled circumstances, actively discouraged. Oil will still be available to those who can afford it, but will no longer be the world's paramount fuel. New powers, corporate and otherwise, in new combinations will have risen with a new energy universe. No one can know, of course, what the world will look like or who will be the winners and losers on this planet. In the intervening 30 years, however, that much violence and suffering will have ensued goes without question. Nor can anyone say today which of the contending forms of energy will prove dominant in 2041 and beyond.

This article only further emphasises for SOYMB the need for democratic, social control of how the resources of our planet are managed. The vested interests of capitalism often stand in the way of achieving sustainability. Capitalism has not provided us with an integrated world strategy of productive development. The urgent need for world co-operation in dealing with the problems of world energy supply cannot be realised within the social productive relations and the existing economic and military framework. It is completely impossible under capitalism for humanity to use the earth's resources for the benefit of all people, and it is equally impossible for it to deploy the accumulated knowledge, the skills and the techniques of production which now exist in a direct relationship with human needs on a basis of world-wide co-operation.

In any consideration of existing social problems, the question of energy supply is of prime importance. It is self-evident that the task of providing decent conditions of life for the whole human population must include providing an adequate supply of energy. Socialism will mitigate the problem in a number of ways. From a practical point of view, society has available a wide range of technical options and there are large reserves of skill, labour and materials, yet at the same time we suffer from a chronic inability to take these up in a free and consciously regulated manner. The present structure of world energy supply involves an unnecessary waste of useful resources. Less material will be required because there will be no built-in obsolescence: equipment will be made to last for very long periods. And, of course, there will be no production of military equipment. Socialism would have no difficulty in adopting the various techniques of conservation which are well known. Yet mitigating a problem is not the same as solving it. Even the people of socialist society are likely to find themselves facing hard choices.