William R Polk: Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, & Guerrilla Warfare, From the American Revolution to Iraq (2007, Harper)

Chapter 1: The American Insurgency (p. 14):

What the American insurgents were doing piecemeal foreshadowed a pattern. Everywhere insurgents spend more energy attacking their fellow inhabitants than the foreign enemy. They do so in part, no doubt, because civilians are easier targets than soldiers, but this is not the crucial reason: it is that unless they can forge a solid core of like-minded people, they cannot hope to survive, much less to "win." Those natives who join the foreigners are more dangerous to the national cause than the foreigners themselves because, unlike the foreigners, they have the capability to form a native government. Thus, in America in the 1760s and early 19770s, as in each subsequent guerrilla war including most recently Iraq, insurgents more often attack their recalcitrant fellows than the foreign soldiers. By war's end, nearly one hundred thousand -- roughly one in each twenty colonists -- had fled.

Chapter 2: The Spanish Guerrilla Against the French (p. 26):

The sack of Cordova showed the people of Saragossa and other cities what a French attack involved: the city was looted, men were massacred, and women were molested; by ransacking the cathedral and gang-raping nuns, the French made the Church their enemy, and it responded in its traditional way. Miracles proclaimed the defeat of the invader. Priests exhorted the people to take up arms and fight the "Godless French." Foreshadowing the role of mullahs and imams in modern Islamic resistance movements, priests proclaimed, "Heaven will be attained by killing the French heretical dogs" and promised that "any soldier wounded fighting the French was ensured 100 years relief from purgatory [and that] anyone killed would be reborn three days later in paradise."

(p. 30):

The guerrilla strategy, which evolved in the circumstances of the confrontation, came down to two key activities. The first was to eliminate or neutralize those Spaniards who tried to collaborate with the French. This was essentially the same as the American insurgents did with the American Loyalists. Within a year or so after the fight began in 1808, those who sided with the French were safe only in cities garrisoned by French troops. Later, when the French evacuated Madrid, they took with them these afrancesados. The second aspect of guerrilla strategy was to draw the French out to protect their supply lines. The French answer, then and later in Vietnam, was to station troops in blockhouses along the routes. At nighttime, when they could no longer communicate with one another (as they did with semaphores) each small garrison became vulnerable. What happened with blockhouses also pertained to towns. One guerrilla band was, in this way, able even to capture a small French-held city. To prevent the guerrillas from gaining local superiority, the French had to give up trying to control all Spanish territory and concentrate only on cities and supply routes. To keep from being overwhlemed at any given location, they had to employ large numbers of troops. One relatively small guerrilla partida, under the leadership of Javier Mina, is said to have occupied ten thousand French troops. This was more or less comparable to what Tito was able to do against troops of the German army and Ho Chi Minh did against the French. Finally, to keep the supply route from the French frontier to Madrid open, about a quarter of the entire French force had to be spread out along the way.

(pp. 32-33):

Consequently, as soon as the French began to withdraw, the Spanish rulers began to dismantle the guerrilla organizations. It proved far easier than anyone could have anticipated. With the French in retreat, there were no longer convoys to be looted. With French soldiers no longer threatening them, villagers who had supported the guerrilla bands no longer saw any need to do so. Contributions ceased to be given freely, and when demanded focused hostility on the guerrillas. As the royal government co-opted or purged the popular juntas, it reestablished its monopoly of taxation and customs so that the guerrilla leaders were no longer able to pay their followers. In desperation, the most successful of the guerrilla leaders, Javier Mina, appealed to the newly restored monarch, Fernando, to incorporate his disintegrating force into the Spanish army. In reply, Fernando issued a proclamation effectively proscribing the entire resistance: all organizations, both military and civil, that had not existed before the French invasion were to cease operation immediately. They had, in effect, been turned, as the French always insisted they were, into outlaws.

Chapter 3: The Philippine "Insurrection" (p. 36):

The southern population was converted to Islam in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by traders and teachers coming from Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Islam spread quickly, and two Muslim kingdoms dominated the Philippines when the Spaniards first began to arrive in the sixteenth century. From their own historical experience, the Spaniards saw the native Muslims as just another species of the Arabs and Berbers, whom they had recently evicted from Spain and were then fighting in Africa; so they fastened the name Moro (Moor) upon the Muslim Filipinos. Spanish policy toward the Moros was simple: it was genocide. After three centuries of sporadic but intensely savage warfare, Muslims had been reduced from more than 50 percent to about 5 percent of the total population.

(pp. 44-45):

In the meantime, to try to square what was actually happening with what the administration wanted the American public to believe, the high command tried to keep American casualties low. So it began to recruit a native army, as the French had done in Spain and were later to do in Algeria. In the Philippines, these special forces were known as the "Scouts." Divided into small flying columns, as Callwell had advocated and as the British later did with their "shock companies" in Ireland and South Africa, these groups raided villages, captured men they could turn by bribery or torture, and carried out savage reprisals. In a particularly daring raid, one small detachment penetrated Aguinaldo's hideout, took him prisoner, and convinced him -- he had previously shown himself particularly susceptible to such convincing in return for money -- to declare the surrender of his partisans.

What happened then was what almost half a century later ensured the collapse of the Greek EAM/ELAS insurgency: the insurgents split into two camps. Those who followed Aguinaldo put down their arms, while the others, deprived of Aguinaldo's leadership, lost coordination and were driven into places where they could not supply themselves. The Filipino population was confused. Since Aguinaldo was the best-known leader, most followed his example, relieved that their struggle had ended. [ . . . ] Loss of popular support was mortal to the resistance. The process was speeded up and spread by various forms of counterinsurgency: those Filipinos who were thought likely to continue to support the insurgents were "regrouped" to places where they were cut off from the still-active insurgents and watched helplessly as their villages were burned and their food supplies confiscated; to prevent the insurgents from getting arms, even the newly created Filipino police were disarmed. The suppression was as brutal as in any guerrilla war.

The Filipino resistance reemerged with the Japanese occupation in WWII, producing a group known as the Hukbalahap ("Huks"). That group was in turn suppressed when the US recovered the Philippines (p. 48):

[General Douglas] MacArthur's background showed in his first actions: he disarmed as many of the Huk guerrillas as could be trapped, arrested their leaders, and arranged that men of the old regime, even those known to have worked for the Japanese, be appointed to senior government posts. His policy seemed almost calculated to provoke the guerrillas, since more than a million people had been killed during the Japanese occupation. Undeterred, MacArthur pardoned Manuel Roxas, the best known and most senior Filipino collaborator, and threw American support (and money) into Roxas's campaign to become Philippine president in 1946. Then on July 4, 1946, he moved to undercut the Hukbalahap movement by what in most circumstances would have been a winning ploy, recognizing Philippine independence.

Chapter 4: The Irish Struggle for Independence

Chapter 5: Tito and the Yugoslav Partisans

Chapter 6: The Greek Resistance

Chapter 7: Kenya and the Mau Mau (pp. 114-115):

Certainly the Mau Mau had objective reasons to revolt. The European and South African settlers had taken lands that the 1.5 million Kikuyu regarded as their national patrimony and had converted virtually the entire Kikuyu people into serfs to work it for them. The Kikuyu had no civil rights and were subjected daily to arbitrary police and settler humiliation and violence. They had no effective say in the management of their own affairs and certainly none in managing Kenya. Moreover, while at that time other areas of Africa seemed to be moving toward freedom -- uhuru -- Kenya looked to be poised to slip even further under white control as was then happening in South African and Southern Rhodesia. Even where Britain loosened the reins of its empire, it was not natives who benefited but white colonists. Thus, the Kikuyu had no reason to hope for improvement and much to fear from the twenty-nine thousand whites who dominated them.

Chapter 8: The Algerian War of National Independence (pp. 142-143):

The cost of the war was horrific and in some ways is still being paid. During the eight years of fighting, at least half a million Algerians -- about one in each sixteen natives -- and about twenty-five thousand French troops were killed in combat. Tens of thousands of Algerians were locked away in concentration camps. One camp I saw when I toured Algeria was still filled with hundreds of what the French called "street Arabs," orphan children. About 1.2 million Europeans fled or wee driven out of the country along with about two hundred thousand Algerian "Loyalists." Far from the battle, France itself was severely damaged. The much vaunted French civilisation was corrupted by the horrors of the conflict. In the memorable phrase of the time, torture had become "the cancer of democracy." Hate, fear, and shame overcame everything. Even so civilized a man as the writer Albert Camus became an apologist for French brutality. Among the most vicious of the paratroopers were men who had suffered in Nazi concentration camps or had fought in the French resistance, yet saw no moral inconsistency between their struggle for freedom in France and torturing or murdering Algerians. Civilization itself was a victim of the war. The costs have yet to be fully reckoned: Algeria remains a wounded society, so far unable to gain a sense of civic balance, while the ugly racism of the colons has been transferred to France itself.

Chapter 9: The Vietnamese Struggle Against the French (p. 152):

To solidify their rule, the French set out to win over what remained of the Vietnamese bureaucracy, the mandarins. As the man who was perhaps the most effective French governor-general, Jean-Marie de Lanessan, explained his policy, i twas based on the notion that "in every society there exists a ruling class, born to rule, without which nothing can be done. Enlist that class in our interests." The mandarins were initially willing to collaborate, but they soon realized that collaboration was leading to the replacement of their way of life by an alien system and their religion by Catholicism; so instead of "pacifying" their fellow countrymen, they began in the last years of the nineteenth century to lead them against the French.

Chapter 10: America Takes Over From France in Vietnam (p. 180):

Militarily the Tet offensive was nearly a disaster for the Viet Minh, as many thousands of their troops were killed, but politically it was the masterstroke that won the war. After Tet, the American public had no stomach for Vietnam. It even brought about a "regime change" in America as Lyndon Johnson withdrew his candidacy for the presidency. Thereafter, the war wound down by fits and starts, with more emphasis on punishing aerial attack, which aimed ostensibly to create a "negotiating climate." That policy had a hard edge for America: during the withdrawal period an additional twenty-one thousand American soldiesr were killed. Thus, the American phase of the war that began in 1945 ended in the Communist victory on January 27, 1973. It was the longest, most brutal, and most destructive guerrilla war in modern history.

Chapter 11: The Afghan Resistance to the British and the Russians (p. 191):

The Pukhtunwali rested on the concept that every village, clan, or tribe was a separate entity, virtually a miniature nation-state. Each had the collective obligation to defend its citizens, their property, and their honor. Thus, it absolutely commanded the taking of revenge (badal) for wrongs or insults to any of its members by outsiders, as the British had learned and the Russians soon would. As among the pre-Islamic Arabs, in the absence of overarching civic institutions and organizations, the certainty that revenge would be taken was the final, indeed the only, safeguard for the individual. That was the theory, but the practice was unending feuding. Consequently, every Afghan was armed and always ready to fight.

The imperative of revenge was softened by the parallel imperative of hospitality (melmastia). Afghan refuges or travelers could demand, and would receive, both hospitality and protection even from enemies. In villages where the inhabitants teetered on the brink of starvation, my team and I were greeted with ruinous generosity. To have attempted to pay for or to have refused what was offered would have been a mortal insult. As guests we were under the protection of our hosts, who had the absolute obligation to defend us or die trying. (Americans would later be babbled by the silent refusal of such poor people to turn over Osama bin Ladin for the, to them, astronomical sum of $25 million.)

(p. 197):

Unlike most of the insurgencies I have studied, the Afghan insurgency was motivated neither by nationalism nor by ideology. It defined itself in terms of its enemy. The enemy was not so much Communism as Russia, and not only Russia alone but all foreigners. The Afghans accepted outside help but did so reluctantly and without affection for the donors. Xenophobia must be considered to have been a major motivation. Insofar as it was refined into something like an ideology, it was defined by Islam. But it was not religion, per se, that seems to have most motivated people: it was the Afghan "way," the social code that was encapsulated in Islam, that Afghans felt was being attacked and that they determined to protect. As a Hezb-i Islami commander told the English visitor Peregrine Hodson, "It is true that Afghanistan is a poor country, but the most precious thing we have is our faith; without it we have nothing. We are fighting to protect our religion."

(pp. 199-200):

Even more impressive was that when ground-to-air missiles began to be made available, the mujahideen claim to have destroyed four hundred aircraft. The Russians virtually stopped flying, and lacking air cover that had tied down and discovered guerrilla forces, Russian ground forces were more vulnerable to ambush and tended to pull back to the cities. As a result, for most of the war, they occupied only about a fifth of the country.

Much as the Americans did in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 and the Germans did in Yugoslavia, the Russians employed the most brutal forms of counterinsurgency: they aimed essentially to destroy the country and kill the inhabitants. Carpet bombing was used on towns and villages; dikes and irrigation works were blown up so that agricultural production fell by about half; forests were burned; roads and bridges were cut; and millions of small bombs were seeded into the countryside killing or wounding animals and people. As Jeri Laber and Barnett Rubin of Helsinki Watch summarized their findings, "the stories that we were to hear over and over again were these: 'The Russians bombed our village. Then the soldiers came. They killed women and children. They burned the wheat. They killed animals -- cows, sheep, chickens. They took our food, put poison in the flour, stole our watches, jewelry, and money.'" The report continued, "The strategy of the Soviets and the Afghan government has been to spread terror in the countryside so that villagers will either be afraid to assist the resistance fighters who depend on them for food and shelter or will be forced to leave . . . We were told of brutal acts of violence by Soviet and Afghan forces: civilians burned alive, dynamited, beheaded; bound men forced to lie down on the road to be crushed by Soviet tanks; grenades thrown into rooms where women and children have been told to wait." Prisoners were summarily shot since the Russians claimed that they were illegal enemy combatants not covered by the Geneva Conventions.

Conclusion: The Very Expensive School. This lists and summarizes seven points from the US Counterinsurgency Field Manual, edited by Lieutenant Generals David Petraeus and James F. Amos based on their experiences in Iraq. This is just one of the seven points (p. 209):

Third, "nation building." Have outsiders ever accomplished that task? Look at the American experience. American forces have been sent abroad to fight more than two hundred times since our country was founded. But in recent years only sixteen times have we attempted "the core objective of nation building . . . regime change or survivability." Of these sixteen, Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper found in a study for the Carnegie Endowment, eleven were "outright failures." Two, Germany and Japan, can be regarded as successes, while two others, tiny and nearby Grenada and Panama, were probably successful. Considering this record, John Tierney asked in the May 17, 2004, International Herald Tribune, how could neoconservatives or any conservatives "who normally do not trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East?"

Richard Heinberg: Peak Everyting: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007, New Society)

Actually, a collection of essays (titles in bold below), not all of particular interest.

Introduction. This starts with a number of charts tracking various issues over time:

• Oil & gas production profiles
• Worldwide possible coal production
• Uranium requirements according to IEA scenario and possible supply from known sources
• World total carbon dioxide emissions
• Global mean surface temperature
• Global temperature anomaly
• World water use: consumption
• World water use: withdrawals
• Water availability
• World grain production
• World population
• World diadromous fish catch
• Total fossil fuel production projection
• Arable land
• Metric tons oil equivalent per capita per year (primary energy)
• US gross domestic product and genuine progress indicators compared, 1950 to 2002

On feedback loops (pp. 7-8):

Self-reinforcing feedback loops sometimes occur in nature (population blooms are always evidence of some sort of reinforcing feedback loop), but they rarely continue for long. They usually lead to population crashes and die-offs. The simple fact is that growth in population and consumption cannot continue unabated on a finite planet.

If the increased availability of cheap energy has historically enabled unprecedented growth in the extraction rates of other resources, then the coincidence of Peak Oil with the peaking and decline of many other resources is entirely predictable.

Moreover, as the availability of energy resources peaks, this will also affect various parameters of social welfare:

• Per-capita consumption levels
• Economic growth
• Easy, cheap, quick mobility
• Technological change and invention
• Political stability

All of these are clearly related to the availability of energy and other critical resources. Once we accept that energy, fresh water, and food will become less freely available over the next few decades, it is hard to escape the conclusion that while the 20th century saw the greatest and most rapid expansion of the scale, scope, and complexity of human societies in history, the 21st will see contraction and simplification. The only real question is whether societies will contract and simplify intelligently or in an uncontrolled, chaotic fashion.

The energy transition (p. 19):

As we have seen, just a few core trends have driven many others in producing the global problems we see today, and those core trends (including population growth and increasing consumption rates) themselves constellate around our ever-burgeoning use of fossil fuels. Thus, a conclusion of starting plainness presents itself: our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels -- and to do this as peacefully, equitably, and intelligently as possible.

Tools with a Life of Their Own (p. 39):

The industrial revolution represented one of history's pivotal infrastructural shifts; everything about human society changed as a result. This revolution did not come about primarily because of religious or political developments, but because a few prior inventions (steel, gears, and a primitive steam engine -- i.e., Class B and C and simple Class D tools) came together in the presence of an abundant new energy source: fossil fuels -- first coal, then oil and natural gas. Ideas (such as Cartesian dualism, capitalism, Calvinism, and Marxism), rather than driving the transformation, achieved prominence because they served useful functions within a flow of events emanating from infrastructural necessity.

(p. 46):

In the best instance, the next generation will find themselves in a low-energy regime in which moral lessons from the fossil-fuel era and its demise have been seared into cultural memory. Like the Native Americans, who learned from the Pleistocene extinctions that over-hunting results in famine, they will have discovered that growth is not always good, that modest material goals are usually better for everyone in the long run than extravagant ones, and that every technology has a hidden cost. There is no free lunch. One hopes that, like the Iroquois, who long ago concluded that fighting over scarce land and resources only means the endless perpetuation of violence, they will also have learned the methods and culture of peacemaking.

Fifty Million Farmers (p. 48):

Modern industrial agriculture has been described as a method of using soil to turn petroleum and gas into food. We use natural gas to make fertilizer. We use oil to fuel farm machinery and power irrigation pumps, as a feedstock for pesticides and herbicides, in the maintenance of animal operations, in crop storage and drying, and for transportation of farm inputs and outputs. Agriculture accounts for about 17 percent of the US annual energy budget; it is the single largest consumer of petroleum products as compared to other industries. By comparison, the US military, in all of its operations, uses les than half that amount. About 350 gallons (1,500 liters) of oil equivalents are required to feed each American each year, and every calorie of food produced requires, on average, ten calories of fossil-fuel inputs. This is a food system profoundly vulnerable, at every level, to fuel shortages and skyrocketing prices. And both are inevitable.

(Post-) Hydrocarbon Aesthetics

Five Axioms of Sustainability: just list them (pp. 88-93):

1. Tainter's Axiom: Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.
   Exception: A society can avoid collapse by finding replacement resources. Limit to the exception:
   In a finite world, the number of possible replacements is also finite.

2. Bartlett's Axiom: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

3. To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment.

4. To be sustainable, the use of non-renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion.

5. Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.

   In cases where pollution from the extraction and consumption of non-renewable resources that have proceeded at expanding rates for some time threatens the viability of ecosystems, reduction in the rates of extraction and consumption of those resources may need to occur at a rate greater than the rate of depletion.

Parrots and Peoples

Population, Resources, and Human Idealism (p. 116):

Malthus believed that a general famine would occur in the near future unless his policies were implemented; in this he was clearly wrong. There have indeed been localized famines in the decades since his death (e.g., in Ireland, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Ethiopia), but these have provided only a minor brake on global population, which has surged by over 500 percent in the interim. This failure of prediction is the main cudgel wielded by generations of Malthus-bashers, who attribute the growth of world food production over the past century-and-a-half primarily to human ingenuity. As knowledge expands, so does out ability to sustain more people.

But increased knowledge and cleverness can account for only a portion of the added global human carrying capacity. The main factor has been the use of fossil fuels for clearing land, pumping irrigation water, fueling tractors and other farm equipment, fertilizing soils, killing pests, and transporting produce ever further distances to support people in remote urban centers who would be otherwise unable to sustain themselves. Malthus could hardly have foreseen the contributions of fossil fuels to economic expansion and population growths during the past two centuries. And so, taking into account the inevitable, now-commencing winding down of that brief, incomparably opulent fossil-fuel fiesta, it may be better to say that Malthus wasn't wrong, he was just ahead of his time.

(pp. 122-123):

An ethic of human rights, of sharing, and of equity without a practically expressed awareness of ecological limits is a setup for disaster. But demographic competition by way of fascism, as a response to population-resource crises, is an admission of failure; and it is less an expression of human nature than of the ugly habits formed through the past few thousand civilized years of extreme inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism.

The Psychology of Peak Oil and Climate Change

Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Activism (pp. 146-148):

Peak Oil activists adhere to more pessimistic resource estimates and production forecasts, and it is tempting to think that this is partly because doing so makes their case appear stronger. However, the track record of prediction by the optimists is not good:

• During the 1960s, the US Geological Survey issued successive reports forecasting a peak in US oil production around the year 2000; this followed M. King Hubbert's controversial forecast of a peak around the year 1970. Confounding the official view, US oil production did reach its maximum in 1970 and has been generally declining ever sine, despite the subsequent discovery of the largest conventional oilfield ever found in North America, on the North Slope of Alaska in the 1970s.
• In their Internatioal Energy Outlook (IEO) 2001 report, the EIA stated that "the United Kingdom is expected to produce about 3.1 mb/d by the middle of this decade, followed by a decline to 2.7 mb/d by 2020," implying a peak around 2005. Britain's oil production from the North Sea actually peaked in 1999, two years before this forecast was issued, at 2.684 mb/d, declining to less than 1.7 mb/d by 2005.
• In their IEO 2003 report, the EIA predicted that the country of Oman was "expected to increase output gradually over the first half of this decade" with "only a gradual production decline after 2005." In fact, Oman's production had already peaked in 2000, three years before the forecast was published.

This pattern of unrealistic optimism on the part of the official forecasting agencies has continued with regard to other countries, and thus probably, by extrapolation, to their forecasts for the world as a whole. So it might be unrealistic for the climate activists to give credence to such forecasts, or even to assume that the truth lies equidistant between the extreme resource estimates of the so-called optimists and pessimists.

(pp. 150-151):

Some depletionists see the world's enormous coal reserves as a partial supply-side answer to Peak Oil. Using a time-proven process, it is possible to gasify coal and then use the resulting gases to synthesize a high-quality diesel fuel. The South African company Sasol, which has updated the process, is currently under contract to provide several new coal-to-liquids (CTL) plants to China and has announced a plant in Montana.

CTL is not attractive to emissions analysts, however. While some carbon could be captured during the gasification stage (at a modest energy cost), burning the final liquid fuel would release as much carbon into the atmosphere as would burning conventional petroleum diesel.

A few depletion analysts tend to take a skeptical view of future coal supplies. According to most widely-quoted estimates, the world has one to two hundred years' worth of coal -- at current rates of usage. However, factoring in dramatic increases in usage (to substitute for declining oil and gas supplies), while also taking account of the Hubbert peak phenomenon -- extraction rates will inevitably begin to decline long before the coal actually runs out -- and the fact that coal resources are of varying quality and accessibility leads to the surprising conclusion that a global peak in coal production could arrive as soon as a decade from now.

(p. 151):

Other low-grade fossil fuels, such as tar sands, oil shale, and heavy oil are also problematic from both the depletion and emissions perspectives. Some depletion analysts recommend full-speed development of these resources. However, the energetic extraction costs for them are usually quite high compared to the energy payoff from the resource extracted. Their already-low energy profit ratio (also known as the energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI) would be compromised still further by efforts to capture and sequester carbon, sine, as with coal, these low-grade fuels have a high carbon content as compared to natural gas or conventional oil. Currently, natural gas is used in the processing of tar sands and heavy oil; from both an energy and an emissions point of view, this is rather like turning gold into lead. Many depletionists point out that, while the total resource base for these substances is enormous, the rate of extraction for each is likely to remain limited by physical factors (such as the availability of natural gas and fersh water needed for processing), so that synthetic liquid fuels from such substances may not help much in dealing with the problem of oil depletion in any case.

(p. 153):

Depletion analysts look to about a two percent per year decline in oil extraction folowing the peak of global oil production, with the rate increasing somewhat as time goes on. Coal extraction, following the production peak, will probably decline more slowly, at least for the first decades. Regional natural gas decline rates will be much steeper. The dates for global production peaks for these fuels are of course still a matter for speculation; however, it is reasonable to estimate that we might see a 25 to 45 percent decline in energy available to the world's growing population over the next quarter-century as a result of depletion.

Boomers' Last Chance? (pp. 161-162):

However, the freedom and affluence of modern Americans are due not just to courage and endurance but also sheer luck. Let us not forget that the people who inhabited the United States in the early 20th century happened to be sitting on one fabulous pile of natural resources -- everything from forests, fresh water, fertile soils, and fish to minerals (gold, nickel, iron, aluminum, copper) to energy resources (oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium). Moreover, the US has enjoyed geographic isolation from Eurasian intrigues, which enabled it to thrive during occasions when Europeans and Asians were tearing each other to bits.

Thus the payoff that came at the end of World War II carried an historic inevitability: with its resource base, factories, and highly motivated work force, the US had helped win the war without damage to its internal infrastructure, but only after seeing their cities, railroads, and factories bombed. While the rest of the industrial world lay in ruins, America stood unscathed.

Because of the American economy's stability, the US dollar was adopted as a reserve currency by other nations. American oil wells supplied over half the total amount of petroleum being extracted globally. Sixty percent of all export goods delivered throughout the world carried a "Made in USA" tag. General Motors was the world's biggest corporation and Hollywood films were on screens everywhere.

US factories made so many manufactured goods that Americans had to be cajoled into a permanent buying frenzy by the greatest propaganda system the world has ever seen -- the American advertising industry -- which made brilliant use of history's greatest propaganda medium -- television. In fact, the consumerist project had gotten under way in the 1920s as fuel-fed American capitalism searched for solutions to the problem of over-production (a problem that was in fact one of the Depression's causes). But World War II's insatiable need for materiel and the post-war expansion of advertising and credit made the Depression vanish like a bad dream and sent the economy into warp drive. Indeed, in the 1950s human beings habitually came to be referred to not as "people" or "citizens" but "consumers."

(p. 164):

Again: people are to some extent the product of the circumstances and events of their historical era. The younger generation, growing up in affluence, was free to take survival -- even abundance -- for granted. And we are discussing a level of abundance significantly greater, in some respects, even than exists today: at that time, the US was still solvent, still a net exporter of credit. In the 1960s an entire family could live on a single average income. Rents were cheap, land was cheap, and college was cheap.

Therefore rebellion was cheap, too. The young people knew they were different from their parents, and they could afford to question their parents' seeming obsession with discipline and hard work, their conformity and unflinching patriotism.

(pp. 166-167):

Of course oil was ana is central to the automobile and airline industries, which have been major drivers of the US economy. Less obvious is oil's role in modern industrial agriculture. However, if one looks more deeply, the very fabric of 20th century America is petroleum-soaked. In 1900 the world's wealthiest and oiliest man was John D. Rockefeller, whose company, Standard Oil, had cornered the national market. Rockefeller himself was an abstemious churchgoer who believed that wealth was a sign of God's favor; what does such a person do with so much money? All sorts of things. Why not go into banking in order to make even more money? The Rockefeller family did so with a vengeance and was instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve System -- the banking system that quietly controls the US currency and economy. If one is exceptionally wealthy it is also handy to have some influence over public opinion -- and so Rockefeller wealth found its way into controlling positions in media organizations. Even scientific research can have its uses: when I was tracing the history of genetic engineering for my 1999 book Cloning the Buddha, I discovered that the inception of molecular biology (the basis for all subsequent developments in genetic science) came in the 1920s as a result of strategic grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in its quest for a means of eugenic "social control." Politics, geopolitics, war, weapons manufacturing, education -- all were deeply impacted by the Rockefeller oil fortune. Oil wasn't just a subsidy to american wealth; it formed the very substance and character of American wealth.

Therefore the fact that by 1971 US oil production had peaked and was in terminal decline was momentous (if unheralded) news. America could no longer be a source of wealth in the same way it had been; if it were to maintain its privileged position globally it would have to become the world's moneychanger, banker, landlord, stockbroker . . . and enforcer. American military force would have to be used increasingly to safeguard and protect US access to the resource wealth of other countries, while international trade agreements would have to be written and enforced to the advantage of American corporations. And those corporations would be ever less involved directly in manufacturing, but more in trading, branding, and licensing.

A Letter From the Future

Talking Ourselves to Extinction (pp. 193-194):

In the last couple of centuries, the magical thinking associated with religion, under assault from science, has found a new home in political and economic ideologies. Economics, which masquerades as a science, began as a branch of moral philosophy -- which it still is in fact. For free-market ideologues, the market is God and profit is the ultimate good. We have used language to talk ourselves into the myth of progress -- the belief that growth is always beneficial and that there are no practical limits to the size of the human population or to the extent of renewable or even non-renewable natural resources we can use. This particular myth was an easy sell: It is an inherently welcome message (a version of "you can eat your cake and have it too") and it seemed to be confirmed by experience during a multi-generational period of unprecedented expansion based on the one-time-only consumption of Earth's hydrocarbon stores.

Lisa Margonelli: Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank (2007; paperback, 2008, Random House)

Herb Richards owns an independent gas station in San Francisco (pp. 23-24):

The great postwar boom in autos, highways, and suburbs rolled out on a wave of cheap gasoline, and men like Herb shaped a culture that seemed uniquely American. Cars got bigger and beefier. The average passenger car in 1950 used 627 gallons of fuel a year; by 1972 it was using 754: Fuel economy actually went down. And still, stations were offering anything they could to customers to grab more market share. Herb was giving Kleenex, stamps redeemable for panty hose, hula hoops, and cooking utensils. Self-serve caught on, but in a desultory way. By the late 1960s only 16 percent of stations in the country were self-serve.

And then came the 1973 oil crisis, when Arab oil-producing countries stopped shipping oil in retribution for U.S. support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. As the price of gasoline rose, the U.S. government implemented a rationing system that caused long lines at stations. Almost overnight the gas game changed and became something else. Drivers stopped thinking of stations as places to get pampered -- the free maps, silverware, and stamps disappeared immediately. Instead, stations were places to get mad. People hated standing in line, and they started to hate going to the gas station. The cost of gasoline suddenly hurt, as did driving those big cars. People read the papers and saw major oil companies' profits more than double from 1972 to 1974. "Obscene profits," said politicians, and most people agreed.

The first oil crisis of 1973 was followed, like a one-two punch, by a second with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Between 1978 and 1980 gas went from 63 cents a gallon (roughly $1.37 in 2000 dollars) to $1.19 ($2.20 in 2000 dollars).

(p. 77):

People who live near drilling pay a high price for rogue mud. In 2004 oil and gas drilling had fouled the water in at least 241 sites in Texas with salt water, hydrocarbons, barium, mercury, chromium, hydrochloric acid, glycol, and PCBs. Local activists believe that number may be much higher, in part because the Railroad Commission (which regulates drilling) monitors groundwater quality at only 55 out of more than 4,000 disposal pits and because penalties for leaks are usually less than $3,500. "It would be fair to say that for decades, oil and gas drilling wastes have polluted ground water across vast areas of Texas," writes journalist Rusty Middleton, citing thousands of complaints of tainted water from eighty-five Texas counties. Near the town of DeBerry, for example, fifty-five people lost their water supply to benzene, oil waste, and salt water when a driller working nearby disposed of drilling wastes by forcing them into a well, an approved disposal method. Nine years after the first leaks killed peach trees and turned Earnestene Roberson's sink green and oily, the community is still without water.

(pp. 87-88):

Today, he says, most of the "easy" gas and oil has already been gotten from the United States. What remains in big quantities is "unconventional" gas -- the methane that occurs with some coal deposits or "tight" gas, like the Bossier gas, locked into its cage of cemented sandstone. In the late 1980s the federal government and the gas industry put up $165 million to figure out how to get tight gas out of the ground. They ended up finding ways to fracture reservoir rock using explosives and pressurized water deep in the wells. Then, to encourage more drilling for unconventional gas, federal and state governments lifted taxes on it. Worthless gas became profitable, and a boom slowly began. The boom in Fairfield is more and more typical for the country because now "unconventional" gas contributes a third of U.S. production; within fifteen years it will make up half. As natural gas prices have risen, unconventional gas looks profitable. "A lot of our future resources are coming from tough areas," says Dr. Kim. "That requires new technology and state and federal incentives."

When oil is extracted from a reservoir, between 50 and 75 percent remains in the ground. It's likely that better technology would improve that. The International Energy Agency estimates that increasing the world oil recovery rate from 35 percent to 40 percent would result in more "new" oil than all of Saudi Arabia's current fields. Even though studies by the National Academy of Science have shown that oil and gas technology research is a worthwhile investment in future oil supplies, money for it has fallen since the mid-1980s. Major oil companies have abandoned their expensive research programs -- partly because oil prices were very low in the 1990s and partly because the industry restructured to focus on profits. The small companies, driven by bottom-line economics, haven't taken over research. In the meantime, the Department of Energy has invested less in research. In 2005 the Bush administration tried to do away with it altogether. Dr. Kim (whose workplace benefits from government funding) says that politicians are reluctant to spend money on fossil fuel research because it looks like they're offering freebies to the energy industry.

(pp. 88-89):

But whatever I pay for energy, I'll never pay as much as residents of Texas do. It's Texans who give up their backyards to noisy drilling rigs, their water aquifers to possible contamination by drilling; who breathe the air near the refineries of the Gulf Coast. When oil prices fall and people are thrown out of work, they're usually Texans. And whatever benefits the average Texan has received from the state's romance with oil, they've sacrificed mightily and, like the owners of surface rights, without much choice in the matter.

(p. 92):

The Black Giant is empty, but we still live in the world it created. It was so big, and gone so quickly, that it reset the world's center of gravity. As soon as the forty-two-mile-long field started producing, drillers descended, each trying to get the oil out o the ground and sell it as quickly as possible. With the glut, prices fell from $1.10 a barrel to 11 cents, and then to 2 cents. (Comparison: A trip to a Kilgore latrine was going for 10 cents; a hot meal or a shower for 35 cents; and women were selling sex for 50 cents.) It was classic oil economics -- a bottomless supply means oil has no value. What looked like a glut was in fact a slow-motion bankruptcy, because each barrel cost 80 cents to get out of the ground. Worse, the oil was being drawn from the reservoir faster than the water that drove it upward toward the surface was being replaced. The field began to produce less oil and was clearly lurching toward ruin. A disaster of abundance was in the works.

One solution was to limit oil production to stabilize both the price and the pressure in the reservoir, but that was un-American, uncapitalist, and utterly anti-oil as we knew it. It took Texas Rangers, the National Guard, and a Supreme Court ruling finally to determine that shutting in production (or pro-rationing) was something the state Railroad Commission had the power to enforce. The amount of oil coming out of the Black Giant was limited by the government, and prices stabilized. The wildcatter had been brought to heel, and some claimed the independent oil producers became a kinder, less venal lot when they were forced to cooperate. I don't know about that.

The Black Giant started a backlash against waste. Until the 1930s, oil fields disposed of natural gas buy [sic] burning it in flares. Now they began capturing the gas and selling it as fuel, creating the natural gas industry.

Strategic petroleum reserve (pp. 103-104):

During the 1960s Arab oil producers began talking about how to step out of the role of willing and seemingly weak suppliers of oil in order to influence U.S. policy toward Israel. Since 1967 the Arab countries had been discussing whether they could show their power, and change U.S. and British foreign policy in the Middle East, by using the "oil weapon." They decided to punish President Nixon for supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War. On October 17, 1973, they embargoed oil going to the United States and Britain.

In the melee, the United States lost about 7 percent of its supply, but government allocation programs worsened the shortfall, and Americans soon found themselves standing in line to buy gas. The gas lines incubated a national loss of identity with geopolitical implications. The whole definition of being American was that we drove our cars anywhere we wanted to. Public transit and waiting in line was something communists did. In gas lines, people turned their anger on each other, on the multinational oil companies, and on an imaginary villain named the "oil sheikh," who was usually characterized with an oil can in one hand and a wad of cash in the other, grinning maniacally. The British were horrified by hear an American official speak casually of invading Saudi Arabia. Nixon's government, addled by Watergate, dithered for the five months of the embargo, and the president made a depressing spectacle of not lighting the White House Christmas tree.

(p. 105):

Behind the rhetoric, though, a more effective oil weapon had taken shape. Conservation laws enacted by Presidents Ford and Carter reduced Americans' per capita oil consumption by 23 percent between 1978 and 1983. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy replaced oil for making electricity. Cars became 40 percent more efficient, and everything from refrigerators to dryers followed. By 1986 the economy was making every dollar of gross domestic product (GDP) with nearly a third less energy.

And by the time the SPR was ready in 1984, embargoes had become more or less extinct because oil-producing countries began to trade their oil on open markets in London and New York, radically changing the flow and control of oil around the world. Now oil was sold to the highest bidder. Because oil consumers were using less, there was oil to spare. Meanwhile, a concerted effort on the part of the United States to bring oil from non-OPEC nations into the market was bearing fruit. Oil producers could no longer dictate who got their oil and who didn't.

Quote from David Pursell, an analyst at Simmons & Company International (p. 117):

"After 9/11, part of the Bush strategy on terror was to announce that we were adding 100,000 barrels a day to the reserves. Strategically, this was the stupidest thing. This was just political grandstanding, but it sent exactly the wrong signal and it spooked everyone. China, India, Korea, and the European countries panicked and started buying more oil than they needed -- they assumed the U.S. knew something they didn't."

(pp. 130-131):

[Charley] Maxwell says he began to watch the market closely in 1998, when it appeared that production from major non-OPEC oil exporters was starting to fall off. He ticks off the years when countries recorded their highest production: the United States in 1970, Egypt in 1996, Argentina in 1998, Colombia in 1999, the U.K.'s North Sea in 1999, Australia in 2000, Norway's North Sea in 2001, Oman in 2001, Yemen in 2002, and Mexico and China are near their peaks now. These countries are still producing, but, like the drillers in East Texas, they are going for oil that's no longer easy, or cheap to extract.

All of this adds up to a picture of the non-OPEC oil producers in decline, tilting the whole oil supply table back toward the OPEC countries. "You could argue that because OPEC countries no longer have to compete for markets against non-OPEC producers or even the Saudis, they suddenly don't feel the need to invest money to increase production," says Maxwell. "The less they invest, the faster the price will rise. A perverse application of economics." The economically irrational gasoline consumers of the United States are on a collision course with their opposite number -- economically irrational oil producers.

Now Maxwell has issued another warning. It is dense, full of analyst-speak, but it is definite: The days of the Black Giant, the drama of oversupply, are over. "The new basis for doing business -- that is, restrained supplies at higher prices versus virtually unlimited supplies at the lower prices of the past -- will entirely change the structure of opportunities, supplier-customer relationships, the establishment and direction of energy-producing organizations, and the valuations we have historically put on them. After 145 years of [the] petroleum industry, a wholly new one is emerging. None of us has ever seen the like of it before."

Venezuela (p. 143):

According to Spanish law, the oil in Maracaibo belonged to the farmers who owned the land above. U.S. oil companies didn't want to negotiate with the farmers, perhaps because the issue of land claims was a mess in Texas and Pennsylvania, and perhaps because they didn't want the farmers to become an alternative center of power, so they proposed that all oil rights lay in the hands of the state.

The Venezuelan state then consisted of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, a nearly illiterate farmer whom the U.S. government had helped gain power. He didn't think of the state as a nation with citizens, but more as one of his farms, with resources and inhabitants to dispose of at his will, and he didn't object to taking possession of the oil underneath them either. And so modern Venezuela was born as a triangle of state and foreign oil company, with citizens as an anxious third. In 1922 the three U.S. oil companies themselves wrote Venezuela's hydrocarbon law.

(p. 165):

As I left Venezuela, it came out that the United States has actually given considerable thought to invading. The Department of Defense labeled Venezuela a "rogue" nation in 2004 and drew up plans for military action should the country pose a "pop-up" threat. According to Washington Post military analyst Bill Arkin, Venezuela's closeness to the United States, and its oil, and the "leftist" nature of Chávez, gave the plans the added strategic priority of being related to homeland security. At the moment, it's hard to imagine that the U.S. public would support an invasion of Venezuela, but what is striking about the plans is how well they serve Chávez. In early 2006 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld echoed the Venezuelan opposition by comparing Chávez to Hitler. For all its hyperbole, sinister tone, and likely benefit to his opponent, Rumsfeld could have been reading a script written by Chávez himself.

Chad (p. 171):

Nolutshingu calls Chad one of the world's "grey areas" or "strange places" where the state is caught between emerging and disintegrating. Long described as a vacuum by African diplomats, Chad has spent most of its history muddling along in a violent haze with intervention from France, Libya, Sudan, and the United States. During the 1980s, Libya invaded Chad, and a collection of warlords fought back with more than $50 million in military support from the United States. Déby, the current president, is a former warlord who installed himself after a coup in 1990, then held an election in 1996 to legitimize his position.

With only three hundred miles of paved roads and limited telephone service across land three times the size of California, Chad is understudied and unknown. Statistically, it is the tenth poorest country in the world, and 80 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, the official market for poverty. The conventional poverty scale may not be sensitive enough to register just how poor this place is, because I meet several people who are living on less than 25 cents a day,a nd they appear to be no worse off than their neighbors. Chad doesn't even have much of a trader class, and in the scraggly market, it takes me ten minutes to change a Chadian bill worth less than $5.

(p. 173):

Chad's poverty is exceptional, but in the scheme of World Bank investments in oil projects, it's not unusual. Between 1992 and 2004, 82 percent of World Bank investment sin oil in developing countries were for export of that oil to developed countries. This has been a deliberate strategy on the part of the United States, which has more influence than any other country in the Bank, to advance American energy concerns. In 1981, after the second oil crisis, the U.S. Treasury Department urged the Bank to use its "neutral stance" as a "development advisor" to expand into oil projects to "enhance security of [energy] supplies and reduce OPEC power over oil prices." In effect, the Bank became an instrument of U.S. policy, just as the oil companies had been in Venezuela sixty years before.

For more than a decade, this approach put a lot of non-OPEC oil on the market, which kept prices down, but by the late 1990s, it was running out of steam. By 2005 Exxon's actual production was less than it was in 1998. Though non-OPEC oil was still rising by more than a million extra barrels a day every year, about 800,000 of those barrels were from Russia. The yearly rise in non-Russian, non-OPEC oil was around 200,000 barrels a day -- something along the lines of Chad.

Africa, which has more undiscovered oil than anywhere else, has become a key part of U.S. strategy. As the curiously named AOPIG -- African Oil Policy Interest Group -- puts it, "African oil is not an end but a means to both greater US energy security and more rapid African economic development." The United States now gets more oil from West Africa than from Saudi Arabia, and the hope is to get a quarter of U.S. imports here by 2015. Energy is almost the only way U.S. companies invest in Africa -- two-thirds to three-quarters of American investment in Africa is in energy.

(pp. 175-176):

If you are looking to bet on an oil project in an developing country, the odds are clearly against. At Stanford, Terry Lynn Karl's analysis of Venezuela's economy during the 1970s and '80s shows that countries whose economy is dominated by oil exports tend to experience shrinking standards of living -- something that Chad can hardly afford. Oil has opportunity costs: A study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andres Warner showed that of ninety-seven developing countries, those without oil grew four times as much as those with oil. At UCLA, Michael L. Ross did regression studies showing that governments that export oil tend to become less democratic over time. At Oxford, Paul Collier's regression studies show that oil- and mineral-exporting countries have a 23 percent likelihood of civil war within five years, compared to less than 1 percent for nondependent countries.

Iran: In 1988, the US attacked an Iranian oil platform, supposedly a response to a US navy ship being damaged by an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf; the results of Operation Praying Mantis (p. 202):

The nine-hour fight ended with two oil platforms burned, wiping out 150,000 barrels of oil production a day, six Iranian ships sunk or damaged, one Iranian plane down, and at least fifteen Iranians dead and twenty-nine wounded. Half of Iran's navy had been destroyed. A helicopter accident killed two Americans.

(pp. 203-204):

In the years since 1988, the U.S. military presence in the Gulf has grown from nothing, to $50 billion a year for the 1990s, to a full-scale occupation costing more than $132 billion a year in 2005. By one estimate, the hidden costs of defense and import spending are the equivalent of an extra $5 for every gallon of imported gasoline, a cost that doesn't show up at American gas pumps.

And while Americans question the morality of using force to secure oil supply, not many question whether it is an effective strategy or worth the money. Whether leaders echo Reagan and say force is necessary to prevent long lines for gasoline, or Iraq war protesters shout "No Blood for Oil," the underlying assumption is that displaying force creates an atmosphere of overwhelming power and hegemony, preventing attacks on oil facilities and supply lines. I wondered if this was true, and if it remains a valid assumption as the market for oil has changed.

I came across a mention of Operation Praying Mantis in a 2003 ruling by the International Court of Justice. The ruling, which didn't get much press in the United States, determined that the United States' destruction of the Iranian platforms was not justifiable as self-defense. I thought it was strange that I had never heard of this bizarre one-day war with Iran. I wondered why the attacks weren't better known. "It still hasn't sunk in," said Gary Sick, head of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and a former member of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. "From the platforms, there was an unbroken arc of increasing involvement [in the Middle East] which is not understood by 99 percent of the public. At the end of the game the U.S. has become a Persian Gulf power. We don't have a doctrine, so we've improvised and dug ourselves into a very deep hole. When we talk about the Gulf now, we're not talking about some exotic foreign place, now we're talking about our neighbors."

Nigeria (p. 249):

After [Ken] Saro-Wiwa's death, international journalists pointed out the large number of oil spills in the delta (about six per week) and the sooty, archaic flares that burn off most of the natural gas associated with Nigeria's oil. They noted that soldiers had shot villagers from Shell's company helicopters. A boycott of Shell began in Europe and the United States, "The company stepped back and said why do the communities see us this way?" says the engineer. "The government is AWOL. The communities say we agree and accept this behavior because it allows us to do business."

Any discussion of the relationship between Shell and the Nigerian government inevitably becomes circular and convoluted. Shell's "Human Rights Dilemmas" workbook runs through the issue in different ways, cautioning "Shell is not the government," a phrase that has to be repeated so often because its meaning is so unclear here. Shell is the most robust and identifiable institution in Nigeria. Part of the reason human rights groups blame Shell when villagers are massacred is that Shell at least offers an entity to hold accountable.

But the complex relationship between Shell and the government has much larger dimensions. In 2004 Shell admitted that it had overestimated the size of its Nigerian oil reserves by 60 percent, not only to make its own reserves look better, but to help the Nigerian government increase the size of its OPEC quota.

(p. 252):

She [Hilda Dokubo], and virtually everyone else, blames the end of Nigeria's middle class on the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Program in the 1980s, which required the government to cut services to qualify for debt assistance. The program is so notorious here that it's routinely referred to as SAP, and as in Venezuela, it is seen as a coup by IMF. "The SAP was when these institutions left, and under [military dictator] Ibrahim Bagangida people fell from the middle class," she says. By 1985 poverty had doubled -- to half the population. By 1996 two-thirds of the country lived in poverty. In 1997 some estimates were that 91 percent of the population lived on less than $2 a day. Encouraged to shrink, the government shriveled up altogether. A succession of military dictatorships survived by destroying whatever institutions remained while stashing billions of dollars in foreign banks. What was left was a void -- a place where the anthill of th state used to be. Hilda dismisses sentiment. "Life has to work, if not peacefully, we must get it with violence."

(pp. 288-289):

Whether measured in dollars or in difficulty, oil will be more expensive in the future, which means the United States needs to change its approach to the stuff. The tools the United States used to exert leverage over oil prices in the past have grown weaker. The special relationships the United States nurtured with countries like Venezuela and the security guarantees offered to Saudi Arabia have lost their appeal and the threats, which include sanctions and military intervention, have lost their effect. The illusion that oil wealth could ensure development or nurture democracy has faded in places as far apart as Chad and Iraq. Oil diplomacy, long outsourced to oil companies, and increasingly to the U.S. military, needs attention and leadership.

With just 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, the United States will be dependent on oil imports for many years. We will need new strategies, one of which could be using deeper cooperation as a route to economic and political stability. Rather than viewing China and India as resource competitors, the United States and the other members of the International Energy Agency could offer guarantees that these growing economies will have access to energy if they are willing to adopt efficient, low-carbon technology. Fostering cooperation between oil producers and consumers is (as the Iranian oil workers mentioned) one way to build zones where the two have mutual interests in peace.

The United States should consider giving up its role as the sole guardian of the world's oil shipping lanes to partner with NATO and Middle Eastern, African, and Asian regional security forces. This strategy can relieve Americans of the burden of paying to police while creating better regional cooperation and combating the trade in stolen and smuggled oil.

Finally, the United States might consider taxing imported oil at the rate of a dollar or two per barrel to create a fund for investing in oil-producing countries. These investments could work with matching investments from host countries and businesses to build infrastructure and create jobs in oil regions where the host government respects human rights. These grants could become a more powerful tool to encourage development than the current strategy of using World Bank loans as "carrots" and sanctions as "sticks." I think there's a strong moral argument for treating the people of oil-producing countries more fairly, but it's also increasingly obvious that the economic stability of the United States is intimately tied to the economic and environmental security of the people who live near the oil wells that supply us.