TomGram: Michael T. Klare - Is Big Brother in Your Energy Future?

By Tom Engelhardt
Created Jan 17 2007 - 8:57am

For the last two weeks, Tomdispatch has been concentrating on the way
Pentagon strategists have taken possession of our future and are writing
their own dystopian science fiction scenarios [1] about the world we are
soon to enter -- and the weapons systems [2] that are meant to go with it.
Five years ago, Michael Klare, a military and energy expert, wrote a
prophetic book, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict [3]. Its
title caught the embattled nature of our emerging resource future moment
better than any Pentagon fantasy. His most recent book, Blood and Oil: The
Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported
Petroleum [4], was no less on the mark. Now, for Tomdispatch, he continues
to peer ahead in the second of a two-part series on our militarized energy
future.

While the Bush administration and its neocon supporters have long been
offering up a vision of a vast imperial enemy-in-the-making that they call
"Islamo-fascism," Klare, in part 1 [5], discovered quite another, more
realistic and chilling set of possibilities that he dubbed
"Energo-fascism" -- or the militarization of the global struggle over
ever-diminishing supplies of energy. There, he focused on the Pentagon's
changing role in global energy politics. Now, he moves on to energy
blackmail in a great-power world and the Big-Brother-style dangers of making
nuclear power a major future alternative source of energy. Tom

* * *

Petro-Power and the Nuclear Renaissance: Two Faces of an Emerging
Energo-fascism (Part 2)

By Michael T. Klare

Not "Islamo-fascism" but "Energo-fascism" -- the heavily militarized global
struggle over diminishing supplies of energy -- will dominate world affairs
(and darken the lives of ordinary citizens) in the decades to come. This is
so because top government officials globally are increasingly unwilling to
rely on market forces to satisfy national energy needs and are instead
assuming direct responsibility for the procurement, delivery, and allocation
of energy supplies. The leaders of the major powers are ever more prepared
to use force when deemed necessary to overcome any resistance to their
energy priorities. In the case of the United States, this has required the
conversion of our armed forces into a global oil-protection service [6]; two
other significant expressions of emerging Energo-fascism are: the arrival of
Russia as an "energy superpower" and the repressive implications of plans to
rely on nuclear power.

Energy Haves and Have-nots

With global demand for energy constantly rising and supplies contracting (or
at least failing to keep pace), the world is being ever more sharply divided
into two classes of nations: the energy haves and have-nots. The haves are
the nations with sufficient domestic reserves (some combination of oil, gas,
coal, hydro-power, uranium, and alternative sources of energy) to satisfy
their own requirements and be able to export to other countries; the
have-nots lack such reserves and must make up the deficit with expensive
imports or suffer the consequences.

From 1950 to 2000, when energy was plentiful and cheap, the distinction did
not seem so obvious as long as the have-nots possessed other forms of power:
immense wealth (like Japan); nuclear weapons (like Britain and France); or
powerful friends (like the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries). Needless to say,
for poor countries possessing none of these assets, being a have-not state
was a burden even then, contributing mightily to the debt crisis that still
afflicts many of them. Today, these other measures of power have come to
seem less important and the distinction between energy haves and have-nots
correspondingly more significant -- even for wealthy and powerful countries
like the United States and Japan.

Surprisingly, there are very few energy haves in the world today. Most
notable among these privileged few are Australia, Canada, Iran, Kazakhstan,
Kuwait, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq (if it
were ever free of conflict), and a few others. These countries are in an
envious position because they do not have to pay stratospheric prices for
imported oil and natural gas and their ruling elites can demand all sorts of
benefits -- political, economic, diplomatic, and military -- from the
foreign leaders who come calling to procure copious quantities of their
energy products. Indeed, they can engage in the delicious game of playing
one foreign leader against another, as Kazakhstan's President, Nursultan
Nazarbayev [7] -- a regular guest in Washington and Beijing -- has become so
adept at doing.

Pushed even further, this pursuit of favors can lead to a quest for
political domination -- with the sale of vital oil and natural gas supplies
made contingent on the recipient's acquiescing to certain political demands
set forth by the seller. No country has embraced this strategy with greater
vigor or enthusiasm than Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The Rising Energy Superpower

At the end of the Cold War, it appeared as if Russia was a forlorn, wasted
ex-superpower, impoverished in spirit, treasure, and influence. For years,
it was treated with disdain by American officials. Its leaders were forced
to swallow humiliating agreements like the expansion of NATO to Moscow's
former satellites in Eastern Europe and the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty. To many in Washington, it must have seemed as if Russia was
little more than a relic of history, a has-been never again slated to play a
significant role in world affairs.

Today, Moscow, not Washington, seems to be enjoying the last laugh. With
control over Eurasia's largest reserves of natural gas and coal as well as
enormous supplies of petroleum and uranium, Russia is the new top dog -- an
energy superpower rather than a military one, but a superpower nonetheless.

First, a look at the big picture. Russia [8] is the absolute king of natural
gas producers. According to BP (the former British Petroleum), it alone
possesses 1.7 quadrillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves [9], or 27%% of
the total world supply. This is even more significant than it might appear
because Europe and the former USSR rely on natural gas for a larger share of
their total energy -- 34%% -- than any other region of the world. (In North
America, where oil is the dominant fuel, natural gas accounts for only 25%%
of the total.) Because Russia is by far the leading supplier of Eurasia's
gas, it enjoys a position of supply dominance unmatched by any energy
provider -- except Saudi Arabia in the petroleum field. Even in that realm,
Russia is the planet's second leading producer, falling just 1.4 million
barrels short of Saudi Arabia's 11.0 million barrels per day at the start of
2006. Russia also possesses the world's second largest reserves of coal
(after the United States) and is a major consumer of nuclear energy, with 31
operational reactors.

Soon after assuming power as president in 1999, Vladimir Putin set out to
convert this superabundance of energy -- the economic equivalent of a
nuclear arsenal -- into the sort of political clout that would restore
Russia's great-power status. By controlling the flow of energy to other
parts of Eurasia from Russia and former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan (whose energy is exported through Russian pipelines), he
reasoned, he could exercise the sort of political influence enjoyed by
Soviet officials during the heyday of the Cold War. To accomplish this,
however, he would have to reverse the wide-ranging privatization of the oil
and gas industry that occurred in the early 1990s after the breakup of the
USSR and bring vital elements of Russia's privately-owned energy industry
back under state control. Since there was no legitimate way to do this under
Russia's post-Communist legal system, Putin and his associates turned to
illegitimate and authoritarian methods to de-privatize these valuable
assets. Here, we see another emerging face of Energo-fascism.

Remarkably, Putin himself had long before spelled out [10] the rationale for
concentrating control over Russia's energy resources in the state's hands.
In a 1999 summary of his Ph.D. dissertation on "Mineral Raw Materials in the
Strategy for Development of the Russian Economy," he asserted that the
Russian state must oversee the utilization of the country's mineral raw
materials -- including oil fields in private hands -- for the good of the
Russian people. "The state has the right to regulate the process of the
acquisition and the use of natural resources, and particularly mineral
resources, independent of on whose property they are located," he wrote. "In
this regard, the state acts in the interests of society as a whole." No
better justification for Energo-fascism can be imagined.

The most famous expression of this outlook has been the so-called
Khodorkovsky Affair. In 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky [11], the CEO of Yukos,
then Russia's top oil producer, was arrested on fraud and tax-evasion
charges. He had run afoul of Putin by pursuing all sorts of energy deals
independent of the state, including possible joint ventures with Exxon
Mobil, and by supporting anti-Putin political forces inside Russia -- either
of which would have alone been sufficient to earn him the Kremlin's wrath.

However, it is now apparent that Putin's ultimate goal in engineering the
arrest was to seize control of Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos' prime asset,
accounting for about 11%% of Russia's oil output [12]. With Khodorkovsky and
his top associates in prison awaiting trial, the government auctioned
Yuganskneftegaz to a secretive shell company, which then resold it to
state-owned Rosneft [13] at a below-market price. In one fell swoop, Putin
had managed to dismember Yukos and turn Rosneft into the country's leading
oil producer.

The Russian president has also sought to extend state control over the
distribution and export of oil and gas by blocking any effort by private
firms to build pipelines that would compete with those owned and operated by
Gazprom [14], the state-owned natural gas monopoly, and Transneft [15], the
state oil-pipeline monopoly. The United States and other consuming nations
have long pushed for the construction of privatized oil and gas pipelines in
Russia to increase the outflow of energy to Europe and other foreign markets
as well as to dilute the power of Gazprom and Transneft. The Kremlin has,
however, systematically foreclosed [16] all such efforts.

If the concentration of ownership of energy assets in the state's hands
through legally dubious means is one dimension of emerging Energo-fascism in
Russia, a second is the utilization of this power to intimidate have-not
states on Russia's periphery. The most notable expression of this to date
was the cutoff of natural gas supplies to Ukraine [17] on January 1, 2006.
Ostensibly, Gazprom stopped the flow in a dispute over the pricing of
Russian gas, but most observers believe that the action was also intended as
a rebuke to Ukraine's Western-leaning president, Victor A. Yushchenko [18].
Remember, this was in the dead of winter, and natural gas is the main source
of heat in Ukraine, as in much of Eastern Europe and the former USSR.
Gazprom resumed the flow after a last-minute pricing compromise and
following vociferous complaints from Western European customers who were
suffering their own losses (as the Ukrainians diverted Europe-bound gas for
their own use). This was the moment when it became clear to all that Moscow
was fully prepared to open and close the energy spigot as a tool of foreign
policy.

Since then, Moscow has employed this tactic on several occasions to
intimidate other neighboring states in what it terms its "near abroad" (as
the U.S. used to speak of Latin America as its "backyard"). On July 29,
2006, claiming a leak, Transneft halted oil shipments to the Mazeikiu
refinery in Lithuania after its owners announced its sale to a Polish firm,
not a Russian one. Observers of the move speculate [19] that Russians
officials intended to force a Russian takeover of the refinery.

In November, Gazprom threatened to more than double the price of natural gas
to its former Georgian SSR from $110 to $230 per 1,000 cubic meters. The
alternative offered was a cessation of deliveries. Again, political pressure
was believed to be at least part of the motive [20] as Georgia's pro-Western
government has defied Moscow on a wide range of issues. In December, Gazprom
pulled the same sort of trick on Belarus, demanding a major readjustment of
prices from a close (and impoverished) ally that had recently been showing
mild signs of independence.

This, then, is another face of Energo-fascism in Russia: the use of its
energy as an instrument of political influence and coercion over weak
have-not states on its borders. "It is not that energy is the new atomic
weapon," Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group consultancy told the Financial
Times, "but Russia knows that petro-power, aggressively and cleverly
applied, can yield diplomatic influence."

Big Brother and the Nuclear Renaissance

The last face of Energo-fascism to be discussed here is the inevitable rise
in state surveillance and repression attendant on an expected increase in
nuclear power. As oil and natural gas become scarcer, government and
industry leaders will undoubtedly push for a greater reliance on nuclear
power to provide additional energy. This is a program likely to gain greater
momentum from rising concerns over global warming -- largely a result of
carbon-dioxide emissions created during the combustion of oil, gas, and
coal. President Bush has repeatedly spoken [21] of his desire to foster
greater reliance on nuclear power and the administration-backed Energy
Policy Act of 2005 [22] already provides a variety of incentives for
electrical utilities to build new reactors in the United States. Other
countries including France, China, Japan, Russia, and India also plan to up
their reliance on nuclear power, greatly adding to the global spread of
nuclear reactors.

Many problems stand in the way of this so-called renaissance, not least the
mammoth costs involved and the fact that no safe system has yet been devised
for the long-term storage of nuclear wastes. Furthermore, despite many
improvements in the safety of nuclear power plants, worries persist about
the risk of nuclear accidents such as those that occurred at Three Mile
Island [23] in 1979 and Chernobyl [24] in 1986. But this is not the place to
weigh these issues. Let me instead focus on two especially worrisome aspects
of the future growth of the nuclear power industry: the possible
federalization of nuclear reactor placement in the U.S. and the repressive
implications globally of the greater availability of nuclear materials open
to diversion to terrorists, criminals, and "rogue" states.

Currently, America's municipalities, counties, and states still exercise
considerable control over the issuance of permits for the construction of
new nuclear power plants, giving citizens in these jurisdictions
considerable opportunity to resist the placement of a reactor "in their
backyard." For decades, this has been one of the leading obstacles to the
construction of new reactors in the U.S., along with the costly and
time-consuming legal process involved in winning over state legislatures,
county boards, and environmental agencies. If this practice prevails, we are
never likely to see a true "renaissance" of nuclear power here, even if a
few new reactors are built in poor rural areas where citizen resistance is
minimal. The only way to increase reliance on nuclear power, therefore, is
to federalize the permit process by shunting local agencies aside and giving
federal bureaucrats the unfettered power to issue permits for the
construction of new reactors.

Unlikely, you say? Well consider this: The Energy Policy Act of 2005
established a significant precedent for the federalization [25] of such
authority by depriving state and local officials of their power to approve
the placement of natural gas "regasification" plants. These are mammoth
facilities used to reconvert liquified natural gas, transported by ship from
foreign suppliers, into a gas that can then be delivered by pipeline to
customers in the United States. Several localities on the East and West
coasts had fought the construction of such plants in their harbors for fear
that they might explode (not an entirely far-fetched concern) or become
targets for terrorists, but they have now lost their legal power to do so.
So much for local democracy.

Here's my worry: That some future administration will push through an
amendment to the Energy Policy Act giving the federal government the same
sort of placement authority for nuclear reactors that it now has for
regasification plants. The feds then announce plans to build dozens or even
hundreds of new reactors in or near places like Boston, New York, Chicago,
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and so on, claiming an urgent need for
additional energy. People protest en masse. Local officials, sympathetic to
the protestors, refuse to arrest them in droves. But now we're speaking of
defiance of federal, not state or municipal, ordinances. Ergo, the National
Guard or the regular Army is called up to quell the protests and protect the
reactor sites -- Energo-fascism in action.

Finally, there's another danger in the spread of nuclear power: that it will
require a systematic increase in state surveillance of everyone even
remotely connected with commercial nuclear energy. After all, every uranium
enrichment facility, nuclear reactor, and waste storage site -- and any of
the linkages between them -- is a potential source of fissionable materials
for terrorists, black-market traffickers, or rogue states like Iran and
North Korea. This means, of course, that all of the personnel employed in
these facilities, and all their contractors and sub-contractors (and all
their families and contacts) will have to be constantly vetted for possible
illicit ties and kept under strict, full-time surveillance. The more
reactors there are, the more facilities and contractors who will have to be
subjected to this sort of oversight -- and the more the security staff
itself will have to be subjected to ever higher levels of surveillance by
state security agencies. It's a formula for Big Brother on a very large
scale.

And then there's the special problem of "breeder reactors." [26] These
plants produce ("breed") more fissionable material than they consume, often
in the form of plutonium, which can, in turn, be burned in power reactors to
generate electricity but can also be used as the fuel for atomic weapons.
Although such reactors are currently banned in the United States, other
countries, including Japan [27], are building them so as to diminish their
reliance on fossil fuels and natural uranium, itself a finite resource. As
the demand for nuclear energy grows, more countries (even, possibly, the
USA) are bound to build breeder reactors. But this will vastly increase the
global supply of bomb-grade plutonium, requiring an even greater increase in
state supervision of the nuclear power industry in all its aspects.

The State's Iron Grip

All the phenomena discussed in this two-part series -- the transformation of
the U.S. military into a global oil-protection service, the growth of the
energy equivalent of a major-power arms race, the emergence of Russia as an
energy superpower, and the need for increased surveillance over the nuclear
power industry -- are expressions of a single, overarching trend: the
tendency of states to extend their control over every aspect of energy
production, procurement, transportation, and allocation. This, in turn, is a
response to the depletion of world energy supplies and a shift in the locus
of energy production from the global north to the global south --
developments that have been under way for some time, but are bound to gain
greater momentum in the years ahead.

Many concerned citizens and organizations -- the Apollo Alliance [28], the
Rocky Mountain Institute [29], and the Worldwatch Institute [30], to name
but a few -- are trying to develop sane, democratic responses to the
problems brought about by energy depletion, instability in energy-producing
areas, and global warming. Most government leaders, however, appear intent
on addressing these problems through increased state controls and a greater
reliance on the use of military force. Unless this tendency is resisted,
Energo-fascism could be our future.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at
Hampshire College and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and
Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum [31] (Owl
Books).

[Note: For the last two weeks, Tomdispatch has focused special attention on
the Pentagon and militarization-related pieces. At the end of this month,
Chalmers Johnson will return to this website with a capstone piece for this
series on militarization and the fate of our republic. Look for it.]

Copyright 2007 Michael T. Klare

--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson