Review: Michael Klare in Maastricht: Oil addiction rehab or bust!

US Professor Michael Klare, an expert on Peace and Security Studies and author of the book “Blood and Oil,” recently presented a chilling perspective in Maastricht on the topic of energy in international politics.

The lecture, entitled “Energy, Politics and Power”, was offered by Maastricht Debates, a joint initiative between Maastricht University, The Netherlands Chapter of the Society for International Development (SID), the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), Europe-open, Concordantia student association and Studium Generale. The collaboration between these various organisations succeeded in generating a large amount of interest in the lecture, as the conference hall was packed.

Although the original intention of a “public debate” as it was titled was not satisfied as there was only one speaker and no alternative perspective presented - it could be that the other speaker dropped out, or that it was simply a matter of faulty advertising -, the highly involved audience was fortunately able to enrich the evening with sound questions.

Klare began his lecture with an overview on American energy consumption, since the United States is among the world’s largest consumers of energy, primarily oil, accounting for one quarter of global energy usage. Oil has played a significant role in US foreign policy since the 1980’s when the Carter Doctrine proclaimed that oil as a primary source of energy sustenance needed to be protected at any cost.

Klare also analyzed the global demand for energy and said that it was rising at a much greater rate than existing energy resources are able to sustain. Today 85 million barrels of oil are produced each day. The US, Europe, Japan, China, India and the Asian Tiger states are the primary consumers and will be responsible for a 50 per cent global rise in consumption by 2030. By then demand will probably have reached 115 million barrels a day.

Reaching the peak moment of oil production
Klare’s manner of speech did not demonstrate any emotional sentiment towards the topic but instead expressed a calm and objective authority. Yet when the professor wished to stress some points, he did it with brio, suddenly raising his voice and stunning the audience at his change in tempo. This happened when he declared that the world’s current oil resources will not be capable of meeting our energy needs after 2030, for today we face, or are very close to, the peak moment of oil production after which conventional oil sources will decline. The current production yield of 85 million barrels a day cannot be increased very much more, if at all.

The peak moment could be stretched out a bit through the exploitation of unconventional oil reserves, like those present beneath the Arctic ice, but the risk of severe environmental damage precludes that possibility, at least with current methods.

One alternative to oil may be in the use of natural gas, but Klare estimates that its availability will decline within a decade after the oil runs out.

The diminishing supply of resources is made especially noticeable in the rising price of oil which is currently at USD 98 per barrel. That figure is very near the USD 101 record reached during the oil crisis of the 1970s, but this time the raise in price won’t simply be due to OPEC’s control of oil exportation, but to the earth itself which has no more to yield.

Trading with instable countries
Michael Klare then elaborated on how the world’s most powerful industrialized countries are getting more and more desperate in accruing what little oil is left. One piece of evidence for this is that China and the US are trading with very instable countries which are often dependent on oil as their only source of wealth. Some of these unstable nations that are providers of both the US and China are located in the Middle East, around the Caspian Sea and Africa. Oil profits have allowed these regions to make massive arms purchases, which have helped exacerbate that instability.

Now both the United States and China are assisting in by sending military liaisons to train their providers’ military forces. In a worst case scenario, Klare hinted that a direct albeit unintentional conflict between China and the US may occur as a result of this competition for control of oil production resources.

The Caspian Sea region
Professor Klare used the second part of his lecture to illustrate how one geographic area is playing a crucial role in the energy futures of the industrialized world, and more specifically of the US, China and Russia. The importance of Caspian Sea region, comprised of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kirgizstan and situated between the southern borders of the Russian Federation and northern Iran, lies primarily in the fact that the area contains some of the world’s largest deposits of natural gas along with a slowly growing oil output that has now elevated it to the fourth largest oil producer in the world.

But the geographic proximity of the Caspian Sea region to some of the most unstable countries in the Middle East and Asia, namely Iraq and Afghanistan, and to what may become a third front in the United States’ “war on terror,” Iran, is a threat that cannot be disregarded.

Domineering economic and military influences will therefore either allow the spread or containment of those hotspots, a point that Klare emphatically stressed. Klare also drew a parallel between the present situation and that during the First World War when the same region was fought over by the Russian, Ottoman and British Empires. Klare believes a similarly volatile situation could emerge if current trends continue.

Concerned audience
After sketching this grim picture, the floor was opened up to the public, which was virtually jumping at the bit to express itself.

One of the most interesting remarks raised by the clearly concerned and educated audience, was related to the fact that Klare did not address how Europe would be involved in the upcoming oil crisis, since he believed only China and the United States would have any influence on its unfolding. The fact that Klare was standing in a lecture hall in Maastricht, the Netherlands, lecturing a predominantly European audience certainly justified the point. Klare said that he didn’t ignore Europe out of disdain, explaining further that his omission was due to the fact that Europe consumes only a fraction of the energy used by the United States and China and therefore is less at risk of suffering the more severe side effects of the oil crisis that will occur in 2030.

Another aspect missing from Klare’s lecture was some degree of optimism, to put it mildly, except a hint at a possible salvation through the use of renewable technology, such as biodiesel fuels, solar power, hydrogen power and geothermal power. But even then, Klare warned that support for the development and widespread usage of those renewable forms of energy is faced with the seemingly insurmountable cultural hurdle present in the oil geared societies of the United States and China. The average American is obsessed with huge, gas-guzzling S.U.Vs (Sport Utility Vehicles) while in China, as the country is developing so rapidly with its middle class simultaneously exploding in size, car use is growing at a much quicker rate than it ever has.

For both of these reasons, finding a way to re-orient the US and China towards using alternative energy resources and give up their bias towards convenient non-renewable energy resources will be a herculean task.

Is there a solution?
What was most apparent by the end of the lecture, and made more convincing by the atmosphere of dismay felt during and after the lecture, is that the members of the audience, mostly students, didn’t get what they had expected out of it. They sought information that might give them hope, or at least give them a hint as to how the oil crisis can be resolved in order to guarantee their continued safety. But Klare was only able to illuminate what humanity is doing wrong: finding an effective solution to the oil crisis is up to you.

The fact that Professor Klare is teaching at five institutes of higher education in the United States makes one perturbed at his overbearing pessimism, and curious as to how the American audiences he usually addresses perceive his negative opinion of the American gas-guzzling culture. For as rife with cynicism towards the American way of life as Europeans are, is it possible that the mainstream American consciousness is now beginning to see the light in a similar fashion? Or did Klare exaggerate in that very cynicism in order to sound like what he expected Europeans would relate to?

What Klare may not have realized is that the use of over-dramatization to make his argument more approachable and more arresting only served in this case to frustrate the audience and make it feel like being talked down to and not with. Let’s hope there comes a time where that is no longer required to garner interest and that hope for our world can, in some fashion, be resurrected.

By Eliot Rolen, Louisa Kistemaker and Christina Sohbach

Eliot Rolen (US), Louisa Kistemaker and Christina Sohbach (Germany) are currently studying at University College Maastricht.

Michael Klare on the US Carter doctrine and oil

More video clips: An exclusive interview by Atticus Mullikin with Michael Klare is available on the EJC YouTube channel (4 parts). A two-part transcript of the interview is available here and here.
Mr Klare’s entire lecture is available on the EJC YouTube Channel (11 parts).