It
was all about oil, global warming
By
Gwynne Dyer
THE year two thousand and seven was the year in which global
warming finally began to be taken seriously. The climate change
deniers were in full retreat,
and the realisation that we face a long and grave crisis was finally dawning
on the general public. However, it remains to be seen whether it was the year
in which the world agreed on effective measures to deal with the crisis.
The global conference in Bali that was supposed to kick off negotiations
for a new treaty to replace the Kyoto accord after 2012 ended ambiguously.
The American delegation did not succeed in wrecking it, but it
did manage to get all specific targets for cuts in greenhouse gas
emissions removed from the text of the agreement.
The other countries went along with it in order to stop the United
States from walking out, on the assumption that next year's presidential
election will produce an administration that is willing to co-operate.
Then the hard targets for cuts will get put back in, and United
States will sign up to them, and the Indians and the Chinese and
the other big developing countries will make a deal that commits
them to some cap on emissions in return for much technological
and financial help from the developed countries in installing clean
energy technologies.
That is the theory, and you can't blame the other countries for
going along with it because the alternative was a rogue America
and no agreement. On the other hand, the history is not promising.
It was Saint Albert Gore himself, then vice-president, who led
the US delegation to the Kyoto talks in 1997 and drove the proposed
emissions cuts down from 15 per cent to five per cent, in the hope
of coming up with a deal that Congress would accept.
But Congress never did accept the Kyoto accord, because its paymasters
in the US energy, transport and natural resources sectors said
not to. Things may have changed a bit now - Congress passed a bill
this month that mandates greater fuel economy in vehicles - but
on the big issues it is still largely subservient.
It really is amazingly cheap to buy the US Congress. Since 1990,
fossil fuel industries, logging interests, agribusiness companies
and the transportation industry have given federal politicians
only about $750 million, but that money plays such a key role in
funding their election campaigns that on the question of climate
change Congress usually toes the line. With no early prospect of
campaign finance reform, there is no reason to believe that the
next Congress will be very different in its behaviour.
George W Bush will no longer be there in 2009, but even a more
climate-friendly president will probably still face a sold-out
Congress.
The crisis has finally been acknowledged around the world, but
we may not be anywhere near a coordinated global response yet.
The other event with truly global impact was the
soaring price of oil, which has been hovering at just below $100
per barrel for
the past four months. It may go back down, of course, but it is
unlikely ever to drop below $50 again and it is just as likely
to rise as to fall. Indeed, many people suspect that we are now
at or near "peak oil'', after which production will steadily
decline and the price will continue to rise indefinitely.
The impact of higher oil prices on the world's
economies has been remarkably slight so far - much less, for
example, than the credit
crunch that has been unleashed by the "sub-prime'' crisis
in the United States - but in the longer run more expensive oil
will drive up almost all other prices. The world is skating along
the edge of a global recession, and only the continued dynamism
of the emerging Asian economies keeps it from toppling in.
The Burmese military junta crushed a non-violent popular uprising
led by Buddhist monks, the first since 1988, by killing some hundreds
of protesters and arresting thousands of monks. President Gloria
Arroyo of the Philippines rode out the fifth coup attempt in seven
years, and the Thai military junta got popular approval for a new
constitution that grants the military a large permanent role even
after democracy is restored.
The
thinly disguised military take-over in Bangladesh in January
was followed by the arrest of both the main party leaders, whom
the army seems determined to exclude from any future elections.
Pakistan is mired in a huge political crisis as the dictator
who has ruled the country for the past eight years, Pervez Musharraf,
struggles to retain control in the face of resurgent political
parties and an aroused civil society. Democracy has not had a
good year in southern Asia - but despite the upheavals, the economies
of all these countries (except Burma, of course) continue to
grow rapidly.
In the Middle East, President Bush's troop "surge" in
Iraq bought him an extra two years and ensured that he would be
able to drop the mess in the lap of his successor, but it is still
an unwinnable war for the United States.
The great and frightening imponderable of the year
was not the fate of Iraq, but the question of whether the United
States would
also attack Iran. Both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney
repeatedly accused Iran of working on nuclear weapons (predicting "World
War III" if it were not stopped), and warned that "all
options are on the table'' including a US attack.
Tony Blair finally relinquished the prime ministership in Britain
in June to take up a lucrative career on the lecture circuit and
a largely symbolic post as prominent-person-in-charge-of-doing-something-for-the-Palestinians,
while his successor Gordon Brown struggled to get the hang of being
prime minister after ten years in the number two job.
In July Turkish democracy weathered a major crisis
when voters decisively supported the "Muslim democrats''
of the ruling Justice and Development Party against veiled threats
of intervention
by an army that still sees an Islamic party as a threat to the
secular state.
You have to look hard to find encouraging news
from Africa. Ivory Coast has reunited, at least for the moment,
after five years of
civil war and division. The civil war in the Congo is still mostly
over, although there was a flare-up in the north-east in September.
Nigeria had a peaceful transfer of power from one elected president
to another, for the first time in its history - although only after
the outgoing president was defeated in his attempt to change the
constitution and run for a third term. But the victor and new president
of Nigeria, Umaru Yar'Adua, won by an absurd four-to-one majority
in an election that European Union observers described as "not
credible'' and the United States called "deeply disturbing''.
Tell magazine put it best, claiming to quote Joseph Stalin: "Those
who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide
everything.''
That's the good news. The bad news is that almost all of north-eastern
Africa is already at war or rapidly drifting in that direction.
The Darfur war in south-western Sudan has spilled over into Chad
and the Central African Republic, exacerbating the local conflicts
there, and the peace deal that ended the far bigger, decades-long
war between southern Sudan and the centre is breaking down. Ethiopia
is fighting its own rebel citizens in the north-east and waging
a brutal and indiscriminate campaign against civilians and resistance
fighters alike in occupied Somalia, while to the north Eritrea,
Africa's Sparta, is gearing up for another war with Ethiopia. These
are some of the poorest countries in Africa and perhaps also among
the earliest victims of climate change, which may explain why they
are also being ravaged by war. Bad things come in threes.
East Africa and southern Africa are in far better shape, of course,
apart from the ongoing disaster of Zimbabwe, but even there very
few countries have an economic growth rate that is more than one
or two points higher than their population growth rate. It will
be a great many years, at that rate, before the majority of their
people escape from grindingpoverty.
The main story in Latin America all year has been the advance
of the left, fuelled in part by Venezuelan oil wealth. Hugo Chavez
was the role model in Ecuador, where President Rafael Correa won
power in January on a platform of radical reform. Venezuela paid
the legal bills when Bolivia nationalised its gas fields and extracted
more revenue from the foreign companies that operate them.
And
Venezuela is now providing so much aid to Cuba, mainly in the
form of cheap oil, that the subsidies compare with those that
Castro used to get from the Soviet Union. That certainly helped
to stabilise Cuba's transition from Fidel Castro's one-man rule
to the new "collective leadership'' - but there was a nationwide
sigh of relief when the still ailing Castro finally indicated
in December that he did not intend to take power back.
In the United States, the war in Iraq fell off the front pages
as American military casualties declined, though it will probably
be back there by next summer: everybody, including the Iraqi insurgents,
knows how the Tet offensive turned American opinion decisively
against the Vietnam war in the election year of 1968. The presidential
primaries, the most wide open in decades, were already taking up
almost all the available media space by year's end, but no candidate
in either party had established an unbeatable lead. The US dollar
was collapsing in external markets, but most attention focussed
instead on the collapse of the domestic mortgage market and the
risk of a recession.
Gwynne
Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries. Petroleumworld
not necessarily share these views.
Editor's note: This
commentary was originally published by Trinidad
Express,
on Wednesday,
December 26th 2007. Petroleumworld
reprint this article in the interest of our readers. Petroleumworld
reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
