"America
is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable
parts of the world," said President George W
Bush in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.
And his solution? He's going to cut US oil imports
from the Middle East by 75 per cent, and replace the
missing oil with ethanol made from fermented plant
waste: "If...being dependent upon oil is a problem
for the long term, why don't we figure out how to
drive our cars using a different type of fuel?"
Not
a word from Mr Bush about attacking the demand side
of the equation by burning less oil (although after
the 1973-74 oil embargo the US managed to cut its
oil consumption by almost 30 per cent strictly by
energy conservation). Not a word about the consequences
for climate change of burning so much oil, or about
the implications of soaring oil demand in the emerging
Asian giants, China and India, for prices and supply.
Just a promise to cut American oil imports from the
Middle East by three-quarters-by 2025.
As
so often with President Bush, it's hard to tell whether
he is trying to fool us, or just fooling himself.
Sixty per cent of the oil that the United States consumes
is imported (up from 53 per cent when Bush came into
office). Last year, less than one-fifth of that imported
oil came from the Middle East, so achieving Bush's
stated goal would only bring the share of imported
oil in US consumption back to the level of 2001. And
much of it would still come from "unstable parts
of the world."
Actually,
Mr Bush is being unfair to the Middle East, which
is the most stable part of the planet in terms of
the longevity of its regimes.
Perhaps
he is afraid that his vaunted democratic revolutions
will actually come to pass, for free elections almost
anywhere in the region would produce governments much
more hostile to the American presence than the current
regimes. (See Hamas's recent victory in the Palestinian
occupied territories, for example.) But he is also
barking up the wrong tree: the real vulnerabilities
of the US lie elsewhere.
The
three largest sources of American oil imports are
Canada, Venezuela and Nigeria. Canada is stable, but
Venezuela is definitely not, mainly because the US
keeps trying to destabilise it. The Bush administration
loathes President Hugo Chavez for his socialism and
his closeness to Fidel Castro, and has already been
implicated in one attempted coup against him in 2002.
If
there were to be another attempt, and Chavez suspected
American involvement, an embargo on Venezuelan oil
exports to the United States would be pretty much
a certainty. As for Nigeria....
"It
must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot
protect your workers or assets," declared the
Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND)
in an e-mail last month to oil companies working in
the region. "Leave our land while you can, or
die in it. Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity
of the Nigerian government to export oil."
Since
mid-December two major pipelines have been blown up
in the Niger Delta, home to all of Nigeria's oil.
Nine people were killed in an attack on the Italian
oil company Agip. Four foreigners were kidnapped from
an offshore rig (and later released, presumably on
payment of a large ransom). And at least seventeen
people died in a motorboat raid on a Shell flow station
in the swamps around Warri.
MEND
is the latest expression of the seething dissatisfaction
of the region's 20 million people with the fact that
all that oil has brought them so little prosperity.
In fact, all of Nigeria's 129 million people have
a legitimate grievance, for most of the $350 billion
that the country has earned from oil exports in the
past fifty years has been stolen by a narrow politico-military
elite, but only the people of the Delta live amidst
the pollution that the oil causes, and only they can
take direct action.
Moreover,
the protest groups and the guerillas are often tangled
up with the criminal gangs who siphon off oil from
the pipelines ("bunkering", as it is known).
The major foreign oil companies operating in the Delta
(Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, ENI and Exxon) have long
turned a blind eye to the bunkering in return for
being left alone to get on with their operations,
and the gangs restricted their stealing to about ten
percent of Nigeria's oil. But with the passage of
time they have got richer, more heavily armed, and
greedier.
The
Nigerian government seems helpless to do anything
about the security situation in the Delta (as it is
about most things). The double threat of political
guerillas and criminal gangs has got so severe that
Stakeholder Democracy Network, an anti-corruption
group active in the area, suggested in a report last
month that "Shell and (other) foreign oil operators
may have to go offshore altogether by 2008 as security
and public order deteriorate."
And
who would then buy the onshore oil facilities, assuming
that MEND had not destroyed them? Probably China,
which is willing to accept higher levels of risk than
strictly commercial companies in order to have secure
long-term oil supplies. If Mr Bush insists on treating
oil as a supply rather than a demand problem, he should
at least find the right trees to bark up.
