The book’s subtitle is “The Myths of Scarcity and Security that Haunt U.S. Energy Policy.”
The subtitle sums up the book’s thrust. There are two primary issues. The book’s last chapter addresses the secondary issue: There never was an “oil for security” deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The famous 1945 meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and Al Saud was primarily about Palestine. Nothing in the record suggests an oil-for-security arrangement. If anything, the oil price shocks of the 1970s (precipitated by OPEC) should have been enough to falsify that myth, yet it persists.
The bulk of the book is about markets. Vitalis’ argument is essentially this: It doesn’t matter who owns the oil in the ground. If there is excess resource for the controlling entity’s needs, then the controlling entity must sell it to realize any benefit. It matters not whether the country is an ally or an enemy; they will sell their oil. If they will not sell it to us, they will sell it to someone else, and that someone else will turn around and sell it to us, or some other oil source will.
Vitalis contends that oil, extracted from the ground, lives in a market like every other commodity. Except possibly in wartime, it is, and was, never necessary for the U.S. to use military force to defend oil sources—yes, even in the case of Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait—and every such use of the military has never resulted in less expensive or more secure oil imports. Much more important, he claims, is secure control of the means of transporting the oil from source to market. In that context, he might agree that protecting ships in the Persian Gulf from Houthi missiles is justified.
The author extensively documents his claims—the endnotes section is longer than the text.
But Vitalis is wrong about one thing. Oil is not “just like” other commodities. First oil (more generally energy stored as carbon-hydrogen bonds. There are only three natural forms of it: oil, coal, and natural gas—technically also wood, which is “pre-coal”) is the apex commodity. It is an input to everything else. No other commodity has this property (food has some of it, since it is also stored carbon energy, but it is a ubiquitous input only to living systems, and today it also requires oil for planting, harvesting, and market transport). Second, every other commodity is, at least in theory, recyclable. Even food can be recycled into fertilizer. Carbon energy cannot be recycled. You have to destroy it to use it.
What about so-called renewable energy sources? Electricity? Where does it come from? Either carbon or the sun/wind/water, but capturing those sources requires oil for mining, building, deploying, and maintaining. What about uranium, the only natural non-carbon energy source (besides the sun)? Same thing. One must mine and process uranium (carbon for digging, transport, and electricity for processing) and build nuclear power plants (more carbon).
What about hydrogen? Hydrogen is not a natural energy source but a storage medium like a battery. How does one get electricity into a battery? You make it somewhere else and put it in by charging the battery. Similarly, we make hydrogen using electricity or chemical reactions, storing that energy as hydrogen. Either way, we are back to carbon. Note that in theory, oil, coal, and gas are stored solar energy (like food), but we count them as “sources” rather than “stores” because the sun put the energy in—via plants—millions of years ago.
Does the difference that oil (carbon energy sources) represents make a difference to Vitalis’ thesis that military intervention in oil sources is unnecessary in the absence of a global conflict? I don’t think so, but not because oil isn’t different from everything else. His thesis holds because, apex input or not, like other commodities, it is bought and sold in markets, and there is enough of it from multiple sources (for now) to permit this kind of treatment.
That brings me to one other small criticism of Oilcraft. Vitalis points out that every time we think we are running out of oil, we find more. He tends to write as if this will always be so, but because carbon energy cannot be recycled, recoverable stocks must eventually be exhausted.
My fourth (read) book by Kaplan is the apex of his thesis. What thesis? First, geography matters. Still true, Kaplan says, but in this book, modified by other forces. Second, geography does not determine history but strongly conditions it. This conditioning remains, but a set of global and interlocking destabilizing phenomena skew its impact. Third, individuals make a difference from two directions. On one side are rare individuals, typically members of the political elite, whether democratic or autocratic, whose choices can shift historical momentum in one direction or another. Kaplan refers to these individuals as “hinge persons.” On the other side is the mob (and he means a literal mob), whose actions can constrain, for good or ill, what the elite can do, even having the ability, sometimes, to force them from power.
Waste Land is Kaplan’s most inclusive view of everything, and its overall effect is pessimistic. He considers:
Rising populations are, in most places, becoming poorer by the year. Many populations, including China’s, are rapidly aging and shrinking, deviating from the typical demographic trend. By contrast, Africa, which in 2025 hosts about twenty percent of the world’s population, is expected to grow to forty percent by 2050. India, South America, and much of Southeast Asia are also increasing. Overpopulation exacerbates every other destabilizer.
The fragile economics of interconnected supply chains rest on a non-existent global political order. An international order only appears to exist when relations between nations are peaceful. However, peace between trading partners can easily collapse: witness Russia versus the EU. As the population expands and, in particular, as expectations rise (see technology below), continuing peace and progress depend on the smooth functioning of these mechanisms.
The technology revolution, and in particular the now globe-spanning Internet. People in poor places now see how people in rich places live, stoking demand for a bigger slice of the pie. Events are reflected across the world almost instantly, but not their more nuanced causes or other details. Partial information can impel political elites to act precipitously before they fully understand what has happened. The lack of detail also opens the door to malicious actors who take such opportunities to flood the Internet with false information, lending strength to counterproductive, precipitous action, sometimes by mobs. AI, for all the good it could do, also enhances this problem. Large Language Model AI can generate such volumes of disinformation and misinformation at the behest of malicious actors that it becomes impossible to discern what is true from what is false.
Pollution and ecological degradation. We are poisoning our biosphere. Carbon and methane foul our atmosphere, the oceans become acidic, and plastic accumulates on our cropland, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Most of the Earth’s populations now live with measurable amounts of plastic in their brains. Microplastics are bad. Nanoplastics—so small that ordinary microscopes cannot see them —are much worse. A disproportionate amount of these (estimates vary from 30 to 70 percent) comes from one source: the daily wearing down of trillions of automobile and truck tires, whose residue is picked up by winds and rain and deposited everywhere. Nor is plastic the only material poisoning us. Industries and large-scale farms have been dumping toxic pollutants into waterways and landfills for two centuries. Many of the coastal dead zones and declines in fish and shellfish populations stem from this. More esoterically, every satellite that burns up in the atmosphere releases toxic metals that slowly settle into the air we breathe. The settling process can take a decade or two, but satellites have been burning up at an increasing rate, year after year, for over sixty years. Kaplan doesn’t get into these last details. I include them for the edification of my readers.
Resource exhaustion. In the late twentieth century, oil appeared to be a significant constraint. We have figured out how to coax more from the Earth, but there is still only a limited amount in the ground. Today, water is the greater geopolitical issue. Half the world lives with water scarcity. Larger populations demand more water, while the sources of water are shrinking. The glaciers that supply fresh water to much of the world are shrinking faster than anyone thought possible. Upstream countries (China in Tibet, Turkey in the Middle East, and Ethiopia in North East Africa, to name a few) are damming rivers to hold more of the water for themselves while the downriver nations dry up even faster than they otherwise would. If anything immediately exposes the lack of a formal global order, it is this.
Climate change is the bookend to population expansion. The carbon we put into the atmosphere is slowly warming the planet. Warming the planet is akin to pressing down on the accelerator of a car. More energy means faster transitions in our weather, more tornadoes and hurricanes, floods, and wildland fires. More energy means more chaotic behavior. Wind, floods, and fires destroy crops, making it harder to feed growing populations as seasonal cycles (longer droughts, larger floods) become less reliable. Sea levels are rising steadily as glaciers melt away. Even the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are melting back more rapidly than expected.
Everything in the above list is a destabilizer of what falsely appears to be a world order based on trade, and it so happens that at this historical moment, what order exists is being deliberately undermined by a hinge person: the presently unhinged president of the United States.
What does a destabilized world look like? We are already experiencing it, and the international state of affairs is on a deteriorating path. More and deadlier wars, mass migration, expanding disease, and starvation of people due to food and water shortages. As resources dwindle, those places that have vital resources will hoard them. More nations will become failed states. More people will be left to their own devices with ever-diminishing resources, along with steadily rising temperatures. There will be no safe place to move tens or even hundreds of millions of starving people. Wars of the have-nots against the haves will become an existential necessity: starvation the only other option. All this Kaplan foresees.
But even Kaplan does not see (yet) how climate change, in combination with ecosystem collapse (to which climate change contributes directly), will gradually grow to overwhelm everything else, possibly precipitating a global nuclear holocaust. Even if hinge people prevent the exchange of H-bombs, conditions everywhere will grow worse at an ever-quickening pace. Year after year, disaster mitigation will consume more of the world’s accumulated capital. The U.S., the world’s wealthiest country, cannot keep up with its annual disaster bill even now. Fragile supply lines will collapse if there is no capital to maintain them. In no place on Earth will there be seasonally reliable weather in which to grow the food needed to feed the planet’s population.
Technology will not save us. Capital, not to mention polluting energy, is required to maintain the technology we have, from the mining and smelting of raw materials to transport and assembly—and maintenance—of finished products. Electricity grids will fail when supply chains break, and there are no parts to maintain them. Our technological way of life will come to an end. With the collapse of industrial capacity, large portions of the Earth will become uninhabitable due to extreme temperatures. With no viable air conditioning or sufficient water, through much of the year, temperatures will exceed the limits of the human body to cool itself.
The severity and frequency of humanitarian crises will grow in inverse proportion to the world’s ability to mitigate them. It will not be possible for parts of the world to assist other parts because disasters will become financially and then physically overwhelming everywhere, and roughly at the same time.
As energy, food, and water become scarce or vanish, protest mobs seeking the impossible — to recover what has been lost — will grow and become progressively more violent, accelerating the decline of order. Local, national, and international orders will unravel. In the end, anarchy, Kaplan’s most dreaded political outcome, will prevail everywhere.
Kaplan tells us that even all of the destabilizers taken together do not determine our future. Hinge people may redirect the course of history into stabilizing channels. I believe he knows in his heart that it is too late. Summing up his take on the world situation as a whole, I have to think Kaplan’s message is: we’re fucked!
Here are some references pertaining to claims I’ve made above. If I have reviewed these in the blog, I will link to my review. The source link is always in there.
Ruminations 