Akosombo Dam; Source – Volta River Authority

Ghana has been forced to cope with increased energy shortages as a result of damages to the West African Gas Pipeline, dating back to Aug. 28, 2012. The $1 billion, 650 kilometer long pipeline, built to carry gas from Nigeria to Benin, Togo and Ghana, was severely damaged during an incident between a Togolese Navy ship and an unidentified non-state actor’s ship. Power rationing is now rampant in the country and severely impacting many areas of industry, business and private affairs.

Ghana, the largest recipient of gas from the pipeline imported 123 million cubic feet of gas per day, has sought to counteract the new deficiency. The Ministry of Energy and Petroleum recently added 265 megawatts (MW) to generation: 132MW from the Takoradi 3 Thermal Power Plant and 133 MW from the Bui Hydro Project, which is scheduled to total 400 MW when all the phases are completed by the end of the year. However, more needs to be done.

Head of Corporate Communications at the Volta River Authority (VRA), the state-owned power generating utility, said based on the rate of the economic growth of the country, Ghana needs to produce more energy to meet its needs; demand has been rising at 12-13 percent per year, according to the World Bank. Since 2009 the government has increased the country’s installed electricity capacity from 1,810 to 2,576 MW and President John Mahama has committed to double the installed capacity to 5,000 MW by 2016.

The country needs to demonstrate the ability to match the rate of electricity demand with adequate supply, as well as the proportion of energy produced for productive use. Ghana’s primary energy source today is from hydropower totaling more than 1,000 MW, accounting for about 80 percent of electrical output. Thermal power sources approximately account for the rest.

A key component of the plan to ramp up electricity generation is to utilize the gas that will be brought to shore from the Jubilee Oil Field via a pipeline that is under construction and is expected to be completed in September. The field, some 65 km off the south west coast in the Gulf of Guinea, came online in December 2010. Then it was producing 55,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) and now it is producing over 100,000 bpd; it has pumped out more than 65 million barrels cumulatively.

Oil and gas money has been a new source of income but it also has stirred lots of debate, with some worrying the government will not properly allocate the new found wealth. The government has consistently maintained the proceeds would be fairly distributed and other related matters handled to benefit the country rather than being seen as a curse.

Ghana is also a country rich in solar radiation and there has been a growing commitment to produce electricity from a domestic asset. President John Mahama inaugurated Ghana’s first 2 MW solar energy plant in Navrongo in the Upper East Region last Thursday. When the facility is expanded from the six photovoltaic arrays, covering 9.6 acres of land to an output of 2.5 MW, only Cape Verde will be home to a larger solar project in West Africa.

President Mahama hailed the project at the inauguration and mentioned that the government is trying to stem the load sharing and he is taking multiple approaches. Mr. Mahama made sure to state that citizens need to pay a “realistic” cost for electricity so the VRA and Electricity Company of Ghana could produce more power.

Recently, Japan’s Ambassador to Ghana, Naoto Nikai joined the movement urging more investment in solar energy. In 2010, Japan provided a 610 million yen (about 6 million USD) grant for the first phase of a 315 kilowatt solar electric system at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Accra. Mr. Nikai stated, in Ghana, where the sun is bright and shines throughout the year, solar power is an appropriate option.

Despite the relative small projects when comparing to developed nations, these successful efforts have already sent signals Ghana is ready for larger scale projects. In fact, CEO of the VRA, Kweku Awotwi mentioned there is an agreement and funding secured for a 12 MW Solar photovoltaic (PV) plant slated to start construction later this year.

Ghana’s energy strategy sets a goal of renewable energy constituting 10 percent of national energy generation by 2020. To reach this goal, the parliament passed the Renewable Energy Act, providing the legal and regulatory framework necessary for enhancing and expanding the country’s renewable energy sector.

To achieve the country’s needs and targets, it needs large sums of infrastructure investment. It also needs to overcome the challenge presented from its growing population and economy.

Mr. Emmanuel Armah Kofi Buah, Minister of Energy and Petroleum relayed that the ministry has undertaken studies on the feasibility of providing renewable energy throughout the country to meet the energy needs. The Minister said, “Our vision to generate 5,000 megawatts of electricity by 2016 is on course and the only way to achieve that is to diversify into wind and solar that are less expensive and more reliable in terms of domestic and industrial consumption.”

Yesterday, I attended a talk by Dr. David Pinder, Reader in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, at Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. His presentation was entitled, “Fluid cities: circulation and the politics of mobility.” Dr. Pinder touched on a number of ideas related to mobilities, such as fixities versus flows, verticality, access and urban design, but the one I want to connect to the Arctic is the dichotomy between nomadism and sedentarism. The state generally prefers that people live in territorially fixed settlements. Nomads are seen as threatening to the power of the state. They are primitive and backwards; the modernist architect Le Corbusier called Paris the “eternal gypsy encampment” before Baron von Haussman razed and rebuilt it with wide open boulevards. In the Arctic, indigenous peoples like the Inuit were historically nomadic. Some Sami in Fenno-Scandinavia and many Nenets in Russia still follow the movements of reindeer. But over time, the state has displaced them and encouraged them to forsake their traditional ways of life for a more sedentary lifestyle. In theory, the Westphalian state is predicated on fixity of borders and boundaries, of territories and populations.

Yet at the same time, neoliberal flows seek to break down these very borders to allow for free circulation of goods and money. Thus, the market state depends on a certain type of nomadism and movement to survive. Capitalism necessitates the constant movement, flow and circulation of investments to new places in order to sustain itself. Nowadays, parts of the Arctic, generally those home to a wealth of natural resources, are attracting new investments. Just as the forces behind capitalist expansion have historically evicted certain nomads, namely indigenous peoples, from the places they frequent, they have simultaneously imported skilled laborers to these sites. The Globe and Mail cites a 2008 study from Chatelaine magazine implying that “more than half of the Fort McMurray area’s 25,000 migrant workers are from Atlantic Canada.” 2,000 to 3,000 people commute from New Brunswick to Fort McMurray for work. They are Canada’s “cowboy nomads” – a figure first mentioned in a letter to a 1969 edition of the magazine, Supplement.

The cowboy nomad is someone who wanders and roams, attempting to escape the mundane nature of middle-class suburbia while at the same time living off the very technologies that enable that suburbia: readily accessible food, electronics, and oil, for example. He chooses to be highly mobile. In “From Counterculture to Cyberculture,” Fred Turner draws a comparison between the cowboy nomad and Gurney Norman’s “Long Hunter” (p. 87). The long hunter is someone who engages in a period of “long-learning, in which modern frontiersmen gain the individual competence that allows them to do the necessary, practical things. Indians were the original teachers. They are with us still, their ways and attitudes remain as models, to emulate and learn from.”  Ultimately, the long hunter is “willing to range beyond the settled places in search of education and adventure” (Norman, 1970, in Turner, 2006, p. 87).

It is interesting to transpose these romanticized figures of cowboy nomads and long hunters to the Arctic. Western society valorizes the men who tough it out in extremes, braving sheets of snow and brazen polar bears to drill for oil, drive massive trucks across precarious ice roads, or simply test the limits of the human body. Just think of recent TV shows such as Ice Road Truckers or the Guardian’s op-ed praising Ranulph Fiennes’ attempt to walk across Antarctica in the dark of winter, despite the fact that he has had to withdraw due to frostbite. These are the cowboy nomads of the north and south poles, for their endeavors would not be possible without modern technology. Furthermore, at least in the Arctic, they are not really ranging beyond the “settled places,” which the region continues to be categorized as despite the thousands of years of indigenous inhabitance. Since many of these indigenous peoples were nomadic, the state did not see their mobile form of inhabiting spaces as legitimate. Complicating matters more, even when the Inuit travel across land, they do not lay down asphalt, stones, or iron to make their tracks permanent. Instead, they ephemerally etch their paths into the snow each year for them only to disappear when summer arrives.

Claudio Aporta has carried out some fascinating research (subscription required) using GIS, GPS, and Google Earth to map the network of Inuit trails. He concludes that Inuit culture is “better understood in terms of moving as a way of living” and that the Inuit have made “systematic use of the Arctic environment as a whole,” traveling from Greenland to Alaska and back. Their trails are not just efficient routes from A to B. Whereas in the West, the purpose of flight is to transport a person as quickly as possible from one spot to another, Inuit tracks often pass through fertile areas where they would hunt and exchange goods and news with others.

Like many places in the world, however, cities are becoming the dominant form of settlement in the Arctic, eroding the importance of such traditional travel networks and generally reterritorializing the north. Iqaluit’s population is growing rapidly with an 8.3% upsurge in 2011. Tromsø grew by 3.8% last year. By contrast, Russia’s northern cities, are shrinking. Residents are not fleeing for the rural countryside or for nomadic lifestyles, but rather for the big city in the south – Moscow. I like this infographic from RIA Novosti of population in the Arctic, as it’s well-designed and shows where the major concentrations of people are.

But a dotmap like the above of the United States, generated by MIT graduate student Brandon Martin-Anderson, depicting settlements in the Arctic would be enlightening. It would better show the distribution of people without regard to the boundaries of municipalities, counties, or countries, as the Russian one does. Of course, the complicating factor is that not all of the residents of the north can be tied to one place. Nomads defy definition as points of population on a map, unless the map is only representative of a moment in time. Thus, to truly grasp the usage patterns of the Arctic by reindeer herders, whale hunters, and the like, it is perhaps better to rely on maps of their travel networks across tundra, taiga, and ocean, as Aporta does.

This 1996 map of Inuit mapped by census subdivision does a better job than the RIA Novosti infographic of illustrating Canada’s population pattern. We can see that people tend to settle on coastlines and lake shores rather than in the interior. I imagine this pattern would replicate itself across much of the modern Arctic — and, in fact, across the world, as 44% of people live within 150 kilometers of the sea (U.N.). Yet it’s important to remember that the interior is not always “barren” and uninhabited: To those who know where to look, there are resources to be found and news to be gathered. Climate change is adding yet another dimension to the reterritorialization of the Arctic, as both indigenous peoples and commodities extractors alike are having to adapt their routes to changing landscapes — and possibly move more inland from the coast as sea levels rise.

So in essence, we have an Arctic in which the state forced many of the nomadic peoples to permanently settle during the 20th century, sometimes under the guise of modernization projects. Settlement and cities are seen as emblems of progress, even though within them, freedom of movement — whether by automobile, foot, or bicycle – is crucial. People are more easily controlled when they are in one place. In the Arctic then, the question is more than just nomadism versus sedentarism. Rather, it is, “Who can be nomadic?”

The oil sands in Athabasca are not exactly in the Arctic, but as a site quite far north, they still lend themselves to a similar analysis of flows of people, capital and transportation networks. The oil sands workers from the Maritime Provinces are northern cowboy nomads, traveling thousands of miles a week between their sites of home and work. They are embedded within the dominant flows of capital and commodities, so such nomadism is permitted and even encouraged. A map of WestJet’s flight routes, which serves Calgary, the main hub airport near Fort McMurray, shows the patterns of travel commuting from various towns and cities in Canada and making getaway vacations to places in southern California, Mexico, and the Caribbean. This is where the oil sands workers go to spend their generous paychecks. Despite their northerliness, these workers are highly mobile.

Many impoverished indigenous peoples in the Arctic cannot afford to be as footloose. Traditional nomadism is discouraged while the new form of roaming is encouraged. In the Arctic, the modern wayfarer, flying between distant sites of work, home, and recreation, replaces the traditional wayfarer, to use the term from Piers Vitebsky’s book, Reindeer People. The WestJet flight map shows one dimension of the new paths in and out of the north, which are reshaping the territorial connections of the Arctic both within itself and to the rest of the world. Western eyes view the blank spaces on the map not filled with points of population as empty, whereas the Inuit might see them as integrated into their larger travel networks regardless of whether anyone permanently resides there. Thus, the Inuit and the West have divergent ways of conceiving of territorialization, nomadism, and “use” of land.

Merkel & Stoltenberg meet in Oslo. (c) Torbjørn Kjos Violence / SMK

German Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to Oslo this week to meet with Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg to discuss the euro crisis and energy issues, including cooperation in the Arctic. This was the pair’s fifth meeting in nine months.

Stoltenberg stressed the importance of German and European companies in assisting with the development of the Arctic region. After his meeting with Merkel, he remarked, “We also touched on the North and the Arctic, and the possibilities inherent in the north, both energy and other resources. Here, I conveyed that it is important that more good effort involved to develop this important region. This applies to Europe as a whole, including Germany and German industry.” Some progress on building collaboration took place this week at a state dinner attended by Merkel, Stoltenberg, and Minister of Petroleum & Energy Ola Borten Moe. Over dinner, representatives from the German energy companies RWE-Dea, Wintershall, Voith, and VNG, which currently operate off Norway, discussed issues with Statoil delegates.

Norway has typically welcome involving non-Arctic states in economic activities in the region. It is even to more political involvement: for instance, it officially supports South Korea’s bid for permanent observer status in the Arctic Council. While diplomatic ties with China have been frosty since the decision by the Nobel Committee to award Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the peace prize in 2010, there have been reports of regularly occuring secret meetings between Norwegian and Chinese diplomats. Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide announced, “The process has been particularly active in recent months. We have got the clear impression that China wants to normalize relations, and that they consider it to be in their interest.” He also commented that he believes the country’s growing interest in the Arctic is behind its newfound friendliness. Willy Lam, a professor of political science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, stated in an interview with Aftenposten (translated from the Norwegian): “China has a growing interest in the Arctic, where Norway is a major power. Therefore, they want a normal relationship. In addition, they probably see that their furious reaction against Norway has backfired.”

While Norway probably will not be exporting oil and gas to China anytime soon, Germany, the largest economy in Europe, is a significant buyer of exports. In 2009, Germany relied on imported energy to meet over 60 percent of its needs. Norway was its second bigger supplier of both oil and gas: 16 percent of all oil comes from its northern neighbor, while 33 percent of its gas does (the percentages are approximately the same for the EU as a whole). The number one supplier of fossil fuels is Russia.

Thus, in light of the EU’s energy roadmap to 2050, which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a mere 5% to 20% of 1990 levels, and move towards renewables, Statoil is seeking affirmation from Berlin that the country will continue to rely strongly on natural gas, even though production is set to decline by 2020. In 2009, natural gas met 24 percent of German energy needs and oil another 32.9 percent. Renewables (hydro, geothermal, solar and wind) only constituted 2 percent, but the country hopes to increase its share, perhaps to the detriment of Norwegian deficits. For a time, things were looking rosy for German imports of oil and gas. In 2011, partly due to the fallout from the Fukushima disaster in Japan, Germany announced that it would phase out nuclear power. Yet instead of oil and gas meeting the new gap, the drop in the price of coal in Europe has allowed it to play an important role in the German energy mix.

Stoltenberg commented, “We are of course concerned that lower coal prices have led to increased coal consumption in Europe, which has reduced demand for Norwegian gas, but believe that the gas has a future in Germany.”

Merkel noted that with the low price of coal in Europe, it is difficult to make power plants that run on natural gas competitive. “It is difficult for the new gas-fired power plants in Germany to compete on price with this will change over time.”

Norway also exports excess hydrothermal electricity to Germany. Statkraft is working on a new subsea power cable from Norway to the continent to export even more renewable energy. So while the outlook is rosy for Norwegian hydropower exports, if the country wants to capitalize on the new finds in the Barents Sea, Skrugard and Havis, more work needs to be done to expand the infrastructure for transmitting oil and natural gas from the Arctic, whether by ship or pipeline. While all the excitement is over trying to transport fossil fuels to the east over the Northern Sea Route, Norway cannot lose sight of the existing markets to the south on the continent.

The planned Statkraft cables across the North Sea. (c) business-on.de

Pipelines from Norway to the continent.

Thanks to fracking and the oil rush in North Dakota, many analysts predict energy independence for North America, and even for the U.S. itself. The most recent high-profile prediction came from Citigroup’ s global commodities research team, headed by Edward Morse. They issued an 85-page report, which sadly is not available for free, on the future of the energy markets. From a purely economic standpoint, the report, and others like it, was upbeat. However in terms of overall foreign policy, it’s hard to see how energy independence is a game changer.

The Citi report stated that the “momentum toward North American energy independence accelerated last year well beyond the wildest dreams of any energy analyst.” The report supported this by noting “Crude oil production rose from the beginning to the end of 2012 by 1.16 million barrels per day, while natural gas liquids increased by 170 thousand barrels per day.”

Since the 1970s oil embargo, the U.S. has focused a lot of its attention on access to oil. Indeed, the Carter Doctrine says that the U.S. will use force to protect the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. The fear then was the Soviets, having moved into Afghanistan, would someday occupy the oil fields of Arabia and win the Cold War. Despite the USSR going out of business, America remains concerned about access to oil from abroad.

If the country achieves energy independence, theory says that America becomes free from the need to prop up unpleasant but friendly dictators, and American policy in the region will undergo a revolution based on a greater ability to maneuver. In practice, though, I am not so sure that the extra room is going to be all that much.

Because of the Al Qaeda murders of 2001 and because of the Arab Spring (and yes, the collapse of the USSR), American policy across North Africa into the Middle East and beyond to Indonesia, has experienced mission creep, for want of a better term. America had a primary interest in access to oil, but in acting on that interest, the country became entangled in other political aspects of the region. In other words, we are so involved now that energy is merely one component of our array of interests.

If energy vanished entirely from the equation, Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups would continue to target America and those close to it. The Arab Spring has illustrated the split between rulers and ruled in many countries where America has established a presence; which side America backs may be tied to access to energy, but many other consideration enter the picture.

I am glad that there is a shot at energy independence for North America in general and the U.S. in particular. It will improve our balance of payments, and it will give us greater control over our environmental policies in the long run. I remain doubtful, though, that ending our importation of oil from sensitive regions in the world will have as great an impact on our foreign policy as some hope. In the 1970s, that might have been the case, but after 40 years, the situation is more complicated.

The Kulluk off Sitkalidak Island. (c) USCG photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Sara Francis.

Royal Dutch Shell has announced that it will be dry towing its two drill ships anchored in Alaska to ports in Asia for repairs. This means that it likely won’t be drilling in the Alaskan Arctic this summer unless the fixes are somehow completed in time. Two ships are needed whenever drilling is taking place: One for the actual drilling, and one able to drill relief wells if necessary in the case of a blowout. Shell has no other ships suitable for drilling in the Arctic, and the need for repairs make one wonder whether even its two existing ships, the Noble Discoverer and the Kulluk, are suitable at all. The Noble Discoverer, built in 1966, nearly had an accident this summer when it dragged its anchor and came close to grounding in Dutch Harbor. When it was sitting in port, the smokestack caught on fire, too. Curtis Smith, spokesman for Shell Alaska, compared the fire to a car engine backfiring, stating, “Ever seen a small flame out of a car when it backfires? This is the same. It is a minor issue. It is not an incident.” In the Alaska Dispatch, however, others described the fire as more severe. The repairs, however, are unrelated to the fire, and will instead address separate problems with the main propulsion system and engine.

The Kulluk will soon make its way to Dutch Harbor before making its way to a yet to be determined dry dock in Asia. The damaged oil rig is currently anchored in Kiliuda Bay, thirty miles north of where it grounded. The Kulluk was built in 1983 and drilled some exploratory wells in the late ’80s and early ’90s in the Beaufort Sea before being mothballed for fourteen years in McKinley Bay, 80 kilometers east of Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories. Shell purchased the ship, due to be sold for scrap, and refurbished it. The grounding of the ship in December 2012 caused structural damage to the hull, electrical damage, and saltwater intrusion.

The accident brought Shell’s plans to drill in the Arctic, in which it has already invested $4.5 billion, under even more intense scrutiny. Members of the Obama administration, which previously advocated offshore drilling in Alaska, expressed doubts about it last month. Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, who will soon be stepping down, observed presciently at an offshore drilling advisory panel meeting in the nation’s capital last month, “It may be that Shell isn’t even ready to move forward with drilling in 2013.” The gravity of the situation is clear, as Salazar stated last summer (with only a touch of drama), “We are at the beginning of deciding the whole future of the Arctic of the earth.” In an editorial in Bloomberg, published last month, two other prominent policymakers, who previously supported drilling in the Arctic, had an about-face. Carol Browner, former director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change policy, and John Podesta, chairman of the Center for American Progress and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, wrote that although sea ice melted to record lows last summer since satellite records began, that doesn’t mean we should rush to drill. “Just because we can access them doesn’t mean we can safely extract them. The Obama administration should hit the pause button on Arctic offshore drilling with relatively little damage done,” they offered.

Senator Mark Begich (D-Alaska), a staunch supporter of the oil industry in Alaska, expressed in the New York Times last month that he would frown upon additional delays. He noted, “Because of the logistical requirements, this could easily be a three-year delay…In the Gulf of Mexico, a year means a year. In the Arctic, a year would mean three.” Ships, helicopters, employees, and all sorts of other infrastructure and search and rescue capabilities need to be put in place well in advance of the short drilling season. If there is any sort of delay, then drilling activities can be pushed back at least one year. Thus, the question isn’t even really whether Shell’s ships will be repaired in time for the summer of 2013, but even the summer of 2014.

The unforeseen delay will give government agencies and environmentalists alike more time to scrutinize Arctic drilling plans. Other oil companies seem content to maintain a wait-and-see approach before undertaking their own activities in the Alaskan Arctic. A spokesperson for Statoil, which has 16 leases in the Chukchi Sea, said in an interview with Reuters last September, “We will not be drilling in 2014, and we have not made a decision to drill.” He added, “We are obviously watching the process that Shell’s going through.” Of course, Statoil still plans to drill nine wells this coming summer on home turf, in the tried and true waters of the Barents Sea. By contrast, Total, the French oil company, has completely disavowed drilling in the Arctic. In September, CEO Christophe de Margerie said in an interview with the Financial Times, “Oil on Greenland would be a disaster…A leak would do too much damage to the image of the company.”

ConocoPhillips is one of the few oil companies still moving forward with its plans in Alaska, which the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is currently reviewing. The company hopes to begin drilling in the summer of 2014 near Devil’s Paw in the Chukchi Sea. A synopsis of their plans is available online.

The towing of the ships to the Far East from Alaska underscores the importance of Asian shipyards in designing, building, and repairing ships for the Arctic. The Kulluk was built in Japan by the Mitsui company in 1982, and it will now go back to Asia, as the continent is home to the world’s largest dry docks. South Korea, which has the world’s largest shipbuilding industry, will fix the Noble Discoverer. Though the shipyards in Seattle, which have been operating for at least 90 years, are able to make some repairs, Shell has instead decided to tow its vessels on the two to three week voyage across the Pacific to docks in Asia. The shipbuilding industry is comparatively young in South Korea and Japan, but these two countries have leapfrogged over competitors to become the world’s premier suppliers of Arctic-ready ships. Perhaps this will add more legitimacy to the Asian states’ applications for permanent observer status in the Arctic Council: If these countries already form an integral part of the Arctic supply chain, why not become an integral part of the Arctic political space?

Both Australia and the Arctic seen as exotic and remote, albeit at opposite ends of the earth. The NT constitutes one-fifth of Australia’s landmass but contains only one percent of the population. Canadian territories, which make up 39.5 percent of the country’s land, are similarly sparsely populated, with only 100,000 people (0.3% of the population). Both the NT and Canada’s territories are resource-rich frontiers with large indigenous populations. The indigenous populations in the NT and in northern Canada, particularly Nunavut, are a higher percentage of the overall population than in the rest of Australia and Canada, respectively. Yet although both regions are in countries that enjoy some of the world’s highest living standards, they are relatively underdeveloped hinterlands.

Extractive Frontiers

Kassam Karim-Aly writes in “North of 60: ‘Homeland or Frontier?’, “The North as homeland is conducive to circumpolar linkages to com- munities across national borders in meeting the challenges of globalization. As frontier, the North is constrained to supplying natural resources to southern markets. In essence, one point of view is indigenous and shaped by a relationship with the natural ecology, whilst the other is informed by industrial capitalism and is exogenous.” Whether furs in the nineteenth century or diamonds in the twenty-first, northern Canada has long supplied primary materials to the outside world. The Canadian scholar Harold Adams Innis identified an east-west axis of trade bridging Canada with the metropolitan center, London. This link eventually became a north-south axis connecting Canada to the burgeoning cities of the United States. This geographic orientation has until recently held true today, with Canada doing the bulk of its trade to the U.S. However, with the blocking of Keystone XL, a pipeline which would have run along that north-south axis, Canada is now rejiggering itself towards an east-west axis of trade, with the direction now pointing in the opposite direction: across the Pacific, towards Asia, rather than across the Atlantic.

Australia’s NT, too, has long been a source of natural resources. Gold mining was taking place as early as the 1870s, with bauxite and manganese mining emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, the regional economy has been booming thanks to onshore and offshore oil and gas development. This isn’t necessarily good news for the local economy down the line. Karim-Aly, citing Michael Pretes (1988), says: “Staples dependence leads to underdevelopment in the long run because socioeconomic policies are not geared to sustainable development based on local needs. Ultimately, staples development removes cultural and economic leverage from the people who live within the region and places it firmly on foreign markets.” This is especially true when there is a large, historically oppressed indigenous population, as is the case with both the NT and northern Canada.

Karim-Aly claims that government transfers subsidize the quality of life in the north, while foreign companies reap the profits from resource extraction. It’s unclear whether or not this is true, but there is certainly a large amount of foreign investment in Canada. Controversially, CNOOC, a Chinese state-run company, recently purchased Nexen, a medium-sized petroleum company based in Calgary, for CAN$15.1 billion. Malaysia’s Petronas bought Progress Energy Resources Corporation for CAN$5.2 billion. Perhaps trying to quell discontent among the electorate, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “When we say that Canada is open for business, we do not mean that Canada is for sale to foreign governments.” In Australia, FDI has grown by 60 percent in the past five years, and in the NT, over 20 Chinese companies alone have invested in the minerals sector. Yet Australia’s recent tax hike on minerals is doing little to keep more of the profits in state coffers.

Defense and Infrastructure

On top of resources, frontiers are also useful for defense even though they are so far away from the metropolitan center. During WWII, the NT proved to be a vital link in Australia’s defenses against Japan. Vegetable farms growing everything from pineapples to cauliflowers stretched in a chain from Darwin to Alice Springs, in the south. This draws a parallel with the DEW Line in Alaska and Canada, which came after WWII but also served as an important part of the radar defense against the Soviet enemy.

The DEW Line.

The question of how best to consolidate sovereignty over sparsely populated land has occupied governments in both corners of the former British Empire. In the 1940s, Australian politician Charles Abbott wrote, ”I consider that settlement in this area is vital, as it is bound up with the all-important question of Australian and, indeed, Empire defence. Northern Australia escaped invasion in 1942 only by a hairbreadth. It is not easy to foresee the future but it is clear that an empty and unpeopled north will always be a very definite danger to Australia.” In both Australia and Canada, the “empty” north threatens the security of the populated, “civilized” south. The idea of an “empty and unpeopled north” completely overlooks the thousands of years of Aboriginal settlement in Australia. Similar tropes are found in discussions about the great white north of Canada, where few people venture and few people live, at least in the popular mindset. When landscapes are viewed as empty, it becomes acceptable (in the extreme) to test and detonate nuclear weapons, as was almost done in Alaska. Less extremely, the government also finds it easier to create huge dams and mining projects in places it presents as voids. Furthermore, Western states also tend to only respect permanent settlement; without that, the land is considered “empty.” This rationale led Ottawa to forcibly move hundreds of indigenous peoples north to essentially stake out and demonstrate presence and sovereignty through permanent homes, even though they had been more nomadically and ephemerally crisscrossing the lands of northern Canada for centuries. For Canberra and Ottawa, ownership trumps occupancy.

Aside from creating defense infrastructure and permanent settlements, civil engineering projects are also seen as a way of taming the wild land and sparking development. In Canada and Australia, development is viewed as a national imperative to bring the frontier up to speed with the rest of the country. Abbott said of the NT, ”In no other part of the British Empire is there such a vast tract of land which is so lagging in development and which would so respond to it.” He strongly supported the construction of a railway from southern Australia up to Darwin. “Without adequate railway communication,” he said, “it is not possible to develop the NT.” The NT eventually got their railway, but northern Canada never did. Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised during the last election to complete the Dempster Highway. These huge infrastructure projects would certainly benefit some of the major points of population, although there could probably be more useful ways of aiding social development, such as by building more housing to relieve overcrowding or creating a university. However, governments tend to often favor large and impressive projects such as railroads, for they visibly demonstrate national power to both civilians and the outside world.

Massive infrastructure projects are at one end of the Western spectrum of what constitutes work, as huge amounts of human (and mechanical) energy are poured into the soil, making the land almost unrecognizable from before. At the opposite end of this spectrum are Western conceptions of many of the things indigenous peoples do, near laziness and idleness. Yet for Aborigines in the NT, what appears to be leisure to the Western observer is actually a form of work. Relaxing and sitting around can actually entail observing nature, gathering important information about the environment and potential food sources. Work can thus be done without a finger being lifted, contrary to the Protestant work ethic driving the belief that land must be actively manipulated. While discussing this blog post with a friend, he reminded me, “The Devil finds work for idle hands.” If indigenous peoples were or are still seen as idle, then it is little wonder that settlers in the Protestant tradition sought to dispossess them of their land. In both the NT and northern Canada, however, what is actually a conflict between two ways of seeing the world – one a dualist, rationalist vision based on the Enlightenment, and the other a “Dreaming” world that does not separate between man and nature – is reframed as a simplistic land claims conflict (Povinelli, 1995)

Horizons in Asia – and beyond

The economies of both Australia and Canada are heavily dependent on the export of commodities. Yet those commodities are not evenly distributed with either country; instead, each country has their cores and peripheries. It is in these peripheries laden with oil and minerals that Asian investors are extending their reaches. As the markets of China, Japan, Korea, India, and the like grow, they are seeking out resources in frontiers north and south. The NT’s top 10 merchandise trading partners are the U.S., Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, China, South Korea, India, Kuwait, Oman and the UAE. Plans are in the works for INPEX, a Japanese company, to build a gas pipeline from the Ichthys field in the Indian Ocean to Darwin, a port city in Northern Territory. The gas would then be exported as LNG to Asia. More LNG plants are being planned, too, by companies such as Shell and ConocoPhillips. The Economist reports that the LNG-investment boom is worth A$180 billion ($187 billion). Japanese investment in Australian LNG brings to mind Kogas’ investigations into building an LNG terminal in Bathurst, NWT. Though that plan looks scuttled for now, Kogas, together with Japan’s Mitsubishi and China’s PetroChina will build an LNG terminal in Kitimat, British Columbia for exporting resources to Asia.

Aborigines are seeing little of the revenues generated by gas and mining – again, a similar situation to places like the NT in Canada, where many of the money flows out back to the south. Indigenous peoples in Canada, though, might be faring better than in Australia, as they are often more closely involved in the decision-making process regarding mining, for instance, thanks to the land claims agreement, and many are also employed by the industry. But Dr. Elizabeth Povinelli illustrates the dispassionate nature of such a train of thought, stating, “Most contemporary land claims include supplemental reports on the economic benefits of them to the indigenous community, on the development prospects of the area for local and regional governments, and on the environmental consequences of maintaining or developing the area.” Such reports overlook the fact that quality of life for many indigenous peoples might not be able to be measured simply by dollar signs.

As Canada looks east, the NT is looking to develop ties with Indonesia, to the north. The territory’s chief minister speaks Indonesian, and he is the leader of the conservative Country Liberal Party, which wrested power from the Labor party after 11 years.  It was not too long ago that Kevin Rudd was prime minister of Australia, and he spoke Mandarin. Thus, just as Australia is forging better relations with China, its biggest trading partner, and other countries in Southeast Asia like Indonesia, many states in the Arctic are doing the same. However, they are focusing more on northeast Asia – countries like Japan and South Korea, alongside China. Perhaps soon, a premier or MP from one of the territories will speak Chinese.

Sizing up the future

The Economist writes, “[Mr. Mills] contemplates a future for the territory that belies is tiny population and remoteness from Australia’s power centres: ‘Our role is to broker better advancement for aborigines and engagement with Indonesia.’” A similar story is told in northern Canada, where many politicians advocate for indigenous rights and economic development, and Alaska. That state’s Lieutenant Governor, Mead Treadwell, recently declared, “We need to prioritize the health and wealth of our communities if this is going to be a golden age of the North” – again, perhaps a vision of a future that transcends small populations and large distances. Leona Aglukkaq, the Member of Parliament for Nunavut (also from the political right, like Mills), puts forth similar goals when discussing the future of her riding and the larger Canadian North.

Next, it might be interesting to view the Arctic as homeland rather than an extractive frontier. Then, instead of examining commodities chains and comparing how resources are exploited from one region to another, we might begin to draw similarities between the indigenous peoples of the world and their cosmologies. Such a comparison could help foster more inclusive and fairer decision-making over the use of resources and land around the world. One might not look at the extraction of tar sands in Canada next to the harvesting of rubber trees in Brazil, but rather the ways in which indigenous peoples in both places view their natural surroundings as home. For while the frontier represents a faraway dreamworld to people at a distance, it can be home for the people who live there, centuries in and centuries out.

Works Cited

Abbott, C.L.A. “Australia’s Frontier Province.” Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society ( with the Institute of British Geographers ) Stable URL : http://www.jstor.org/stable/1789281 . JSTOR to digitize , preserve and extend access to The Geographical Journal, 111(1), pp.22–31.

Karim-Aly, Kassam. “North of 60: Homeland or Frontier?.” (2001).

Povinelli, E. “Do Rocks Listen? The Cultural Politics of Apprehending Australian Aboriginal Labor,” American Anthropologist , New Series, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 505-518

Shell’s Kulluk rig grounded in Alaska. (c) Reuters

Greenpeace Canada has obtained a draft of the Arctic Council’s Agreement on Cooperation on Marine Oil Pollution that officials have claimed is genuine. In a press release on Greenpeace’s website, Christy Ferguson, Arctic project leader for Greenpeace Canada, called the 21-page agreement “effectively useless.” She stated,

“Despite promises that this would be the first legally-binding agreement of its kind, it fails to outline any essential response equipment, methods for capping wells, or cleaning up oiled habitat and wildlife, relying instead on vague statements that Arctic nations should ‘ensure’ they try and take ‘appropriate steps within available resources.’”

I read through the draft agreement, and it is certainly vague. Yet this isn’t too surprising. The first treaty signed under the auspices of the Arctic Council, the 2011 Search and Rescue Agreement, is similarly unspecific. First of all, any agreement nowadays that is only 21 pages is likely not going to contain many specifics. At the opposite extreme, the health care bill in the United States is 906 pages long. Given the complexity of negotiating the legal systems of eight countries, a solid and detailed treaty explaining how to handle oil pollution in the Arctic would simply have to be more than 21 pages long.

Second, even Greenpeace recognizes the difficulty with getting the eight Arctic Council member states to agree to any binding regulations within their own territories. A statement submitted before the ongoing two-day Arctic Environment Ministers meeting in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, reads, “Clearly, individual states retain sovereignty over activities in their territorial waters and economic zones.” This is part of the problem with the Arctic, where issues of national identity, sovereignty, and natural resources are tightly bundled. Countries are loathe to give up power over how to develop their own oil and gas resources. At the end of the day, the state is still the primary political entity in the Arctic, to which the Council is subordinate.  Underscoring this point, Article 4 issues: “Each Party shall maintain a national system for responding promptly and effectively to oil pollution incidents.” Thus, the rules in the U.S. could differ drastically from the rules of Russia. The treaty has not yet done anything to standardize crisis response.

I think it’s too early to give up entirely on the treaty’s potential, though. As I mentioned, the SAR Treaty is similarly ambiguous, but what began as seemingly empty platitudes are becoming, over time, more fine-tuned through additional meetings. As I discussed in a blog post last April, about one year after the signing of the SAR Treaty, the chiefs of defense from all eight Arctic states met in Canada and decided to make the meeting an annual event. Cooperation on oil and gas spill response is not going to happen over night, but at least the treaty is a step in the right direction towards harmonizing response mechanisms. Indeed, Article 14 of the oil spill treaty mandates that a meeting happen no later than one year after the treaty’s signing. At this and additional meetings, discussions over how to implement the treaty will take place, and they will hopefully develop more specifics. Article 21 explains that operational guidelines will be created over time, so perhaps the complaints Greenpeace has about there not being any particulars on capping wells, for instance, will be addressed.

One of the real weaknesses that I do note with the draft, which is not expected to change much before the ministerial meeting in May, is the following: “Implementation of this Agreement, except for Article 10, shall be subject to the capabilities of the Parties and the availability of relevant resources.” This means that the agreement is essentially meaningless if a country doesn’t have the right level and mix of capabilities to implement the regulations. Whatever is written down on paper is immaterial if it’s not backed by real capabilities and infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if a country is obligated to fly a helicopter over the spill site within 24 hours of the occurrence, for instance, if it simply doesn’t have the equipment to do so. Therefore, a step in the right direction would be mandating that countries provide needed resources in times of crisis. Countries already do this voluntarily: just think about how many countries offered to send aid when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, or how many countries’ militaries sent assistance to coastal areas in southeast Asia after the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Similar voluntary sharing of resources happens in the Arctic, too: Russia provided a tanker to help deliver energy supplies to Nome this past winter – though in this case, the company that was supposed to deliver the fuel to Alaska, Vitus Marine, paid the Russian shipping company for Renda’s services. If the Arctic Council were able to have nearby countries send whatever resources they could in a time of crisis, provided they weren’t needed in the home country at the time, this would go a long way towards ensuring that appropriate resources would be directed in a timely manner. In an ideal world, there could even be some mechanism for billing the responsible oil company for ultimately paying the other countries for whatever resources they provided. Yet this is probably a too radical step for now.

USNS Mercy near Indonesia – an example of foreign resources and capability being provided in a time of crisis.

The CGC Healy and the Russian tanker Renda, near Nome.

Lastly, it’s interesting how countries decide on the geographical extent of where the oil spill treaty will apply. Canada will apply the rules in maritime areas north of 60°, while Norway will apply them north of the Arctic Circle. At 66°, this is a full 414 miles farther north than Canada’s line. Canada uses the 60° line likely because it just makes sense, for this is the line of latitude demarcating the southern border of the country’s three territories. Norway, though, prefers to use the Arctic Circle as the southern border perhaps because the farther north the treaty begins, the less it has to worry about implementing it farther south, where most of its offshore wells currently lie. Still, it’s important to note that the Lofoten Islands lie just north of the Arctic Circle, so any oil drilling here in future would fall under the new treaty’s rules.

A funny side note: on the agenda for the Arctic Environment Ministers meeting in Jukkasjärvi, the first day’s meeting venue is listed as: “The Kiruna mine, 550 m below ground.” Delegates are convening at the Ice Hotel on the second day. The Arctic is certainly a good field to go into if you’re interested in having meetings in bizarre locations.

News Links

“Greenpeace slams Arctic Council’s oil spill response plan,” CBC

“Proposed Arctic Council treaty on oil spills ‘useless,’ Greenpeace says,” The Globe and Mail

“Arctic nations’ oil spill plans too vague -environmentalists,” Reuters

Previous administrations allowed oil exploitation in the Amazon jungle section of Ecuador with disastrous results caused by oil waste being dumped with little or no consideration for the wildlife there.
Correa is attempting a unique arrangement whereby Ecuador leaves the Yasuni region in its pristine state and is rewarded by the international community for doing so.
That approach is an example of the new socialism, a belief system that embraces global thinking and local stewardship.
Correa rejects the old system of development where the recipient of foreign aid is held hostage to creditors indefinitely.
It is an interesting time in Latin America right now. The left has risen from country to country over the last few years.
Although Correa is a socialist, he does not adhere to the traditional socialism that Hugo Chavez does in Venezuela.
This documentary does an excellent job of revealing the challenges faced by Ecuador and the bold experiment it has undertaken.
Ecuador is available to rent.
Murphy can be reached at: Lojano@comcast.net

Photo: AP Photo Gerald Herbert, File

One chapter of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which occurred back on April 20, 2010, has been closed, but not everybody is satisfied with the resolution.

On January 29th, U.S. District Judge Sarah Vance approved a November 2012 plea bargain agreement between the British oil giant BP p.l.c. and the United States Department of Justice to settle a U.S. government’s criminal probe. In the agreement, BP agreed to plead guilty to 14 counts of criminal acts and pay a record $4 billion in fines—BP still faces a civil trial with claims that can sum to billions of dollars. Under the terms of the criminal plea, BP will be on probation for five years and can pay the fines and penalties within that period.

It is important to remember the breadth of the disaster riddled BP-operated drilling rig. The mile-deep Macondo well caused an explosion which killed 11 workers more than 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana southeast of Venice and released more than 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding wetlands. It also greatly affected the local communities, beaches, economies and killed birds, fish and other wildlife.

In addition, the incident led President Obama to impose a moratorium on deep- water drilling and later forced BP to agree to spend at least $7.8 billion to settle lawsuits over the incident.

Some of the specific crimes agreed to in the plea deal range from felony manslaughter to a misdemeanor plea under the Clean Water Act to a misdemeanor count under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to obstruction of Congress.

In fact, BP employees deliberately provided false data to Congress and the Coast Guard on the amount of oil being released from the well. The company stated publicly that 5,000 barrels of oil were being released daily. However, at the same time internal estimates showed as much as 100,000 barrels were being spewed daily into the Gulf.

The Clean Water Act plea prohibits new contracts with the United States government, even though it was the Department of Defense’s top energy supplier in 2011.

Many injured rig workers and family members of those who perished do not believe the settlement is adequate for the crimes that were committed. There is the assertion that BP tried to cut costs while putting the safety of the workers at risk and the agreed upon punishment does not meet the negligent actions. Notwithstanding the record $4 billion fine, some see it as lenient—especially since BP’s estimated revenue for 2012 was $353.6 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Despite the calls to reject the deal, Judge Vance stated she was obliged to the agreement that was previously settled. Federal law does not allow a judge to dictate the terms of such an agreement. She can only approve it, or reject it, and a rejection would allow BP to change its plea to not guilty and face a jury trial.

According to a BP statement, Luke Keller, a vice president of BP America stated, “Our guilty plea makes clear, BP understands and acknowledges its role in that tragedy, and we apologize — BP apologizes — to all those injured and especially to the families of the lost loved ones,” he said.

More than half of the financial penalty, $2.4 billion, will be transferred to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), a congressionally chartered non-profit organization. Louisiana will receive about half of the payments and the balance will be divided according to a formula among Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Texas. The chairman of the board of NFWF Don McGrath said after the decision, “Our primary responsibility is to ensure these funds are applied to projects that demonstrably benefit the Gulf’s natural resources. We are going to be diligent in making certain the funds are used effectively, efficiently and transparently.”

This chapter transitions to the next, the civil trial, which will be structured in two sections. The first section will start at the end of February and focus on how the incident occurred and the second phase will focus on many aspects of the response to the incident.

On the heels of Judge Vance’s decision and in preparation  for the upcoming civil trial, the Department of Justice has now requested for BP to share its records, and flow-rate data, detailing how it formulated their misleading figures to Congress and the Coast Guard in regards to the amount of oil being spewed out of the blown well. DOJ hopes to prove gross negligence during the civil trial to increase its fines from the Clean Water Act.

Under the Clean Water Act now, the parties responsible for the well blowout can be subject to a $1,000 for each barrel of oil that flowed into the Gulf. However, if gross negligence is proved during the civil trial, the penalty can escalate greatly to $4,300 per barrel, obviously raising the overall fine by billions of dollars.

The RESTORE Act, signed by President Obama in July 2012, directs 80 percent of any Clean Water Act penalties to the coastal areas directly impacted by the spill.

The senior senator from Louisiana Mary Landrieu (D) summed up the current proceedings stating, “The approval of BP’s manslaughter plea and an unprecedented $4 billion in criminal penalties is a tremendous step toward justice for the men who lost their lives in the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the entire Gulf Coast.” Senator Landrieu continued, “We must continue to hold BP accountable for what I believe was gross negligence leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, especially as February’s civil trial approaches.”

The Lofoten Islands. (c) Mia Bennett

“Do you see an ocean of opportunities or a picture of climate change?” This is the question Maren Esmark, the General Secretary of Naturvernforbundet (Friends of the Earth Norway), asked during her speech at the Arctic Frontiers conference. I’m guessing that many of the conference attendees, particularly, government ministers and representatives from oil and gas companies, would answer the former. Petroleum companies, and to a lesser extent, state governments, generally favor natural resource extraction, as it can be a huge source of profits, especially in the commodities-driven economies of the north – and above all, in Norway. The general debate of the conference thus tended to focus more on whether or not the Arctic would serve as an important source of hydrocarbons to the rest of the world in the future, considering the larger state of flux of world oil and gas supplies. Less was said about whether we should drill at all in the region.

Yet Esmark offered a counternarrative to the conference. She spoke out strongly against the oil industry’s activities in the north. Her NGO has been heavily involved in combatting the proposed oil drilling off the Lofoten Islands, the stunning archipelago in northern Norway that is home to some of the world’s most important cod and herring fisheries. Esmark, like some others at the conference, favors the promotion of fishing in the Arctic, as it is a renewable resource, sustainable, and relatively well-managed. It can also provide a valuable source of protein for the rest of the world. Yet even though it is important politically, fishing only constitutes a small part of the economy in Norway, as the chart below illustrates.

Esmark specifically pointed out the hypocrisy of Norway, a country which prides itself on its respect for the environment yet was also the world’s seventh largest exporter of oil in 2011. “Who is it that should leave their oil in the ground, if it’s not Norway?” she asked. “Norway is eager to support the Kyoto Protocol as long as it can cut emissions elsewhere and not in the country itself,” she stated. She believes it should be the rich countries that take responsibility for climate change more so than the poor ones. Seeking to shift the tone of the debate, she proposed a moratorium on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, arguing that the discussion should center on where do we draw the line with regard to drilling – not what new technologies we need.

Esmark’s speech was important in the context of the conference because it refocused attention on the long-term damage we are doing to the planet for short-term gains. The South, she said, needs a robust long-term energy supply that is not oil and gas. I would go farther and say that the world at large does, too. This isn’t going to happen overnight, though, as we all know. Norway can’t fathom leaving any of its oil in the ground given the sheer reliance of the country on petroleum exports. An entire restructuring of the economy would be needed. Now, the country is exploring areas for oil and gas that never would have been previously considered due to their importance for fisheries and tourism and their sheer natural beauty because the amount of exports has been dropping since the turn of the 21st century.

Today, after eight years of party opposition to exploring oil and gas around the pristine archipelago, deputy party leader Helga Pedersen announced, “We will first carry out an impact assessment study of the vulnerable, untapped waters off Lofoten, Vesterålen and Senja. When this analysis is completed, we will make a decision as to whether or not the area should be opened for oil activity.” As to be expected, Gro Braekken, head of the lobby group Norwegian Oil and Gas, delightedly offered, “We’re very happy about this.”

By contrast, Socialist Left Party leader Audun Lysbakken asserted, “For the sake of nature, climate and future business, our crystal- clear answer in the debate about drilling for oil is ‘no.’” Frederic Hauge, leader of the environmental NGO, Bellona, criticized the Labor Party’s switch, saying (translated from Norwegian), “Tonight, the power socialists in the Labor Party have become oil socialists.” Power socialists refers to party members that favored hanging power lines over the cherished Hardanger Fjord in 2010.

(c) Marissa, blogger.com

Norway struck it rich in the 60s and keeps finding more potential sources of oil, but actual production has fallen dramatically since the turn of the century. How far north will they go? Will oil extraction begin in Svalbard next? That would open up a whole new can of worms, with questions over the Svalbard Treaty and taxation to be solved. One person mentioned during the conference (perhaps somewhat hyperbolically) that Svalbard could become the next Dubai. Yet instead of pushing new frontiers in oil exploration, perhaps Norway should do more to push new frontiers in exploring alternative, renewable sources of energy.

News Links

“Norway’s Labor Party Moves to Open Lofoten to Oil Exploration,” Business Week

“Arbeiderpartiet lar seg styre av særinteresser og LO,” Bellona

Iran’s revenue from oil exports is off by 40% thanks to the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU over the Iranian nuclear program.  Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi told the budget commission of the Iranian parliament, “There has been a 40 percent decrease in oil sales and a 45 percent decrease in repatriating oil money.” According to Agence France Press, the government there relied on the $100 billion oil exports brought in during 2011 to pay 60% of the government’s budget.

Economy Minister Shamseddine Hosseini has stated that oil revenues are off 50 percent since the embargo hit Iran’s oil industry back in July. OPEC and the International Energy Agency both estimated that crude exports have fallen from around 2.4 million barrels per day [mbpd] in late 2011 to around 1.0 mbpd by the end of last month. Including oil pumped for domestic consumption, Iran is producing just 3.0 mbpd, a level last seen back during its war with Iraq in the 1980s, and Iraq and Kuwait have moved up the production table putting Iran in fourth place – all of them trail Saudi Arabia.

So clearly the sanctions are biting, but I have never been one to put much stock in the effectiveness of embargoes and similar trade sanctions. Britain blockaded Napoleonic Europe, and Napoleon had his Continental System aimed at damaging Britain – in the end, things were settled on Europe’s battlefields. The American oil embargo against the Japanese in 1941 led directly to Pearl Harbor, which was hardly the point of the sanctions. The sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not change his behavior. South Africa’s apartheid regime didn’t collapse because of the trade sanctions imposed upon it. Instead, the collapse of the Soviet Union made it less important as an anti-communist bulwark, and it had been bled white (an unfortunate turn of phrase) trying to hold onto Namibia against insurgents as well as Angolan and Cuban mercenaries. And on the subject of Cuba, the U.S. still hasn’t managed to oust Castro by not buying cigars.

This isn’t to say sanctions don’t have a place in global politics. They send a powerful signal, and in many cases, they put some force behind a simple moral stance. Recalling an ambassador just doesn’t have the same impact.

However, we must be careful of expecting too much from economic sanctions and of not expecting the unexpected. I don’t believe for a minute that the Iranian theocrats are about to stop their nuclear program because their oil revenues are off. I don’t really think the regime there is going to fall because the currency is under pressure from the sanctions.

At best, putting the sanctions in place has given the west some carrots to offer Iran, the sanctions can be lifted bit by bit in exchange for more transparency. At worst, the sanctions have given the ayatollahs a reason to accelerate their research and acquire the means to make The Bomb even if they don’t actually build one.

The Kulluk runs aground.

2013 has not gotten off to an auspicious start for Shell. Its oil rig, the Kulluk, has run aground with hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel and oil on board. On Monday night, two of Shell’s ships, the Aiviq and the Alert, were towing the Kulluk near the coast of Kodiak Island in southern Alaska towards Seattle when the rig became detached.

The rig had already been separated four times over the past few days due to stormy weather and rough seas, with swells of up to thirty-five feet and sixty-mile per hour winds battering the rig and its four support vessels, the Aiviq, Nanuq, Guardsman and Alert. Despite attempts to tandem tow the rig, it still could not be controlled. On Saturday, the U.S. Coast Guard decided to evacuate the 18 crew members on board. After the Kulluk became detached for the first time, Shell and the Coast Guard attempted to reconnect the towlines, only for the oil rig to become separated again and again. After the fifth and final time, the Kulluk ran aground on Sitkalidak Island, near Kodiak Island.

According to the New York Times, the rig is carrying 139,000 gallons of diesel fuel and 12,000 gallons of lubricating oil. This is relatively small compared to the amount carried by the Exxon Valdez when it ran aground not too far from the site of the Kulluk grounding in 1989, as it had 53.1 million gallons of oil on board. Still, even a small oil spill could prove highly damaging. Anchorage Daily News, which is offering the best coverage on the incident as it unfolds, reports that there are several salmon streams and three endangered species that inhabit the waters around Sitkalidak Island: Steller sea lions, Steller’s eiders and southwest sea otters. A Coast Guard helicopter flew over the site of the disaster, and officials from Shell, the Coast Guard, and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation reported that “the rig appeared intact and there was no sign that any of the fuel, hydraulic fluid or other petroleum liquids on board had spilled.”

Coast Guard Commander Shane Montoya, in charge of the response task force, stated, ”We are now entering into the salvage and possible spill-response phase of this event.” Shell’s emergency incident commander, Susan Childs, stated during a press conference that the Kulluk’s unique construction encases the diesel fuel in heavy steel tanks at the center of the ship, implying that the risk of a spill would be lower. The rig also has an ice-strengthened hull. Still, the seas can be a monster to contend with, especially as the rig is being battered near the rocky island shore. Shell is providing frequent updates about the Kulluk grounding on its website.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a staunch supporter of drilling in her state, visited the Unified Command post that has been established to respond to the Kulluk disaster. She has not yet issued an official statement, but Coast Guard Rear Admiral Thomas Ostebo observed, ”Senator Murkowski shares the Coast Guard desire to protect the pristine Alaskan environment and response personnel.” It’s ironic – and a sad twist of fate – to note that only six months ago, she visited the rig at it was docked in Seattle and tweeted, “Impressive tour of the Kulluk today, before it heads ‘North to the Future’ & a new era in American energy.”

Senator Murkowski on board the Kulluk in June 2012.

Others in Congress had more opinionated reactions to the rig’s grounding. Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who is also the Ranking Member of the House Natural Resources Committee, is one of the officials in Congress leading the opposition to Shell’s Arctic drilling program. He plans to run for Senator John Kerry’s seat once he vacates it to become Secretary of State. Markey issued a statement regarding the Kulluk, saying, “Oil companies keep saying they can conquer the Arctic, but the Arctic keeps disagreeing with the oil companies…Drilling expansion could prove disastrous for this sensitive environment.” In early December, he also wrote a letter to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar asking harsh questions after one of Shell’s containment domes massively failed during testing. Should Markey be elevated to the position of senator, that might create a more vocal and visible challenge to Shell in the Arctic. Markey is right to seriously question the safety of Shell’s endeavors. The company is fortunate that the Kulluk was not carrying more oil on board, as that could have resulted in a major ecological disaster. The multiple failures and accidents Shell has experienced in the few months it has spent engaged in drilling-related activities in the Arctic are a warning sign that the company is not yet ready to drill up north, and perhaps never may be. Furthermore, it’s important to note that the storm was not anything unusual. Rough weather is typical across the Arctic in winter. For instance, just over one year ago, the Russian oil rig, the Kolskaya, capsized while being towed near Sakhalin, killing 53 of the 67 crew members on board.

Shell has now spent close to five billion dollars in the Arctic without generating a barrel of oil. Curtis Smith, Shell Alaska’s spokesperson, said earlier this year, “We’re spending billions of dollars now for the right to spend tens of billions of dollars more.” Shell believes that the chances of striking oil in one of its wells is high, but the costs – and bad publicity – might eventually stack high enough to deter the company from further pursuing its northern exploits. The salvaging of the $290 million Kulluk, and the money the company will have to spend to clean up its image, will further add to its Arctic expenses. In a way, then, each setback Shell encounters in the Arctic is a victory for greens, so long as the setbacks are not actually damaging the environment.

News Links

“What Shell’s Kulluk Oil Rig Accident Means for Arctic Drilling,” Popular Mechanics

Saudi Arabia is perhaps the only remaining country in the world that takes its name from a ruling family — the Al Saud.  It has vast hydrocarbon resources that feed the world’s insatiable hunger for energy.  It also is an absolute monarchy founded upon religious principles of Wahhabi Islam.  The alliance of the Al Saud with a Wahhabi religious elite largely precludes freedom of thought and individualism. Saudi Arabia is a kingdom where gender segregation permeates every aspect of social life with women looked upon as de facto sexual bombs who, if not contained by male relatives, could explode and send society into disarray.  Saudi Arabia also is unique in its reaction to regional revolts known as the Arab Spring, doling out billions of its petrodollars to preclude its citizenry from any thought of taking to the streets. But, according to Karen Elliott House, things in this shrouded kingdom could well change.

Ms. House sat down with Reza Akhlaghi of Foreign Policy Association to talk about her new book  “On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines – and Future.” 

Karen Elliott House is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who spent thirty years writing about Saudi Arabia as diplomatic correspondent and foreign editor at The Wall Street Journal. Later she served as President of Dow Jones International and then publisher of The Wall Street Journal. A former board member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ms. House is Vice Chair of the RAND Corporation.

____________________________________________________________________

For over three decades you reported on Saudi Arabia as The Wall Street Journal’s diplomatic correspondent. What made you decide to write this book? What fascinates you most about Saudi Arabia?  

As diplomatic correspondent, I had spent much time interviewing Saudi government officials on oil, security and geopolitical events but I wanted to understand the Saudi people, society and culture and then understand what was changing in society and why,  and what was not changing and why.    What fascinates me is how very different are Saudi Arabia and the U.S.  Yet there also are similarities between today’s conservative Saudi life and the cloistered life I led in a tiny town in Texas half a century ago growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family with no TV, no alcohol, no musical instruments in my church, and no shorts or pants on the women of the household.  It was a life focused on religion and moral living, and that made Saudi Arabia somewhat more familiar to me. 

You start your book by painting a very gloomy picture of socio-economic as well as religious life in Saudi Arabia. Under the surface of perceived stability in Saudi Arabia, there seems to be a simmering discontent against what appears to be a political order that may have run its course given the tectonic changes in the region and explosion in modern communication technologies. Given its current domestic environment, how is the Saudi power structure coping with an increasingly changing and connected world?

The Saudi power structure—the royal and the religious—have come to understand and to make use of modern technology.  The religious use the internet to spread the official Wahhabi version of Islam.  The royals, who run the government use technology very effectively to seek out terrorists and to spy on their own people.  What neither the royals nor the religious fully appreciate is the degree to which the Saudi citizenry, and particularly the youth, are now wired into the wider world of the Internet and thus much better informed and thus much less inclined than their parents to follow the dictates of the power structure.  Thus, modern communication is a double-edged sword.

The political stability in Saudi Arabia, as you assert in your book, has been assured based on a three-hundred-year old social contract binding the people to their Saudi rulers. This social contract appears to be challenged from multiple fronts. Can you elaborate on some of the key challenges that are contributing to the erosion of this social contract?

The original social contract—loyalty for stability—also became loyalty for prosperity after the discovery of oil.  But as the population of Saudi Arabia has exploded (there now are 19.6 million Saudis some 60% of whom are under the age of 20) government services have deteriorated.  Given satellite television and social media, Saudis know much more about huge wealth disparities and government inefficiencies and this is undermining loyalty to the regime.  Additionally, the Al Saud’s legitimacy has always derived from the support it receives from the kingdom’s religious establishment led by the Council of Senior Ulama.  But as the religious establishment has become increasingly and visibly subservient to the political needs of the Al Saud, its legitimacy is eroding and with it the legitimacy of the Al Saud.  In short, the longstanding partnership between the Al Saud and the religious ulama which benefited both is now providing fewer benefits to either.

“On Saudi Arabia”, Random House, 320 pages

Your book illustrates the omnipresence of Saudi princes in every aspect of life and their control over all economic levers in the country,  so much so that “Saudis of all sorts resent having to beg princes for favors to secure services that should be a public right”. What are some of the key required mechanisms that can lead to the deconstruction of this notion of “privilege” (favor) and possibly lead to a discourse around the notion of “right”?

So long as princes seek to retain influence and power, those in government and their many thousands of cousins outside government prefer dispensing privileges to people to receive persona credit rather than creating an efficient government that provides these benefits—good health care, good education, justice—because they are owed to citizens.  To change this, would require the royal family, beginning with the King, to emphasize accountability and transparency of government so that officials who didn’t deliver services were held accountable, removed and replaced.   Now, when government fails, a new bureaucracy is simply created or some new entity funded by a prince steps in to provide partial services on an ad hoc basis.  Even when people benefit from some service or favor bestowed by a prince, many say they resent what they regard as begging for services that should be theirs by right as a citizen.

Let’s turn our attention to women. In Wahhabi Islamic thought women are objects, potentially dangerous that need to be controlled. Therefore, the chief concern in Wahhabi thinking is women’s presence in social life. With the reforms being adopted under the rule of the current King Abdullah, how could the increasing participation of Saudi women in social life, however at glacial pace, impact the alliance between the Saudi Royals and the Wahhabi religious establishment?  

King Abdullah has instituted some gradual reforms—allowing women to have an identity card separate from their male family members, to check into a hotel without a male family member, and encouraging creation of more jobs for women.   So far he has kept the reforms modest so that his religious establishment (he appoints the senior Ulama) has continued to support the Al Saud.  Given the importance of retaining this ‘Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval’ from the religious establishment, the Al Saud aren’t likely to move at a pace that breaks the bond of mutual self-interest that holds the royals and Wahhabi religious establishment together.   So holding this tandem power structure together is the overriding aim of the Al Saud, but the links are fraying as both religious conservatives and more liberal modernizers among the citizenry pull in opposite directions.

The level of corruption in Saudi Arabia and the increasing gap between the poor and the rich are in parallel with a growing gap between Islamic teachings and the exercise of those teachings and values by the ruling royals. What, in your opinion, are the implications of these two parallel lines on how Saudis, the youth in particular, view the royal family and the religious elite?

Yes, the growing awareness of young Saudis of the gap between the way Wahhabi Islam is preached and practiced is a threat to both the Al Saud and its religious partners. Young Saudis—even very religious ones—are losing respect the religious establishment whom they see as more eager to do the bidding of the Al Saud than of Allah.  How youth translate their cynicism about two of the three key pillars of stability in Saudi Arabia (oil wealth being the third) into action for change isn’t clear given that this is a kingdom without any political or even social organizations.  Still, thanks to social media, youth definitely are communicating to each other their distaste for the growing gap between the religion of the Prophet Muhammad and the Islam preached but not always practiced in modern Saudi.

Given the religious establishment’s grip on the Saudi education system, the near total ban on humanities and philosophy, and the slow pace of educational reforms, are there efforts outside of Saudi Arabia that offer education online on these banned subjects to inquiring Saudi minds with the goal of breaking the status quo on the subject of ‘thought’?  

Young Saudis can access all kinds of worldwide websites that provide Islamic teaching ranging from modern and moderate to fundamentalist and even jihadist.  In whatever form, religious websites are a powerful influence in the kingdom.  At the same time, the Saudi King also has sent 100,000 Saudis abroad for non-religious higher education.  Some Saudi students, however, also argue that foreign universities should be able to open branches inside the kingdom to allow a far greater number of young Saudis to get a modern education.   A growing number of universities including prominent ones like Princeton and Stanford, however, are providing online classes that anyone around the world can join.  These are so new I do not know if many or any young Saudis are participating.  Undeniably, the potential surely exists for more young Saudis to access education if they have the curiosity to do so.  But the Saudi religious establishment will surely continue to teach that obedience–not curiosity or questioning–is the right course for young Saudis and that religious education is sufficient for Saudis.

On the future of Saudi Arabia you outline four options, one of which is civil strife. Should the latter become reality, you anticipate that there could be a call for “the agonizing choice of military intervention to safeguard global oil supplies”. Of the four scenarios, which one do you anticipate to be the most likely to unfold?

Of the several scenarios I outline in my book, the least likely, I believe, is that the kingdom can transform itself into a more liberal, even if not fully democratic, society of the sort Saudi modernizers wish for.  The most likely, I suspect, is a perpetuation of the status quo in which the Al Saud minimal reforms will not keep pace with public pressures for more individual dignity and social justice.  As I write in my book there is little chance for real reform unless or until the crown passes to one of the scores of grandsons of the founder who might have the energy, inclination and longevity to make substantial changes.  That jump to a new generation, however, entails its own high risks of dividing the royal family and setting off a divisive power struggle.

The regional revolts known as the Arab Spring have pushed the U.S.-Saudi relations into a new and complex phase. The Saudi leadership was seriously jolted after the Obama administration essentially pulled the plug on Mubarak’s regime, an event you call in your book as “a double disaster” for the Saudis. What do you expect to be the key determining factors in U.S.-Saudi relations over the next five years? And should the Saudi leadership decide to make an about-face in its strategic and security calculus, do you believe they would be guaranteed the same level of security from potentially new allies like China, Pakistan, and India?

In the region as a whole, the U.S. clearly needs to restrain Iran, protect Israel and ensure global oil supplies for the foreseeable future.    Spreading democracy to Saudi Arabia is not an American policy priority.   But Saudi stability is.  Absent greater commitment by the Al Saud to reforms that offer citizens more individual liberty that stability is threatened.  Moreover,  U.S. friendship with an absolute monarchy that denies its citizens any real voice in governance, will become more politically costly to U.S. administrations.   Questions about a close relationship with Riyadh will become more pressing as the U.S. edges closer to energy independence in coming years through production of shale oil and the logic of security for oil erodes in American minds.   Meantime, U.S. support for Israel and for the Saudi royal family makes the U.S. government unpopular with many Saudis.   The growing trend in the Arab world to replace dictators with governments that claim to be Islamic will, in the short term at least,  further erode U.S. influence and standing in the region.  The Saudi regime already has begun to hedge its bets by reaching out to China, Russia, Western Europe and Pakistan.  As the Saudi foreign minister likes to say, the U.S. and Saudi used to have a catholic marriage but now it is a Muslim marriage—meaning Saudi has multiple partners, not just the U.S.  While Pakistan might be able to provide Saudi with a porous nuclear umbrella to counter Iranian nuclear weapons, it is still the U.S. on whom the Saudis would have to rely for protection against external threats, particularly from Iran.  Saudi Arabia’s other “marriage partners” such as China, Russia and Europe do not have the capability or inclination to mount major military operations to protect the Al Saud family.  So, for the foreseeable future, the Saudi-U.S. marriage, whatever its growing tensions and resentments, remains a useful one for both partners.

In a radio interview airing Nov. 17 on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Zhang Junsai, China’s ambassador to Canada, told radio host Evan Solomon that Chinese firms are not involved in foreign espionage, “I can assure you that our companies working in other countries are strictly doing business according to the local laws.” Zhang blamed the allegations of espionage against Chinese firms on “a Cold War mentality”, and challenged anyone who claims otherwise to produce evidence or keep quiet, “If you really have the evidence, come [out] with it. If not… shut up”.

The Chinese ambassador’s comments come during a time of growing concern over Chinese investment in Canada’s natural resources. Canada’s federal government is currently reviewing a $15 billion proposed takeover of Canadian upstream oil and gas producer Nexen by China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Opposition among Canadians to the deal is widespread, with the New Democrats against the deal and with members of the Conservative caucus said to be grappling with the bid. Canada’s oil industry, however, is backing the bid in exchange for further reciprocity from China, causing the review period to be extended to Dec. 10.

The flareup in Canada comes on the heels of a scathing report released by a U.S. intelligence committee last month coinciding with the start of a high-profile espionage trial. The U.S. report warns of the security risks associated with doing business with two of China’s leading telecommunications firms, Huawei and ZTE, with evidence has been turned over to the FBI. Last week marked the start of the trial of an ex-General Motors engineer and her husband, who face allegations of stealing the auto maker’s technology in order to benefit Chinese car manufacturers. Prosecutors accuse Shanshan Du, of stealing confidential information on hybrid cars, and passing on the documents to her husband, Yu Qin, who used the data to seek partnerships or employment with the Chinese car manufacturer Chery Automobile. GM considers the value of the secrets to be worth more than $40 million, while the defendant’s lawyer said that the case reflects U.S. xenophobia and that the secrets at issue were “completely useless” for the companies the couple approached. The case adds to a growing list of similar allegations in which people of Chinese descent are accused of stealing trade secrets from U.S. companies with the intention to sell to Chinese buyers.

The espionage is not only taking place on foreign soil – many foreign companies sell their products to China or have been asked to set up research and development facilities in China. Last May, a Chinese researcher at WuXi PharmaTech was found guilty by a Shanghai court of stealing and selling patented medical compounds from U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. The court ruled that Wang Hui had stolen two Merck compounds while they were being tested in China. The court sentenced the man to 18 months probation and ordered him to pay around $7,000 in restitution. Merck has been Wuxi PharmaTech’s single biggest customer by revenue in recent years.

Why pick on the Chinese? After all, every nation has its spies trying to obtain information. China stands out not only for stealing information but technology, in a desperate bid to compete economically in green technologies, new information technologies, biology, and high-end manufacturing with the likes of the U.S. and Japan. China also stands out for the volume of its efforts. The U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive’s 2011 report to the U.S. Congress on industrial espionage publicly identified Chinese actors as “the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage.” The report noted that of the seven cases litigated in 2010 under the U.S. Economic Espionage Act of 1996, six involved China.

Obviously, the recent display of unabashed arrogance by China’s representative to Canada is no way to win friends and influence people, especially when in need of their resources. China is now a world economic power after making historical leaps in pulling record amounts of people out of poverty, and now graduates more than 900,000 science, mathematics and engineering graduates every year. Maybe now is the time to shift the focus to developing indigenous technologies instead of taking toys from others and denying responsibility.

After a panel discussion at New York University shortly before November’s election, General Wesley Clark (ret.) was kind enough to answer some questions regarding the national security dimension of America’s energy situation. This piece originally appeared in the Kensington Review.

Q: What security threats bother you most when it comes to energy issues?

General Clark: Over four decades, US national strategy has been seriously distorted, and the economy has received repeated setbacks as a result of our dependence on imported oil. Our alliances have also been pulled and distorted by our allies’ dependence on fuels imported from elsewhere. You can be certain that European foreign policy clearly reflects the sources of its oil and gas imports.

More fundamentally, petrodollars have fueled the rise of extremism and corruption around the world. Our adversaries have often benefited from these petrodollars. Countries like Iran would be crippled if the price of oil wasn’t held up by the quasi-monopolistic pricing of OPEC. Salafi extremist funding is wholly dependent on petrodollars; its rise and expansionism is closely correlated with the price of oil and the flow of funds into the MidEast.

Now, thanks to cyberattack, our electrical grid is increasingly vulnerable, and with it, industries like petrochemicals, that depend on reliable electric power.

Q: The military’s consumption of energy is immense, and as a huge purchaser, it can influence energy markets. What efforts are underway to operate from a more secure energy base as opposed to imported oil? And what effects might this have on the civilian economy?

General Clark: DoD has begun to push for biofuels and electric power as alternatives to traditional fuels. Only the national security argument can prevail against market-pricing, and DoD has been strongly asserting that argument. This will strongly push the commercialization of advanced biofuels, which are critical to give us full liquid fuel independence. This will also enable us to take the energy revolution nationwide, even to regions that may not have underground gas and oil to be tapped. And ultimately we may even be able to use carbon dioxide for fuel.

Q: We have seen power knocked out by a hurricane; we had a major black out a few years ago. It appears that America’s electrical grid is in need of significant upgrading. How can we improve our grid and enhance its security as we upgrade it?

General Clark: We need much better cybersecurity protection for our grid. This has to include both software and hardware components of protection. And, because the essence of an electric power grid is “connectedness” such protections must be distributed across the nation and are really inseparable from electricity users. This requires a new cybersecurity legal and policy framework and substantial investment.

Distributed energy generation is an important fall-back in times of emergency, and can reduce over-reliance on centrally located utility-scale generation, but it is no protection against cyberattack on the grid. Distributed generation is itself both vulnerable and a vulnerability to the grid, since most systems are subject to control (or disruption) over the Internet.

Q: Most developed nations have highly centralized electrical systems. They generate power in a huge plant and then distribute it across the region, but is there a security case for decentralizing things, generating power where it will be consumed? Which technologies are best suited for this?

General ClarK: Our power system is particularly vulnerable because we don’t bury our power cables, instead we hang them from poles and towers. Short of a massive infrastructure investment to bury power cables, these vulnerabilities will persist, but smarter grids can speed adjustment to line failures and isolate sections to prevent cascades of failure we’ve seen in the past. And in these circumstances, rooftop solar and local wind could provide important augmentation in times of emergency. Utility-scale battery storage could also help, as well as, with the increasing population of electric automobiles, the possibility of creating a distributed battery system using recharging auto batteries. We expect renewable costs and battery storage costs to decline significantly.

Q: America’s 104 civilian nuclear power plants account for about 20% of America’s electrical supply. Most of these plants are reaching the end of their lifespan. From a national security perspective, should we build new reactors or change the mix of energy sources?

General Clark: Our nuclear plants should be modernized with newer technologies, including new nuclear waste technologies. Smaller scale, sealed reactors offer promising and much lower cost, more distributed energy.

Q: If you were in charge of charting America’s energy strategy for the next 50 years, where would you focus our national efforts?

General Clark: We need a real “strategy”. Not just market forces shaped by laws. We should press for our own liquid-fuel independence. In fact, we should maximize our gas-to-liquids and coal-to-liquids efforts to place us as the world’s greatest energy exporter. We need to offset OPEC and hold down the rising price of oil. Simultaneously, we need to implement the market incentives to move us rapidly away from a carbon economy and into a renewable electricity economy. Ultimately, the most profound threat is climate change – and we need to do all we can to slow down the build-up of greenhouse gases.

Note: In 38 years of service in the United States Army, Wesley K. Clark rose to the rank of four-star general as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. Since retiring from the military in 2000, he has become an investment banker, businessman, commentator, author and teacher. In September 2003, he answered the call to stand as a Democratic candidate for President of the United States, where his campaign won the state of Oklahoma and launched him to national prominence before he returned to the private sector in February 2004. Clark has chaired several public and private companies, and is a progressive leader in pursuing energy solutions.