Beyond BP: Michael Klare on US Energy Policy

Why we should heed the warnings offered by Hampshire College’s famed peace and world security prof.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
By Jim Cabral

Michael Klare talks straight about energy and politics.

The disaster engendered by the explosion and subsequent hemorrhaging of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico has thrust energy costs—economic and environmental—back into the public discourse in a way not seen since gasoline prices went ballistic in the summer of 2008. That summer, with prices hovering in the $4-per-gallon range, Hampshire College’s Michael Klare published Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co., New York).

Klare’s book could not have been more timely. After all, his warnings about the dire implications of the world’s growing reliance on finite energy sources—especially petroleum, natural gas, and uranium—seemed all too painfully validated by those record-high gas prices. However, shortly afterward, an epidemic of real estate foreclosures and the subsequent financial crisis and recession contributed to a near-50 percent reduction in the price of gasoline. (Of course, prices have since rebounded somewhat.)

Was Klare’s ominous portrayal of the problems attending energy extraction and consumption an overstatement? Hardly, if the current crisis in the Gulf is any indication.

In view of recent comments made by BP officials—such as CEO Tony Hayward’s claim that the sheer “vastness” of the world’s oceans would render the environmental costs of virtually any oil spill negligible—it is easy to imagine them and other defenders of the fossil fuel status quo dismissing Klare’s warnings as alarmist. But today’s geopolitics of energy is in fact a scary state of affairs, and that is certainly not due to any embellishment on Klare’s part.

Rising Powers is a cogent, accessible, well researched (e.g., relying on energy trade publications and statements from energy officials both in and out of government) expose of the intensifying, heavily militarized competition among the globe’s largest energy-consuming nations for finite—and soon to be dwindling—sources of energy. Moreover, Klare makes clear that these remaining sources, like the oil currently gushing out of the well in the Gulf of Mexico, are becoming increasingly remote and hazardous to extract.

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