Thoughts on energy and war from Bob Zubrin:
In World War II, we controlled the oil. In this war, the enemy does. This is an unacceptable situation, because it places our fate in the hands of people who want to kill us. In World War II, we had no compunction about destroying the Nazi fuel-making facilities at Ploesti and Leuna, or about systematically sinking the Japanese tanker fleet, because we didn’t need their oil. As we have seen, those attacks were incredibly effective in breaking the enemy’s power. On May 12, 1944, the day of the Leuna raid, the Third Reich ruled an empire comprising nearly all of continental Europe, with a collective population and industrial potential exceeding that of the United States. A year later, it did not exist. Once Japan’s tanker fleet was sunk, the collapse of its empire was almost as fast. Today we are confronted by an enemy without a shadow of the armaments of the Axis; all the Islamist countries have is oil. Were we to destroy that power, they would be left with nothing at all. But we can’t hit them where it would truly hurt, because our economy needs their oil to survive.
And we have people in power who think that climate change is a bigger risk than totalitarianism. Because, you know, in many ways, they don’t mind totalitarianism that much, as long as it’s their own.
In this war, the enemy does.
I didn’t know the US was at war with all the “Islamist” countries.
We’re not. But they’re at war with us.
Well, that’s OK, as long as no one tells them they’re at war with you, otherwise they might stop selling you oil.
We don’t buy oil from them.
Zubrin: But we can’t hit them where it would truly hurt, because our economy needs their oil to survive.
Rand: We don’t buy oil from them.
Maybe this discussion would make more sense if someone named these Islamist countries that are at war with the US.
Correction, Zubrin does mention a couple of countries: Saudi Arabia and Iran. the US imports between one and one and a half million barrels a day from Saudi Arabia.
The only significant one from which we buy oil is Saudi Arabia, but we could do without it. Zubrin probably means that our economy is dependent on Japan’s and Europe’s, and they are very dependent on oil from Saudi Arabia and Iran.
If the word ‘war’ scares you, replace ‘enemy’ with ‘adversary’ and ‘war’ with ‘competition’. But do recognize that the opposition doesn’t regard it as a competition.
This can also be tied back to “Advice for Republicans on Climate Change.”
Jump hard on nuclear power. Use barges for the central cores to make the geological surveys several orders of magnitude easier. Call them “Aircraft Carriers” if you have to. And basically demonstrate a willingness to flat -make- gasoline if you have to.
Make Saudi Arabia irrelevant.
Al, this just strikes me as a misuse of the word, “war”. Perhaps, we’re at “war” with Islam in a similar sense to how we’re at war with drugs or poverty. I don’t see a genuine military conflict with well over a billion people here. There’d be a lot more fighting and dying, if there was.
And I think it also shows in the proposed solutions. Why do we think that hampering trade with the Middle East helps in this “war”? My view is that things like the trade of oil and exposure to modern societies actually weaken primitive belief systems like radical Islam.
No, we’re not at war with Islam. But we are at war with Islamists.
So, just to be clear, is it Islamists, or Islamist countries you’re at war with?
It’s starting to look like you’re desperately searching for a decent war.
Islamists are at war with us. Some countries support them, to greater or lesser degrees, and they do so with oil money.
Al Qaeda declared war on the US twice, first in 1996 and again in 1998. Following those declarations, they attacked some of our embassies and the USS Cole. Too bad Bill Clinton was more concerned with getting bl*wjobs in the Oral Office than foreign policy. The moral of the story is that when someone declares war on you, it’s probably a good idea to pay attention.
Bill Clinton sent cruise missiles to the compound in Afghanistan where Bin Laden was supposed to be. They hit not long after he left the compound. This is BTW one of the rationales behind the DoD program for the hypercruise missiles and reconverting ICBMs to use conventional warheads.
He also bombed a factory in Sudan which was claimed to be manufacturing chemical weapons. I remember both times he was panned in the press for trying to start a conflict to make people forget about the Lewinsky case and that there was no real threat going on. They were obviously wrong and so are you. They were taking attention even back then.
By publicly naming ObL and then failing to eliminate him, Bill Clinton made him into a superstar in the Islamic world: the man that America was afraid of, and couldn’t kill. Clinton then let the issue drop. He had three seperate chances to puch ObL’s ticket, but each time his intelligence officers came to him for permission to strike, he had something more important to do. In one case, that “important thing” was guest-of-honor at a celebrity golf game.
In the process of launching those Tomahawks, Clinton severely depelted ready stocks without producing results- and then failed to budget for their replacement.
And, since you bring up The Big Creep and Osama, shoud we talk about the Gorelick Wall?
Don’t forget that as a result of the failed Afganistan cruise-missile strike, Osama started having dreams about jets flying into buildings.
Al Qaeda declared war on the US twice, first in 1996 and again in 1998.
I didn’t realize Al Qaeda was a country.
Are you foolish enough to think only countries can wage war or that some countries didn’t support Al Quaeda?
No, but this discussion is supposed to be about Zubrin’s article, Zubrin doesn’t mention Al Qaeda, and as far as I know, Al Qaeda doesn’t sell the US any oil, but if you want to head off on some tangent that has nothing to do with the topic good for you.
Saudi Arabia, which does sell oil to the US, was the country of origin of most of the 9/11 hijackers. The country has been active in spreading Islamism (a topic that Rand raised), as has Iran. Several of the Middle Eastern OPEC nations have promoted Islamism.
Al Qaeda doesn’t sell us oil, but the people who fund it do.
Westphalia is an archaic notion at this point in history.
The Muslims might have oil. But most of them have bad engineers with some exceptions like Iran. None of them have any decent heavy industry. I am talking about steel production, engine manufacturing, turbine manufacturing, or even electronics, avionics, radar, etc. The list goes on and on.
Like Sherman said: where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make.
No the real opponent is China and that is why the US Government is moving ships and troops to the Pacific region.
It’s kind of ironic that the culture that invented the truck bomb had to wonder “What if they cut off our supply of trucks?”
The change in opponent doesn’t change the focus.
In a conflict with China we will still be well-served by both increasing our own internal capacity for energy on all fronts.
Letting someone (anyone!) end up in the position of being able to screw us by just saying: “Hey, we’re not part of that conflict, we won’t sell to either side.” is not a good idea.
Just watching Russia roll the Europeans over gas prices yearly is another example of just how fun this can be.
I have a feeling that Zubrin’s article was originally written for publication at a mainstream media site, but didn’t quite make it. I imagine the rejection e-mail said:
“Mr. Zubrin,
In your article you stated:
Did you really think you could trick us into publishing the word Benghazi in a story? Think again.
Editors.”
The US need for foreign oil is quickly diminishing. It would be gone completely if not for the barriers put in place by the administration. We could easily end our need for overseas oil, but the President is blocking those efforts as well.
Like you said it is happening. Obama has to pander to his audience but he knows there is no way forward without the tar sands and the shale oil and gas. He did not cancel the nuclear projects either as many expected he would. Vogtle plant is one example.
Has the law or the regulations involved changed somehow?
Last time I was paying particularly close attention, they’d made a ruling that final approval of new plants couldn’t happen without a permanent waste disposal site. And … we don’t have one. Yucca Mountain was supposed to be one, and Hanford et al. are all ‘Temporary Storage’. A fair chunk of the current waste is held onsite as ‘temporary storage’ also.
IOW: Why does TVA and the others think they’ll get a different answer now when it comes time to actually turn them on?
Perhaps the most effective thing we could do to hurt islamists is to promote affordable energy from sources they don’t control. Since affordable energy is desirable independent of mid-east politics, Win-Win.
But the White House is occupied by the tyrants best friend, seemingly intent on weakening us in every way possible.
Well, the Saudi oil minister recently wrote that US fracking could destroy Saudi Arabia’s economy because they never diversified against an utter collapse in oil export revenues (unlike Dubai which never had oil revenues to begin with).
On the one hand, collapsing revenues would of course eliminate much of the regions’ power, military spending, and the spread of Wahabism by funding mosque construction in Europe and elsewhere. On the other hand, many of the rich states that are currently run by rich oligarchies, and which are at least not openly hostile to the West, will possibly get toppled as soon as they can’t buy off their public with free benefits and get replaced by radical Islamist regimes. Of course the new Islamist regimes won’t have oil revenues either, and perhaps they’ll prove as unpopular as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt when they can’t deliver on their promises and instead try to set themselves up as absolutist tyrannical theocrats.
Of course, without the oil revenues and the political leverage it gives them, along with its buying power (especially for weapons), we probably wouldn’t care what happened in the region any more than we care about central Africa, were it not for the mass immigration of Muslims into the West and especially into Europe.
Pretty good analysis. If the US threw off the shackles of the Obama administration, the EPA and the Green Organizations (which should be brought up on RICO statutes), countries like Saudi Arabia would continue to sell of Europe, Japan, China, etc. Still, we wouldn’t be sending them untold billions of dollars every year and the world oil price could drop due to decreased demand. If civil unrest toppled those countries, who knows who would rise to power. Odds are it wouldn’t be pretty.
I’d also point out that although they can cut off some of our oil, they could never cut off our coal – unless they managed to get us to elect a Luddite moron who was convinced that carbon dioxide is a toxic gas.
It reminds me of the dichotomy between Marxist goals in the communist block and Marxist goals in the West. Communist bloc Marxists wanted to produce abundant energy and raw materials by any means necessary so they could catch-up to and surpass the West, especially the US. Their communist puppets and water carriers over hear wanted to destroy energy and material production by any means necessary for exactly the same reason, to make the US fall behind communist countries and thus collapse, forcing our eventual surrender or enabling a communist takeover.
Thus, stemming from the 1960’s Marxist student movements, pursing the goals of their Chinese and Soviet masters, the left became opposed to cheap and abundant energy because it enhanced relative US power. Those views became entrenched in academia as the leftists took over the academy, and Obama’s entire administration is chock full of idiots who don’t know why they hate coal and big oil, just that everyone they sip cocktails with share the hatred, and of course so many well-bred, well-educated people can’t possibly be wrong.
Thus they pursue a US energy policy that would’ve made Albert Speer, and later Joseph Stalin, applaud.
Depends on which Communists you are talking about. Stalin the promoter of heavy industry and military power, or Pol Pot, the guy who thought it would be wonderful to dismantle all the cities and put everyone back digging for crops in the field in the middle of the jungle. Or Mao who much like Pol Pot thought it would be better off to go microscale in the industrial efforts and start making steel in everybody’s kitchen after his personal falling out with Stalin.
Unfortunately people no longer take notice of the big issues of energy and water generation as ways to increase overall human prosperity. Instead people have fun pretending to be primitives belonging to some tribe.
Well, I’d say Hitler, Stalin, and Mao who wanted their countries to simply outproduce their enemies, thus crushing them under a weight of their nation’s steel. Mao incorrectly thought that he had a system of production better adapted to local Chinese conditions. Pol Pot wasn’t trying to become a player on the world military stage.
So the basic idea was for the communists in their own countries to up production, and the communists in capitalist countries to sabotage production. In short, we got the wrong set of communists.
Cheap energy, definitely. Preferably cheap, clean energy. Even more preferably reliable, cheap, clean energy. Which does, in fact and for completely unalterable reasons, exclude ground solar and wind power. And, for various reasons, tokamak fusion. Why the last? Well, it won’t be clean; all the projections are that the amount of radioactive waste produced will be greater than with fission plants – and that’s without counting the inevitable leaks of tritium into the environment, which can’t be contained for fairly obvious reasons once it’s leaked. It won’t be cheap; nobody now thinks that building tokamaks smaller than a ten-storey building will be possible, and they will require rare and expensive raw materials. And it won’t be reliable for the extremely simple reason that we haven’t got it to work yet!
What might contribute, that hasn’t had serious work done yet? Well, let’s see. OTEC, wave power, Polywell and/or focus fusion, oil-bearing algae, biomass and garbage incineration, space solar. None have had serious investment.
The West needs to start getting serious about “alternative” energy for many reasons, and they definitely include defunding Islamic extremists. Which means that we need to defund large-scale ground solar, wind power and tokamak fusion – RIGHT FREAKING NOW – and use the money on research into things that might actually work.
The budget for ITER is set at 15 billion euros. We could do a great deal of good, useful, effective research with that.