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Title: Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author by Michael T. Klare ISBN: 0-8050-5576-2 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 13 March, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.78 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Great Resource
Comment: This book was particularly helpful because it filled an information gap, especially in regards to entertaining feuds over the rather esoteric, tiny Spratley Islands, as well as the importance of water rights. There are sections concerning water rights disputes in Israel, Iraq, and Pakistan vs. India. Of course, plenty of space is given to various oil and gas reserves, including the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus region. The maps were clear and very helpful. Readers will also enjoy the tables that include the innumerable purchases of US military equipment by Saudi Arabia. This book will continue to be valuable as countries vie for the resources of inner Eurasia.
Rating: 3
Summary: Self-inflicted wounds
Comment: Michael Klare, I would argue, has a better claim to being able to predict tomorrow's headlines than self-proclaimed "futurists" who absurdly forecast that computers are going to surpass human intelligence and take over the world in 30 years. That's assuming our civilization can still generate electricity reliably, of course, which I suspect will become increasingly problematic as the parts of the world with projectable militaries fight over the remaining fossil fuels supplies and waterways suitable for hydroelectric damming. Already North America faces the prospect of our pilot lights going out this winter because of a severe natural gas shortage, which portends even worse resource crises to come.
I came away from this book feeling really bad about the human prospect. The neo-con junta running the U.S. thinks it can solve America's problems by occupying the oil reserves in Southwest Asia, without any Plan B for dealing with the oil supply's eventual exhaustion. Meanwhile, people in the less developed, dry countries of the Nile Valley, the Tigris-Euphrates region and the Indus River have been mindlessly pumping out babies for generations well in excess of their death rates, and now find themselves facing catastrophic water shortages. In many rain-forested tropical countries, corrupt dictators and warlords have been stripping out their natural resources to sell to Western companies so they can buy the guns and supplies they need to keep their soldiers' loyalty and stay in power. I found this last part of Klare's account especially striking in light of all the free-market propaganda about the wonders of globalization. Despite the fiction that trade requires noncoercive, mutually consensual transactions all along the line from the producer to the eventual consumer, in the real world the "producers" of many luxury goods like diamonds and fine tropical woods use armed force (including private military companies, which Klare names) to extract these resources at the expense of local populations who want to keep their environments intact because their traditional livelihoods depend on them. Once these goods enter the global market, however, whatever blood spilled in producing them conveniently falls down the memory hole.
I would have given this book a 4-star rating, but Klare failed to show what's really going to happen if we don't deal with these resource problems rationally, especially the shrinking supplies of oil and gas. Since the Industrial Revolution we have been living on an artificial energy subsidy from fossil fuels that has allowed us to cheat environmental constraints on the human population by a factor of four to six. We face the likelihood of a massive Malthusian die-off once this subsidy is exhausted.
Rating: 5
Summary: A sober warning going unheeded
Comment: This is a clear and lucid account of the perils facing oil addicted societies, and those facing other shortages of water and other minerals. While the Middle East smolders, and while the burning of fossil fuels contributes to global warming, the US and its policy "leaders" increase our dependence on a resource that will increasingly provoke conflict and put coming generations in harm's way. This book also, intentionally or no, helps answer that post-9/11 question: Why do they hate us? In short, to satisfy the needs of our own economy and wastrel practices, we have helped repress and impoverish millions of innocents to our benefit. Our freedom, our prosperity have come in large measure at their expense, and this book clearly lays out the future venues where the bill from our policies will likely and finally come due and payable. This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, and this book's contents, very strait laced, have the potential to create the outrage for a change of national direction. Must reading.
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Title: The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg ISBN: 0865714827 Publisher: New Society Pub Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Hubbert's Peak : The Impending World Oil Shortage by Kenneth S. Deffeyes ISBN: 0691116253 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 11 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil by David Goodstein ISBN: 0393058573 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2004 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Oil Factor: How Oil Controls the Economy and Your Financial Future by Donna Leeb, Stephen Leeb ISBN: 0446533173 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: February, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. by Thomas F. Homer-Dixon ISBN: 0691089795 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 02 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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