The Post-Abundance Era

by soccerdad

Michael T Klare who has written extensively on global resources has the above titled article in the Asia Times.

The key to his argument is that the balance of supply and demand has fundamentally changed forever. In the 20 th century large multinational corporations spent billions finding and then exploiting resource reserves all over the globe.

This permitted consumers around the world to increase their consumption of virtually everything, safe in the knowledge that even more of these commodities would be available next year and the year after that, and so on infinitely into the future.

However, he notes that most of the world's supply of resources, minerals as well as oil, have been found and exploited. As billions are poured into finding additional sources the returns are becoming more meager. Take oil for example:

Ever since the 1960s, the most fruitful decade in the worldwide discovery of new oilfields, there has been a steady decline in the identification of new deposits, according to a recent study by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Even more worrisome, the rate of oilfield discovery fell below the rate of global petroleum consumption in the 1980s, and since then has fallen to about half the rate of consumption. This means we are increasingly relying on deposits found in previous decades to slake our insatiable thirst for petroleum - a pattern that cannot continue for much longer before we will begin to experience an irreversible and traumatic decline in the global supply of oil.

These events will have effect on us all especially with reagrds to the price of almost everything. The price of food will increase dramatically because of the role of oil in providing power as well as its use in fertilizers. It will aslo have effects on our foreign policy.

In the case of energy, this could lead to wars over oil. Even if oil was not the only motive for the US invasion of Iraq, the United States has long sought to maintain a dominant position in the oil-rich Persian Gulf area and a permanent military presence in Iraq will facilitate US efforts to seize the oil of Iran and neighboring countries if a decision is ever made to do so. The US Department of Defense is also beefing up its capacity to "project" military power into the oil-producing areas of Africa and the Caspian Sea basin. No one in official circles will admit that "guarding foreign oilfields" is the ultimate objective of Pentagon war plans, but it is becoming increasingly evident that the US military is being reconfigured to accomplish exactly this task

Klare points out that the end of abundance is not the same as scarcity, although the latter is possible for oil. However, since the price of many things will increase, items we take for granted today will become luxury items in the future to be purchased only by the well-to-do.

But the end of abundance will create a new international environment - a new gestalt, [1] if you will - in which expectations are lowered and struggles over what remains become fiercer and more violent.

Ideological, political, and ethnic differences will have their place in this new environment, but increasingly these will be infused with or subordinated to resource pressures. The growing edginess evident in Sino-US relations, for example, can be traced at least in part to a perception that the United States and China are becoming bitter competitors in the global hunt for new sources of petroleum. Likewise, the growing frostiness in US-Russian relations can be attributed in part to Moscow's heavy-handed use of its natural-gas monopoly to browbeat neighboring countries such as Ukraine and Georgia. This is exactly how we would expect international affairs to evolve in the Post-Abundance Era.