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The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, by Michael Klare
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"As Michael Klare makes clear in this powerful book, the heads of our corporate empires have decided to rip apart the planet in one last burst of profiteering. If you want to understand the next decade, I fear you better read this book."---Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion---a crisis that encompasses shortages of oil and coal, copper and cobalt, water and arable land. With all of the Earth's accessible areas already being exploited, the desperate hunt for supplies has now reached the final frontiers. The Race for What's Left takes us from the Arctic to war zones to deep ocean floors, from a Russian submarine planting the country's flag under the North Pole to the large-scale buying up of African farmland by Saudi Arabia and other food-scarce nations. With resource extraction growing more difficult, the environmental risks are becoming increasingly severe---and the intense search for dwindling supplies is igniting new conflicts and territorial disputes. The only way out, Michael T. Klare argues, is to alter our consumption patterns altogether, a crucial task that will be the greatest challenge of the coming century.
- Sales Rank: #404210 in Books
- Published on: 2012-12-24
- Released on: 2012-12-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.19" h x .84" w x 5.48" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
“A first-rate, well-researched wake-up call.” ―The Christian Science Monitor
“Outstanding…Exhaustively researched, beautifully written, and convincingly argued.” ―The Huffington Post
“Stunning.” ―Rolling Stone
“Reading this book, it's hard not to think about postapocalyptic fiction….Think Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, and, most recent, Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games. Yet novelists often skip over the messy parts along the road to dystopia. It's scary to think that Klare, far from crying wolf, might be providing the sordid details in real time.” ―Science News
“If you think oil is the only major thing we're running short of, think again.…Crisp, authoritative…A guidebook to wars to come.” ―Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost
About the Author
Michael T. Klare is the author of fourteen books, including Resource Wars and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A contributor to Current History, Foreign Affairs, and the Los Angeles Times, he is the defense correspondent for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Driven by DepletionIn 1971, a Mexican fisherman named Rudesino Cantarell encountered an annoying problem while plying his trade off the Yucatán Peninsula: clots of oil, apparently seeping from underground seams in the Bay of Campeche, were clinging to his nets and reducing his catch. After putting up with this inconvenience for some time, Cantarell described his difficulties to officials of the government-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos, known as Pemex. This prompted Pemex to conduct an exploratory survey of the area where Cantarell's nets had been contaminated--and at this spot, in 1976, the company found the second most prolific oil field in the world. Whether the fisherman ever received any financial reward for his role in the discovery is not recorded, but the giant field was called "Cantarell" in his honor.1For nearly three decades, the oil gushing from the Cantarell field was a veritable fountain of gold for the Mexican government. By 1981 the field was yielding an impressive 1.2 million barrels per day, and that amount continued to rise in the years that followed. Cantarell's prolific output allowed the Mexican state to significantly increase public spending and helped ensure the extended tenure of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as PRI for its initials in Spanish). Indeed, no other asset has contributed more to Mexico's economic vigor in modern times than the discovery and exploitation of Cantarell.2Lying under shallow water some fifty miles off the western coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, the Cantarell field is located in the Chicxulub Crater, produced by a giant asteroid that struck the Earth some 65 million years ago. (Many scientists believe that this asteroid, one of the largest ever to hit the Earth, produced a global cloud of ashes and dust that blocked sunlight and destroyed the food supply for many species, including the dinosaurs, leading to their extinction.)3 The crater is filled with shattered rock and rubble, and this highly fractured geology has made it easy to extract the field's extensive oil reserves. In its best years, Cantarell yielded over 2.1 million barrels of oil per day--more than any other field in the world except the colossal Ghawar deposit in Saudi Arabia.4But the same conditions that made it easy to pump out Cantarell's petroleum bounty also contributed to its rapid decline. As more and more petroleum was drawn from Cantarell, the field's underground cavities emptied out and the ambient pressure dropped, reducing the outflow of oil. By 1995, the yield had fallen to 1 million barrels per day, the lowest recorded in more than fifteen years. To restore higher levels of production, Pemex spent $6 billion on a daring scheme to inject massive volumes of nitrogen into the Cantarell reservoir, intending to boost the underground pressure. For a time, the plan worked as designed, and output rose again--reaching just over 2 million barrels a day in 2003 and 2004. But the use of extraordinary means to increase production only hastened the depletion of the field. By 2005, Cantarell was again in sharp decline, and in 2010 the field produced only 558,000 barrels per day--an astonishing 74 percent reduction from its 2004 peak. At this point, engineers at Pemex possess few options to reverse the slide, and so Cantarell's output is expected to keep falling.5The rapid decline of the Cantarell field has profound implications for Mexico, the United States, and the world at large. In Mexico, the reduction in oil profits has meant a substantial loss of state revenue just as the government is trying to grapple with the global economic crisis and an escalating drug war. The problem is all the greater because Cantarell provided such a large share of Mexico's total oil output. With no other fields capable of replacing it, the country's total oil production has fallen from an average of 3.8 million barrels per day in 2003-06 to 2.9 million barrels in 2010.6 Since Mexican demand for oil is rising even as the production levels continue to fall, sometime before 2015 the country will switch from being a net oil exporter to a net importer, significantly damaging the country's economy.7 Meanwhile, the United States, which imported much of the oil produced at Cantarell, faces the loss of one of its most trusted and reliable sources of energy; as a result, more and more of America's imports will have to come from distant, unreliable suppliers in the Middle East and Africa.The magnitude of Cantarell's decline--and the speed with which it has occurred--has understandably been a shock for Mexican officials, who must now grapple with the consequences. "I don't recall seeing anything in the industry as dramatic as Cantarell," said Mark Thurber, an energy researcher at Stanford University.8 But the field's degeneration also troubles global oil experts, who see in it a premonition of production declines at other major reservoirs, including Ghawar and similar "supergiants" in the Middle East. "The demise of Cantarell highlights a global issue," noted David Luhnow of the Wall Street Journal. "Nearly a quarter of the world's daily oil output of 85 million barrels is pumped from the biggest 20 fields.... And many of those fields, discovered decades ago, could soon follow in Cantarell's footsteps."9In many ways, the story of Cantarell's rise and fall provides a microcosm of the global resource dilemma. Many of the world's principal sources of oil--and of coal, natural gas, uranium, copper, and assorted other vital materials--were, like Cantarell, discovered several decades ago and are now becoming less and less productive. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), all but a few large oil fields have already reached their peak output levels and now face long-term decline.10 Unless new reservoirs of comparable size and productivity are discovered in the years ahead, the global supply of oil will inevitably contract. The outlook is similar for other raw materials, even if the details vary slightly case by case. Since few discoveries can be expected in the world's existing, well-explored resource zones, any increase in worldwide output will require the development of untapped reserves in new and often inhospitable locations.The decline of existing sources of supply and the hunt for new reserves in more remote and more dangerous areas is not a new phenomenon. Virtually all of the minerals and fossil fuels at the core of modern industrial civilization are finite materials that exist in deposits of varying degrees of size, richness, and accessibility. Almost always, producers begin by drawing on the deposits that are the easiest to find and exploit--typically, those that lie close to the surface, are located near major markets, and require minimal refining and processing. When these high-quality, easily accessed deposits are exhausted, resource firms inevitably must seek fresh reserves in places that are less convenient--usually deeper underground, farther offshore, in smaller and less concentrated deposits, or in far-flung areas of the globe. For a time, the development of new technology allows resources to be profitably extracted from these harsher, more difficult locations. But the logic of depletion is unyielding. Every fresh advance in mining and drilling techniques leads to the exploitation of hard-to-reach reserves, until those deposits, too, are exhausted--and then the cycle of exploration and production begins anew in even more demanding circumstances.The depletion of existing resource deposits and the search for new sources of supply was in large measure the driving force behind European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas from the fifteenth century onward. But what occurred in the past over a lengthy span of time is now happening very rapidly: many of the world's main reservoirs of vital materials are facing systemic depletion at the same time, leaving corporations and governments urgently scrambling to find replacements. As the wholesale exhaustion of the world's natural resource base coincides with unprecedented demand for these materials, the race for what's left is set in motion.The Great Postwar Resource BoomThe Cantarell oil field in Mexico, the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, and many of the other giant oil reservoirs that we rely on today for a large share of our petroleum supply--along with the biggest reserves of natural gas, copper ore, and other vital materials that we depend on--were mostly discovered in the decades after World War II, when giant energy and mining companies scoured the world in search of new reserves to supply the booming world economy. Between 1950 and 2001, the world's combined gross domestic product (GDP) increased by 600 percent in real terms, jumping from $5.3 to $37.2 trillion in 1990 dollars.11 This extraordinary surge in global economic activity produced an insatiable need for resources of all types: energy for transportation, manufacturing, and electricity generation; minerals for buildings, infrastructure, and consumer products; and food and water to sustain a growing (and increasingly urbanized) global population. As Table 1.1 shows, production of most of the basic resources rose dramatically during the postwar years. The amount of copper mined in 2000 was almost five times what it had been in 1950; the production of natural gas increased nearly twelvefold; and other natural resources showed similarly impressive gains during those decades.12To achieve these mammoth increases in resource output, the world's extractive industries had to expand beyond the well-established reservoirs that they had been exploiting at the end of World War II--reservoirs located largely in North America, Europe, and the Soviet Union. Those existing mines, oil fields, and gas reserves were not remotely large enough to support the ever-increasing levels of output demanded by the burgeoning world economy, so the resource firms were obliged to seek new reserves in other parts of the world. As a result of this drive, many resource-rich are...
Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
A tortoise, not a hare
By Cecil Bothwell
The information conveyed in Michael T. Klare's latest book is important, even critical to our common future. We're between a hard place and a rock, and the rock doesn't contain enough useful minerals or topsoil to save our bacon. Klare's work can be viewed as a useful resource for policy makers and industrialists who might want an overview of the problems we face.
That said, the book feels padded out, like a great idea for a longish think-piece in a serious magazine that was bulked up to make a book. Weary of the repetition, I began to skim the last half, reading intros and conclusions to chapters rather than spending my time wading through the jetsam.
I get it already. There are too many people on board this little planet, and all of them want to live like Americans. It won't work, long term. Famine is extremely likely. War is probable. The next half century is going to be difficult at best, tear-inducing in many ways, and utterly miserable for the poorest billion or so.
As Aimee Mann sang it (in a different context) "That's how I knew this story would break my heart."
57 of 64 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting and Informative
By Robert S Bogner
Well worth your time and money. Michael Klare clearly describes hhow the earth's ever decreasing non-renewable resources , combined with the ever increasing demand for them, will contribute to an expensive and frantic "Race for What's Left." He exapnds on three components of this race; energy,minerals,and agriculture (the section concerning agriculture is especially absorbing). He then describes how this may eventually lead to armed conflicts, and will eventually lead to the switch to renewables.
The book is written in a rather easy to read textbook style, and very clealy depicts the necessary projections from our current dependance on non-renewable resources.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Our race to oblivion
By Stephen Zielinski
The prolific Michael Klare has produced another book -- "The Race for What's Left" -- addressing the dangers we will face in the coming years, dangers which express our strong dependence on the earth and its material abundance along with our inability to create global political institutions which secure peace and prosperity. It is worthy read as are Klare's previous books on this subject. In his latest, he addresses a few simple theses:
1. The demand for natural resources will continue to grow
2. The supply of these resources will continue to shrink
3. The search for new sources of hydrocarbons, common and uncommon minerals, water and arable land will intensify over time and likely will generate resources wars.
In a nutshell, we are now passing from an "easy-resource world" to a "hard-resource world." This claim encapsulates a few disturbing facts: Existing oil wells no longer produce at the rate they once had and once productive mines have become stingy. These key resources have peaked or will peak soon, and this fact will drive commerce in the future. More importantly, fallow and potentially productive farm land has become scarce in various locales due to overuse, desertification, urbanization and other destructive forms of consumption. We can expect food shortages to intensify as time passes. Furthermore, increasing demand will augment this `natural' scarcity. Brazil, Russia, India and China are industrializing (or reindustrializing in Russia's case). Other countries have also taken off. Many are trying to develop their productive capacity and their natural resources. The industries in many of these countries are now competitive in the global market and will consume a growing share of the planet's raw goods. They will produce finished or near-to-finished goods, some of which will be shipped abroad and some of which will supply their local `haves' with the commodities of a `modern' consumer culture. Consumer demand, the system of production it drives and the quest for profits will thus continuously diminish the quantity of available raw materials. These goods are finite in number and, in some cases, lack an adequate substitute. Impelled by local and global demand as well as by the scarcity of the materials needed to compete, countries and firms will intensify their search for new sources of these increasingly scarce resources. Finding and using these goods will be neither easy nor cheap. We can expect competition for these resources to be intense.
This, therefore, is the race for what's left: We have consumed so much of the planet's resources that we can only renew our supply of these materials by finding new sources, mostly in inhospitable locales. We can also expect these new sources to be either less productive than the sources they replace or made to produce only with more effort, greater risks and higher costs. Arctic drilling and mining provide the exemplary cases of this problem. They are not the only cases, however. Worst of all, the race for what's left can never end given the nature of a modern and global economic system. Resource use today necessarily generates the scarcity of tomorrow.
Klare, oddly enough, gives little attention to one resource now in decline: An environment fit for human habitation. Global warming can and will likely become a species threat. Industrial waste befouls the land, water and atmosphere. A proud humankind may not survive the externalities generated by its supposed achievements. Of course, the global warming catastrophe has already begun, and the task humans must complete to survive goes well beyond taking measures that will ensure we avoid that dire situation. There is no magic bullet solution to this situation. The task instead requires pulling on the brake handle before it becomes too late to save ourselves and the world we have long inhabited.
It may have been inevitable that "The Race for What's Left' will not inspire hope for the future. The race is driven by the need to conserve the industrial method of production, techniques and resource usage which cause global warming and resource depletion. The sense I got from reading Klare's book is that we can expect national states to seek to secure the resources they need before it is too late to do so, too late to keep pace in a increasingly ruthless world economic system. Capitalist firms, on the other hand, will continue to seek out profitable uses for their technological capabilities and, of course, their property in general. The fortunate ones may take superprofits from their efforts, using resource scarcity to extract rents from the consumers of their goods. The stakes for these firms are very high and will increase in the future since countries and firms that fail to compete in the emerging markets can end in social disintegration, subjugation and bankruptcy because of their failure. Path dependent development entails confronting a socio-political rigidity that can prove fatal. Why fatal? At present, the world devotes little to the effort to pull on the brake handle, to radically alter the direction of material progress. Rather, it devotes treasure and blood reproducing the disaster.
The situation grows increasingly dire, and hopes for the future depend upon the human capacity for reasonable thought and action as well as for generating solidarity among humanity's diverse parts. In this situation -- yoked as we are to techniques and social forms which cannot sustain themselves -- gaining hope for the future entails confronting the hopelessness of our very modern predicament.
I gave "Race for What's Left" four stars. It is an accessible, well-researched and timely intervention into the world public sphere. I deducted a star because it is not the definitive work on the subject, although I should state that Klare clearly did not mean it to be such.
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