Editorial

To the last drop of oil

Consider the following scenario:
China’s economy is growing very, very fast. With that growth comes a rapidly increasing appetite for natural resources, principally oil.
These days, what China wants, China gets, because it has the willpower and the money. Hence the billions being invested in foreign oil development, some of it in places with very unfriendly political regimes in power. Sudan is one of those. Iran is another.
As Thomas Friedman points out in his book ‘The World is Flat’, China’s foreign policy “consists of just two things – preventing Taiwan from becoming independent and searching for oil and other natural resources.
“The more desperate China becomes for oil, the more vigorously it will use its veto at the United Nations Security Council to prevent sanctions against its newfound providers of crude – no matter what horrible things they are doing on the world stage.”
An example is the Sudanese government’s complicity in the genocide that is happening in the Darfur region of that country. China has invested billions in Sudanese oil, which amounts to seven per cent of its total supply.
This is just one example of the minefields that the world faces in the new geopolitical reality of the 21st Century. Another, of course, is the environmental impact that awaits the world as 1.3 billion Chinese move into the middle class and start demanding all the gadgets that western consumers have been taking for granted for 50 years.
And how about that competition for oil? There’s more. China, Friedman says, currently imports about seven million barrels of oil per day.
If the current growth trends hold, that number will rise to 14 million barrels per day by 2012. “For the world to accommodate that increase it would have to find another Saudi Arabia,” Friedman says.
China is doing what it can to make that discovery, as is, of course, the United States. The race is on.
“In 2004, China began competing with the United States for oil exploration opportunities in Canada and Venezuela,” says Friedman. “If China has its way, it will stick a straw into (these two pools) and suck out every drop of oil, which will have the side effect of making America more dependent on Saudi Arabia.”
Propping up repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia is bad business, no matter how you slice it. A country that can stay rich by doing nothing but pumping oil has no incentive whatsoever to institute reforms of any kind.
What’s needed, in Friedman’s opinion, is the kind of leadership in the west (starting in the White House) that can change the nature of the game. If everything depends on oil, and that dependence is leading us down the road to disaster, then nothing could be more important than finding a way to reduce or even eliminate dependence on oil. It would take a big effort. A lot of guts. A clear vision of what’s at stake and unwavering political will. And the Bush administration in the States has completely missed the boat on it. So the U.S. – and Canada along with it – remains locked in a dogfight for the last drop of oil to the bitter end.
Somebody needs to break the pattern.