The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."
Showing posts with label resources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resources. Show all posts

Monday, March 21, 2022

Ukraine: a Glimpse of the New Eurasian Empire


 

      Empires are alive, they move, they grow, they feel, they die. They have a soul that sometimes can be glimpsed, as in this unbelievable scene from "Dragon Blade" (2015). A silly movie but, at some points, it has a force, a presence, -- yes, a soul -- that grips you. The encounter of two great Empires, the Roman and the Chinese, is told as if it were the meeting of two persons, who are diffident at first, then they discover that they like and respect each other. Empires are part of the human adventure, part of the human ways, of what humans are. And nowadays, perhaps, we are beginning to see the birth of something that never existed before: the first true Eurasian Empire. 



Eurasia is a gigantic landmass, the largest continent, the most populated one. So huge it is, that over thousands of years of history, it was never completely conquered and turned into a single empire. The two greatest empires of antiquity that arose on the opposite side of Eurasia, the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire, never came directly in contact with each other.

Then, at some moment during the 2nd century BC, or maybe even earlier, the many local commercial roads that crisscrossed Eurasia became connected, forming a network that crossed the whole continent. It was the Silk Road, an offspring of the domestication of the camel, a new transportation technology that replaced the more expensive wheeled vehicles. 

Vaster than empires and more slow, the Silk Road was to bring enormous changes. The Romans and the Chinese started trading with each other. Silk moved from East to West and, gold moved from West to East. In the long run, the Romans were ruined by their passion for luxury items coming from Asia. Their gold went to China and the empire collapsed with the depletion of their gold mines in Spain. 

In time, the Europeans learned how to make silk in their lands, but the Silk Road continued to exist. During the 13th century, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo traveled all the way to China by camel, following overland routes. At about the same time, the Mongol armies swept over Eurasia from their base in the very center of the continent. Their empire was the largest ever seen in history. But they could not expand it all the way to the limits of the Eurasian continent. In the East, they were stopped by the divine wind (the Kamikaze) in Japan. In the South-West, they were stopped by the Mamluk warriors in the Middle East. In Western in Europe, the shores of the Atlantic Ocean were too far even for the nimble Mongol horsemen. 

Empires come and go. After that the Mongols were gone, it was the turn of the empire of the man of iron, Timur, also known as Tamerlane. He couldn't conquer the whole Eurasia, either. Timur was the last of the great nomadic conquerors, made obsolete by the development of gunpowder and firearms.

During the 19th century, the coal-based West European states tried more than once to expand into Eurasia. Their armies never managed to do more than march into the East-European plains, to be destroyed there. It was the destiny of Napoleon's Grande Armée in 1812, then of the Germans in two successive, ill-fated attempts. At the same time, the "Great Game" ("bolshoya igra") was being played: The land-based Russian Empire and the seafaring British Empire battled each other for the control of Eurasia, later with Britain replaced by the US. These two Empires never fought each other directly, except for a brief episode during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Neither could occupy Eurasia, and they jockeyed at the edges of the respective borders. Afghanistan was a watershed where one or the other empire tried to establish a foothold. Neither succeeded. The latest attempt by the US empire ignominiously crumbled in 2020.

While all this was happening, China remained the largest Eurasian state, sometimes conquered, sometimes conquering. At the time of admiral Zheng He, in the early 1400s, China tried for the first time to expand beyond its borders. Zheng He's fleet sailed all over the Indian Ocean, reaching Africa and establishing a Chinese influence in the area. Eventually, China abandoned its seafaring power: it remained a land-based power. 

The late 19th and the early 20th centuries were a disastrous period for China, besieged and attacked from all directions. But, with the end of World War 2, China started to rebuild its economy. By the 21st century, China was poised to become the world's #1 economic power, and that had strategic implications. At present, the Chinese seem to have decided that they don't want to challenge the U.S. maritime power directly. Instead, for the first time after the reign of Genghis Khan, the prospect of a land-based Eurasian Empire is becoming a real possibility. 

What would make the new continental empire possible is the "Belt and Road Initiative", proposed by the Chinese government. It is a "Silk Road 2.0," that would link the Eastern shores of Eurasia with Western Europe and Africa by means of high-speed trains. It includes a maritime network of lanes that follows and expands on where the old Zheng He fleet had sailed. A gigantic project on a timescale of decades, perhaps centuries. The Chinese do think long-term. 



But a transport infrastructure is not enough to create an empire: energy is needed to make it function. Up to now, the booming Chinese economy has been functioning mainly on coal, but the Chinese seem to understand that they can't continue for long with that. They are diversifying, expanding their nuclear and renewables industry, at present the largest in the world. Nevertheless, becoming independent of fossil fuels will still take decades. That is pushing China to collaborate with Russia, which can provide oil and gas for the transition phase, as well as mineral resources, food, and timber. 

What we are seeing in the world right now is a transient phase of the slow development of an integrated Eurasian Economy. The war in Ukraine is having the effect of decoupling the Central Eurasian economy from the Western economy. It may be seen as part of a strategic design to control the Eurasian resources. No matter who started the war, nor how it will end, the Russian resources that once went to Europe will soon go south, to China. Western Europe will be demoted to a coastal appendage of the Western Maritime Empire, expendable as needed. 

It is curious how Western Europe not only accepted to be cut off from the Russian resources they desperately need, but enthusiastically acted for that purpose. The Chinese may have put to work a precept from Sun Tzu that goes as, "the opportunity to beat your enemy is provided by the enemy himself." One of the (many) problems Westerners have is that they can't control their own propaganda, and, in this case, they have directed it against themselves. We cannot say whether the Chinese gave a push in that direction, or just exploited a trend. In any case, it happened.  Western Europe has locked itself out of Central Eurasia while thinking they were locking the Eurasians in. 

At present, the Chinese are working on new financial instruments to decouple the Eurasian financial system from the dominance of the US dollar, and to access the Middle Eastern and African resources directly. India has good reasons to join this effort, just as Iran and many other Asian and African countries do. With this tool, the Chinese can build a Central Asian block of enormous economic power, while Western Europe has been pushed into irrelevance. At least, that gives Europeans a chance to put into practice their idea of the "EnergieWende" -- the transition to renewable energy. So far, it was mostly smoke and mirrors, but now they'll have to work on it for real. They will find that it won't be as easy as it was proposed, especially if they have to do it while their economies are collapsing. But, after all, problems are always opportunities, at least if you can solve them. 

The war in Ukraine may die out in the coming weeks, or it may expand, but that matters little. It is just a brief flare in a story that unfolds on a timescale of decades and centuries. The Russian philosopher Alexandr Dugin has been promoting for some time the concept of "Eurasianism" as a new unifying approach to governing Eurasia. In the West, Dugin's ideas are not popular in the mainstream debate. But, if they exist, it means that there exists a current of thought that examines this subject on the basis of the concept that one day Eurasia will exist as a coordinated political entity. 

Will the Eurasian Empire be a good thing or a bad thing? We cannot say: empires are not bad and are not good. They are. And they will be. 



Monday, February 28, 2022

Back to Reality: We are All Children of Oil

 

Colin Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), speaks in Pisa in 2006. Officially, the Powers that Be (PTB) ignored the ASPO message, but it could be that they understood it all too well. That would explain many things about the current situation. For two years, we thought that all our problems were caused by a microscopic, peduncled critter. Now, we are back to reality: we are all children of oil, and we cannot survive without it.


A few days ago, I found by chance on my shelves some documents from the 2006 conference of ASPO (the association for the study of peak oil) that I and others organized in Pisa, in Tuscany. The conference had a certain global resonance: it was sponsored by the Tuscan government, hundreds of people from all over the world came to attend, and the international media commented on it. It was part of a wave of interest on peak oil and its consequences. Just as another example, see the leaflet on the right that I also found rummaging among old documents. It announces a meeting to be held in the Tuscan countryside in 2004, titled, "The Party is Over", and subtitled "How to exit from the petroleum-based economy"

Today, it looks as if these things are a hundred years old. How was it that there was an age in which you could express this kind of subversive thoughts in public and be given some space in the media? And how could we delude ourselves into thinking that we could have convinced that nebulous entity called "humanity" that we were running out of our natural resources, crude oil in the first place? Even more subversive, that we should reduce consumption and move to renewable sources before it was too late?

At the time, we didn't know exactly how much time we had before troubles were to start, but our estimates were correct in terms of orders of magnitude. In the early 2000s, Colin Campbell proposed that the peak of "conventional" oil production would come around 2012. It probably did, but the peak was masked by the production of non-conventional resources. "Shale oil" bought us another decade of growth, although at a modest rate and at a high cost. So, we had more than 20 years to prepare from when, in 1998, Colin Campbell and Jean Lahérrere had first flagged the problem with an article published on "Scientific American." But, as we should have expected, nothing serious was done.

On the contrary, the entity called "humanity" showed the maturity and wisdom of someone in the grip of convulsions and possessed by demonic forces. We have seen 20 years of a roller coaster in the desperate search for an enemy to destroy and turn the clock back, to when things were good. The enemy has been singled out as Osama, Saddam, Assad, Qaddafi, and many others, destroyed only to be replaced by the new monster of the year. 

For two years, then, the monster was not a human being, but a microscopic peduncled creature that nicely played its role of bugaboo, until it was officially vaporized by the microscopic equivalent of carpet bombing. Now, it is over, and a new, more conventional monster is advancing: the soulless Vladimir Putin. Chances are that he will not be the last monster in the demonization chain.

Every time we seemed to have destroyed our arch-enemy, it came back in another form, bigger and uglier than before. And each time, in the fight against the monster on duty, we lost something of our wisdom, our freedom, our humanity. 

We never realized that what we were fighting was not a monster, but a reflection of ourselves in the desperate search for a way to continue a way of life that some of our leaders defined as "not up for negotiations." But when you deal with Nature, everything is up for negotiations. And Nature always wins the game. 

Peak oil never reached the level of the official monster of the day, but it was worrisome enough that it deserved the standard demonization treatment. It could not be bombed and there was no vaccine against it. But we marginalized it, ridiculed it, and made it disappear from view as if we had bombed it to smithereens. Yet, it is returning, even though not mentioned, during the current crisis. 

We are 8 billion on this planet, all children of crude oil. Without crude oil and other fossil fuels, most of us simply wouldn't exist. And without crude oil, we cannot continue to exist. As a monster, peak oil is much scarier than any of the bugaboos that the mainstream media have been proposing to us. Gas and coal are in the same group.

We should have known what to expect. It was all written already in 1972 in the study titled "The Limits to Growth." To be sure, the authors never mentioned wars for resources in their discussion. But just by taking a look at the curves for the most likely scenarios, it wasn't difficult to imagine that the global collapse was not going to be a friendly party. 

With the world's economic system expected to crash at some moment during the first decades of the 21st century, we should have expected the race to grab what was left would get uglier and uglier. It is happening. 


Is it the story of a failure? Maybe, but in a strangely twisted way. Thinking about what's happening right now in the world, I have a strong impression that our leaders didn't ignore our message. Not at all. Already in 2001, it was said that George Bush Jr. had decided to invade Iraq because he had read some material produced by ASPO and was worried about peak oil. It is probably just a legend, but the so-called "Carter Doctrine" of 1980 already recognized that the US couldn't survive without the oil resources of the Middle East. Our leaders are not smarter than us, but not stupid, either. 

So, it may well be that the PTBs perfectly understand the situation and that they are maneuvering to place themselves in a position to gain from the coming (actually ongoing) collapse. After all, the game that the elites know best is putting the commoners one against the other. It is the game being played right now. Like the Russian Roulette, it is one of those games you won't necessarily survive.