The Geopolitics of Oil

The understanding of our predicament concerning our energy dependence begins to kick in into the ruling class, both here in Europe and in the United States. The US Senate Commitee on Energy and Natural Resources held a hearing earlier this week. The hearing was into a report entitled "The Geopolitics of Oil" and as Richard Bell from the Post-Carbon Institute describes it gave "an almost palpable sense of graveness and alarm that lent a chill to the room". The United States imports somewhere around 65% of its oil and most of this oil comes from countries like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria where they don't want to be in the first place.

Now you can always have ideas about what they use all this energy for (the United States basically use all this oil to run their Interstate Highway system fully furnished with all their Drive-In utopia), but it really misses the point. The bottomline here is that all their economy and ours as a result is dependent on imported petroleum, and with it our capacity to project power. Without energy we are nothing. In fact, as the Senate report rightly points out: "It's the Achilles-heel of our whole society". These are our reasons for waging war on countries like Iran.

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/836