A friend studying #InternationalRelations recently introduced me to a book by #PeterZeihan called 'The Absent Super Power', published by his company in 2016. Zeihan's thesis is that #ShaleOil from #fracking in North America is making the US energy independent, allowing to to withdraw from the global military contest over Earth's remaining oil reserves.
Have you come across that book @dredmorbius ? It's tangentially related to the topics we were discussing recently, and I'd be very interested in your take on it.
Have you come across that book @dredmorbius ? It's tangentially related to the topics we were discussing recently, and I'd be very interested in your take on it.
My hot take: Zeihan doesn't seem to take into account that the #EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) of all non-conventional oil sources is very low, if not negative, as #RichardHeinberg showed in his 2013 book '#SnakeOil'. Fracking has allowed to the US to artificially inflate its short term oil extraction figures, maybe allowing it to get cheaper prices on the oil it still imports. But its still just as dependent on those imports as ever, even in the short term.
Zeihan's book is almost entirely unreferenced, and reads like a book length blog post. But if you want to understand the US oil industry from an inside perspective, it's well worth a read. There's some useful stuff activists could glean from his cheerleading about what makes the US such a great #fracking target, for example.
For example, this: "Thousands of people will need to be housed, oftentimes in areas that don't have thousands of extra apartments. Every hotel room will be bought up in bulk. Low-income housing will be emptied to make room. Man camps the size of medium-sized towns will be established by the same firms that build temporary military bases."
... suggests a number of strategies for making.it difficult to get new fracking operations off the ground.
For example, by working with affordable housing activists and targeting the "man camp" firms with divestment campaigns, it may be possible to stop fracking companies housing enough staff to start operations.
Or chapter 4, where Zeihan describes how a big chunk of the money the US government printed in the late 2000s, using the #GFC as an excuse ("#QuantitiveEasing"), was used to finance the domestic fracking industry (and presumably other uneconomic unconventional #FossilFuel extraction).
Zeihan's American exceptionalism is so strong it makes my gums bleed: "The United States is the most powerful country in history and will remain so until long after your grandchildren are gone."
The US failed to defeat a guerrilla army of peasants in Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and every other Middle East country it's tried to occupy over the last 20 years. It's now retreating from the region with it's tail between it's legs. Zeihan claims that's because fracking ("the shale revolution") means it doesn't need to control Middle East oil reserves any more. #YeahRight
But the US economy is still powerful, right. You mean the one that was only ever able to import as much as it did because of #PetroDollars (everyone needing US dollars to buy oil)? The one that all but died in 2007 and is surviving on life support in the form of printing money (much of it invested in fracking) to keep it's corporations alive, and selling government bonds to China? The one that can't educate or heal most US citizens properly or maintain crumbling infrastructure?
@publius yup, Zeihan is one of them. Which wouldn't matter if it wasn't for the fact that #NZ university courses in International Relations (#IR) seem to take take him very seriously.
"... it is the United States that holds the title of the world's financial superpower."
I'm laughing so hard it hurts to breath. That's just the punchline, the joke is the delusional description of US banking that leads up to that conclusion.
@michel_slm and the current incarnation of the Dems. Any party that can seriously consider Clinton, Biden, or Bloomberg, as a Presidential candidate has problems just as fundamental as one that can nominate Trump. So, short of a revolution against the investor oligopoly that controls both the economy *and* politics in the US (against AdamSmith's advice in The Wealth of Nations), I'm sticking with "can't".
@michel_slm introducing some kind of #ProportionalRepresentation to your election system could help. Having voted in both German-style #MMP elections (Mixed Member Proportional), and Oz-style #STV elections (Single Transferable Vote), I'd suggest the latter for the US.
Nothing illustrates the level of delusion in Zeihan's narrative better than this: "The Emeratis built their own less classy version of Las Vegas - calling it Dubai."
@michel_slm There are historical reasons for the existence of the #ElectoralCollege that I suspect would make STV easier to achieve. STV voting in the Presidential elections would either solve the problems blamed on the EC, or make them so undeniable to all sides that a motion to abolish it would easily get multi-party support. Worth thinking about.
"The US military is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. Every year, our armed forces consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations" - Union of Concerned Scientists https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/us-military-and-oil
This is the most obvious reason Zeihan is wrong. Even if #fracking could make US civilian infrastructure energy independent for decades (and it can't), whichever military controls the majority of the world's remaining oil is the dominant superpower. Most of that is in the Middle East. Is the US going to let Russia or China have it? Not if they have a choice. So their withdrawal from the region suggests a lack of capacity to maintain military dominance there, rather than a choice not to.
"... a desperate has-been, clinging to the remnants of a fallen empire and lashing out at its neighbours in the hopes of some crumbs to aid in its survival."
An apt description of the US since 9/11. But this is Zeihan describing a near-future #China, in an orgy of projection and wishful thinking. China is still building infrastructure, unlike the US, which has wasted 20 years of resources on adventurist wars that it has mostly lost, while its increasingly outdated infrastructure crumbles.
The Chinese are investing heavily in educating and upskilling their people, including English language education that for many begins in preschool. The education system in the US - like most countries that have embraced the #WashingtonConsensus - has been falling apart since the 1980s. So while the US frack their way down a dead end street in an orgy of #ClimateChange and #PeakOil denial, the Chinese are actively preparing for a world of electric transport, powered by #RenewableEnergy.
Zeihan thinks China will collapse due to shortages of fossil fuels without the US policing global shipping lanes (!?!). Which means that as well as knowing much less about future energy supply than he thinks he does, he knows nothing about the electronics industry. China is the global centre for both production and design of almost all advanced digital electronics, and not only in #Shenzhen. Anyone who wants a world with affordable computers has to make sure shipping to and from China is safe.