Scheer Solar Economy Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future (Earthscan, 2005)

Table 3.2 Growths rates for fossil energy use in Asia, in millions of tonnes

	1976	1981	Increase on	1986	Increase on	1991	Increase on	1996	Increase on
	Annual	Annual	1976	Annual	1981	Annual	1986	Annual	1991
	quantity	quantity	(%)	quantity	(%)	quantity	(%)	quantity	(%)
China
Fossil fuel consumption in
power stations	175.8	253.28	44.0	355.0	40.2	552.46	55.6	877.77	58.9
Oil consumption	77.7	83.1	6.9	97.2	17.0	119.6	23.0	172.6	44.3
India
Fossil fuel consumption in
power stations	57.51	89.89	56.3	142.39	58.4	237.29	66.6	357.54	50.7
Oil consumption	24.86	35.55	43.0	45.7	28.6	59.96	31.2	82.19	37.1
Asia (total)*
Fossil fuel consumption in
power stations	300.68	468.1	55.7	812.91	73.7	1065.2	31.0	1657.57	55.6
Oil consumption	161.3	219.7	36.2	255.1	16.1	339.9	33.2	481.1	41.5

* Not including the OECD countries Japan, South Korea and the Asian republics of the former USSR. Source: International Energy Agency

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portionate energy imports of the leading industrialized nations raise the spectre of ‘cold’ trade wars and ‘hot’ shooting wars to come.

Yet rather than looking to renewable energy, the geopolitics of global resources instead revolves around checkmating potential competitors or playing them off against each other. This strategy takes two forms. On the one hand, there is the unrelenting campaign to impose a world market as the global economic order, in order to keep all doors open for unimpeded imports. In a world market, the transnational corporations’ large capital stock for investment, purchasing power, technological edge and dominant influence on international institutions of the Western industrialized countries gains them the lion’s share of global resources. On the other hand, these nations are also enhancing the superiority of their military technology and their ability to conduct global operations, in order to be able to use military force, if need be, to put competitors in their place.

Many experts are of the opinion that competition for access to vital water reserves is most likely to escalate into outright war. Tensions are greatest where two countries depend on the same major rivers for their water. Whoever controls the source of the river is in a position to crowd out downstream countries. Thus Sudan has the advantage over Egypt along the Nile, and Turkey over Iraq along the Euphrates.23 Albeit these conflicts are a matter of life and death to the countries concerned, they nevertheless remain restricted to particular regions. The competition for fossil fuel resources, on the other hand, has global dimensions, even though the visible effects have to date been more regional. Dwindling reserves will almost by necessity force a radical shake-up of the global political scene in the decades to come. Even if it never comes to war, the arms race has already begun.

The connection between nuclear proliferation within the Islamic–Indian sphere and the competition for resources is impossible to ignore. The leading industrialized nations have been working together to isolate Iran following the fall of the Shah in 1979 just as effectively as they cooperated in the nearexecution of Iraq in 1991. Both of these were clearly punitive

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actions taken against states who dared upset the resource status quo. The subsequent occasional missile attacks on Iraq are intended to frustrate the country’s aspirations to become a nuclear power. The knock-on effect, however, has been to push other nations in the global competition for resources to accelerate their own nuclear weapons programmes. Once these countries are established nuclear powers, the USA will no longer be able to push them around as it did Iraq: this is the lesson that was taken from the Gulf War. Iran’s nuclear programme is founded on this calculation. Albeit the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan that produced the spectacular weapons tests of 1998 may be primarily a product of the old enmity between these two countries, the overarching motivation is the greater bargaining power that nuclear weapons bring. Chinese politicians justify their uncompromising stance on nuclear weapons in explicit terms of the need for a position of strength in the light of China’s rapidly growing dependence on imports.

Total Western defence expenditure has by no means fallen by as much as the end of the cold war would have suggested, despite the almost universally parlous state of public finances. According to calculations performed by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, defence expenditure in 1986 ran to $585 billion within NATO, and $343 billion in the USSR. In 1997, NATO expenditure was still $454 billion, whereas the Russian defence budget (albeit pertaining to a smaller area than the former USSR) had shrunk to $64 billion. If NATO accounted for 48 per cent of global defence expenditure in 1985, this figure is now 57 per cent – even without the numerous NATO ‘partner countries’. Terrorist threats, while undeniably real, do not wholly justify this expenditure, as the fight against terrorism cannot be won by conventional warfare alone. Russia’s internal crisis and the fragmentation of its army make a Russian threat unlikely. The sole remaining legitimization is the power to intervene in regional crises, crises which increasingly have the character of resource conflicts. The global political likelihood is that those countries with growing demand for fossil fuels will in future want to claim a larger slice of the dwindling cake, and build alliances against the US–European–

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Japanese axis that currently controls access to global reserves. Possible alliances include not just China with Russia or India, but perhaps also Russia with Iran, or even with a Turkey spurned by the EU; or possibly Turkey with Iran, Pakistan and China. Another possibility is that Japan might sell out and ally itself with China, and possibly with India and Indonesia as well, with a view to Australian resources. The USA’s emphatic endorsement of Turkey’s candidature for EU membership (despite Turkey’s well-documented human rights abuses) also has the resourcestrategic objective of forestalling any other alliances. It is no coincidence that south, southeast and central Asia are the only regions where defence budgets have been sharply increased: from $120.6 billion to $160.8 billion between 1985 and 1997, measured at 1997 exchange rates.

Resource reserves, gunboat diplomacy and the moral bankruptcy of society

Be it Russia or Somalia, Indonesia or Mexico, Congo or Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia or Algeria, Angola or Georgia, Nigeria or Afghanistan, Rwanda or Uzbekistan, instances of political collapse and bloody conflict are becoming ever more common. These ethnically, religiously or nationalistically motivated conflicts offer a taste of what is to come, as

•the already highly unequal distribution of global fossil fuel reserves will inevitably deteriorate further as stocks are depleted; and

•the increasing environmental damage wrought by fossil fuel consumption, alongside potential nuclear accidents, will devastate the livelihoods of ever more people.

The resulting shortages of land and sustenance will be the spark for escalating violence and bloody excesses, wherein the familiar mechanisms of anthropogenic selection will see their most tyrannical and remorseless application yet. What may at first sight appear to be an ethnic or religious conflict requiring the intervention of the enlightened guardians of law and order and human rights, is in reality the resource-centric self-interest of

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those self-same self-appointed guardians.

Coarsened and brutalized relationships both within and between states and the likely disintegration of state structures loom large on the horizon of the 21st century. Some countries, like Somalia, fall into anarchy; others, like the USSR, with Russia possibly soon to follow, collapse into ever smaller fragments. Next on the list could be Indonesia, China or India. This disintegration cannot be always counted on to pass off as uneventfully – without threat to world peace – as has so far been the case in the former USSR. Whether even the EU itself will survive the economic turmoil when resource shortages begin to bite is also more than debatable.

The existence of some sort of global governance has made it possible on numerous occasions to dampen down conflicts which those involved have no longer been able or willing to settle themselves. Outside authorities can sometimes be a force for moderation, and can help to construct a new social order. This remains a possibility, for as long as gulfs can still be bridged the conflict remains soluble, so long as the helping hands are truly interested in defending common values – protecting people and achieving an equitable outcome. The question of resources, however, is a raw nerve for the large industrialized nations, and where there is dispute, the global players of the political and economic world are single-minded and unscrupulous in the pursuit of their own interests. ‘Global governance’ is in this case doomed to fail, because when it is their resource interests that are at stake, the dominant powers not only lack the necessary credibility to be accepted as impartial arbitrators, they also have no real desire to achieve an equitable settlement.

All the giants of the political stage have at least indirectly contributed to the ecological destruction of human habitats and the social constraints that result from unequal access to resources. Despite the historic scale of their global power, they have so far proved incapable of global responsibility. They rely first and foremost on the economic agents that have arisen to manage food, energy and resource supplies. Not only have they proved themselves able to supply society with cheap food, but in the form of corporate empires, these economic global players

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have also proved superior to all other business forms in the global marketplace, both in efficiency and range of products. The result is a determination not to upset the applecart, on the basis that these structures are the only way to secure economic livelihood.

On the one hand there are the transnational corporations, whose scope is continually being widened not just by themselves, but also by political agreement. It is not just the WTO that draws no distinction between environmentally friendly and environmentally harmful products, or between finite and renewable resources; so does the increasing tendency of both national governments and international agreements to smooth the way for transnational companies. There is scarcely an investment made by these companies which does not attract subsidies, whether the publicly funded provision of business parks and infrastructure, several years of tax breaks or direct investment grants. There are few large mergers which are not welcomed or even actively supported by the host country. As governments are no longer in a position to shape their own futures, they hope that transnational corporations will do it for them. This is the thinking that lay behind the proposed Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI). The effect of this agreement, which suffered at least a temporary setback in the summer of 1998,24 would have been to shield foreign direct investment – which in the case of transnational companies covers effectively all investment – from subsequent additional political obligations with unknown cost implications, essentially new legislation on social, tax or environmental issues. Governments would have become liable for any additional business costs that might result from such legislation. This would have effectively exempted all corporate empires from domestic legislation, turning them into international institutions with unlimited power but no political or social liability.

On the other hand, there are the global environmental and the social consequences, whose effect is felt nowhere more keenly than in the rural regions of the developing world, the incubator for the greatest sociocultural debacle in world history. Three billion people, half the world’s population, are sustained by agriculture in these regions. As agriculture must

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increasingly look towards the global market, these people will become ever more dependent on the global food-processing corporations, whose industrial logic leads them to move towards mass production in large-scale agribusiness. Their monopoly on purchasing gives them the power – through market forces – to reshape business structures more imperiously than ever.25 Assuming this standard model of agricultural modernization under world market conditions, the likely consequence is that two of these three billions will lose their livelihood without any prospect of anything to replace it. At the turn of the century, the Chinese sociologist Feng Lenrui estimates that there will be 170 million unemployed agricultural workers in China – one quarter of the entire workforce.26

The consequence: either we embark on the road towards a solar resource base and correspondingly towards agricultural structures that do not follow the industrial model of the global market, or we abandon the values of the modern age because the global economic ‘reality’ seemingly admits of no other world. From the ideal of international equity to the maintenance of the natural basis for life; from the ideal of a social balance within states to the ideal of the constitutional democracy – all subordinated to the need for unimpeded access to resources and their optimal economic deployment. Anything may happen – from apathetic acceptance of ruinous trends to the closed eyes and ears of the leisure society, from turmoil and conflict in disintegrating societies to the blatant use of military force in support of business interests, from the decay of order within nations to the collapse of hard-won but underdeveloped international agreements – to the point where ‘chaos reigns’ (Samir Amin).27

Because nothing is so crucial to survival as a secure resource base, where it is under threat for part or all of humanity there is willingness to commit acts of extreme ruthlessness and barbarity. Ruthlessness can already be seen; barbarity will follow as the threat to resources becomes more acute. It is hard to imagine what faces the world if the opportunity to switch to solar resources is not seized – including a return to agricultural methods which preserve the fertility of limited

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agricultural land and the cleanliness of limited water supplies. If the only policy options open were continued consumption or abstention, humanity would stand little chance of not tearing itself apart. As plausible as it may sound, forgoing consumption may well prove to be an unworkable solution. There are no satisfactory answers to the questions of who should enforce it on whom, to whose benefit and at whose cost. Resource needs are too basic and access too unequal for consensus to be achieved at national level, let alone on a global scale. Many need and want more, but no-one is prepared to

take less.

Only a solar resource base offers any escape. The apologists of the fossil global economy justify their failure to make even half-hearted progress along this road with an equally tired fossil of an argument: in a world of global competition, the ‘luxury’ of concern for the environment must be earned through further conventional economic growth. This economic philosophy is in reality a necrosophy – the wisdom of death. Its absurd consequence is that the price for safeguarding the environment is the freedom to continue – for how long? – damaging it. This ‘wisdom’ has dominated our culture for too long, and we can no longer afford to heed it.

C H A P T E R 4

The distorting effects of fossil supply chains

THE DISTORTING EFFECTS of fossil supply chains can be seen most clearly at the extreme ends of the sociocultural spectrum – in the cities of the industrialized countries and the rural regions of the developing world. It was supplies of fossil energy that first made the megacities of the modern age possible; now, as supplies of fossil energy near exhaustion, those megacities are threatened with collapse.

The rise to dominance of fossil energy and the emergence of a global energy monoculture had severe knock-on effects on rural regions. Developing countries are experiencing today what the industrialized countries lived through in the past. Despite abundant solar energy, migration from the land to the slums of the cities continues to increase because people see no way of earning a living from agriculture. One reason for this is the lack of effective energy systems, without which neither agricultural structures nor new business initiatives can develop. Plenty of sun, but no energy for economic development: that is the grotesque situation of the developing countries, rather as if the crew of a ship had run out of drinking water, and its captain could only lament, ‘Water, water all around, but not a drop to drink.’ An on-board desalination plant would have prevented this life-threatening problem from arising. Similarly, the developing world urgently needs a solar energy industry to ensure future prosperity.

Patterns of settlement and social organization have always been heavily influenced by the nature and available reserves of energy supplies.1 As we enter the twilight of the fossil energy

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age it is all the more important that we should tackle the grave problems facing rural and urban areas alike, and consider how they might develop in a post-fossil-fuel age. The energy question currently does not figure in discussions of the future of town and country, such as the Habitat conferences initiated by the United Nations to examine the future prospects of urban lifestyles. This omission must be rectified.2

The rise and fall of the fossil city

While there were still no technologies available to harness energy efficiently, no fast and capacious means of transport and no transport infrastructure, settlements had to be located directly where energy and food were produced. In pre-indus- trial times, a town needed an area of fields and woodland for its energy needs between 40 and 100 times as large as the actual inhabited area, depending on the local climate and soil quality. Dearth crises were unlikely as long as this natural growth limit was respected. The structure of the economy was not conducive to amassing wealth, but its stability was assured as long as peace prevailed.3 There were differences in living standards, resulting from natural conditions or from varying levels of technological and cultural development, but these differences were smaller than the global disparities of the fossil industrial age, especially following the industrial concentration and monopolization of the fossil energy system in the first half of the 20th century, and its ultimate globalization in the second half.

At the height of the Roman Empire in the 1st century CE, the inhabitants of Rome numbered perhaps half a million. It was only with the availability of concentrated energy supplies and the constantly improving technology of the industrial revolution that urban expansion and the shift in settlement patterns from country to town could take place. The ability to transport food and energy into the towns and cities from ever more distant regions, with ever increasing technological ease and at ever lower cost, was crucial to this development. In 1800, there was one city on the entire planet with more than 1 million inhabitants. In 1900 this had risen to 13, by 1990 it had reached 300.4 The urban industrial centres developed first