|
Week 21 - May 27th - 2002 |
David
Seaton's Energy Links® Commentary
We have come to this. In the next few
days, weeks at the most, there is a real, calculable risk of another war
between India and Pakistan. This time, however it could quickly evolve
into an atomic exchange. Although nothing in art, literature or personal
experience will have prepared us for such horror, anyone who has visited
these countries, so packed with people and observed their titanic struggle
just to eat and wear clean clothes can imagine what an atomic explosion
in such a place as Calcutta or Karachi would mean. In days gone by, to
the world's indifference, millions died of hunger in the sub-continent's
periodic famines, but that was long before CNN brought all of us universal
death and desolation live in constant "24 x 7" updates. Pakistan's President
Pervez Musharraf has been in the news a lot since 9-11 when US President
George W. Bush discovered how useful that general could be in America's
crusade against evil. The other side is perhaps not so well known, India's
Atal Behari Vajpayee is not to be confused with Gandhi or his Hindu extremist
policies with the Mahatma's doctrine of Ahimsa or non-violence. The Bharatiya
Janata party he leads is India's version of Le Pen's Front Nationale. They
are the linear descendents of The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fascist
political movement that was held directly responsible for Gandhi's assassination.
More recently the BJP was behind the destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya
believed to have been built on the site of a temple marking the birth place
of the Hindu god Rama. This incident led to the death of over 2000 people
in subsequent communal violence. In essence then, we are watching the preparations
for the world's first two-sided atomic war. In one corner a military dictator
commanding an army long accused of harboring the Islamic fundamentalists
who created the Afghani Taliban. In the opposite corner a fanatically anti-Muslim
Hindu fundamentalist. In their care the fate of hundreds of millions of
people whose real battle is to find enough food for themselves and their
children. David Seaton
|
| The
Next Oil Frontier (Business Week)
(...)Most Americans, (...) couldn't find Azerbaijan on the map. And they probably wouldn't be able to find--or spell--Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, or Tajikistan. But American soldiers, oilmen, and diplomats are rapidly getting to know this remote corner of the world, the old underbelly of the Soviet Union and a region that's been almost untouched by Western armies since the time of Alexander the Great. The game the Americans are playing has some of the highest stakes going. What they are attempting is nothing less than the biggest carve-out of a new U.S. sphere of influence since the U.S. became engaged in the Mideast 50 years ago. The result could be a commitment of decades that exposes America to the threat of countless wars and dangers. But this huge venture--call it an Accidental Empire--could also stabilize the fault line between the West and the Muslim world and reap fabulous energy wealth for the companies rich enough and determined enough to get it. The buildup of this commitment has been breathtakingly fast. Consider: -- A year ago, not a single U.S. soldier was in the region. Today, roughly 4,000 servicemen and women are building bases, assisting the Afghan war, and training anti-insurgency troops along a rim of peril stretching 2,000 miles from Kyrgyzstan, on China's border, to Georgia, on the Black Sea. In early May, U.S. advisers started training antiguerrilla forces in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, where Muslim insurgents believed to be connected to al Qaeda are taking refuge from their struggle against Russian troops across the border in Chechnya. A few days before that, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared on a visit to Kyrgyzstan, where the U.S. Air Force has a base, that coalition troops would stay there "as long as necessary." -- From incidental sums fewer than five years ago, the amount of U.S. investment in the region has jumped to $20 billion. The biggest recipient: Kazakhstan, a vast state with huge oil reserves and a dictatorial ruler, ex-Communist boss Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. Click here to read more Contents |
| With
Mideast uncertainty, US turns to Africa for oil (Christian Science Monitor)
In the search for alternative sources of oil outside the politically volatile Middle East, the US is increasingly turning toward a place not normally seen as a major energy producer: sub-Saharan Africa. The region's crude oil production surpassed 4 million barrels a day in 2000 – more than Iran, Venezuela, or Mexico. The US currently gets 16 percent of its oil imports from sub-Saharan Africa – almost as much as from Saudi Arabia. And, according to projections by the National Intelligence Council, that proportion will reach 25 percent by 2015, surpassing the entire Persian Gulf. The vast majority of it will come from a stretch of coastline between Nigeria and Angola called the Gulf of Guinea. Today, the African Oil Policy Initiative Group, a lobby group with members from the oil industry and various arms of government, will present a white paper in Washington. The document urges Congress and the Bush administration to encourage greater extraction of oil across Africa, and to declare the Gulf of Guinea "an area of vital interest" to the US. There is some indication that the Bush administration already feels that way. Walter Kansteiner, the assistant secretary of State for Africa said earlier this year: "African oil is of national strategic interest to us, and it will increase and become more important as we go forward."(...) In theory, the growing American interest could help develop one of the poorest regions on the planet. But oil creates few jobs for local people, and the wealth rarely spreads itself across the society, says Gavin Hayman of Global Witness, a London-based group that monitors resource extraction and human rights in developing countries. "The states that find oil tend to show regressive levels of development, where oil revenues go up and humanitarian indicators go down," says Mr. Hayman. The huge investments are also bringing increasing pressure from the industry for a greater US military presence in the region. The white paper recommends establishing a military subcommand for the Gulf of Guinea. Click here to read more Contents |
| In
Khartoum's Oil Pipelines flow Blood (The Nation, Nairobi - allAfrica.com)
Two documents on the Sudan released almost simultaneously last week expose the complexities and contradictions inherent in the search for peace in that country's conflict that has lasted two decades, killed two million people, displaced 4.5 million others and burnt hundreds of billions of dollars. And nowhere is this more dramatic than in the reports' treatment of the role of oil in the war between the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and its allies, and the Government of Sudan GOS. The first report, Depopulating Sudan's Oil Regions, is written by Diane deGuzman for the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan. It is a searing condemnation of the GOS strategy to strafe civilian populated regions in South Sudan for the express purpose of clearing the regions for oil drilling work to either start or continue. It documents atrocities against the civilians starting from October 2001, when the GOS launched an offensive in the southeast part of Ruweng County, in oil concession Block 2. Although no SPLA troops were on the ground, the report says that the villages between Jukabar and Bal were bombarded from the air, with ground troops moving in to mop up. Many were killed and those lucky to survive now huddle in swampland to the northeast and southeast of the county. Click here to read more Contents |
| And
the new leader: Arafat (Ha'aretz)
(...)If anyone can replace Arafat, it is only Arafat himself. Less than a day before his speech, everyone had just about finished their analyses about the demise of his leadership. There was talk about possible replacements and a war of succession, stories of grassroot Palestinian pressures and even visions of guardian angels from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan coming in the dark of night to the Muqata building to install a fresh Palestinian leader, perhaps a Zionist one. To keep things in perspective, it is instructive to note that Egypt's foreign minister, Ahmad Maher, said last week that the diplomatic activity of the Arab states is not at all intended to clip the wings of the intifada or bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, but only to move the Palestinian struggle onto a diplomatic track. On the other side, Sharon floated the test of reforms as the threshold condition for entering into a diplomatic process. The expression "reforms" has, as usual, a double meaning. For Israeli ears, there is only one reform. It makes no difference to Israel who the members of the Palestinian parliament will be, who the mayors are, whether the status of women will be recognized or whether Palestinian child labor is prohibited. After all, Israel is not interested in democracy for democracy's sake, but rather in "reform" that will depose Arafat and remove him from the public discourse. American ears hear "reform" differently. They were quick to praise Arafat's speech, his condemnation of terror and decision to implement reforms in the American sense - those aimed at building a more soundly functioning Palestinian government, unified security forces, and transparent economy deserving of foreign assistance in advance of establishing a Palestinian state, which has become a firm stance in American policy. But reality in Palestine has its own voice, and it is unlike the voice of either Sharon or the American administration. Click here to read more Contents |
| An
Unholy Alliance in Support of Israel (Los Angeles Times)
In the "strange bedfellows" department, one of the oddest pairings on the current political scene is American Jews and the Christian right. Yes, both groups back Israel. But their long-term visions for its future are miles apart. Consider the following quotation from the Web site of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, a strong supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent actions: "Indeed, there will finally be such a fullness of Israel when their hardness and blindness to the gospel is overcome as to vastly enrich the whole world. For the almost unbelievable truth is that all Israel will be saved. The fullness of Gentiles will climax with the fullness of Israel." It's hard to believe that this vision of an Israel in which all the Jews convert to Christianity is compatible with the vision for Israel held by most Jews. It's not that non-Jewish support in the U.S. for Israel is something new--think Pete Seeger or the Weavers singing "Kumbaya." But there has been a seismic shift in the makeup of that support. It used to be progressive non-Jewish Americans who strongly backed Israel. Now Israel's best friends here are people like former Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed (who now heads the Georgia Republican Party) and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas). The Anti-Defamation League even went to the extreme of reprinting as an advertisement in the New York Times and other newspapers an article titled "We People of Faith Stand Firmly With Israel" that Reed wrote for The Los Angeles Times. Is this the same ADL that has as its cornerstone fighting bigotry, supporting civil rights and maintaining separation between church and state? If Jews feel mainstream media coverage of Israel is biased, perhaps they ought to protest by watching a network that gives plenty of positive coverage to Israel: Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Of course, the network's vision of Israel may make many Jews uncomfortable. As another article on its Web site proclaims: "Thus Jews, Israel, will eventually--and supernaturally--witness to the gospel, and with such explosive power that the world can scarcely be the same! Ah, there is God's future for ethnic Israel." Click here to read more Contents |
| Energy
deregulation: A big turn-off (Financial Times)
The fall-out from California's energy crisis is spreading nationwide. The outcry over shortages, blackouts and soaring prices, blamed at the time on a hamfisted local experiment in liberalisation, has mushroomed into a national business and a political crisis. It has cast a shadow of suspicion over the entire energy trading sector. It has blighted the reputation of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It has helped to undermine public confidence in popular capitalism by discrediting the deregulation model as a workable policy. As most now acknowledge, California's experiment, launched in 1998, was fundamentally misconceived. Fixing retail electricity prices while leaving wholesale rates floating freely was a recipe for disaster. Catastrophe struck first last year when PG&E and Southern California Edison, the two largest investor-owned power distributors in California, were declared insolvent - unable to collect from consumers anything other than a tiny fraction of the soaring prices on the state's wholesale power exchange. Since then, much evidence has surfaced to show that energy traders used the now-defunct exchange to exploit the market's weaknesses to the full. Whether their manoeuvrings were legal or not, or how much they contributed to California's difficulties, has yet to be determined from affidavits, congressional hearings and legal inquiries now under way at federal and state level. The most dramatic revelations to date emerged some two weeks ago with the disclosure of Enron trading strategies with Hollywood-style codenames such as "Get Shorty", "Death Star" and "Fat Boy". They introduced the American public to the concept of "round tripping". The main feature of the round trip, also known as "in-and-out" trading, is that two or more traders buy and sell energy among themselves for the same price and at the same time. Click here to read more Contents |
|
Remember that links from newspapers and magazines online are "here today and gone tomorrow": our advice is to download them into a folder on your desktop immediately or better yet print them out for reading when you have time. Don't leave them till you get around to them... They may have changed by then! |