Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Maybe I am just being fanboy here but I believe that if Dr.Barnett had written on this subject he would have produced something a lot less fatuous than this piece. The premise of the article is that if Core nations shift to using alternatives to petroleum based fuels, it will cause disruption and oil producers will fight the change and produce less oil.

All change causes disruption. The transition to oil was tough on the coal industry.

The thing that is never examined in the article is that rule sets are more important than resources. Good rule sets in the United States allow the production of ethanol for ~$1.00 a gallon even though the US has a high cost of labor and the ethanol producers are using corn, which is not the best feed stock. Brazil, using cheaper labor and sugar cane which is a better feed stock produces ethanol for ~$0.50 a gallon because it has decent rule sets in addition to better resources.

Most oil producing countries have execrable rule sets. The money from their oil wealth has allowed them to avoid the pain of upgrading their rule sets to allow them to participate in the Core. For historical precedence think of Spain in the late 1600s. For more than a hundred years Spain was a major world power because of the silver extracted from her New World colonies. That silver allowed Spain to cling to Medieval rule sets while the rest of Europe was upgrading to Early Modern rule sets. Resource poor Holland and then Britain upgraded their rule sets and thrived while by 1700, Spain's golden age was over and they were just a poor, irrelevant corner of Europe.

The authors of this piece see the same thing happening to the oil producing countries and they are not happy about it. They are aware that there are enough places around the world that are desperate enough to change their rule sets and that have natural resources of soil and climate that can support Brazilian type production of alternate fuel to supply the world's energy needs.

As agriculturally produced alternate fuels become more important, out armed forces will pay more attention to Africa and less to the Middle East. Sys Admin forces might have a decent chance to help get houses in order when the houses are not already on fire and the occupants are not running around throwing gasoline on the flames.