The War Of Resources  

The Republic has a good article on the looming resource wars that I tend to drone on about. The author makes the interesting comment that the major oil companies are circling the globe like vultures, attempting to maximise their profits while keeping tensions in check - I wonder how much truth there is to this ?

Dealing with oil scarcity is problematic at a technical level, but I tend to believe its a surmountable problem if the world's population can be kept under control (ie. stops increasing). Unfortunately the likelihood of some sort of major war breaking out seems all too real to me - which may solve the population problem in the most unpleasant way.

The War of Resources will proceed against the backdrop of an ever-widening gap between global demand for oil and global supply. Oil is not only critical to industrial energy and transportation, but is also integral to food supply, all chemical industries, and most manufacturing. To the advanced technological civilizations of today, oil supply is a matter of national life and death, literally. For all of the major powers, a serious cut of oil supplies will mean collapse of their economies, widespread starvation, and massive social upheaval in all cases leading to overthrow of current leaderships. Eventually, all measures, including total war between the major powers, will become possible, and with time, increasingly likely.

Therefore, from now on, all six major economic powers will be under severe pressure to maximize the flow of oil from the oil producing countries into their own economies, and to cut the flow of oil into each other’s economies. As pressure builds, they will each become more encouraged to open up war on the minor players to force their allegiances, and increasingly on each other to remove competition from the field.

The six large oil companies, meanwhile, will attempt to manage the global conflict so as to maximize their profits. A massive world war directly between any or all of the six major players would mark a failure by the oil companies who, in such a scenario, would see oil demand (and prices) collapse in widespread industrial destruction following the likely brief (nuclear) war. Their job is to maximize the competition for oil to the point of war in the oil-producing battlefields, but to keep the War of Resources from boiling over into an all-out and total military conflict between the major powers.

This is the point we are at now: The major combatants are deploying economic and military forces to positions in and around all the oil producers, those producers—the minor powers—are playing their cards as best they can to generate their own best outcome, and the oil companies have deployed executives to all capitals major and minor to offer information, advice, and encouragements, as well as to make strategic investments or disinvestments, in order to regulate the rising heat of the war and to try keeping it from boiling over.