Beware Fools Playing Geopolitics  

Crikey has a good post from Michael Pascoe on "the seduction of India".

The world's biggest and most dangerous game is being played by the United States in India – and there's a reasonable suspicion that at least half the players are fools. The United States' hypocritical nuclear deal signed yesterday is just one step in a plan to promote India as America's proxy against both Islam and China, a role fraught with danger for absolutely everyone.

The cornerstone of real politick is “my enemy's enemy is my friend” – and thus the Bush administration is desperate to befriend India. The great danger is that the Republicans' Washington will promote an adversarial role for India against America's great foes. Left to its own devices, if not its prejudices, India (and the world) would have a better future if the two most populous nations and the second and third most populous religions pursued non-adversarial co-operation and friendship. That is a very difficult hope, but the last thing the world needs is the born-again neo-cons whipping up and supporting age-old rivalries.

The United States' unnatural ally of convenience, Pakistan, of course wants the same civilian nuclear deal. Neither India nor Pakistan has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Bush is breaking the nuclear club's own rules in a bid to make up for the cold shoulder shown to India throughout the Cold War, but doing the same thing for Pakistan is much harder.

What worries the US most is that its alliance with Pakistan is based on a military dictatorship remaining in control of an unstable Islamic nation that is at best ambivalent about the US. For all of Washington's bluster, it knows that an Islamic nation it doesn't really trust already has the bomb.

The United States tried but failed to entice India to join its Iraq adventure. If you want something really big to worry about instead of our piddly local politics, consider that eventually the Americans will happily promote whatever forces within India might be interested in fighting its wars for it and garrisoning the Middle East. What India's leadership must be extremely wary of is the inevitable American courtship of India's military.

And Australia will do its little bit for American policy as usual – John Howard is off to New Delhi next week. The Smage reports the trip as being about trade, but Malaysian media interestingly homes in on the “strategic” angle: "Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who will embark on a four-day visit to India next week, has said that 'more energy' needed to be put into bilateral ties for 'general strategic reasons'."

"More energy" might be a more apt way of summing up the Indian situation than he realises.

Arundhati Roy says that Bush isn't welcome in India, and explains why the government had to put him on display in the Delhi zoo (I wonder if there are any other chimps in there ?).

So now we're into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks from Purana Qila, the Old Fort. Ironic, isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity should be a crumbling medieval fort?

Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George Bush's audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under the category of "eminent persons." They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.

So what's going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that Bush isn't traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?

Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.

We really would prefer that he didn't.

On a more comforting note, David Letterman notes - "President Bush right now is in India. He's in India. So it's comforting to know that Quick-Draw Cheney has his finger on the button".

The thought of Cheney yelling "EXTERMINATE" repeatedly in his high chair while playing with the button might give you the creeps, but the wise Jonathan at Past Peak counsels that despair is a pointless course of action.

From TedBlog (via TreeHugger):

One of the more poignant points that Al Gore made in [February 22nd's] powerful speech about global warming was that a lot of people move directly from a state of denial about this issue to one of despair. People in the first state don't go out and try to change things because they don’t see a problem. People in the second state are often no more inclined to act because they think the situation is hopeless. The fact that these are the two most stable cognitive states on this issue probably explains why a lot of people do, in fact, remain in denial. It's human to avoid pain, and therefore perhaps natural to subconsciously choose a state of denial over the daily trauma of despairing for the future of humanity.

My guess is that most of you who read PastPeak are too smart and too well-informed to choose denial: you already know better. Despair's not much of an option, either: it's not only self-defeating and pointless, it's no fun. That leaves activism. Activists are lucky. They get to interact with some of the brightest, most ethical and compassionate people on the planet. They get to look themselves in the mirror — and look their children in the eye — and know they're working on the side of the angels. And history is full of examples of movements that had miniscule beginnings against what seemed like overwhelming odds, only to triumph in the end. Forget denial. Forget despair. Activism is the only stance worth taking, if not for yourself, then for your children and the generations yet to come. It's part of the good life.

The Independent reports that bizarre anti-wind power decisions aren't just the domain of lunatic Republican senators in the US - the British government can play the same game too.

MonkeyGrinder is in good form lately, pointing out some anti-peak oil propaganda from Exxon (via Scientific American)along with a bunch of other pieces of data in "the wild slide" (they must be taking a break from the usual global warming denial propaganda game).

Just under Glenn Zorpette's nice op-ed article in today's New York Times (see entry below) was a large ad-ed placed by ExxonMobil. Titled "Peak Oil? Contrary to the theory, oil production shows no sign of a peak," the piece blows smoke at the growing consensus among serious petroleum geologists that production of the cheap oil on which all modern economies are based is fast approaching the day when it stops growing to match demand, levels off for a while, and then inexorably falls. While many of its peer companies, including BP and Shell, have recognized the coming sea change and have begun (slowly) restructuring their research and development accordingly, ExxonMobil has apparently decided to address this looming socioeconomic problem by trying to convince the public and politicians that it isn't there. The facts suggest otherwise. Scientific American was among the first to present the scientific basis for projections of a peak in global production of conventional crude, in our 1998 special section "Preventing the Next Oil Crunch," which led with an article on "The End of Cheap Oil."

Hilarious. Exxon took out an ad against “Peak Oil”. Good times. Good times. That pretty much becomes the cornerstone of my argument, don’t know about anybody else out there.

WorldChanging wonders "So... How Do We Know Oil Is Peaking?".

The redoubtable Stuart Staniford has posted another excellent piece over at The Oil Drum, this time explaining for people who are new to the concept just why reasonable people can assert that oil production is at or very near its peak, and we're headed to a world of gradually -- and potentially rapidly -- declining petroleum reserves. It comes, in part, in response to an article in the New York Times (subscription required) laying out for lay readers the peak oil argument. If you're still hazy about why anyone would believe that oil production has peaked or will do so soon, read the Oil Drum piece first.

Stuart's piece makes clear that there's no single piece of evidence saying definitively that oil has peaked, but rather a collection of circumstances that point, in total, to this conclusion. Less certain, however, is what happens afterwards. Implicit in some of the peak oil work (and notably absent in Stuart's essays) is an assumption that once oil production has peaked, the collapse of civilization is just around the corner. And while we're hardly ones to discount a good end of the world scenario, we should emphasize that while peak oil is a geophysical phenomenon, the social and economic responses are not -- and we have a lot more control over our societies than we often acknowledge.

WorldChanging also has a look at the greenhouse gas problems caused by flying (there is no better way to increase your personal output than jumping on a plane, as George Monbiot explains) and examines a biofuel alternative.

A development by the University of North Dakota may change that. Researchers at UND's Energy and Environmental Research Center have come up with a biofuel that has the characteristics needed for aircraft use -- and in some respects, it's actually better than kerosene. This fuel potentially costs less than petroleum-based aviation fuel, too.

The real question will be whether farms could keep up with the demand for biofuel feedstock along with the increased food needs of a world heading towards 9 billion people, especially if biofuels take on a leading role as a green car fuel, too. Even assuming that the aviation biofuel can be made from non-nutritive biomass (stalks, leaves and such), and various bio-hacks can make the plants grow faster, it's unlikely that we'll be able to cover all three industries. More likely is that automotive biofuels are transitional, while aviation will rely on biofuels for decades to come.

The bigger question is whether the current air travel paradigm will continue. High fuel prices aren't the only threat: shaky financial performance, fickle consumers, and the rising threat of pandemic could each send the air travel industry crashing. Conversely, alternative models of air travel, including next-generation airships, could make flight cleaner and more like a cruiseship than a sardine can.

The Energy Blog has a post on the largest coal liquefaction plant in the US - the quantities of fuel produced are minimal, but expansion is occurring (OK - its a bad solution but I suspect we'll see plenty of it happening nevertheless, until carbon taxes make it less viable).

Significant progress is being made on development of the largest coal liquefaction plant in the US. Medicine Bow Fuel & Power LLC (MBF&P), a wholly-owned subsidiary of DKRW Advanced Fuels LLC (DKRW), headquartered in Houston, Texas has signed licenses to use key technologies and an agreement for the coal supply. DKRW's proposed coal-to-liquids facility is in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The first phase of the Medicine Bow project is designed to produce approximately 11,000 bpd of ultra-clean diesel fuel and other fuels from Carbon Basin coal. MBF&P plans to eventually expand the plant capacity to 40,000 bpd. DKRW had previously announced that construction was to begin in 2006, with initial operations to begin in the 2008-2010 timeframe.

Robert Fisk has a look at progress in the middle east courtesy of America's dependence on foreign oil (and its urge to dominate other countries in the same boat).

The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat cruder methods of the Algerians next door whose government death squads slaughtered quite a few of the 150,000 victims of the recent war against the Islamists. The Algerian lads - and I've interviewed a few of them after their nightmares persuaded them to seek asylum in London - would strap their naked victims to a ladder and, if the "chiffon" torture didn't work, they'd push a tube down the victim's throat and turn on a water tap until the prisoner swelled up like a balloon. There was a special department (at the Chateauneuf police station, in case Donald Rumsfeld wants to know) for torturing women, who were inevitably raped before being dispatched by an execution squad.

All this I mention because Rumsfeld's also been cosying up to the Algerians. On a visit to Algiers this month, he announced that "the United States and Algeria have a multifaceted relationship. It involves political and economic as well as military-to-military co-operation. And we very much value the co-operation we are receiving in counter-terrorism..." Yes, I imagine the "chiffon" technique is easy to learn, the abuse of prisoners, too - just like Abu Ghraib, for example, which now seems to have been the fault of journalists rather than America's thugs.

Rumsfeld's latest pronouncements have included a defence of the Pentagon's system of buying favourable news stories in Iraq with bribes - "non-traditional means to provide accurate information" was his fantasy description of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of the American regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the Abu Ghraib tortures. "Consider for a moment the vast quantity of column inches and hours of television devoted to the detainee abuse [sic] at Abu Ghraib. Compare that to the volume of coverage and condemnation associated with, say, the discovery of Saddam Hussein's mass graves, which were filled with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis."

Let's expose this whopping lie. We were exposing Saddam's vile regime, especially his use of gas, as long ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to Iraq by Saddam's satraps for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu Ghraib. And what was Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad, grovelling before Saddam, to whom he did not mention the murders and mass graves, which he knew about, and pleading with the Beast of Baghdad to reopen the US embassy in Iraq.

With the usual press courtiers in tow, Rumsfeld has no problems, witness George Melloan's recent interview with the Beast of Washington in his Boeing 737: "He generously spares me time for a chat about defence strategy. Bright sunlight streams in and lights his face ... Sitting across from him at a desk high above the clouds, one wonders if the ability of this modern Jove to call down lightning on transgressors will be equal to the tasks ahead."

And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand.

And to close, go and watch Jon Stewart answer some amazingly asinine questions from Larry King with aplomb (Quicktime).