Photo: Audun K This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. Welcome to an edgy world where a single incident at an energy "chokepoint" could set a region aflame, provoking bloody encounters, boosting oil prices, and putting the global economy at risk. With energy demand on the rise and sources of supply dwindling, we are, in fact, entering a new epoch -- the Geo-Energy Era -- in which disputes over vital resources will dominate world affairs. In 2012 and beyond, energy and conflict will be bound ever more tightly together, lending increasing importance …

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. America and Oil. It's like bacon and eggs, Batman and Robin. As the old song lyric went, you can't have one without the other. Once upon a time, it was also a surefire formula for national greatness and global preeminence. Now, it's a guarantee of a trip to hell in a handbasket. The Chinese know it. Does Washington? America's rise to economic and military supremacy was fueled in no small measure by its control over the world's supply of oil. Oil powered the country's first …

World powers will duke it out over fuel sources. This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. A 30-year war for energy preeminence? You wouldn't wish it even on a desperate planet. But that's where we're headed and there's no turning back. From 1618 to 1648, Europe was engulfed in a series of intensely brutal conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years' War. It was, in part, a struggle between an imperial system of governance and the emerging nation-state. Indeed, many historians believe that the modern international system of nation-states was crystallized in …

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. Here's the good news about energy: Thanks to rising oil prices and deteriorating economic conditions worldwide, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global oil demand will not grow this year as much as once assumed, which may provide some temporary price relief at the gas pump. In its May "Oil Market Report," the IEA reduced its 2011 estimate for global oil consumption by 190,000 barrels per day, pegging it at 89.2 million barrels daily. As a result, retail prices may not reach the stratospheric …

The Earth may look glum, but it's not to be messed with.Photo: John LeGearThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. In his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it's no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of "melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat." Altered as it is from the world …

No matter what comes of the protests in Iran, it's unlikely that the country's oil output will rise significantly.Photo: Hamed SaberThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: The world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that's now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core. For a century stretching back to the discovery of oil in southwestern Persia before World War I, Western …

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. Get ready for a rocky year. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest. Start with a simple fact: The prices of basic food staples are already approaching or exceeding their 2008 peaks, that year when deadly riots erupted in dozens of countries around the world. It's not surprising then that food and energy experts are beginning to warn that 2011 could …

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. If you want to know which way the global wind is blowing (or the sun shining or the coal burning), watch China. That's the news for our energy future and for the future of great-power politics on planet Earth. Washington is already watching -- with anxiety. Rarely has a simple press interview said more about the global power shifts taking place in our world. On July 20th, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, told the Wall Street Journal that China …

The Gulf nightmare.Photo: Department of EnergyThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. On June 15, in their testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the chief executives of America's leading oil companies argued that BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was an aberration -- something that would not have occurred with proper corporate oversight and will not happen again once proper safeguards are put in place. This is fallacious, if not an outright lie. The Deep Horizon explosion was the inevitable result of a relentless effort to extract …

The oil spill viewed from NASA’s Terra satellite on May 17.Photo: NASA's Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team Cross-posted from TomDispatch. Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources. Make no mistake: we're entering the danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.  It may never be possible to pin …