Iran

Carbon cap would deny Iran precious petrodollars: Over $100 million a day

Cross-posted from Wonk Room. A strong cap on carbon would significantly cut the flow of petrodollars to Iran’s hostile regime, a Wonk Room analysis shows. The economic and political strength of Iran’s dictatorship is a threat to the national security of the United States and the world, and its nuclear ambitions threaten to destabilize the […]

Glaciers, cheetahs, and nukes, oh my!

Financial Times South Asia Bureau Chief James Lamont has written a flood of environment-as-political-dialogue stories this week! (Well, only two, but that constitutes a deluge in the world of environmental peacebuilding.) On Monday he wrote about India and China’s agreement to work together to monitor Himalayan glacial melt. The potential decline in water availability from […]

We must strive to meet the U.N.'s low population projection of 8 billion by 2041

Some 43 countries around the world now have populations that are either essentially stable or declining slowly. In countries with the lowest fertility rates, including Japan, Russia, Germany, and Italy, populations will likely decline somewhat over the next half-century. A larger group of countries has reduced fertility to the replacement level or just below. They are headed for population stability after large numbers of young people move through their reproductive years. Included in this group are China and the United States. A third group of countries is projected to more than double their populations by 2050, including Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda.

United Nations projections show world population growth under three different assumptions about fertility levels. The medium projection, the one most commonly used, has world population reaching 9.2 billion by 2050. The high one reaches 10.8 billion. The low projection, which assumes that the world will quickly move below replacement-level fertility to 1.6 children per couple, has population peaking at just under 8 billion in 2041 and then declining. If the goal is to eradicate poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, and lessen pressures on already strained natural resources, we have little choice but to strive for the lower projection.

Slowing world population growth means that all women who want to plan their families should have access to the family planning services they need. Unfortunately, at present 201 million couples cannot obtain the services they need. Former U.S. Agency for International Development official J. Joseph Speidel notes that "if you ask anthropologists who live and work with poor people at the village level ... they often say that women live in fear of their next pregnancy. They just do not want to get pregnant." Filling the family planning gap may be the most urgent item on the global agenda. The benefits are enormous and the costs are minimal.

Cheap oil: Be careful what you wish for

This guest essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.

-----

Only yesterday, it seems, we were bemoaning the high price of oil. Under the headline "Oil's Rapid Rise Stirs Talk of $200 a Barrel This Year," the July 7 issue of the Wall Street Journal warned that prices that high would put "extreme strains on large sectors of the U.S. economy." Today, oil, at over $40 a barrel, costs less than one-third what it did in July, and some economists have predicted that it could fall as low as $25 a barrel in 2009.

Prices that low -- and their equivalents at the gas pump -- will no doubt be viewed as a godsend by many hard-hit American consumers, even if they ensure severe economic hardship in oil-producing countries like Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Kuwait, and Venezuela that depend on energy exports for a large share of their national income. Here, however, is a simple but crucial reality to keep in mind: No matter how much it costs, whether it's rising or falling, oil has a profound impact on the world we inhabit -- and this will be no less true in 2009 than in 2008.

The main reason? In good times and bad, oil will continue to supply the largest share of the world's energy supply. For all the talk of alternatives, petroleum will remain the number one source of energy for at least the next several decades. According to December 2008 projections from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), petroleum products will still make up 38 percent of America's total energy supply in 2015; natural gas and coal only 23 percent each. Oil's overall share is expected to decline slightly as biofuels (and other alternatives) take on a larger percentage of the total, but even in 2030 -- the furthest the DoE is currently willing to project -- it will still remain the dominant fuel.

A similar pattern holds for the planet as a whole: Although biofuels and other renewable sources of energy are expected to play a growing role in the global energy equation, don't expect oil to be anything but the world's leading source of fuel for decades to come.

Keep your eye on the politics of oil and you'll always know a lot about what's actually happening on this planet. Low prices, as at present, are bad for producers, and so will hurt a number of countries that the U.S. government considers hostile, including Venezuela, Iran, and even that natural-gas-and-oil giant Russia. All of them have, in recent years, used their soaring oil income to finance political endeavors considered inimical to U.S. interests. However, dwindling prices could also shake the very foundations of oil allies like Mexico, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, which could experience internal unrest as oil revenues, and so state expenditures, decline.

No less important, diminished oil prices discourage investment in complex oil ventures like deep-offshore drilling, as well as investment in the development of alternatives to oil like advanced (non-food) biofuels. Perhaps most disastrously, in a cheap oil moment, investment in non-polluting, non-climate-altering alternatives like solar, wind, and tidal energy is also likely to dwindle. In the longer term, what this means is that, once a global economic recovery begins, we can expect a fresh oil price shock as future energy options prove painfully limited.

Clearly, there is no escaping oil's influence. Yet it's hard to know just what forms this influence will take in the year. Nevertheless, here are three provisional observations on oil's fate -- and so ours -- in the year ahead.

It’s time to break the American addiction to oil

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project. —– When George Bush declared that the United States is addicted to oil, it may have been the most insightful moment of his presidency. It is a cruel but apt analogy, and that’s why the big push for […]

Most revealing Palin energy whopper: Iran could cut off a fifth of the world’s energy supplies

Palin’s full speech contained yet another energy lie, one that is very revealing: To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s energy supplies … Not even close. Yes, if you live in a world where the only energy source is oil, then the Persian Gulf countries […]

Time to choose between a new cold war with Russia and a new cold war with Iran

It seems that centrist Mark Kleiman thinks continued Iran bashing is a bad idea because it is time “to give a hard time to” Russia. This belated opponent of the Iraq war seems to think that the point of ending that bloodbath is to turn our firepower against the appropriate new enemy — to be […]

The ‘psychological effects’ of threatening war with Iran

Steve Clemons makes a point worth repeating — if you’re worried about "psychological effects" on oil speculators, perhaps a better strategy than hyping offshore drilling is dialing back the warmongering rhetoric toward Iran.

With global wheat stocks at all-time lows, a killer fungus looms

Remember awhile back, when a fertilizer magnate raised the specter of global famine? He said: If you had any major upset where you didn’t have a crop in a major growing agricultural region this year, I believe you’d see famine … We need to have a record crop in 2008 just to stay even with […]