Could an Increase in Renewable Energy Lead to More Terrorism?
This post is designed as more of a rambling thought process than as any sort of quantifiable or supportable hypothesis. Keep that in mind - the point here is to discuss, not to define or state fact.
Despite the fact that I think the idea of converting as much of our energy in the US (and yes, around the world) to renewable sources such as solar, tidal, wind, etc. is the necessary step for us to take to improve the environment and get out of the quagmire that is the Middle East, I'm also concerned that such a step will open the floodgates to a whole new set of problems. This is a discussion of some of those problems as regards terrorism.
During what is commonly called "the Dark Ages" in Europe (when in fact it was hardly any sort of dark age, from what I've been reading recently), the Middle East and Muslim culture was soaring forward on the academic and cultural fronts. Much of the learning of ancient Greece and Rome was absorbed by Muslim scholars and improved upon, and many new sciences were developed as well. The number system we use today comes directly from that used by Muslim scholars; indeed the number zero was created by the Muslim mathematicians who found need for a placeholder in their system. Truly brilliant work was done during this time, and the Muslim world was the greatest center of learning in the world during that period.
Fast forward to the discovery of oil in the Middle East. Suddenly (or not so suddenly, given the imperialist nature of European powers in the 18th and 19th centuries), the value of the Middle East was no longer in the quality of its scholars and its position as a center of learning, but rather in its location and the black, oozy mess that was under its sands.
Since that discovery, and the sudden wealth that the sheiks and shahs and the like were bringing in based on nothing more than blind luck (that the oil was under their territories), the culture of the Middle East has been in a sharp decline. Instead of centers of learning, we now had centers of power, where those who controlled the flow of oil controlled the politics as well. Learning was taken out of the equation and pure capitalism was embraced in its stead.
So we now have a once-great culture, renowned for repositories of knowledge and institutions of learning, and now simply the distributors of a product. One product - crude oil. And in that time, the Muslim world has gone from a peaceful, mostly tolerant area of the world (and despite traditional views of the Crusades, it was an invasion by the Christian world of the Muslim world) to a very factionalized area, with rampant terrorism and intolerant regimes of all sorts. Let's face it - the globalized world has not been kind to the Middle East, for the most part. Sure, there are great centers of capitalism in the Middle East such as Dubai, but how many of those people are actually benefiting from that money rolling in? That's right: very few.
Now, the primary consumers of that one product, the western world (America and Europe), are trying to move away from an oil-based energy system. A system that our demand for a single product has put in place in the Middle East is now basically going to be abandoned, now that we're increasingly done with the product. What will the outcry of that be in the Middle East?
If I was a resident of that part of the world, and I'd seen my entire country revolve around the sale of oil for decades based on the demand of the western world, only to have that demand vanish over the span of a few years, I wouldn't be a particularly understanding person. In fact, what I'd see is that the West took my country and used it up, then leaving it on its own after it served its use.
What kind of resentment is going to remain in those countries after we leave and take our money with us? And what kind of revenge are they going to seek against us after we leave?
As I see it, the one thing we'd have going for us is that no more money would be flowing out of our coffers and into theirs, so there would be less money for terrorism (and let's face it - terrorism costs money, otherwise they wouldn't need to get oil money from Arabian sheiks).
Other than that, the necessary step we are taking to reduce our use of oil is going to result in a whole new set of problems. Keep your eyes open.
I welcome your comments - please keep it civil. I don't mean to offend anyone with my comments, just to stir up some debate.
3 comments:
My initial instinct is to say "no," because resentment without the monetary fuel to turn it into something with a violent global reach is far less threatening to everyone.
I'm not entirely sure that switching away from petroleum will render the Middle East irrelevant, though. Petroleum has other industrial uses such as plastic, so there will be a steady, albeit lower demand. But it will be the end of the states on the Arabian peninsula as we know them. They were economically marginal before oil, and they will return to that after. Even though Arabia was the birthplace of Islam, it ceased to be the political capital after the death of Muhammad--the caliphate moved north first to Damascus, then to Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, Istanbul--but not Arabia.
Iraq and Iran are different, and have more inherent economic viability, as they have throughout history. But even there, the post-oil detox will involve convulsions that make Trainspotting look like The Wiggles.
But, yes, your essential point that oil has distorted the Middle East is dead on. Someone once described the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia as "john" and prostitute, with all the mutual distaste that involves.
One more thing--Islam started to stagnate intellectually just about the time the West started to wake up. First, the great Islamic philosophers (Averroes, Avicenna) were rebuked for unorthodoxy, and their work abandoned after the 11th century. The sack of still-intellectually-vibrant Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 is another major step in this process, and it spiralled further downward with the "closing of the gates of ijtihad," or free inquiry/application in the fifteenth century. The last was the conclusion of the four schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence that everything relevant to Islamic thought was contained in the Quran, ahadith or Islamic legal rulings clearly based on the same. No more extrapolating. Some Muslims are trying to "crash the gates," as it were, but it's very, very slow going.
If you remember the predictably-awful Keanu Reeves/Morgan Freeman movie about cold fusion (I can't remember the name - Keanu is the maintenance guy who inadvertently solves some science/energy-from-water process while practicing a guitar), this is a familiar idea.
I remember asking, as a group of friends walked out of the movie, whether it was a bad thing that I completely agreed with everything the bad guy said. Freeman's character essentially laid out your argument as a response to the "information wants to be free" rhetoric from Reeves' protagonist. Abandoning oil (in this case in favor of water-derived energy) would trigger such a drastic shift in power that it would destabilize the region, and thus the world.
The alternative, Freeman argued, was to carefully release such information, in measured doses, to allow everyone to adjust to the new reality. Work with everyone affected, including the OPEC nations, so that the displacement (and thus instability) is minimized.
Sometimes things need to be destabilized - but in contexts like this, I'd argue that a smooth transition is in everyone's interest.
Dale - Plastics, unlike oil used for fuel, can be recycled. And as oil gets more expensive and we remove ourselves from it, that also means less oil coming over via ships and less petroleum that can be used to make plastic. From that point, if we were to move completely away from oil for a fuel source, our own stocks of petroleum might be sufficient for new plastic needs.
Yes, Iran and Iraq, and the smaller states of the non-Arabian peninsula Middle East have more going for them than oil. I think that if oil was to go away, though, it'd totally upset the power bases of those countries that it would be decades before anyone was able to stabilize things enough to take advantage of that.
Thanks for the mental image I have of Anthony Wiggle in a ditch with a heroin needle stuck into his arm, by the way.
True - oil was not the only thing that destabilized the Middle East. As part of the Silk Road, they've been on the path of conquerors coming from both sides.
Interestingly, they've gone through a similar situation that is happening in the US today, where the fundamentalists are fighting against the scientists over what "truth" is. Hopefully we can come out on a better side of that than they did.
Matt - you're probably right about the need for a smooth transition. And if we had a more centralized economy, that would probably happen (BTW - that movie is Chain Reaction which I've not seen, but I remember seeing stuff about it). But given our society's impatience for growth and dominance of markets, I'd be very surprised if such a transition took place.
Of course, just to build up the infrastructure for a new energy technology will take decades, probably, to say nothing of making it economically viable across the board. So that may aid in the transition, but I don't think that will happen on purpose.
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