Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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April 1, 2012 Tomgram: Michael Klare, Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the U.S. [Note for TomDispatch Readers: With today’s Michael Klare piece, you get your last chance to receive a signed, personalized copy of his new book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, in return for a contribution of $100 or more to this website.  (Visit our donation page to check it out.)  The offer will end later this week.  Many thanks to those of you who have already given.  Klare’s book is little short of prophetic and the dollars you so generously send in really do help keep TomDispatch afloat! Tom] Here’s a simple rule of thumb when it comes to energy disasters: if it’s the nuclear industry and something begins to go wrong -- from Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 to Fukushima, Japan, after the 2011 tsunami -- whatever news is first released, always relatively reassuring, will be a lie, pure and simple.  And as the disaster unrolls, it’s not likely to get much better.  The nuclear industry is incapable of telling the truth about the harm it does.  So when the early stories appear about the next nuclear plant in trouble, whatever you hear or read, just assume that you don’t know the half, not even the quarter, of it. When it comes to the oil and gas industry and disasters, a similar rule of thumb follows: however bad it first sounds, the odds are it’s going to sound a lot worse before it’s over.  (See BP, Deepwater Horizon.)  So when you first hear about an oil leak from a Chevron well off the coast of Brazil or from a natural gas well in the North Sea operated by the French oil giant Total and you get those expectable reassurances, they, too, are likely to be nothing but gas. And here’s the sad thing, you’re going to get all too many chances to test out these simple rules when it comes to bad energy news.  After all, as Michael Klare has been writing at this site for years, we’re entering the “tough energy” era.  The big energy companies are going to be extracting hydrocarbons in ever more hazardous, difficult-to-reach places like the Arctic and they're going to be using ever uglier methods to do so. It’s a guarantee that, however bad the environmental damage we’ve seen so far, it’s only going to get worse as the energy industry despoils various regions to give us our fossil-fuel fix and their mega-profits.  As Klare points out, one of those regions is slated to be not in distant Africa, the Persian Gulf, or the Caspian Sea, but right here in the U.S.  Klare has been ahead of the energy curve ever since, in the late 1990s, he suggested that we would soon be on a planet embroiled in “resource wars.”  His new book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, catches the nightmarish nature of the planet’s last energy boom in a way no one else has.  And don’t be surprised if that nightmare lands squarely in your backyard. Tom A New Energy Third World in North America? How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State By Michael T. Klare The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.  Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas.  But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere?  Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World? Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer.  But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil. Click here to read more of this dispatch.