4:59AM
Arctic resource wars!!!!! Canceled!
Monday, June 9, 2008 at 4:59AM ARTICLE: "5 Countries Agree to Talk, Not Compete Over the Arctic," by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, 29 May 2008, p. A10..
Damn it all!
They even agreed to use the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Took them a whole day!
Weren't these diplomats informed about the growing academic consensus on future resource wars?
Reader Comments (8)
Tom believes that people will innovate and markets will transform.
for more: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.thomaspmbarnett.com%20resource%20wars
FYI, the buzz-term "resource wars" refers primarily to post-oil conflict--Klare covers the topic quite a bit these days. More likely, Tom is right to predict massive innovation and market revolution...er, I mean, transformation. As stated by Tom and others, war is a last resort even in territorial disputes and is, at best, more costly than beneficial.
Sean, thank you for the link regarding resource wars here on Tom's site.
Back when the Reagan Administration came into office, the 'resource war' meme was popular. Opponents of the Law of the Sea Convention argued that the Soviet Union was trying to gain control of access to oil in the middle east and to the hard mineral resources of Africa. The arguments had currency for a while, but fell by the wayside once Reagan decided that he would not sign the Convention because, in the form it was then, it discouraged development of seabed minerals as an alternative source of supply.
In the two years that followed, I directed a study of strategic minerals for the Office of Technology Assessment. We noted that past peacetime interruptions resulted from a variety of causes, and that there were some reasonable, and not costly, ways to address them. Our recommendation to potential interruptions of supply was to diversify mineral sources, identify and pre-certify substitute alloys, ceramics and plastics in critical applications and step up recycling (with different mixes of the three approaches fitting the perspectives of different factions in Congress). Both our report and the Reagan Administration supported a small minerals stockpile to deal with adjustment periods to interruptions.
Seabed sources of oil and gas and of hard minerals (now that Reagan's objections were resolved in a second LOS agreement in 1994) certainly fit the diversity of supply approach we identified in our 1985 report to Congress. It appears now, with Russia a major supplier of oil and gas, nickel and cobalt, that some of the old supply vulnerability arguments might be revived. But now, as back in 1980, the real threat is not an attack on mineral supply lines during peacetime, it is a vulnerability to supply disruptions due to mine disasters, labor strikes, instability in central Africa and competition with other consumers (notably China for now) for energy and minerals that we are unprepared to do without.
Unlike 1980, the resource supply vulnerability argument supports ratification of the LOS Convention, both for oil and gas in the extended (beyond 200 nautical miles) continental shelf and hard minerals of the deep ocean floor.