Peter Nolan

Ireland's Energy Sugar Rush

In the Sunday Business Post in October last year, I wrote to criticise the

If you still suffer from the delusion that we live in a democracy, then Ireland’s prospective new energy policy should open your eyes. Last Sunday saw the publication of the Green Paper on energy, the most significant planning document on energy for 20 years. The Green Paper promises investment in new technologies and a new focus on protecting the environment.

However, as usually happens in Irish politics, politicians are instead granting privileges to special interests at the expense of the public. All that is new is that this is now justified by doubtful claims as to the environmental benefits and cost advantages of renewable energy. In the 1970s, haunted by the fear of ever-more expensive oil, the government invested in the huge Moneypoint generating plant in Co Clare, powered by coal. The feared oil shock never materialised.
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The Green Paper, echoing the Oireachtas committee’s report, makes a heavy rhetorical commitment to renewable energy, in spite of the cost disadvantages. It stresses biofuels extracted from fuel crops such as rape, wheat or sugar beet as a route towards lower energy costs and environmental protection. Here we see the farming lobby triumphant. Domestic sugar beet is offered as a solution - as if Ireland is akin to a boggy Kuwait. The fairyland economics of European agriculture seriously distort the economics of biofuels. Brazilian sugar cane can produce ethanol for transport at about a third of the cost of crops grown in western Europe, according to the IEA, but faces tariff barriers that make it uneconomic.

The use of biofuels to deliver reductions in greenhouse gases that cause global warming is also doubtful. Each ton of carbon dioxide avoided, the IEA estimates, comes at a cost of some $200 to $400. This is more than ten times the cost of alternatives, like sponsoring clean energy projects in developing countries through Kyoto’s clean development mechanism or buying reductions through the EU emissions trading system.

In essence, with the CAP in slow and painful decline, the Irish farming lobby have formed an alliance with idiotic politicians and cyncial bureaucrats to lock in subsidies for the domestic production of biofuels - rape, wood and even sugarbeet, uneconomic even at the peak of oil prices and yielding no environmental benefit.  For the Irish public, too much sugar in the diet is bound to be unhealthy. 

Imperial Hubris

This is the interview with Dr Michael Scheuer, the founding head of the CIA's Station Alex, the "virtual"  unit headquartered in Langley, devoted to combatting Osama Bin Laden, that Richard and I wrote up for Magill in September 2005, in time for the 4th anniversary of 9/11.  Dr Scheuer is described as an obsessive and determined character who would begin work before dawn and rapidly got to grips with the novel threat of Al Qaeda.  He also was the first to propose some serious violence to stop him, advocating his kidnap and/or killing by Afghan associates of the CIA, an operation that seems, by various accounts, including the 9/11 Commission (which refers to Scheuer as "Mike") to have withered somewhere in the chain of command between then CIA director George Tenet and President Clinton, also involving the White House office of counter-terrorism co-ordinator Richard A Clarke. 

Clarke, incidentally, also seems to have been the person who did the most to kill any possibility of US military intervention to stop Rwanda's genocide in 1994, at least in Samatha Power's telling. 

Scheuer's second book, Imperial Hubris, which I reviewed in detail for the Jerusalem Post, was critical of the conduct of the war on terror under President George W Bush, calling for either radical changes in US foreign policy to defuse tensions with Muslims, such as ending support for Israel and the Arab oligarchies, and withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan or a step-up in the violence used to produce terror and devastation in the Islamic world.  In spite of a number of close readings of the book, I never figured out which exactly Dr Scheuer was advocating or in what mix.  Mainly, his thesis that western policy is to blame for the Al Qaeda campaign chimed well with the critique of much of the European left and many realist scholars of international relations. 

Scheuer, who describes himself as a die-hard Republican and "moderate isolationist" found himself embroiled in controversy over his denigration of Israel and its American advocates. 

Still, he remains a popular analyst, often appearing on the BBC and US television.   Whatever reservations I have about his analytical skills and some of his political attitudes, I think that there is no doubting his patriotism, dedication to his work at the CIA and the judgement he showed in his anti-terrorist role before being removed in 1999. 

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Mike Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, headed the team covering Osama Bin Laden, from 1996-1999.  In this time, he was responsible for building up the first analysis showing the scale and global reach of the growing threat from Al Qaeda and he organised a number of attempts to capture or kill the terrorist leader.  In his recent bestselling book, “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the Terror”, published anonymously before he left the Agency last year, he criticises the US government for giving a distorted picture of the threat and shying away from the measures needed to counter it. 

Q: Why do Al Qaeda attack us?

The political leaders of both parties have lied about the motivation of bin Laden and other Islamic militants.  They are attacking America because they believe US foreign policies are a threat to the survival of Islam and Muslims.  They are not attacking us because of our freedom, liberties, elections, or because female movie stars go about in public with bare midriffs. 

We get attacked for a couple of reasons. First, Bin Laden thinks we’re far weaker and less able to taken pain than the Saudi royals and the rest of the dictators. The second thing is that he doesn’t think those governments can survive – Israel included – without the support of the Americans. His goal in attacking us is not to occupy California, it’s just to get us out of the way so that he and his allies can go after the other governments.

We must prepare to fight savagely a patient, well-led, and religiously motivated enemy for as long as we decide to maintain our current foreign policies toward the Muslim world.

Q: Does oil play a role?

Political leaders have wilfully failed to do anything to improve America’s energy security since the first OPEC oil embargo.  For thirty years, we have left our economic welfare in the hands of massively corrupt and anti-Western Arab princes.  And now we are paying extortionate prices for fuel, and our children in the military are dying, in part, so we can pay even more extortionate prices in the years ahead.

Q: What was your opinion of the London attacks?

The London attacks struck me, especially the first one, as precisely in al-Qaeda’s modus operandi of separate simultaneous attacks. Strategically, it hit the three big things - mass casualties, economic damage, and symbolic impact. They proved that the eight strongest men on Earth couldn’t stop it.

The way I look at London is that it’s another in the secondary campaign that they’re conducting against America’s allies.  Britain, France, Italy, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Spain – they’ve all been attacked since 9/11.

Q: Why in your book do you warn that America’s use of force to date has been “dainty” and counsel that without radical changes in foreign policy, America must, “get used to and good at killing”?

I’ve been treated both as an appeaser and as a warmonger in reviews, but there’s a great aversion to considering force. In my experience the idea of collateral damage of killing someone when you’re after someone else is a showstopper. One time they had a chance to kill bin Laden and there was an Arab prince having lunch with him and they said ‘No, you can’t do that’. You’re never going to get a chance to kill him when there would have been less collateral damage. The US government is palsied by this. I used to think it was all rhetoric and it was just people being either duplicitous or saying the right thing for the media, Bin Laden is alive today because people were afraid of collateral damage.

Q: You’ve taken criticism and have even been accused of anti-Semitism for saying that Israel is employing covert, clandestine intelligence activities, using lobbyists, spies and even Washington’s Holocaust Museum to influence or control US foreign policy.  What is your response to this?

I am unperturbed by such statements and accusations.  Calling people anti-Semitic is just a way to denigrate and shut-up speakers who raise topics the slingers of that epithet do not want to debate.  I am a firm supporter of Israel’s right to do anything and everything it believes is necessary to defend its territory and people.  That is the right of every nation state. 

What we have is the ability of Israel to influence very important policymakers and very important leaders in the United States – the media elites, the governing elites, and certainly in the cabinet.  That’s a public activity, and a less public activity we know have this unfolding case before the courts on activists from AIPAC [the main pro-Israel lobbying group] were getting classified information from American civil servants.

Q: Who should be America’s allies?

I think there are very few countries in the world where the United States is obligated to support a country largely without question, and I think it stems from two World Wars. I would only put the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand in that particular basket of countries towards whom our nation has a debt of honour.

Q: Will America and its allies win the war against Al Qaeda?

Eventually it’s going to dawn on Republicans and Democrats alike that their chance to win this war was when they had a chance to kill him.  It’s gone and the chance to win has passed. 

I think the best terms on which this can finish is that we get out of the way and let whatever’s going to occur in Islamic society occur. There are so many scores to settle, there’s sectarian differences that are going to be fought out, there is retribution against people like [Egypt’s President] Mubarak and the Saudi royals. It’s going to be a messy Islamic civilization for a long time but it’s not necessarily one that can remain united against us, the West, once we’re out of the way, because I think we’re only the target because we’re seen as the prop for the ones they hate the most which is their own government.

"Never again", again?

My interview with the Harvard human rights scholar, Samantha Power, who won the Pulitzer prize for her book on world inaction in the face of genocide from Armenia to Kosovo, A Problem from Hell, appears in this month's Magill magazine.  Some of the Magill archive is now also available online too, although the current issue is accessible to subscribers only.  Power, who was born in Dungarvan before immigrating to the US at the age of nine, attended Yale before becoming a freelance foreign correspondent covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia for the Economist, Boston Globe, US News & World Report and others.  This was done in collaboration with my friend Patrick Belton of OxBlog. 

Bumps in the road

My apologies if posting is a little light over the next week or so.  I'm going through something of a busy period at work, I have to do some travelling and I'm also writing a profile cum interview of the man who is, by many accounts, the world's most influential columnist.  So, sorry to dissappoint all of you in my audience, that means you John, if posting isn't what it should be. 

Cover boy

My interview with Steve Forbes, the US magazine publisher, twice contender for the Republican presidential nomination and flat-tax advocate is in the  current issue of Business and Finance, now on sale in Ireland.

This is my first cover story anywhere, so I'm especially sasta  on that account.   

Gore no more

My review of Al Gore's book and movie An Inconvenient Truth was published in the Sunday Business Post.  It was fun to write, as you can probably tell.  I enjoyed the feedback as well. 

The more the merrier....

First the Da Vinci Code and now this.....

Only children tend not to be very good at sharing and the folks over at the Optimum Population Trust don't want all those nasty brown people coming here. 

Professor Philip Booth and I had an article about their ideas of "population control" in the Catholic Times.  Read it on the IEA website. 

Groups proposing policies of population control are once again making the headlines. They suggest that the world needs a smaller population to control its “environmental footprint”, to preserve natural resources and to ensure that we can live in peace and relative comfort. These ideas were once popular in the 1960s and 1970s. They are clearly incompatible with Catholic teaching on sex and the family. However, arguments in favour of an “optimum population” are also vacuous from an economic perspective. It is important that the economic arguments are understood. Particularly in Catholic schools, young people should not simply be taught the received wisdom on environmental issues: young Catholics should be encouraged to challenge the establishment view.

One of the more interesting things I found while researching this was an early book by Columbia University's Mahmood Mamdani from 1972 called "The Myth of Population Control". He writes:

Westerners have strong feelings about the value of personas and of human life not necessarily shared by Punjabi villagers.  Some crusaders may feel that the pressures arising from growing numbers of people were self-evident. The villagers did not always hold that view.

“These Americans are the enemies of the smile on this child’s face", one said, "All they are interested in is war or family planning.”

His account would warm the heart of any libertarian, telling of how of the Punjabi people making their own decisions about family sizes.  Contrary to the view of the higher-caste Indians and foreign experts, these were rational and fully sustainable in a rural economy with regular migration to the cities.  The villagers simply let the government intervention, free contraceptives and lectures simply wash over them , often being kindly by lying to the government contraception advocates that they were using the devices provided. 

Power failure

In May, Stockholm Network published Power Failure: The Politics of European Energy, which I edited with Sacha Kumaria.  The full publication is available for download on Stockholm's website. 

I summarised it in an article for The Business, Sparking a revolution in European energy

Fossil fools

The Business published my dismissal of a recent BBC docu-drama on world oil running short: The BBC scrapes the bottom of the barrel

The main characters in this miniature drama-documentary are Americans. The unspoken message, unsubtly applied, appears to be that it’s the Yanks who are to blame. An overweight and badly-dressed couple, housewife Janie and her truck-driver husband, John, are shown trying to adapt as prices escalate from $85 to $160 dollars a barrel, and a society based on cheap oil comes under stress. First there are queues at petrol stations and then outright shortages. Food prices rise. John loses his job. With the SUV unaffordable, the couple eventually have to resort to wheeling their groceries home in a shopping trolley.

John is prone to all sorts of anti-social individualism. Besides driving a big, fuel-hungry 4x4, he is shown stealing from his employers, hoarding diesel, unwilling to offer lifts to neighbours and driving like a maniac. Eventually, he gets his comeuppance, being left bloodied and bruised after getting into a fist fight on a garage forecourt – an allegory for the Iraq war?

Their daughter, the pushy Jess, works as an oil company executive and lives in London, with her English husband Nick, who, presumably like Prime Minister Tony Blair, is bulldozed into submission by his American partner. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, she despoils the Alaskan wilderness on behalf of her multinational employer. However, her search for “the world’s last giant oilfield” ultimately proves to be fruitless. The program also shows Venezuela’s governing left-wing and rabidly anti-US strongman Hugo Chavez still in power in 2016 – the one prediction in the program with which I feel comfortable.

 

Peak oil and Ireland

In April, I took issue with a report issued by Forfas, the Irish state industry and science body forecasting a global peak in oil production and making some policy recommendations for Ireland Opinion: Energy wasted on Forfas report

‘‘The best way to secure energy security is to have a free market . . . that’s exactly the opposite of what is happening in Russia,’’ Andrei Illarionov, president Vladimir Putin’s long-time economic adviser, told the BBC recently.

Instead of addressing these problems and the internal market reforms and multilateral solutions being undertaken by our European partners, Forfas has instead opted to peddle the ‘‘peak oil’’ theory promoted by a fringe group of environmentalists, based on an report carried out by American engineering consultant Robert Hirsch.

Hirsch is an activist in an organisation called the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) (found on the web at http://peakoil.net), and he bases most of his work for Forfas on that of other ASPO activists, rather than mainstream analysts.

The leading figure in this movement is Dr Colin Campbell, a retired oil geologist, now living in Cork. He has spent much of the last decade spreading the apocalyptic forecast of an imminent shortfall in the supply of oil as we exhaust the Earth’s available fields.

Dr Campbell’s scientific analysis is contested by other experts and none of the authoritative studies of the world energy - by the US Geological Survey, the IEA or the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - gives it credence.

Unluckily for Forfas, the report appeared out of date even before it was released. Last Monday, Venezuela announced that it would be asking Opec to recognise it as the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, bypassing Saudi Arabia, with enough oil to maintain its current production for another two centuries.

This comes as the country’s huge stocks of ultra-heavy crude oil - which is more expensive and difficult to refine, but which is economically viable at prices above $30-$40 per barrel - is being commercially produced for the first time.

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EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs hopes that reforms favouring free markets and liberal institutions will provide the right multilateral framework for investment and trade between consuming and producing countries through treaties such as the Energy Charter and international institutions such as the IEA.

Instead, Forfas suggests that, even as a minnow in world politics, we somehow have the clout to cut our own bilateral deals on favourable terms with producing countries. However, a majority of the public in the EU - according to a recent Eurobarometer survey - would prefer Brussels to take the lead with a common European energy strategy.