Lights off in America?

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(Lecture given at Concordia College, Bronxville, NY, 04/06/06)

Before I talk to you about Tom Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat, I must tell you this much about my own politics: I am an old-fashioned European conservative, a German Christian Democrat, definitely not some Green Party utopian. I want you to know this because what follows might seem uncomfortable to you and give you the false impression that I am pushing some weird ideological agenda.

There is something else you should be aware of. I have been a journalist for 50 years this very day. I actually started my career with a local newspaper in Westphalia on April 6, 1956. Hence I think like a journalist, view the world like a journalist and read other journalists’ works from a journalist’s perspective.

This is what I did with the Flat World. I found it wonderfully informative, entertaining and snappy. Friedman describes our globalized world brilliantly and amusingly. I don’t think any popular writer has done as good a job in describing the mechanics, workings and repercussions of globalization as well as he. Contrary to his many critics, I love his title. It’s a snazzy metaphor though a little off the wall. It appeals to the consummate headline writer in me. And it helps sell this book. Good for Mr. Friedman!

Having said this, though, I must confess that I have a great problem with this book. This problem has to do with the familiar differences between a jaded European worldview and the seemingly eternal American optimism, which we have long found disarming but are often unable to share. Friedman’s tome is a case in point. He presents a generally rosy picture of the flattened world without sufficiently addressing another aspect of globalization – the globalized petroleum madness that appears to be leading the world to an unprecedented catastrophe, which could only be prevented with a rapid and vast globalized rescue operation.

It is touching to read the last sentences in Friedman’s book: “You can flourish in this flat world, but it does take the right imagination and the right motivation. While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11, the world needs you to be forever the generation of 11/9 (he is referring to the date the Berlin Wall was opened) – the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things can be better but also acts on that generation every day.”

This is good stuff. It would be better still if it were balanced with a realistic account of a potentially catastrophic form of globalization – a threat stemming from to America’s and the rest of the world’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for oil and the crazy fact that petroleum deposits are almost exclusively in the hands of actual or potential enemies of the United States.

And of those some major ones are busy conspiring against America most of whose citizens seem oblivious of this danger, because they are badly served by their media, which are world champions in ignoring foreign affairs. Just think: Russia is massively arming Venezuela and Iran. Iran, soon to be a nuclear power, is establishing close bonds with Venezuela. Venezuela has acquired a new strong ally – Bolivia, which is home to one of America’s most significant natural gas fields. Bolivia has invited China to manage these natural gas fields.

China has acquired most of the storage facilities along the Panama Canal. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran have become petroleum-thirsty China’s premium oil suppliers. Should the United States prematurely pull out of Iraq, that country’s massive oil fields are expected to come under Iran’s control. This prediction of mounting woes for the United States can be extended ad infinitum.

Yet Friedman no more than hints at them.

Now put this into context with a lengthy article I found recently in the London Times magazine just about at the same time when I read Friedman’s volume on the Flat World. As you are well aware, the London Times is by no means a far-left journal. It cannot be accused of an anti-American bias. The article in question was titled, “Waiting for the Lights to go out.”

Its author, Brian Appleby deals not with some distant possibility but with the certainty that in the lifetime of many alive today is going to run out of oil. What angers me about Friedman is that he addresses this scenario with the light-hearted suggestion (page 413) that the current and future champion gas guzzlers – the United States and China – develop a grand joint “Manhattan Project,” a crash program to develop clean alternative fuel.

This makes good reading, but surely, Friedman cannot be that naïve. Can you imagine how long such a Manhattan project would take till completion? In truth, no real efforts are being made in the United States to prepare for a sudden interruption of oil supplies. In the meantime, the Swedish parliament has just passed a bill mandating that nation’s total independence from imported petroleum by the year 2020 – 14 years from now.

Appleby shows, as the foreign affairs specialist Friedman doubtless knows, that the interruption of oil supplies could come quickly if America’s actual or potential enemies who own most of the oil and natural gas deposits should conspire to strangle this country. To be sure, this seems like nutty idea, but then nutty rulers and nutty ideologies are no historical rarities, especially not in case where religious or quasi-religious fanaticism supersedes natural reason. This is the case in Iran and, in a different way, perhaps also in Venezuela, whose ruler sees himself as the reincarnation of Simon Bolivar and feels called to reestablish Bolivar’s ill-fated empire, Gran Colombia, as a counterweight against United States might.

And I am not at all certain that reason can prevail over hatred, especially the globalized hatred of what this country stands for. Yet I see in America no urgency in re-establishing an infrastructure that would free this country from its bondage to the petroleum-dependent automobile. Where I live, in St. Louis, there is no public transport system worth that name. You have no railroads capable of large numbers of people in times of a major crisis either; buses and planes are no substitute, especially if there is no fuel.

Now let me quote you some excerpts from Appleby’s article.

“Practically every day…. a big oil company took a whole page to promote the fact that we are facing a crisis. One, paid for by Chevron, called on readers to help find a solution. I visited Chevron's website, www.willyoujoinus.com, where a whirring clock monitored worldwide oil consumption: nearly 1,500 barrels a second.”

Please do check this Website. It will give you a jolt.

Appleby goes on:

“The more I read the scarier it became. Michael Meacher, who was Britain's environment minister for six years, is plainly terrified. ‘The implications are mind-blowing... Civilization faces the sharpest and perhaps most violent dislocation in recent history.’ Matthew Simmons, a Houston-based energy-industry financier and adviser to George Bush and Dick Cheney, was asked in 2003 if there is a solution. He replied: ‘The solution is to pray.’“

As Aplleby makes clear,

“These people are not loonies. Optimists believe that the market — the law of supply and demand — will solve the problem. As oil becomes more expensive, we'll shift to some other energy source. But do high prices really cut demand? Since early 1999, oil prices have risen by about 350%. Meanwhile, demand growth in 2004 was the highest in 25 years. That's bad news, because the market won't push energy companies into pursuing alternative sources of energy until oil reaches considerably higher prices. And then it will be too late to make the switch.

“The former oil-industry executive Jan Lundberg reckons the crisis will be sudden. ‘Market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices skyward,’ he says. ‘And the market will become paralyzed at prices too high for the wheels of commerce and daily living.’ So forget the price at the pump: when oil becomes truly unaffordable, you will be more worried about the collapse of distribution networks, and the absence of food from local shops.

“Ecologists use a technical term, ‘die-off,’ to describe what happens when a population grows too big for the resources that sustain it. Where will die-off occur this time? Everywhere. By some estimates, 5 billion of the world's 6 billion population would never have been able to live without the blessed effects of fossil fuels, and oil in particular: oil powered the pumps that drained the land, and from oil came the chemicals that made intensive farming possible.

“If oil dries up, we can assume, those 5 billion must starve. And they won't all be in Africa this time. You too may be fighting off neighbors to protect a shrinking stash of canned food, and, when that runs out, foraging for insects in suburban gardens.”

I invite you to download Appleby’s article from the Internet. All you have to do is to type “Waiting for the lights to go out” into the Google search engine, and it will pop up first.
If he is right, and I fear he is, then the flattened earth faces the prospect of returning to a globalized Stone Age, a world without anesthetics, antihistamines, aspirin and artificial heart valves, a world where hypnosis will be the only remedy against for pain control.

Given this scenario, the entire world-flattening dynamic might prove futile unless redirected literally to save mankind. And I find it objectionable that this need does not take up a substantial amount of space in Friedman’s 473 pages.

Inspired by Appleby’s article, I have developed a doctoral-level seminar, which I am currently teaching at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. This seminar has developed into a think tank of sorts whose members are currently trying to develop pastoral care methodologies for a post-petroleum era when neither produce nor people will make it to supermarkets; when the faithful can’t reach their mega-churches; when civil authority falters to the point of chaos that might evolve in God knows what tyranny; when community turns against community, generation against generation, when the young ask their parents and grandparents: Why did you squander our natural resources?

So now Friedman tells us about the leveled global playing field on which an Indian receives his order of a new Dell laptop, which is then assembled in Malaysia from parts flown in from China or Taiwan, Germany, Israel, Thailand, Japan and Philippines and elsewhere, and guess what? Two weeks later the computer shows up in Friedman’s home in Bethesda, Maryland.

What he describes there is a wonderfully peaceful scenario, just like the pleasant fact that while American doctors and patients sleep at night, their CAT scans are being examined by competent specialists in Australia or Israel, where it’s daytime. Or the notion that while China and Taiwan are both profiting mightily from the flattening of the world, China won’t invade Taiwan.

He doesn’t tell us what might happen when if there is no longer the kerosene to fly computer parts to Friedman’s nascent laptop in Malaysia? What if Dell can’t afford to fly that laptop from Penang to Washington, D.C.?

The favorite line of American pacifists, “Why don’t we all get along?”, might not work in a world where genuine and irrational haters of the United States, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez und Iran, conspire against supplying America, shipping their oil to ever-thirsty China instead. Or when Russia, which is already using its natural gas as a means to bully its neighbors, ships its oil and gas to China rather than Western Europe – and when China takes up Bolivia’s offer to manage its natural gas fields, the second largest in the America’s. Or when the ruling clan in Saudi Arabia is ousted and replaced by America-hating radicals.

If you read, as I do and Mr. Friedman does, the world’s press daily – and not just the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – you can’t escape the conclusion that Appleby’s and my fears are realistic.

It is a unique situation in world history that a major power has maneuvered itself with open eyes into a situation where its very lifeblood is in the hands of its foes. This is what irritates me so about the insouciant tenor of Mr. Friedman’s book.

It seems small comfort that we are cooperating so well with the genius of India, as we read in Friedman’s tome. What will then happen to India’s bright young people currently providing tech support to American computer owners if Appleby’s visions come true?

In 20 years’ time, India will have the world’s largest population living on real estate a third of the size of the United States. What if America maneuvers itself into an international stranglehold where it will cease to be India’s reliable partner? Why should the Indians continue to play second fiddle to the United States considering that they are now producing more and moiré competent engineers and scientists?

Will India then not turn to its old friend Russia, which has all the necessary natural resources? Will India pool its ingenuity with that of China at America’s expense?

I agree, these are for the moment all hypothetical scenarios, but they ought to be discussed in a book about the flattening of the world. Friedman describes how Al Qaeda is using its own form of globalization against the West.

What if madness or greed compel countries with huge populations and talents to turn against an America they no longer consider invulnerable or invincible?

Friedman barely touches on these dangers but that does not make them any less real. If you want to know where I am coming from – please remember this. A century ago, my country led the world in science, knowledge and the quality of its products.

It took a few short years for Germany to fall from these lofty heights to the catastrophes of a lost war, from prosperity to a devastating inflation, from decency to a tyranny, another World War, shame and the loss of one-third of its territory.

If somebody had told my grandparents at the time of their marriage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that this was going to happen to their nation they would have laughed him out of their parlors.

Siddharth Varadarajan, an Indian intellectual and one of Mr. Friedman’s unkindest critics, mocked Friedman’s Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention: “Now two countries that are part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other.”

In the Indian newspaper, The Hindu, Varadarajan reminds his readers of earlier forms of globalization. Before World War II, U.S. corporations invested massively in Nazi Germany. That did not preserve peace.

Many of the trucks that transported German soldiers to the front -- and Nazi victims to the concentration camps -- were Opels. General Motors had a heavy stake in the Opel corporation, which it now owns entirely.

If I sound a little cynical about the global benefits of globalization, please consider this: I own two cars, one in America, one in France. The American car is a 6-cylinder 2005 Dodge Stratus, my car in France is a 1996 Audi A6 Quattro, so both are manufactured by a corporation with plants around the world – DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen. The Dodge gives me 22 miles to the gallon of gas if I drive it carefully, the Audi well over 30 miles at speeds up to 100 m.p.h.

Moreover, the Audi has a diesel engine. When I am in Germany, I fill it up with biodiesel made from soy or corn or rapeseed. It could also be made from waste grease thrown out by MacDonald’s restaurants; some amateurs right here in America are doing this.

These days, only three smaller VW models sold in the United States are capable of running on biodiesel. No Audi diesels are available here. Neither can you buy any of the European-made General Motors and Ford cars that could easily be converted to use that kind of fuel which you can produce in your own basement and which, if mass produced from plants, could ease the plight of American farmers.

DaimlerChrysler, the manufacturers of my Stratus, also builds the small but very comfortable and zippy Smart cars made in France. The diesel version of these cars –- which would perfect for shopping and getting around urban centers – give you almost 70miles per gallon, and they could of course also be made compatible with biodiesel.

So while Tom Friedman dreams of a Chinese-American Manhattan project to develop alternative fuels, globalized car and fuel manufacturers have come a long way in realizing this dream – but only on the other side of the Atlantic, not here. In other words, even in what seems to be a most dire situation, some of the flattened world’s globalized corporations fail humanity miserably.

Why this is so, Mr. Friedman does not explain. This is why I find so frustrating about his otherwise readable book, given that the crisis predicted by Mr. Appleby could be imminent. Though well crafted and full of valuable information, it misses the crucial point, which a responsible work on globalization must address comprehensively.

Comments

[Jeremy Abel]

Thank you, Dr. Siemon-Netto, for using your influence to spread this vital information. It is truly refreshing to see this issue being tackled by someone within our synod.

[Deborah]

Thank you for posting this speech. I hope it gets read far and wide and people heed what you are saying before it's too late.

[Dan at Necessary Roughness]

Dr. Siemon-Netto, thank you for your insight and your proactive local measures. The article you are quoting from seems to be titled "Why I am Saving the World", instead of "Waiting for the Lights to Go Out". Readers should google for your quotes rather than the title in order to find the article you want them to read. At the following link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1813695_2,00.html

The actual source of the article seems to be:

From: When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance and Planetary Survival, by Matthew Stein

[Fr. Gabriel Jay Rochelle]

Comments

Great piece! Right on time! We've been buzzing about this in the corridors of various places here lately. Maybe this summer will prove the tipping point, to use another recent metaphor. We're going to see a lot more people on Vespas and
bicycles, and a lot more people trying to figure out how to either a) work from home; or b) move closer to their work or vice versa. I see this all over the Lehigh Valley. These 30-somethings with their gas-guzzling SUVs and jobs in NYC are
simply not going to survive at their current level of expense. Then what will the developers who have ruined this valley do with all their half-a-million dollar mc mansions, when their "owners" become unable to carry the mortgages any more. When I say this, people around me say "oh you're such a pessimist," to which my instant response is, "I've never been
one before; I've spent my life as a realist, and I'm not about to change now."

KUDOS!

a boiling Rochelle

The Rev. Gabriel Jay Rochelle
Allentown, Pa.

[Rebuttal]

To paraphrase the comedian Dennis Miller concerning Elvis Presley: "You can take the German out of Germany, but you can't take the Germany out of the German."

1. I respect Dr. Siemon-Netto a great deal. 99% of his essays are well-researched and insightful. This was not one of them. This essay comes right out of an extremely biased, liberal, German-European mentality. The opening disclaimer was very suspicious.

2. Dr. Siemon-Netto is a world class journalist and a very capable and decent Lutheran theologian. He is not an economist.

3. Dr. Friedman is a brilliant economist.

4. Forget the London Times. Try logging on to www.HumanEventsOnline.com and searching on "world's oil supply," "America's Oil Supply" or simply "oil" and see what you find.

5. Liberals, like the others who commented on this essay, have prevented our country from tapping into the UNLIMITED supply of oil. There is no shortage.

6. This article was very disappointing. Dr. Siemon-Netto is way out of his league in this area.

[Rebuttal]

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=15702

[Rebuttal]

More updates:

"Running Out of Oil?"
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=16084

"Drill Our Own"
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=16101