El siguiente artículo me parece un buen ejemplo de las fortalezas y las debilidades de los análisis que uno encuentra en la prensa seria norteamericana. Aunque inspirado en parte por la reciente decisión de Evo Morales, lo que dice sobre ese punto particular, y sobre la realidad latinoamericana, es superficial y erróneo. Además, aunque aparece en una revista que ha cuestionado las políticas de Bush, comparte la demonización de Chávez corriente en los conservadores yanquis. Al mismo tiempo, sus comentarios geopolíticos y económicos sobre el cambio de paradigma que estamos viviendo y el rol de Rusia en él son lúcidos y deben leerse. Su título en inglés “Las guerras por la energía” apunta a un mundo en el que todos deberemos vivir
By Michael Hirsh - Newsweek - May 3, 2006
It is a mantra of the globalization crowd. In today's global economy, we are
told, all that really matters is which country produces the best brains and
skills. The world is flat, after all. The playing field is leveled. Wrong, wrong
and wrong. What also matters, we are learning, is who controls the world's
energy resources. Evo Morales's abrupt decision earlier this week to nationalize
Bolivia's natural-gas industry was only the latest worrisome move in a long-term
trend. Morales, a leftist elected president last December, was apparently
influenced by a meeting he had in Havana last Saturday with Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez, who's rocketed to international prominence by doing much the same
thing to his country's oil industry. President Chavez, sitting atop his growing
pile of petrodollars, has gleefully thumbed his nose at Washington's efforts to
rein him in. Similarly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is defiantly
enriching uranium and sneering at Western threats of sanctions. And he obviously
thinks he can, perhaps because no one is threatening to cut off Iran's oil
exports as part of the forthcoming sanctions plan.
The would-be czar of this new global energy elite is Vladimir Putin. Having
spent the better part of his six years in office wresting control of his
nation's vast oil and gas resources, the Russian president is now playing a
brass-knuckle game of power politics. When Putin partially cut off gas supplies
to Ukraine and therefore to Western Europe in the first three days of the year-mainly
to bully Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko into taking a lower price-the
European Union went into a state of near panic. According to the Energy Charter
Secretariat in Brussels, by 2020 the Western Europeans are expected to get half
their gas from Russia, which commands 28 percent of world gas reserves, more
than any country in the world. Suddenly the Europeans realized there weren't
that many alternative suppliers. Putin's Kremlin-controlled gas monopoly,
Gazprom, has hired German Chancellor Angela Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard
Schröder, as a consultant. Gazprom deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev admitted at an
economic forum earlier this month that even Britain's flagship utility, Centrica,
should be considered a potential takeover target. "With our present financial
strength, it is very difficult to find a company which is not on our watch list,"
he said.
What does all this geostrategic strutting have to do with soaring prices at the
gas pump? For one thing, the uncertainty created by Iran, Iraq and Venezuela has
added a $10-$20 risk premium to the price of oil per barrel, according to Wall
Street analysts. The politics of energy also doesn't bode well for future prices,
as U.S. Secretary of Energy Sam Bodman seemed to suggest last weekend when he
said Americans might have to get used to paying $3-plus per gallon for gasoline.
Today, oil and gas experts around the world are growing alarmed not just at
future scarcity-the idea that the world may have hit "peak oil" seems to be
taking hold-but at who's in control of the precious stuff. As demand for energy
explodes worldwide, there is less of it available and less exploration for it.
That is partly because of a dropoff in investment created by the decline in oil
prices in the '90s. But it is also because multinational corporations like
ExxonMobil (despite its record profits) now own just 6 percent of supplies,
versus a whopping 77 percent that's now owned by state-owned entities, according
to the Petroleum Finance Corp., a Washington-based consulting group. State
control guarantees less efficiency in the exploration for oil, and in the
extraction and refinement of fuel. Further, these state-owned companies do not
divulge how much they really own, or what the production and exploration numbers
are. These have become the new state secrets.
Quietly an understanding of this power shift in the world is growing in
Washington, as well. The price shock after Hurricane Katrina, especially-not to
mention the plummeting poll numbers that followed for Bush-led administration
officials to understand just how fragile U.S. economic security has become
because of energy. Nothing quite like it has happened since the 1973 OPEC
embargo. Administration sources say the Katrina effect, as well as concern over
moves by Chavez, were mainly behind Bush's surprising call for an end to "America's
oil addiction" in his State of the Union address last January. At the same time,
U.S. officials have come to realize that there is deep anger and enmity in the
Kremlin against the United States (particularly over U.S. efforts to win Ukraine
and Georgia to the West), and that Putin has his own agenda. One example: even
as Moscow has joined the Western effort to confront Tehran over its nuclear
program, Russia and Iran are taking a unified stand in resisting a U.S. effort
to build a trans-Caspian pipeline that would reroute gas out of the Russian
system to Baku, Azerbaijan.
Putin has long been nursing ambitions of using Russia's vast oil and gas
supplies as an instrument of power. In the mid '90s, after 15 years in the KGB,
Putin went back to school, attending the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. He
wrote a dissertation titled "Toward a Russian Transnational Energy Company." The
topic: how to use energy resources for grand strategic planning. There is reason
to believe that Putin's highly publicized confrontation with Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the defunct Yukos-the last of the big private
energy concerns in Russia-was about much more than wresting political power from
the so-called oligarchs, former apparatchiks who gained control of Russia's
resources after the Soviet Union's collapse. Putin is not known to be personally
corrupt, or even particularly power-hungry. What he is hungry for-and indeed has
been since he was elected in 2000-is a restoration of Russia's power and
influence. Some observers believe that Putin's trumped-up arrest of Khodorkovsky-who
will be spending the next few years in a Siberian labor camp-was mainly about
taking control of the energy sector, rather than edging aside a political rival.
It is tempting to say that oil and gas have become the new strategic weapons of
the 21st century. But in one crucial respect that is not true. As Putin
discovered from his aborted effort to cut off Ukraine's gas-and as even
Ahmadinejad is learning-when you threaten to cut off your customers, you only
cut off your own nose. You have to sell oil to someone; otherwise crude is just
black muck. Where the control of energy counts is in accumulating wealth, and
therefore power and influence. As former U.S. under secretary of State Marc
Grossman says, "The question is what are they doing with the money."
The Bush administration may think it has one trump card in Iraq. U.S. interests
obviously lie with the vast proven and potential Iraqi oil fields, said to be
the world's largest. The Iraqi oil ministry has signed about 40 memorandums of
understanding, many with U.S. companies, according to industry sources. Under
them, the majors such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips are giving
technical advice "free" to the ministry (a typical get-in-the-door strategy for
the industry). Challenged at a congressional hearing in March, CENTCOM commander
Gen. John Abizaid was frank in suggesting that, while oil was not the reason
America went to war, it may provide a critical reason for staying. "The United
States and its allies have a vital interest in the oil-rich region," Abizaid
said. "Ultimately it comes down to the free flow of goods and resources on which
the prosperity of our own nation and everybody else in the world depend."
But after three years of explosive anger against the U.S. occupation, it would
be foolish to think that the Iraqi government, too, won't catch the nationalist
bug that's spreading worldwide, in what appears to be an outgrowth of both
antiglobalization sentiments and anti-Americanism. "I think the likelihood is
high that American companies will have some significant position in Iraq," says
J. Robinson West, head of Petroleum Finance Corp. "On the other hand I think
it's highly unlikely that the petroleum sector will be dominated by American
companies. We really didn't go to war over oil, and I think at this late date we
don't want to make it look like we did." ExxonMobil spokesman Russ Roberts adds,
"The Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people. If the Iraqi people determine that
they want the help of international oil companies in developing their resources,
then ExxonMobil would certainly be interested in participating."
What does it all mean? "Welcome to the age of energy insecurity," says West, a
former Reagan administration official (and friend of Dick Cheney's, the man who
once dismissed energy conservation as a "personal virtue"). "Worldwide
production will peak. The result will be skyrocketing prices, with a huge,
sustained economic shock. Jobs will be lost. Without action, the crisis will
certainly bring energy rivalries, if not energy wars. Vast wealth will be
shifted, probably away from the U.S. For the last 20 years, U.S. policy has
discouraged production and encouraged consumption. If we dither any more, we
will pay a terrible price, the economic equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane.
Katrina was Category 4."
Washington appears as helpless in preparing for this crisis as it did in
anticipating Hurricane Katrina. As we have seen in recent weeks, Congress is
still dithering over such silly proposals as a $100 rebate to gasoline customers.
But Republican leaders are balking at sponsoring proposals that could really
make a difference, like a new gasoline tax that would change U.S. consumption
habits and a serious increase in CAFE (corporate average fuel-economy) standards,
which require automakers to meet an average mileage requirement. With the GOP
facing a bitter fight for control of the Congress later this year, such measures
are considered too politically painful. There could be a lot more pain for
Americans down the road, however, at the hands of Putin and his energy-rich
allies.
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