The map above is illustrative of why we need to make The War Against Oil the centerpiece of our foreign policy.
Even if you don’t believe in global warming, I hope you will find the image compelling.
It’s from Worldmapper, a project by the University of Sheffield in England and the University of Michigan. The idea is to scale countries to specific variables, rather than to their actual size. This gives you an idea of how they stack up on important variables.
The map above is for fuel exports. The date is 2002.
Notice, please, how well our current foreign policy challenges conform
to the details of this map. Notice how big Saudi Arabia is, how big
Russia is, how big Venezuela is, how big Iran is, and how Nigeria dominates the map of
Africa.
By contrast, the map here is of world fuel imports, also from 2002. The page from which this is taken notes that Western Europe’s large size here is mainly due to energy movements within the EC.
These are not just maps of trade flows. They define power in an age that ignores The War Against Oil.
We don’t have nearly as much power as we should. We have little control
over our own economy, because we don’t export what the world most wants.
The aim of this blog is to change this map, radically. America has the
potential to become a dominant economic power again, but only if it
leads the way in alternative energy technologies, in the use of wind,
of water, of the Sun and the energy of the Earth.
There is plenty of power in these four sources to take us where we want
our children to go in this century. We need only harness it.
This must be our top priority, regardless of our politics.
