Polemos

Without oil and gas energy inputs our modern industrial agriculture industries would collapse, no more cheap fertilizer and pesticide in bulk to promote monoculture growth in our degraded agricultural soils, and no more fuel for the machinery that sows, harvests, processes and transports the produce to our supermarkets. And no more personal transport for us consumers to travel en masse to those supermarkets.

The link between oil and food is a serious one for us moderns especially as we have become completely habituated to eating heavily processed foods that are transported from all corners of the earth. Next time you sit down to eat a meal consider the amount of energy that has gone into bringing it to your plate, including the energy you required to cook it. You are literally eating the embedded energy of the crude oil that fuels our entire modern global economic order. Without an equivalent energy input to that sourced from the extraction of oil you and your family would quickly starve to death, it only takes a week without food to seriously debilitate your body and usually less than 30 days to die.
Hitler’s Russian conquest for Lebensraum was supposed to deliver Caucasus oil and Siberia’s natural resources, along with a Slavic slave labour force, as the economic base of a greater Third Reich. If he’d been successful the post WW2 super power balance would have been between the US and Germany rather than the Soviet Union and I have a feeling Hitler’s democratic, capital friendly dictatorship would have been much more accommodating business partners than the Stalinists. The US itself and its economic and military power is founded on the British conquest of North America in competition with the other European colonial powers for the riches of the New World. Rape and pillage have long been a profitable mainstay for economic growth opening up markets and procuring resources in situations where commerce has failed to deliver the goods. As far as I’m concerned a nation’s military power is wedded to its economic power and both are dependent on maintaining the security and constant growth of energy supply.

The current bloody occupation of Iraq is a defining example of how gigantic military force can be unleashed when energy security is threatened. For those of you who insist that this conquest is in the interests of opening up democratic free markets it remains to be seen whether the massive US national debts now accruing will be offset by the global economic benefits of enforcing liberal democracy on rogue nations and their people. More to the point, is the entirely unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ both in Iraq and in our vulnerable major cities worth it?