The World Is Changing Minute by Minute

[Geee]

National Review:

We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs. The shake-up is a perfect storm of political, demographic, and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable.

Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of accepted global constants. The European Union was assumed to have evolved beyond the nation-state as it ended the cycle of militarism and renounced free-market capitalism. With its strong euro, soft power, and nonaligned foreign policy, the EU was praised as a utopian sort of foil to the overarmed U.S. with its ailing dollar.

Germany, ostracized after losing two world wars and struggling with the guilt of the Holocaust, as penance was to be permanently submerged in European alliances, as its economic power was always expected to prop up the euro-zone experiment.

The Arab Middle East for the last 40 years seemed to be the world’s cockpit, as its huge petroleum reserves brought in trillions of dollars from an oil-depleted West, along with political concessions. Petrodollars fed global terrorism. Oil-poor Israel had little clout with Europe. In general, the West ignored any human-rights concerns involving the region’s oil-rich dictatorships, monarchies, and theocracies, as well as their aid to Islamic terrorists.

Conventional wisdom also assumed that an indebted U.S. was in permanent decline, a cash-rich China in ascendency. The world would increasingly make the necessary political corrections as it pivoted eastward.

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But none of that conventional wisdom now seems very wise — largely because of a number of technological breakthroughs and equally unforeseen political upheavals.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

Also see My man Big Walt!

Israel’s Emergence As Energy Superpower Making Waves

Walter Russell Mead

7/2/12

 

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously lamented that Moses led the children of Israel for forty years of wandering in the desert until he found the only place in the Middle East where there wasn’t any oil.

 

But could Moses have been smarter than believed? Apparently the Canadians and the Russians think so, as both countries are moving to step up energy relations with a tiny nation whose total energy reserves some experts now think could rival or even surpass the fabled oil wealth of Saudi Arabia.

 

Actual production is still minuscule, but evidence is accumulating that the Promised Land, from a natural resource point of view, could be an El Dorado: inch for inch the most valuable and energy rich country anywhere in the world. If this turns out to be true, a lot of things are going to change, and some of those changes are already underway.

 

Israel and Canada have just signed an agreement to cooperate on the exploration and development of what, apparently, could be vast shale oil reserves beneath the Jewish state.

 

(Snip)

 

 

The Energy Revolution Part One: The Biggest Losers

Walter Russell Mead

7/8/12

 

Over the past year, we’ve been watching a geopolitical revolution get underway. It’s much bigger and more consequential than the Arab Spring, though the legacy media are giving it much less play. It will rearrange the global chessboard, improving the position of some powers, weakening others. It is a powerful boost to American power, reducing America’s strategic and economic liabilities while adding considerably to its assets. And it dramatically changes the long term outlook for, among other things, the US dollar. In line with Via Meadia‘s policy of trying to focus attention on the most consequential events of the time, we will be following this story as it unfolds, looking at the implications of the shifts now underway for world politics, the US economy, our domestic politics, and the green movement.

 

While the chattering classes yammered on about American decline and peak oil, a quite different future is taking shape. A world energy revolution is underway and it will be shaping the realities of the 21st century when the Crash of 2008 and the Great Stagnation that followed only interest historians. A new age of abundance for fossil fuels is upon us. And the center of gravity of the global energy picture is shifting from the Middle East to… North America.

 

The two biggest winners look to be Canada and the United States. Canada, with something like two trillion barrels worth of conventional oil in its tar sands, and the United States with about a trillion barrels of shale oil, are the planet’s new super giant energy powers. Throw in natural gas and coal, and the United States is better supplied with fossil fuels than any other country on earth. Canada and the United States are each richer in oil than Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia combined.

 

(Snip)

[Geee]

That was most interesting. If only we now get a president who will let us exploit these resources. He says he will have future articles. Interested to see them.