My Interview with Michael Klare: Part I

This is a transcript of an interview with Professor Michael Klare, which was conducted by Atticus Mullikin and filmed at the Maastricht School of Governance by Bernd Kapeller, Associate Producer at the European Journalism Centre. The video was divided into four parts and uploaded to EJCNetTube to accompany Mr. Klare's Energy, Politics and Power lecture for Maastricht Debates.

Part I of the transcript includes the implications of the U.S military's dependence on oil, a discussion of rising oil prices, questions about the European Union's energy strategy and the implications of biofuel development.

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A.M. – It's November 14, 2007, in Maastricht, the Netherlands. I'm speaking today with Professor Michael Klare, Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and author of many books including Resource Wars and his latest, Blood and Oil. He's participating in a Maastricht Debate this evening entitled Energy, Politics and Power. Professor Klare, welcome to Maastricht.

You've written about geopolitics and what you've termed "resource wars" for years. In your opinion, what is the greatest current threat to EU energy security?

M. Klare – My greatest concern, internationally, is energy in general. For the United States and the other great powers it's oil, because oil is a commodity of greatest demand; it's the most valuable commodity in international commerce and it's also a commodity that's essential for military forces. [See Prof. Klare's The Pentagon v. Peak Oil] This is sometimes forgotten, as we don't think of oil in military terms – we think of computers and explosives – but its oil that drives the military forces of the world, especially the American military, which is highly mechanized. So it's a strategic commodity as well as an economic commodity. That's why I focus especially on oil.

A.M. – What would you say is driving the increase in oil prices? [Oil hit the $100 per barrel threshold the previous week]

M. Klare – Well that's a long discussion, because the price of oil is set by a combination of supply and demand and current international events…. You have rising world demand, and that's coming from the mature industrial powers – the U.S., the EU countries, Japan on one side and the rising industrial powers on the other, China and India. All of them want more oil at the same time. Meanwhile the supply side is becoming more complicated. You have historically been able to increase supply to match demand. That's no longer the case. The [oil] producing countries are no longer able to keep up with demand…. And then you have an immediate political situation which is very tenuous, very unstable. You have insurgency in Nigeria, which has shut down some oil [production]; you have the war in Iraq; you have difficulties in Venezuela; and on the horizon, especially, the threat of a war with Iran, which I think has contributed to the spike in prices. So you add all that up together and you have $100 a barrel oil.

A.M. – In November, 2007, the Executive Director of the IEA, Nobuo Tanaka…said, "The next ten years will be crucial for all countries….We need to act now to bring about a radical shift in investment in favour of cleaner, more efficient and more secure energy technologies." How do you think that the EU's goals measure against Director Tanaka's position? Are they too low, to high? [In March 2007 the EU Commission presented an Action Plan to reduce CO2 emissions by 20%, increase the share of renewable energy to 20% and raise energy efficiency by 20% by the year 2020]

M. Klare – Well first of all the problem is that the EU is just a small part of the world's energy equation, and it will be a diminishing share of the world's energy equation because the United States and China are going to account for an ever-increasing share of the world's energy; especially China. China alone with exceed the EU. If it doesn't already, it will soon. And then you have India following in China's footsteps. So whatever the EU does – and I'm thrilled to hear that the EU is taking these great steps – but if China, India and the United States do not follow in the same path we're going to have tremendous problems in the years ahead. What the EU does is simply not enough. The problem is much bigger than that.

A.M. – So the measures that the EU is taking needs to be something that's done on a global scale?

M. Klare – Exactly. The EU, somehow, has got to have a foreign policy that stretches to the United States on one hand – the United States, alone, consumes one-fourth of the world's energy; far more than the EU does – and it also has to extend to China, India and other rising consumers of energy. Unless the EU is able to extend its initiatives in those directions it's not going to have the necessary impact on world energy behaviour.

A.M. – What chance do you see of the EU being able to convince its highly industrialized partners of this in anticipation of the end of the Kyoto Protocol?

M. Klare – By itself the EU does not have the power to do that. What the EU has to do is work with like-minded forces in those countries, with business interests, with environmentalists..., that share similar values and expectations that the EU has. There are people in the United States and in China that are concerned about global warming, about energy problems, that also want to make these changes. The EU has got to find allies in the United States and in the rising industrial powers and work with them to put pressure on the U.S. government and the Chinese government. It won't work otherwise.

A.M. – As a supplement to oil, how much potential do you see in biofuel development?

M. Klare – If you're looking at biofuels, you have to look at what kind of technology is used to produce them. If we're talking about existing technology to produce biofuels – in the United States we basically use the…corn kernels, the most valuable part of the corn plants - and there simply is no way in which you can produce enough fuel using this valuable part of the corn plant. Also the technology used is very energy intensive. The net gain in energy is very little, so there's no practical way to achieve a decisive breakthrough using existing biofuel technology.

I don't know how you produce it in the EU. Brazil, of course, uses sugarcane, which is a more efficient way of getting biofuel. You could use soy to get bio-diesel. But these technologies are simply not going to bring us to the target. We have to develop new technology to convert biomass into fuels, second-generation biofuels like Cellulosic ethanol, and at the rate we're going is not adequate to reach that objective.

A.M. – In regards to the EU, they're discussing importing biofuel crop products to make various types of biofuels. What effect to you think this will have on the world's food supply?

M. Klare – Well this is why I say that the existing technology for producing biofuels is simply not acceptable because, if you use current methods, so much land will have to be devoted to producing fuel that there will not be enough land available to produce food for the future world population. So unless we adopt alternative technologies for producing biofuels, we'll have mass starvation. So you have to make a massive investment in these second-generation biofuels if we're going to get to the fuel target without producing mass starvation.

A.M. – By some estimates, the EU will be importing 90% of its oil and 80% of its natural gas by 2030. In the wake of the 2006 Russia/Ukraine gas standoff, there was a lot of talk about diversifying supply from different regions of the world. Many of these regions are politically unstable and I'd like to go down a list of some of the places we're going to be expected to get these fossil fuels; if you could comment on the situation in each place. First of all Russia.

M. Klare – Well, it's going to be very hard for the EU to diversify away from Russia because Russia has such a powerful advantage in supplying natural gas to Europe.

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