Customer Reviews

Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy (Woodrow Wilson Center Press)

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Patrick Clawson's statements ring true, Energy and Security provides a definitive account of the Washington consensus on the energy-security nexus. It argues that energy policy of the last half century has produced excessive dependence on unstable and repressive governments, has failed to redress the environmental consequences of energy consumption, and has failed to invest adequately in technology that would reduce strategic vulnerability and environmental degradation.

It sounds convincing--until one asks the question of cost. The last fifty years have also been a period of unprecedented global prosperity, and low-cost energy was no small part of the reason. In that time, energy consumption has exploded, as electricity has been brought to billions, and transporting goods and people across vast distances has become commonplace. Those who would change direction on energy policy should acknowledge that thirty years ago, in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s, the best and brightest made many of the same recommendations repeated here, and the result was a waste of tens of billions of dollars on inappropriate technologies and complicated regulatory schemes. It is disheartening to see such prominent experts so quick to skip over the errors of the past and so little interested in the dollars-and-cents implications of their recommendations.

That said, the twenty-two essays have much useful information and many important insights. The globe is covered in twelve essays grouped in four regions with a commentary section for each: Russia, the Caspian, and European gas; the Persian Gulf, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa; China, Japan, and southeast Asia; and North America, South America, and the North Atlantic (i.e., North Sea). A major theme is that energy resources are abundant--few serious experts have much patience for resource pessimism so often trotted out by certain engineers and environmentalists--but that there are serious questions about the framework of government policies for making use of those resources.

Another set of essays paints the global framework, such as the role of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the International Energy Agency, and commodity exchanges. The essays in the final section look at public policy issues such as climate protection, environmental sustainability, technology development, and strategic reserves. The authors do an excellent job of describing the issues as seen in Washington, including analysis of the debates about what should be government policies. That is a welcome contrast to the shrill tone and extreme positions staked out by many authors addressing these matters.

It is the fate of any topic that as its importance rises in the public domain, the quality of the debate on it decreases almost proportionally. Energy security has not escaped this rule. As the intuitive grasp on energy security becomes more complicated, the prescriptions to solve it become simpler and sillier. The purpose of this volume is to navigate through the complicated subject of energy security with solemnity and seriousness.

In doing so, it begins, sensibly, from refuting the more obscene and far-fetched ideas out there on how to deal with America's energy security. It then outlines the various features of economy, technology, and geopolitics that make up America's energy security map and proceeds to explain how they can be integrated in a larger foreign and domestic policy framework.

What emerges from this volume is a double sense: the first is that a topic as complex as energy security can be reasonably broken down to its individual components (in fact, it is obvious in the text why it is necessary to do so). The second is that enhancing America's energy security involves serious tradeoffs in domestic and foreign policy-tradeoffs that politicians seem unwilling to accept as necessary much less adopt as policy.

To contrast the hoopla out there on energy security, this tome offers both a good start and a reasonable advancement on the field. Anyone who wants to think about energy security in a sensible, systematic and comprehensive sense has to become acquainted with this book.

This is a wide ranging and well thought out discussion on contemporary issues in US energy security, comnprehensively covering many aspects of hydrocarbon politics. The book puts into perspective that prices at the petrol pump are more than simply politicians in Washington who should be 'doing something' about oil prices, but rather that the problem is a whole raft of interconnected global political issues. This discussion clearly highlights the current heavy reliance that the US has on many, unstable third world nations. This fact in itself is quite worring.

One area where I felt that the book could have been a little more in-depth was around solutions to the energy security issue, and in particular the use and development of alternative energy supplies or other strategies for reducing the reliance upon hydrocarbons. There are short chapters on both alternative energy and on the environmental problems of oil, both of which likely to become much bigger over the next decade or so. As the book rightly points out, however, there is going to be no short term solution and much of the US foreign policy for the next decade or so is going to be driven by protecting its foreign oil supplies.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in current global issues in energy security.

Bravo to the editors and writers of this very timely policy treatise discussing the very urgent need for the US to realign its foreign policy to secure our future. A must read.

required reading as background history of oil to understand the future we need to understand the past to the best of our abilities

By my reckoning, this book is a wordy, round-about, flawed argument for exploitation of natural gas to substitute for rapidly depleting oil reserves. After peeling away the accolades, one sees that the authors are apologists for the American way of life, but it is strange that they don't seem to come to grips with the fact that North America has long since peaked in natural gas. (Google Oil Crisis and check the gas.) Furthermore, transporting natural gas over large distances is extremely inefficient and sustains US dependency on foreign energy sources, contradicting the authors' stated objectives.

If US security is the goal, then promoting a home-grown solution is the only sensible way forward. Solar and wind energy in mass production will be far more economical and require far less energy to deploy in comparison with fossil fuels and nuclear power.