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The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources Hardcover – March 13, 2012
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From Michael Klare, the renowned expert on natural resource issues, an invaluable account of a new and dangerous global competition
The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion―a crisis that goes beyond "peak oil" to encompass shortages of coal and uranium, copper and lithium, water and arable land. With all of the planet's easily accessible resource deposits rapidly approaching exhaustion, the desperate hunt for supplies has become a frenzy of extreme exploration, as governments and corporations rush to stake their claim in areas previously considered too dangerous and remote. The Race for What's Left takes us from the Arctic to war zones to deep ocean floors, from a Russian submarine planting the country's flag on the North Pole seabed to the large-scale buying up of African farmland by Saudi Arabia, China, and other food-importing nations.
As Klare explains, this invasion of the final frontiers carries grave consequences. With resource extraction growing more complex, the environmental risks are becoming increasingly severe; the Deepwater Horizon disaster is only a preview of the dangers to come. At the same time, the intense search for dwindling supplies is igniting new border disputes, raising the likelihood of military confrontation. Inevitably, if the scouring of the globe continues on its present path, many key resources that modern industry relies upon will disappear completely. The only way out, Klare argues, is to alter our consumption patterns altogether―a crucial task that will be the greatest challenge of the coming century.
Review
“Pulls no punches in describing what's dead ahead... Whether you're a hard-line climate-denying billionaire capitalist or a liberal-leaning environmentalist, you need to read Michael Klare's new Race For What's Left.” ―MarketWatch
“A first-rate, well-researched wake-up call... Klare has identified the problem in vivid detail.” ―The Christian Science Monitor
“An outstanding book―exhaustively researched, beautifully written, and convincingly argued.” ―History News Network
“In a sane world, we'd take the limits we are clearly reaching as a signal to reduce our fixation on growth and begin searching for new ways to live. Instead, as Michael Klare makes clear in this powerful book, the heads of our corporate empires have decided to rip apart the planet in one last burst of profiteering. If you want to understand the next decade, I fear you better read this book.” ―Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
“If you think oil is the only major thing we're running short of, think again. Michael Klare has long been farsighted about the many hazards of a resource-hungry world, and this crisp, authoritative survey does more than just show what the other dangers are. It also feels like a guidebook to wars to come.” ―Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost
“Michael Klare has written a gripping account of the world's great resource grab and its terrifying implications for the planet. Fortunately, he doesn't stop there but offers the world a way out through a ‘race to adapt.' A must read for anyone who wants to understand not only the challenge of our diminishing resources but also what we can do about it.” ―Elizabeth C. Economy, author of The River Runs Black
“Michael Klare is like a beacon shining into the dark and scary wilderness that our future has become. This is an indispensable book for anyone who wants to understand what reality requires of us in the years ahead.” ―James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency
“If Michael Klare cared more about his wallet than about humanity's welfare, he could have spent his career earning gazillions as a global trends adviser for Wall Street. Luckily for the rest of us, he chose people over profit. Now, for the mere price of a book, we all can benefit from Klare's razor-sharp analysis of where the world is heading--and how we can still change course.” ―Mark Hertsgaard, author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
“Michael Klare has done it again. In clear and compelling prose, The Race for What's Left shows how resource depletion is accelerating even more rapidly than originally suspected and how competition for scarce resources has intensified. The potential for conflict and environmental catastrophe is frightening. This book is vital for understanding the crossroads we face: either develop green technologies now or fight another round of devastating resource wars. Our future depends upon the choices we make right now.” ―Terry Lynn Karl, author of The Paradox of Plenty
About the Author
Michael T. Klare is the author of fourteen books, including Resource Wars and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A contributor to Current History, Foreign Affairs, and the Los Angeles Times, he is the defense correspondent for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMetropolitan Books
- Publication dateMarch 13, 2012
- Dimensions6.49 x 1.14 x 9.54 inches
- ISBN-100805091262
- ISBN-13978-0805091267
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- Publisher : Metropolitan Books; First Edition (March 13, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0805091262
- ISBN-13 : 978-0805091267
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.49 x 1.14 x 9.54 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,180,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,717 in Environmental Policy
- #3,359 in Globalization & Politics
- #6,198 in Environmental Economics (Books)
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Review of The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2012) by Katrin Marx
I was raised to love learning, science, and respectful mutual active listening. There is a sort of peace and a great, wonderful sense of achievement that comes from "coming together" to solutions or conclusions of arguments, as Plato's Socrates demonstrates. The world needs this sort of dialectic. Given the latest data on the catastrophically changing climate, and Klare's information on rare Earth metals and other things he "shows" we need, we can only survive now by means of this creative listening: not merely polls or studies, but listening to those who know (about the causes of, and ways to avoid the climate catastrophes looming ahead of us soon). Given that wars waste more resources than any other human effort, we need to invent enough peace to give us time to work together in the world for the new technologies we need. We need a completely different process-of ethical creativity, social action together, and alternatives to both the capitalist and the old Marxist political economies, instead of the purported "race for what's left," the title of Michael Klare's new book, so tauted by The Nation and its readers. It fails in its premises and its blind, basic thrust, though well-intended and, one presumes, hoping to help inform us so that we might avoid the wars that he "shows" will result.
The Gloom and Doom of Klare's book should not be as popular as it appears to be: As even Klare himself suggests at the end, on page 227 in "The Race to Adapt," PEACE and deciding NOT to race (for these toxic, Earth-killing oil and other mineral deposits he seems to value too much) should be our path. Why FOCUS on that which , we KNOW we are now addicted to, and most of which will (even if burned "cleanly") kill the planet? There is a very clear scientific consensus about fossil fuels and the coming complete global disaster: rising coastal water levels, dying oceans from excessive CO2 dissolved as Carbonic Acid. In addition, there is Methane from cattle farms and human wastes and landfills, which traps heat 33 times worse than CO2 does, not to mention agriculturally overused Oxides of Nitrogen which trap heat 300% more than CO2. It's no longer in doubt. Given these substances whose stable remains in Earth's atmosphere which will continue to trap heat and increase global warming and extreme climate events for at least the next hundred years, even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases soon, most crops will fail. Klare does acknowledge this. But he commits, then, the fallacy of "false cause," presuming it's the lack of the resources he suggests we will or should race for, that could, if we do not change course, cause this mass starvation and the death of most of the selfish, guilty, greedy human race. How will we "RACE" for more carbon-based fuel then, on empty stomachs and brains, and why would we decide to, if we were sane? We must refuse to race now while we can still think and while scarcity is not so extreme that we can still cooperate to make the needed changes. We must create a different race: to the Other Sources, but not merely in material "resources:" we need different sources in our moral grounding and our thinking about Ethics, Logic, imagination, and government.
The Unstated Premises: Klare assumes our "stockpiles" are nearing "wholesale Exhaustion." (p. 36). We are so distracted by Klare's details about such admittedly (currently) very useful things as Rare Earth Elements for military and commercial uses, or Lithium (for batteries, even for relatively "low tech" cell phones, etc.), that we fail to notice the basic premises on which the book is based. It is a mistake to think that the toxic "resources" studied in such depth and detail by Klare are "What's LEFT!" They are what we should put on lists to be AVOIDED and NEVER developed! I was very upset by the unstated underlying assumptions of "The Race for What's Left" - which commits classic and TRAGIC logical fallacies of "missing premise," `is' to `ought," and non-sequitur. Just because there ARE such toxins deeply buried, which some know how to mine and burn, is not a reason to BURN or USE them. We CAN find alternatives, and we CAN CONSERVE the 65% of all energy produced, that is completely WASTED! There is not much left of REASON and good logical thinking about "The Future," if it now exists as even a possibility beyond the year 2100.
One is compelled to ask, not "What's LEFT?!" as if we are greedy youngest siblings who have come too late for dinner, but rather, what I heard in German as a young University student in Hamburg, even as I nearly went hungry a few weeks, when my mother failed to send promised funds, ... "Was noch?" (What ELSE is there? What OTHER sources of what we think we need. I found some, and survived!) "What ELSE is there?" is the question we should ask, not how we could race to resources that are toxic. "What else is there?!" is what he means by "Adapt!" it seems. We need imagination, not just adaptation. "Adapt" to what, in a book that cites the Wall Street Journal more than Amory Lovins, and does not reference any environmental groups? We seem to be stuck with the deadly view that all Nature is a marketable "resource" for us humans, with few solutions, needing a basic "redirect" of our attitude and perspective to solve these problems, not just adaptation to shortages. We seem to say "we can't" when confronted with views of Earth as Source, her (not "our!") "resources" not merely of use value, but intrinsically sacred or valuable, even if left alone or not "exploited." But we "can't" sit still and meditate on this. We still think we must "race" after resources we believe we have a right to mine and use come what may. We "can't" stop! We therefore need someone, or a supportive group, to help us envision how things can be better, not stuck in this race.
Elementary school teachers with wisdom know this: I have heard one ask her students, "What would it be like if you DID know...?" something they had just said they didn't know or couldn't do. The students did come up with good answers then. The cognitive moral skill that is lacking is called, by researchers in ethics, "Moral Imagination," and it's of course crucial. There are other "cognitive" factors, or really objective, measurable and, with sufficient community and experience of real crisis or need, teachable skills in thinking, that we must teach, share,and develop together. We must challenge those who would "race" to toxic old sources of energy, and listen actively and carefully about needs versus wants, both as despairing individuals of our era and as communities that must rise to this occasion. We must collectively acknowledge the premise upon which any energy strategy rests: the CLEAR and truly indisputable facts (but easily "deniable" if we want to avoid the ethical stress needed to urge us onward), the data on ineluctable Human-Induced Climate Change and the complete predicted disasters of an unlivable planet, for humans and other living things we know.
One finds it hard to praise, or even re-read, the deterministic predictions and economic prophecies of this author, who claims to be involved in international relations programs, which presumably study the techniques of peace as well as the self-fulfilling prophecies of war. We have all been surprised by wholly new economic entities in recent decades, such as micro-finance for women-owned businesses, the massive collapse of corrupt mortgage finance and the housing bubble, etc. Why would these be any more certain than predictions of those who held the "too big to fail" assumptions?
Klare mentions climate change and global warming a respectable number of times in his Index, but gives it no serious or prolonged treatment or consideration by comparison with "new sources" of old, filthy oil, for instance. If is as if he let his older brothers in the oil business bully him into going along on their same old pattern of a deadly rampage in the night, in deliberate ignorance of alternative projects, friends, of more affirming and imaginative exploits than stealing, raping, plundering, spoiling, and degrading others just to prove "we" are somehow better. Klare's knowledge of all these "sources" of something we now know to be basically "bad" -for Earth and for us, -things that we only think we need, e.g., petroleum in various unacceptable forms and uses may be detailed, but it takes our attention from the details of empowering local people in each of these places, -- from the Arctic to Guinea and Gabon, ... to defend eco-systems free of pollution by this whole toxic, addictive process which leads this misguided "race." Instead of DOING, GETTING, RACING and thinking we need what we only want because of a deep sickness and addiction, we CAN work together to listen, CREATE, imagine, meditate, respect, mediate, care, and think and LIVE (survive!) ethically and globally. We need seminars and projects in Ethics and Logic even more than we may need Lithium batteries and the "Win/Win" that still permits such domineering corporate personhood in all its forms.
Think for once, human technology addicts! Did Plato "NEED" a cell phone? The Greeks did have a theory that the actual metals of the Earth mixed with human flesh and blood and determined who would be bright, and who dull, but they knew that the Good was not in these elements alone, or their material uses. The great enduring Greek philosophers, poets, and playwrights showed that the questions about what really makes happiness are more important than the material wants and superficial pleasures that may completely fill up and pollute our days and nights. What DO we (including the Earth we are a part of) need? A healthy Earth? And if we cannot "help" her, at least we ought not do further harm.
Instead of asking "What's LEFT" (for me, for us, egoistically and unethically) we need to ask "What ELSE is possible?" Is is striking that Klare does not mention other books of great relevance, if only to update their important, not totally outdated information: Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak, by Kenneth Deffeyes (NY: Hill and Wang, 2005) on Hubbert's Curve (is it meaningless now that oil's high price and lack of effective taxation make the dirtiest, most expensive oil "worthwhile" and permissible to process) and Energy Beyond Oil by Paul Mobbs, (Leicester, UK: Matador, 2005), or Paul Roberts' The End of Oil (2004) and many others with positive project ideas. His sources are standard media sites, the NRC (surely not an objective observer regarding energy policy), various websites including BP propaganda, and many other oil and gas industry publications. One wonders truly how he intended to find the truth and preserve the sciences from raw exploitation and misuse by groups with vested interests and media ignorance linked with commercial and political bias in almost every mainstream media source.
What Klare properly calls "the race to adapt" by finding the new solutions he doesn't really focus on is in fact starting now, led by (among so many others worthy of note) people he does mention, such as Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, and "Green" thinkers in Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, and China. But we won't have the solutions in place, together, on Planet Earth, without a priority on Ethics, Logic, and developing Imagination. We must continue to monitor the route of the race, know where we start from, and what we, inextricably Earthlings, really need.
See, for the predictions based on science that may even be underestimating how fast and total the Earth's mass extinction and complete change of climate and habitability will happen, given recent increases in all areas I visited during the past month in the US, all of which were ten degrees hotter than normal and experiencing DROUGHT (followed in some cases by extreme flooding and storm damage, thus taking out even more of the trees that generally help us take up CO2 and resist erosion.) For more information on the immediate climate catastrophes we face, and our ignoring at our imminent peril, see recent articles by David Orr, June 2012, and the following:
The scientific publication: June 2012 Nature article costs $32 to read [...]
Summary orally in [...]
[...]
MOST APPALLINGLY ABSENT from Public Discourse Currently, and Klare's Basic Premises:
A study by group of scientists from five nations has shown that the earth is rapidly approaching a "tipping point" of catastrophic and irreversible global environmental upheaval. The research shows a combination of population growth, climate change, habitat and species extinction, and the over exploitation of energy resources threaten to cause major destructive changes to the earth similar to those not seen since the end of the last ice age, close to 14,000 years ago. Led by Anthony Barnosky, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, the report appears in the June 7 issue of the journal, Nature. Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology involves more than 100 UC Berkeley scientists from a wide range of disciplines. But this time, it's "fire" and ice "will not suffice!" to paraphrase Robert Frost the poet. We are truly living in times of terrifying future scenarios, now. Read this book, but also read the climate catastrophe items above, and consider if we haven't missed something. Then contact everyone you know with any power, local, state, county, and federal: demand that we have an immediate moratorium on coal and tarsands oil, fracking, and major Methane REcapture innovations funding! IMMEDIATELY, as "after the elections" will be, in all likelihood, too late to save any meaningful, habitable future, given the facts about the absolute seriousness of the threat of rapid climate change, facts we had formerly underestimated.
The author's conclusion is bleak with a ray of light. A combination of technology and behavior change is direly needed. The twist is the fact that the technology necessary to save us is dependent on those very same scarce resources he warns us about in his book.
The book is written in a rather easy to read textbook style, and very clealy depicts the necessary projections from our current dependance on non-renewable resources.
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Then there's about four pages where he offers his 'solution': renewable energy.
At this point there is still quarter of the book left to read, and you are expecting him to put some meat on the bones of the framework he has laid out for the reader. Surely now the book will really get interesting. Where is all this going to lead? What is the future for mankind? But no! The book ends there. Fully a quarter of the book, the final 70 pages are taken up with notes and references.
He has spent the whole book telling us we can't carry on growing our population and consuming all the resources, because eventually we'll run out of not only energy, but also something even more critical and which certainly cannot be replaced with renewable resources: agricultural land (and living space). But he never once considers that the problem is caused by there being too many people, and the solution isn't merely to switch to renewable energy sources (although undoubtedly, a not only desirable step but one which we will eventually have no choice about), but to control our numbers! Should we grasp the nettle and do it now, when it would be challenging but doable, gradually, over time? Or should we wait for nature to enforce harsh limits on our numbers by one day finding that the planet can't produce enough food for 10 or 12 or 15 billion people? But he never asks this question, nor offers any solutions, commentary or analysis.
The book quickly becomes monotonous, offers no particular insight and I did not find it of much value.


