The prolific Michael Klare has produced another book -- "The Race for What's Left" -- addressing the dangers we will face in the coming years, dangers which express our strong dependence on the earth and its material abundance along with our inability to create global political institutions which secure peace and prosperity. It is worthy read as are Klare's previous books on this subject. In his latest, he addresses a few simple theses:
1. The demand for natural resources will continue to grow
2. The supply of these resources will continue to shrink
3. The search for new sources of hydrocarbons, common and uncommon minerals, water and arable land will intensify over time and likely will generate resources wars.
In a nutshell, we are now passing from an "easy-resource world" to a "hard-resource world." This claim encapsulates a few disturbing facts: Existing oil wells no longer produce at the rate they once had and once productive mines have become stingy. These key resources have peaked or will peak soon, and this fact will drive commerce in the future. More importantly, fallow and potentially productive farm land has become scarce in various locales due to overuse, desertification, urbanization and other destructive forms of consumption. We can expect food shortages to intensify as time passes. Furthermore, increasing demand will augment this `natural' scarcity. Brazil, Russia, India and China are industrializing (or reindustrializing in Russia's case). Other countries have also taken off. Many are trying to develop their productive capacity and their natural resources. The industries in many of these countries are now competitive in the global market and will consume a growing share of the planet's raw goods. They will produce finished or near-to-finished goods, some of which will be shipped abroad and some of which will supply their local `haves' with the commodities of a `modern' consumer culture. Consumer demand, the system of production it drives and the quest for profits will thus continuously diminish the quantity of available raw materials. These goods are finite in number and, in some cases, lack an adequate substitute. Impelled by local and global demand as well as by the scarcity of the materials needed to compete, countries and firms will intensify their search for new sources of these increasingly scarce resources. Finding and using these goods will be neither easy nor cheap. We can expect competition for these resources to be intense.
This, therefore, is the race for what's left: We have consumed so much of the planet's resources that we can only renew our supply of these materials by finding new sources, mostly in inhospitable locales. We can also expect these new sources to be either less productive than the sources they replace or made to produce only with more effort, greater risks and higher costs. Arctic drilling and mining provide the exemplary cases of this problem. They are not the only cases, however. Worst of all, the race for what's left can never end given the nature of a modern and global economic system. Resource use today necessarily generates the scarcity of tomorrow.
Klare, oddly enough, gives little attention to one resource now in decline: An environment fit for human habitation. Global warming can and will likely become a species threat. Industrial waste befouls the land, water and atmosphere. A proud humankind may not survive the externalities generated by its supposed achievements. Of course, the global warming catastrophe has already begun, and the task humans must complete to survive goes well beyond taking measures that will ensure we avoid that dire situation. There is no magic bullet solution to this situation. The task instead requires pulling on the brake handle before it becomes too late to save ourselves and the world we have long inhabited.
It may have been inevitable that "The Race for What's Left' will not inspire hope for the future. The race is driven by the need to conserve the industrial method of production, techniques and resource usage which cause global warming and resource depletion. The sense I got from reading Klare's book is that we can expect national states to seek to secure the resources they need before it is too late to do so, too late to keep pace in a increasingly ruthless world economic system. Capitalist firms, on the other hand, will continue to seek out profitable uses for their technological capabilities and, of course, their property in general. The fortunate ones may take superprofits from their efforts, using resource scarcity to extract rents from the consumers of their goods. The stakes for these firms are very high and will increase in the future since countries and firms that fail to compete in the emerging markets can end in social disintegration, subjugation and bankruptcy because of their failure. Path dependent development entails confronting a socio-political rigidity that can prove fatal. Why fatal? At present, the world devotes little to the effort to pull on the brake handle, to radically alter the direction of material progress. Rather, it devotes treasure and blood reproducing the disaster.
The situation grows increasingly dire, and hopes for the future depend upon the human capacity for reasonable thought and action as well as for generating solidarity among humanity's diverse parts. In this situation -- yoked as we are to techniques and social forms which cannot sustain themselves -- gaining hope for the future entails confronting the hopelessness of our very modern predicament.
I gave "Race for What's Left" four stars. It is an accessible, well-researched and timely intervention into the world public sphere. I deducted a star because it is not the definitive work on the subject, although I should state that Klare clearly did not mean it to be such.
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