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| Volume XIV, Spring 2007, Number 1 |
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ABSTRACT
Rx for "Oil Addiction": The Middle East And Energy Security
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| Jan H. Kalicki |
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Mr. Kalicki is a former counselor to the U.S. Department of Commerce and co-chair of the US-GCC Economic Dialogue. He is co-editor (with David Goldwyn) of Energy & Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy (Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press). This article is based on speeches delivered at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.
For all the talk about ending the "oil addiction" and specifically dependence on Middle East oil, the world maintains a growing need for both. Since the topics of energy and the Middle East are so fraught with ideology and emotion, it helps even more than usual to start with a few facts. Some of these may be inconvenient, but they are true and they must be reckoned with.
The first is that the world's total annual energy consumption - oil, gas, coal, nuclear and renewables -Optimistically has increased from 104 billion barrels of oil equivalent in 1970 to 192 billion barrels of oil equivalent in 2000, and is projected to increase to 338 billion barrels by 2030. It is the flip side of more people, more development, and more consumption: it can be managed but it cannot be stopped.
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