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Petrocracy gives us too much gas
By Steve Lewis
slewis42@mscd.edu

“Green is the new red, white and blue,” wrote columnist Thomas Friedman in a forthright and passionate article entitled “The Power of Green” in the April 15 New York Times Magazine. By which he means that two seemingly disparate issues such as environmentalism and foreign policy are in fact closely connected and that sound environmental policies are not only sensible; they are patriotic.

With the climate change bandwagon now rolling merrily in the right direction and only the occasional maverick academic or Bush administration official still holding out, Friedman sets out the environmental disaster in the offing and the science that compels the world to make changes in our use of energy. What he also contends is that confronting our addiction to oil and weaning ourselves off it will have significant foreign policy benefits both for America and for the spread of democracy.

By “financing both sides in the war on terrorism” – firstly our military with tax dollars and then all manner of mayhem with our purchases of oil – Friedman says we are doubly stupid and he is right. With a barrel of oil nearing $70 and the U.S. unable to quench its thirst for the black gold, we are pouring untold riches into the coffers of some pretty unsavory characters and propping up regimes which are far from democratic.

Some glaring examples of this new “petrocracy” are our friends in Saudi Arabia, the corrupt House of Saud, who have bought off the fanatics within and directly financed terrorism without, the current genocidal regime in Sudan, our new enemy-du-jour Iran, everyone’s favorite anti-American Hugo Chavez – the list goes on and on. Friedman invokes what he calls the “First Law of Petropolitics,” which is that high oil prices allow bad people to hold onto power while low oil prices force those very same bad people to open up their countries and their societies by seeking foreign investment. There is a clear correlation between low oil prices and democratic progress. If we really want to spread democracy across the globe, (and do we, really?), then not buying oil is perhaps a more effective manner of doing it than trumped-up wars or forced globalization at the hands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

So no more red states and blue states – let’s go green states. Doing the right thing for the planet is also doing the right thing for the foreign masses yearning for freedom and doing the right thing for America’s place in the world. The world’s problems are clear for all to see. Friedman’s brand of green geopolitics is beyond seductive; it is common sense. But do we have the will to effect change or do we have a system in which our powers that be benefit from the oil and war circus? So take the bus, forget the plastic bags, but keep an eye on the Halliburton stock price.