[url=http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-08/phillips-energy-balance-shifting/4508512]Fracking shifts the global power balance[/url]
By ABC’s Sara Phillips
As fracking allows the US to tap into its own energy resources the global politics which has historically been heavily influenced by oil supplies will be dramatically altered writes Sara Phillips.
A rough estimate from Brown University of the cost to the American people of the “War on Terror” is a staggering $US4 trillion.
The war nominally against radical Islamic ideology is also widely seen as the US attempting to gain a strategic foothold in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. With a price tag of $4 trillion it was clearly a much-valued foothold for the superpower.
Thomas Friedman in his book Hot Flat and Crowded laments the time money and energy spent securing this precarious perch in the tumultuous Middle East in the name of oil.
[O]ur oil addition is not just changing the climate system; it is also changing the international system… First and most important through our energy purchases we are helping to strengthen the most intolerant anti-modern anti-Western anti-women’s rights and antipluralistic strain of Islam -….
Second our oil addition is helping to finance a reversal of the democratic trends in Russia Latin American and elsewhere that were set in motion by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism…I call this phenomenon ‘the First Law of Petropolitics’: As the price of oil goes up the pace of freedom goes down…
However German magazine Der Spiegel this week pointed out how the global politics that have unfolded as a result of the US strategic foothold may be all about to change because of fracking.
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