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Is It Ethical to Wage War Over Oil?

Stanford Professor Amos Nur expresses concern about the consequences of competing with countries such as China for oil.

The decision to go to war over oil is one of the greatest ethical decisions a country can make. That's at least according to Amos Nur, Stanford geophysics professor emeritus, who spoke at the final session of this year’s Ethics at Noon series Friday.

Nur said that nations go to war for perceived existential threats, which are often murky. In World War II, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a desperate drive toward the Caspian Sea oilfields near Baku and stormed across North Africa in a quest for Middle East oil. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in order to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet and have free access to oil from Sumatra.

He estimates that the energy in a barrel of oil is equal to 10 men working 48 hours a week for an entire year.

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Worldwide oil consumption has grown to 32 billions barrels per year. The amount consumed by a nation is proportional to its per capita income. As our world population grows—it’s now close to 7 billion people—the demand for energy will also grow. Shell Oil predicts that by 2060, our energy usage will be three times what it is today. Nur believes that there will be no growth in energy from fossil fuels; the growth will have to come from biomass, geothermal, nuclear, solar, wind and other alternatives.

Nur referred to the work of geophysicist M. King Hubbert, who in 1956 predicted that for any geographic area, from an oilfield to the planet as a whole, the rate of petroleum production would resemble a bell curve. Nur showed how major oil fields have been depleted after about 30 years of production.

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Hubbert’s predictions have been accurate, and in 1970, the United States began to import large quantities of oil. By 1995, we were consuming more oil than we were discovering, and now we get only a third of our oil from domestic sources.

Nur called the 1991 Gulf War the first “skirmish” over oil, because Iraq tried to annex Kuwait and have combined oil reserves that would rival Saudi Arabia’s 259 billion barrels.

The second skirmish over oil occurred on 9/11, according to political scientist Michael T. Klare, who in 2001 wrote that, “Osama bin Laden's ultimate objectives include the imposition of a new Saudi government, which in turn would control the single most valuable geopolitical prize on the face of the earth: Saudi Arabia's vast oil deposits.”

Nur regards the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as the third skirmish over oil, because to then-Vice President Dick Cheney, our oil shortfall was an existential threat. He wonders if Iran, Venezuela, Russia or Libya could be next.

Nur is concerned that the real problem could be countries with whom we’re competing in the market for imported oil, especially in the developing world. China started importing oil in 1993 and continues to deal with all possible suppliers including Iran. Since 2004, China has been the world’s second-largest oil consumer.

”Conflict with China could erupt into World War III,” Nur said.

He quoted Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley, who described energy as the “single most critical challenge facing humanity in this century.”

We have to invest $500 billion in energy research, Nur said at the conclusion of the talk, but we’re investing only a 10th of that.

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