Review Rising Power Shrinking Planet

| Quarterly Paper in World History II |

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Rising powers, shrinking planet |

The New Geopolitics of Energy

Michae T. KlareSubmitted by:Charmaine Faye A. VelasquezII-22 BSE Social Science |

Summary:

Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet surveys the energy-driven dynamic that is reconfiguring the international landscape: Russia, the battered Cold War loser, is now the arrogant broker of Eurasian energy, and the United States, once the world’s superpower, must now compete with the emerging "Chindia" juggernaut for finite and diminishing resources. Forecasting a future of surprising new alliances and explosive danger, Michael T. Klare, the top expert on resource geopolitics, argues that the only route to survival in our radically altered world lies through international cooperation.

‘Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet confer how scarce energy is creating a new world order’, the author takes a broad look at who has resources and who wants them. There are essentially four main resource pools. A number of competing powers are engaged in all of them, or desperately seeking to be engaged in them, knowing that their economies rely on the continued supply of oil and gas, as well as uranium, copper and other minerals. Guaranteeing those supplies is becoming increasingly difficult.

Those four key regions are the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait), the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Kazahkstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekhistan), Africa (Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, Libya, Sudan), and Russia’s vast gas fields, which hold 26% of the world’s gas.

Competing for the oil and gas are the US, the EU, Russia, Japan, and the increasingly thirsty India and China, with the rest of the world hoping to pick up some scraps along the way. The big players are the oil companies that we know as household names, Exxon, Shell, BP, Total and so on, but also the hugely powerful national oil companies: Russia’s Gazprom and Rosneft, only recently maneuvered back out of the hands of the...