Bill, At 10:05 17/09/02 -0400, you wrote: <<<< I honestly believe that this process happens when population demand on resources is such that, to survive, one country needs to control the resources of another. We are in an end-stage process described so well by Jeremy Rifkin in Entropy. >>>>
If, by the above, you mean competition between users of resources (chiefly oil and gas -- the energistic facilitator of all other resources), I'm not so sure. There is certainly great inequality of consumption between nations but most of the world doesn't yet have the technologies or economic structures which could absorb many resources. The biggest rival to America in its future needs for Middle East oil and gas, China, still has quite modest requirements. Although the theoretical end is in sight for oil and gas (tailing off from about 2030 onwards*) this doesn't yet enter much into the calculations of business and certainly not of politicians with even shorter time scales. (*However, the tailing-off will be a great deal more protracted than the rapidity of the take-up between 1950 and now. In other words the supply curve is very assymmetric.) The competition at present is rather between producers. It's still a buyers' market even though OPEC, and particularly Saudi Arabia as its biggest producer, has a degree of control and can manipulate the price of oil within quite large margins. From the political point of view the royal family of Saudi Arabia is far more dependent on being able to supply a large and dependable export market (America) than America is dependent on SA imports, large though they are at present. Any significant decrease in SA imports into America would cause huge economic problems for America but it would probably be able to scramble around and make up the supply within three or four years -- it wouldn't be the end of the American political system. But, for the Saudi Arabian royal family, any further decreases in their ability to make welfare payments to their large numbers of unemployed (particularly young men) and other state supports, would certainly bring about the end of their autocracy forever, and quite possibly bring about the sort of long-term civil wars that already characterise something like 20 or 30 countries around the world. If we're at Jeremy Rifkin's end-stage, then I think we're at the very beginnings of it. It will take at least a century to play itself through. Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
