Petrotyranny

By John Bacher and David Suzuki

High gas prices aren’t the end of the world- but they may be the beginning of the end. This, at least, is the feeling of many who shudder at the staggering power oil-rich countries have over the world’s political affairs.

In Petrotyranny, John Bacher uncovers the frightening facts of the world’s oil industry. He reveals that the worst dictatorships control six times the reserves that are under democratic control, and explores the potential for global conflict that exists as the demand for energy increases and the oil supply decreases. What kind of power will these dictatorships possess in the future? How many wars will be fought over the ever-shrinking supply of oil?

Bacher takes an optimistic approach, viewing the problem as a challenge: the world’s democracies need to devise a creative response to avoid the looming crisis. That is, start replacing fossil-fuel burning with renewable energy - and start the process now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Sep 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9781459719682

John Bacher

John Bacher received his Ph.D. in History from McMaster University in 1985, and has taught at McMaster and the University of Toronto. A co-author of Get a Life: An Environmentalist's Guide to Better Living, Bacher is a passionate supporter of environmental preservation.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Oil consumption is seen by most citizens of affluent democracies as an innocent, almost wholesome activity. Although oil sometimes receives negative attention, as it did in the Gulf War and following the Exxon Valdez disaster, burning oil as fuel is seldom viewed as one of the deadly sins. Smoking, littering and illegal drug use all receive much more public censure than filling up the tank. Although movements for the smoke-free workplace are growing, few have lobbied for the creation of analogous oil-free zones.

Many of the reasons for the apparent innocence of oil are understandable, even admirable. In the densely populated areas of prosperous and democratic Japan, Europe and North America, forest cover increased as oil replaced wood-burning stoves. Even the familiar horrors of oil, such as tarred sea birds and blazing oil wells, are commonly viewed as mild compared to older dangers of coal and the newer hazards of nuclear power.

US theorist Lewis Mumford spoke eloquently and passionately of the horrors of the Paleotechnic age when coal was the world’s dominant energy source. The perils of coal were and remain quite real. Coal is the most objectionable fossil fuel contributing to global warming. Burning coal causes acid rain and mining it poisons streams. Coal creates a deadly nightmare of dangers for workers and their communities. These include collapsing mineshafts and landslides that can bury schools and villages.

The use of oil is generally associated with progress and comfort. Despite traffic jams, breakdowns or risky incidents, driving is commonly viewed as a pleasurable activity. Even the luxurious carriages of the Victorian elite fail to inspire a similar promise of satisfaction. The days of the horse and buggy, although within the lifespan of most of our grandparents, appear as remote as the Middle Ages. The idea of being met by a carriage at a train station, for a week-end trip to the summer cottage, seems equally remote.

Nearly every person who owns a private means of oil-assisted transport treasures the sense of freedom that comes from these powerful possessions. The humblest motor scooter gives options that surpass the fastest chariot or stagecoach of days gone by.

Few appreciate that the most wasteful forms of oil consumption, such as driving a massive sports utility vehicle to fetch a carton of milk during a smog alert, do harm comparable to smoking in a crowded public place. Letting car engines idle or using petroleum-powered lawnmowers can contribute to fatal illnesses in heavily polluted cities, yet they are not viewed as crimes comparable to assault. Such offensive actions could be ended by using a hand-powered lawnmower, or walking to the nearest store.

This book highlights the remarkable success in curbing oil consumption in democracies such as Taiwan, Japan, Costa Rica, Denmark and the Netherlands. These examples illustrate how reducing oil consumption can be relatively painless. Restrictions that would push society backward into an unacceptable past mode of living are unnecessary.

The popular association of oil consumption with comfort has been greatly reinforced by land-use planning in North America, which has long been based on the assumption that private transport is an inevitable and dominant fact of life. Even the great iconoclast Lewis Mumford boasted that his model town was designed for the car. The most harmful manner in which incentives have been built into urban form to encourage cars and motorcycles is single-purpose land-use zoning. Zoning to keep polluting, coal-burning factories away from residential neighbourhoods assists the goals of public health and safety. However, the public good is not served by keeping apart retail services and housing. With suburban tracts segregated from shopping centres, the task of getting a loaf of bread becomes an athletic challenge for those without private transport, particularly the elderly. As several chapters illustrate, this is not the way that land-use planning and transportation issues are handled in Copenhagen, Bologna, Amsterdam, or Curitiba, Brazil.

In dictatorships, oil’s environmental impacts cannot be effectively regulated by legislated standards. For example, traffic safety is difficult to achieve. Tyrannies invariably have high accident and death rates. This is a theme of Chapter Three, which shows how oil consumption presents most of humanity with a cruel illusion.

Laws to protect forests and wildlife and to prevent pollution may exist in dictatorships, but they are less well enforced than in democracies. Attempts to circumvent these laws by corruption are less subject to public sanctions in dictatorships. Here there are not the pressures of a free press and possible governmental defeat in multi-party elections. Thus, environmental problems associated with oil, such as gas flaring and leaking pipelines, are especially severe in countries whose citizens are denied basic human rights.

Oil has its most tragic consequences in connection with dictatorships. Oil wealth is the biggest single factor sustaining these tyrannies. Oil profits’ aid to repression also makes them a principal cause of war. This book shows how, by sustaining dictatorship, oil wealth goes hand in hand with forest destruction and the loss of biodiversity in much of the world.

Most of the planning and expenditure for wars involves internal conflict within oil-rich states, or possible wars between dictatorships over disputed oil resources. This problem is examined for a number of countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Indonesia, the two Congos, Chad, Cameroon, Angola and every petroleum-producing state in the Middle East.

This book illustrates how the deadly trinity of oil, war and dictatorship presents the greatest challenge to humanity at the start of the new millennium. Fortunately, with conservation, and by replacing fossil fuels and nuclear energy with renewables, it is possible to foster instead a holy trinity of peace, human rights and environmental sustainability.

Security threats to democracies have been the subject of considerable debate, although not the focus of writers on the petroleum industry, such as Daniel Yergin, author of the provocative history of that industry, The Prize. The debates have tended to be grouped into two camps of influential writers: the strategic studies analysts dominated by the towering figure of Samuel Huntington through his book, The Clash of Civilizations; and the other group stressing the destabilizing effects of environmental scarcity, highlighted in the innovative writings of University of Toronto Peace Studies Professor Tad Homer-Dixon, and the controversial American journalist Robert Kaplan.

Both the writings on the clash of civilizations and those on resource scarcity tend to overlook the great magnitude of the problems caused by petrotyranny. In particular, Huntington’s stress on Islam as a barrier to democracy ignores how oil wealth in these same states has been a buttress to dictatorship. Most writings on resource depletion ignore the role of dictatorships in degrading the environment.

Today nearly all environmental groups that are concerned about climate change and promote sustainable energy recognize the need to stop coal and oil burning in the long term. Since these fuels pollute in the short and medium term, society must without delay begin the change to dependence on renewables.

The urgency of dealing with climate change has brought about a renewed interest in nuclear energy in some circles. However, the hazards of nuclear power, linked to weaponry that has the potential to destroy all human life with a push of a button, are ominous. The catastrophe of Chernobyl dwarfs the worst disasters connected with petroleum.

This book highlights a new urgency to move away from fossil fuels by clarifying the threats of petrotyranny and war. The challenge of achieving a democratic peace is thus connected to global energy policies everywhere, which are detailed in all the chapters dealing with dictatorship.

The transition to an oil-free, democratic world is required to prevent a holocaust of species extinctions, horrific military expenditures and prolonged wars. Dictatorships can be challenged through courageous nonviolent actions. Such action saw the Berlin Wall come down and stopped a coup by communist hardliners against the freedom movement in the USSR. Similar nonviolent democratic oppositions have toppled tyrannies from South Africa to the Philippines.

In the world’s remaining dictatorships and semi-democracies, nonviolent human rights activists continue bravely to advance the cause of freedom. We can help these heroic efforts by reducing the flow of oil income to their oppressors.

CHAPTER TWO

HOW OIL SUSTAINS DICTATORSHIP

Oil is critical to the support of dictatorships since it provides the most abundant form of wealth for a repressive government — income that does not have to be obtained through taxation. The collection of taxes generally compels a higher degree of consent from citizens than a misappropriation of oil rents when big money is needed for the repressive apparatus of despotism.

While repression is in retreat in the post-Cold-War world, the remaining havens of dictatorship are concentrated in oil-rich states, many of which export war and repression beyond their borders. Such mischief is encouraged by the two Congos, the tiny but oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, Angola and almost every oil-producing state in the Middle East.

Semi-democracies such as Mexico, Colombia, Russia and Peru are helped in their repressive power by their oil exports. Russia can support allies such as Yugoslavia through its revenues from oil exports. Mexico’s role as a reliable oil producer causes it to receive billions in bailouts from the United States in place of the economic sanctions that are imposed on other human-rights abusers.

THE SUPEROIL DICTATORSHIPS

The US superpower is frequently challenged by the phenomenon of the superoil dictatorships — the five Persian Gulf states each having more than 70 billion barrels of oil. They are: The United Arab Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Of these only Kuwait is rated by the US human-rights group Freedom House as partially free. The rest are ranked as not free, the designation given by Freedom House for absolute dictatorships.

The impartiality of Freedom House, an American human-rights organization, is shown by its consistently low ranking for Saudi Arabia despite its being a close US ally. The Saudi reserves of 258 billion barrels amount to more than double those of any other superoil dictatorship, or of any other country.

Since Freedom House began its annual national rankings for political rights and civil liberties in 1955, Saudi Arabia has consistently been given the worst ratings. One of its closest allies in the pro-US Gulf Cooperation Council, The United Arab Emirates, another oil superpower, is also rated by Freedom House as not free [1].

Freedom House recognizes that there are different degrees of repression among dictatorships. It has a ranking scale of freedom for the world’s states, with separate categories for both political rights and civil liberties. Full democracies are ranked at one to three, partially free states at four to five, and dictatorships or not-free states at six to seven.

There are 16 states currently ranked as the worst dictatorships, with ratings of seven in both civil liberties and political rights. Among these 16 are some of the world’s biggest oil producers including Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Significant oil producers in the rogue’s gallery of despotic states include Equatorial Guinea, China, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Syria, Libya, and Myanmar (formerly Burma). Several other states without exploited petroleum reserves that are among the most repressive dictatorships, most notably North Korea and Afghanistan, receive substantial economic assistance from oil-rich states. Out of the said 16 worst countries only four are not tied to the vortex of oil-financed oppression.

The human-rights situation is disastrous in Iraq. Its oil reserves, like those of its enemy, Iran, are estimated to be 100 billion barrels [2].

The superoil dictatorships are sharply divided on issues of religion, alliance, language and ideology. A common feature is the absence of any independent labour movement.

Free labour movements have been critical in crushing despotism from Poland to South Africa. Oil wealth now keeps such movements out of the Persian Gulf, where labour organizing died out in the late 1970s. At that time a flood of money was obtained from the sudden price increases achieved by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). This made it possible for the superoil states to buy off labour demands without recognizing the democratizing principles of free collective bargaining [3].

In addition to providing a carrot, oil wealth gives the superoil states a big stick, used with special severity against groups in the state not represented in their country’s ruling elite. These states have maintained the most wide-ranging religious persecution of the post-Cold-War period, except for Myanmar. All these tyrannies continue to practise capital punishment and use torture. Some make mutilations part of normal sentencing.

Saudi Arabia’s religious intolerance is a product of the dictatorship’s historic roots in an alliance between the ruling Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam. This has resulted in religious persecution that falls harshly on Christians and Shiite Muslims. Christians are forbidden to wear crosses, read a Bible in public, or utter non-Islamic prayers. Religious police search for clandestine church services. In December 1992 two Christian Filipino nationals were arrested for preaching on Christmas Day. Because of their foreign nationality, their deaths sentences were commuted, and they were deported [4].

Iraq’s secular Arab nationalist government has brutally relocated many Shiite civilians and driven thousands into exile. Bans on Shiite ceremonies and books have been imposed. Authorities have desecrated the faith’s most holy shrines [5].

Since its revolution in 1978, Iran’s Shiite theocracy has exhibited extreme repression against religious minorities. Amnesty International estimates that 200 Baha’is have been executed. Authorities rarely grant approval for the publication of Christian texts. Islamic knowledge is required for admission to universities and the civil service [6].

Dissidents in the superoil states are threatened by the world’s most ruthless security services. In Iran, executions of 100 to 200 persons per year for political reasons have been the norm since the revolution. Saudi Arabia employs one of the most blood-stained judicial systems. In 1997, it executed 123 persons. Police routinely torture detainees to extract confessions. The UN has documented the disappearance of 16,000 Iraqi civilians in recent years. Iraqi women are subjected to the worst terror in the world: men are granted immunity for killing female relations involved in alleged acts of vice [7].

OIL, NOT SPIRITUAL CULTURE, HAS BLOCKED THE SPREAD OF FREEDOM

Many of the religious faiths have been blamed for delays in the advance of liberty since the end of the Cold War. American strategic studies analyst, Samuel Huntington, has vilified Islam, while Robert Kaplan described animism as the curse of Africa.

Islamic states suffer not from their ancient and honourable spiritual cultures but from the curse of oil. Only Mali is now recognized by Freedom House as fully democratic among Islamic majority states. It is a country that lacks oil. Except for Kuwait, all the Islamic states that export oil are rated as not free.

There are also several Islamic majority semi-democracies that lack oil — Albania, Bosnia, Bangladesh, the Kyrgyz Republic and Turkey. They all have better democratic ratings than Kuwait, the most liberal Islamic-majority state that exports oil. In Albania and Bangladesh, governments have been peacefully changed through free elections.

In the vanguard of freedom in many Islamic nations there have been many heroic champions of democracy. Freedom, for instance, came to oilless Bangladesh in 1990. This democratic restoration took place after a 15-year old military dictatorship was overthrown through massive demonstrations and strikes.

Since the return of democratic government Bangladesh has made considerable progress. One step was signing on December 2, 1997, an accord which successfully ended its long civil war in the Chittagong Hills District. This tolerantly granted regional autonomy for a district largely composed of Buddhist hill tribes [8].

Prior to India’s independence, many Islamic supporters of freedom were committed democrats in the Congress Party. Most of these democratically minded Muslims stayed in India following independence. However, many others stayed in newly formed Pakistan. The most deeply committed to the cause of freedom was a close supporter of Gandhi, the remarkable statesman, Badshah Khan.

Badshah Khan was colonial India’s bravest champion of nonviolent tactics in situations of extreme danger. He organized his Congress Party followers in the North West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan. Here his Khudai Khidmatagar movement was able in the early 1930s to face down gunfire from British troops as part of a successful campaign for an elected provincial government.

Following the establishment of Pakistan, Badshah Khan spent 15 years in and out of prison and seven in exile. In 1962, he was honoured by Amnesty International as their prisoner of the year. In 1956, Badshah Khan founded the Awami League. This was Pakistan’s first social democratic party and is now the dominant political force in Bangladesh. His heroic story is typical of many brave crusades for freedom in the Islamic world [9].

With his finger pointing at animism, Kaplan is as off the mark as Huntington is in his castigation of Islam. The progress of democracy in Africa, as in the rest of the world, has been swiftest when there is no oil to hinder it. Benin is the only predominantly African animist state, but it is one of a handful of fully democratic democracies on the continent. Apart from the strength of its democratic movement, its absence of oil made it easier for outside lenders to encourage a democratic transition when the country was essentially bankrupt during the worldwide democracy wave of 1989 [10].

Huntington’s witch-hunting of the world’s religions for demons who oppose democracy leaves few corners in the world untouched. He attributes much of the authoritarianism in Latin America to Catholicism. Likewise the difficulties of democratic transitions in the USSR and much of Eastern Europe are blamed on Orthodox Christianity. He stresses antidemocratic elements in Hinduism and ancient Chinese civilization.

Huntington’s varied attacks on diverse faith traditions ignore the deadly mix of oil and fundamentalism that undermines democracy in much of the world. Blaming European influences for most of the authoritarian elements in Latin-American culture, Huntington ignores the role played by American oil companies and their allied Protestant fundamentalist sects. His suspicions about the incompatibility of Orthodox Christianity and democracy have recently been challenged by the success of freedom movements in Romania and Bulgaria. While these countries have the same faith as Russia, they lack its great oil wealth [11].

The antidemocratic outrages of Belarus, Serbia and Russia are more the result of the totalitarian toxic residue from atheistic Communism than holy Eastern Christian spiritual traditions. The embrace of the ruthless Russian military actions in Chechnya by the atheistic leadership of the Chinese Communists on the eve of Christmas 1999 illustrates how tyrants still unite against the free world.

The divisions between Western and Eastern Christianity are not based on profound doctrinal concepts. They emerged largely from linguistic differences between Greek and Latin and an ancient administrative division of the Roman Empire.

The Orthodox clergy of Serbia are playing a major role in their country’s brave democracy movement. It is a small part of this ancient faith’s crusade for ecological healing in the new millennium. Guided by its visionary Patriarch, Bartholomew, the Eastern Orthodox Church is now engaged in a remarkable effort that unites the quest for peace, freedom and environmental restoration.

The core leader of Orthodox civilization is in profound disagreement with Samuel Huntington. Patriarch Bartholomew supports the entry of more countries into the European Union and has refuted Huntington’s notion that Europe ends where Orthodoxy begins.

Bartholomew’s quest for a united free Europe is based on the notion of a Christian faith revitalized by a reverence for nature. He has termed pollution a sin and sacrilege. The Eastern Patriarch has passionately declared that it is morally unacceptable to burden others with our waste.

The spiritual passion for nature of the Orthodox Patriarch emerged in his blessing the Danube River, in early December 1999. Here he lamented, The Danube is a life-giving river. Yet it is in danger of becoming a river of death, carrying pollutants and toxic substances.

The Reverend John Chyssargis, an important adviser to the Patriarch, has stressed that part of worshipping God is to respect nature. In modernity we have separated the soul from nature. We are saying that we can bring them back together again.

The religious seminaries of the Orthodox faith have become training centres and forums in democratic environmental green activism. Such strategies are intended to eventually transfer the environmental concerns of the church’s leadership into grass roots actions at the parish level [11].

Huntington correctly identifies a tendency for an affluent minority to take part in fundamentalist movements that weaken democracy and threaten war. However, he disregards how lower income groups tend to have a non-fundamentalist religion, frequently based on reverence for nature. Examples of a democratic green faith include the Sufi of Sudan, the Catholic base communities of Latin America and the popular Hinduism of rural India. While oil, authoritarianism and fundamentalism mix, so do Earth-respecting movements for ecology and freedom.

In India, both secular authoritarians and Hindu fundamentalists tend to have contempt for concerns of environmental preservation. The Emergency was a two-year period of martial law from 1975 to 1977. It was spearheaded by secular authoritarians such as auto enthusiast Sanjay Gandhi, the black sheep of the democratically minded Nehru family.

The Emergency was catastrophic for the environment. During this time the enormous Kudremukh iron ore mining and smelting complex was begun in the South Indian State of Karnatakata. It turned formerly lush tropical rainforests of the mountainous Western Ghats into sterile bare rock for subsidized steel and automotive production. This scheme was pushed by the suspension of normal democratic debate and controls [12].

Secular assaults on Indian democracy have been replaced by attacks based on religious fundamentalism. Much of folk Hinduism is expressed in defence of forests threatened by the oil-based luxuries loved by India’s fundamentalist minority. One of these popular democratic actions is the defence of sacred groves of trees. The most revered is the grove of Karikanamma, mother goddess of a dark forest perched on a hill overlooking the Arabian Sea [13].

Late-Victorian notions of progress, coupled uncomfortably with notions of the sacredness of nature, further stimulated conflicts between Muslims and Hindus in India. British university-educated founders of the Muslim League, which created the notion of a separate Islamic state of Pakistan, had contempt for Sufi rites intended to secure an emotional bond with the Earth. They despised ancient Sufi seers and poets who stressed religious tolerance and love of nature. Likewise imperially trained high-caste Hindus ridiculed popular elements of their own traditional veneration of nature, such as the pacifist and literally tree-hugging Bishnoi.

Reverence for sacred trees is a common part of popular religion among both Hindus and Muslims in India. This has taken on a new ecological significance. The sacred neem tree is now appreciated as a non-toxic insecticide, a vital ingredient to organic-farming movements around the world. The pipal tree is popularly considered as the dwelling place for the Hindu sacred Trinity of Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva. It is also revered as the tree where Buddha obtained enlightenment. The pipal tree is a common feature around the shrines of many sacred sites of different faith traditions. The sandalwood tree of southern India has long been venerated by rural communities of both Hindus and Muslims. The sacred banyan tree cannot be used for firewood or fuel, and is also planted near shrines.

The coconut palm, a central element of the economy of the green democratic oasis of Kerala, is widely viewed as a sacred species throughout the tropics. Coconuts are used ceremonially in blessing the bridegroom at weddings.

Nowadays these trees are threatened with destruction to provide luxuries for affluent fundamentalists. Muslim and Hindu villagers protect trees at the risk of their lives. Such humble passion for the Earth is incomprehensible to the haughty strategists of India and Pakistan who develop mad scenarios for nuclear war between the two states [13].

OIL, NOT RELIGION, FUELS DICTATORSHIP AND WAR

Huntington’s warnings of a possible third world war between a combination of Islamic and Chinese civilizations, versus the west, popularize the earlier work of another American strategic studies expert, Kent Calder, author of Pacific Defense. However, many of Calder’s facts, as opposed to the analysis he draws from them, actually support the notion of building democracy through devaluing oil.

TABLE 1

LIBERTY AND DICTATORSHIP IN ASIA AMONG OIL HAVES AND HAVE NOTS IN 1992

When combined with Freedom House’s human rights rankings, a different threat to security emerges from Calder’s energy data. His illustration of Asia’s oil haves and have nots reveals Asia’s oil exporters to be repressive, while those that import oil were in 1992, or have since become, full democracies except for Singapore.

Calder’s data show all four Asian full democracies on Freedom House’s 1998 list as oil importers, while every not free country was an oil exporter in 1992. Japan has been a democracy since 1947, whereas lack of oil made the former dictatorships of Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines more vulnerable to their freedom movements. All listed countries that were oil exporters in 1992 had failed to democratize by the beginning of 1998. Indonesia has subsequently begun a democratization process but the human rights situation in every other 1992 Asian oil exporter — Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia and China — has still not improved.

There are many other ways in which the relationship between oil and dictatorship can be quantified and studied. This is evident in tables 2 and 3, which compare nations’ freedom ratings and their oil reserves.

TABLE 2

NUMBERS AND PERCENTAGES OF COUNTRIES HAVING OIL WEALTH ABOVE VARIOUS MINIMA

The wealth is given in billions of barrels (bbl) of reserves

TABLE 3

TOTAL RESERVES AND RESERVES PER COUNTRY BY FREEDOM RATING

Clearly these data show that oil is a storehouse of revenues for dictatorships. The data are even more striking when it is considered that only two countries ranked by Freedom House as full democracies for every year of the post-Cold-War era, Norway and Trinidad & Tobago, are net oil exporters. In every one of the repressive countries with oil exports, such revenues help sustain a repressive military and security apparatus [14].

ROYALTIES: THE BIGGEST BARRIER TO FREEDOM

Petroleum exports are simply the most lucrative form of wealth stemming from locational advantage, rather than hard work and creativity. Royalties from oil extraction, often called rents by writers on the oil industry, do not dominate the economies of the world’s successful capitalist countries.

Royalties are not the basis for new technologies such as the microchip, solar power and the information highway. Nor do they characterize the entertainment industry, art, fashion, repair and maintenance, crafts, sports, family farms and electronics.

While not found in the commanding heights of Hollywood, Wall Street, the Olympics, or the City of London, royalties dominate the economies of the most repressive tyrannies of the world. Not one of the 16 countries rated worst by Freedom House is an engine of new science, or of technology, a centre of banking or of motion pictures, insurance or stock exchanges. Oil does not drive the capitalist dream machine, protect it from risk, or lubricate its liquidity. Freedom, more than oil, serves to make the world go round.

Oil is powerful since its supporters are better organized than their more diffuse opponents. Oil interests dominate dictatorships and have considerable influence in the democratic world. Their foes have failed to exhibit comparable skills in coalition building. Environmentalists are just getting used to the idea of appealing to capitalist self-interest. Oil companies benefit from long experience in painting their opponents as extremists.

Insurance revenues are four times greater than oil and their stability is important for the long-term success of the global capitalist economy. In many ways insurance’s requirements are similar to the predictable rule of law which is important for democratic capitalist prosperity.

Despite the fact it is strongly in their own interest, the global insurance industry has failed to lobby in a cohesive fashion so as to discourage the consumption of fossil fuel. Insurance companies have never mounted, for instance, anything comparable to the $13 million TV and print campaign waged in the United States by oil industry opponents of the Kyoto Treaty. American insurance companies are particularly timid, being unwilling to co-operate with the European and Japanese company initiatives to build support for environmental protection. On the issue of global warming the fossil-fuel industries of the United States, Australia and Canada are able to have their views prevail in Chambers of Commerce and other business coalitions [15].

The notion of rent extraction, with its concept of unfairly exploiting a locational advantage for unusually high profits, was evident in the barons of the feudal era who exacted tolls from travellers along a river. After feudalism was abolished the concept of rentierism evolved to describe the unearned increments from real property, denounced by the foe of land speculation, economist Henry George. Profits from land speculation are not enough to finance a repressive army and security apparatus. This is one of the reasons both Adam Smith and George liked the idea of restricting government revenues to this source, since there would not be enough money to pay for expensive, militarist adventures.

What can pay for repression is the control of resources in the ground, such as petroleum, diamonds and other minerals. Repressive regimes also benefit from other sources of rentier wealth such as the narcotics trade and gambling. Angola is plagued by both oil and diamond wealth. Although the former Belgian Congo is a small but growing oil producer, most of its repressive apparatus has been paid for by its mineral wealth. Some repressive states such as Colombia and Nigeria combine narcotics and oil exports. During its last years as an oil-rich, military dictatorship, Nigeria was cut off from US government foreign aid because of its role in the narcotics trade [16].

Several factors make oil the preferred source of rentier wealth to prop up dictatorships. Its uneven distribution causes most industrialized nations to import oil. More evenly distributed coal and natural gas have never been the basis of a successful cartel such as OPEC.

Russia is unusual in getting a major rentier advantage from natural gas. It is the world’s largest producer and can export to European markets via pipelines. Minerals aid repression in a number of nations, notably Sierra Leone, and even Papua New Guinea is guilty of flagrant human rights abuses in favouring mining development on offshore Bougainville island.

There are only a few petroleum- and mineral-poor dictatorships. What is critical to maintaining the repressive, resource-poor regimes in Afghanistan, Burundi and Somalia is foreign aid flowing in from Saudi Arabia, France and Iran respectively. Unlike the United States, since the end of the Cold War, these countries are not inclined to impose donor democracy.

HOW DEMOCRATIC CULTURE KEEPS TWO OIL RICH STATES FREE

There are currently 57 free states in the world, among them only three net oil exporters. One, Venezuela, has a shaky democracy, being recently ranked by Freedom House as only partly free. Its President, Hugo Chavez, is a convicted coup plotter and has dismissed the country’s elected legislature. The only two stable, full democracies are Norway and Trinidad & Tobago.

Norway’s ability to combine democracy and oil exports has been helped by fortunate timing. Here oil wealth was never used by an oligarchic elite to cling to power. When Norway became a full democracy in 1919, and the king’s last prerogatives over defence and foreign policy passed to the elected government, the country imported all its oil. Democracy in Norway was a product of a long struggle by the country’s peasant, labour and co-operative movements, which could not be bought off by a share in oil wealth. Norway, with Sweden, leads the world in the high percentage of parliamentary seats held by women.

Since 1919, Norway has been one of the world’s most prosperous and successful constitutional monarchies. Its only interruption of democratic government took place when the country was invaded by Nazi Germany. Norway’s North Sea oil boom in the 1970s could not corrupt a democratic culture that was a half-century old.

Although it is a far smaller oil exporter than Norway, Trinidad & Tobago faced the danger of dictatorship when it achieved independence from Great Britain in 1962. The country’s political elite could have used its position as an oil exporter to orchestrate a coup and cling to power by oil revenues funding a repressive security apparatus. That the country’s elite did not succumb to this temptation is a sign of their commitment to democracy.

A requirement for democracy is that political leaders believe in it. This was the case in Trinidad. The remarkable statesman that guided the new nation in its formative years of independence, Eric Williams, was quite familiar with the authoritarian excesses of rentierism. Before becoming Prime Minister, Williams wrote a well received book, Capitalism and Slavery. It exposed the horrors of the 17th century slave trade and provided excellent preparation for avoiding the 20th century curse of oil and dictatorship.

Williams steered Trinidad away from dictatorship, helping to make it a harmonious place for four great civilizations. Here Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the Earth-respecting culture of native Americans are able to live together in a democratic peace.

Trinidad’s political leaders are a representative sampling of the country’s diverse races and faith communities. Following Williams’ death, political power peacefully passed through elections away from his heavily black People’s National Movement, to a multiracial coalition government. It is headed by Basedo Panday, an East Indian, who is widely respected for efforts to curb the narcotics trade through the creation of a regional witness-protection program [17].

Trinidad’s democratic success is shared broadly by all the British Commonwealth Caribbean island nations. None of these 12 states is currently ranked as not free. Each one, with the exception of Antigua and Barbuda, is currently regarded by Freedom House as a full democracy. Most have retained the form of constitutional monarchy headed by a crown shared with Great Britain.