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COMMENTARY
August 18, 2007
Russia's recovery
Stirling engines. This was my first thought on reading this week’s important news, that the Russians have resumed long-range bomber flights over both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, for the first time since the Cold War. And NATO jets have been scrambled to “accompany” them, just as in the good old days.The background to the story is simple enough: that Vladimir Putin’s Russia, in desperate need of so many things besides A-bombs, tanks, and Cheka officers, has been rebuilding the Soviet armed forces and the old KGB apparatus with its extraordinary income from oil and natural gas -- supplemented by growing income from environmental “offsets,” as the West pays billions in Kyoto-inspired guilt money to upgrade the relatively primitive Russian resource infrastructure. Along with this oil wealth, and military build-up, has gone what is politely called “a more assertive foreign policy,” in which the Putin administration finds ever-new ways to remind us that Russia never was an ally of the West. One of them is using both pricing and secure delivery of her much-needed oil and gas shipments as an implicit, and occasionally explicit threat, to extort concessions from Western Europeans and Russia’s own neighbours. To my mind, oil and gas reserves are a curse, not only for the people who don’t have them, but more for the people who do. This is not for any magic in fossil fuels themselves, but because such reserves confer huge unearned wealth on those who own them by the luck of geology. And unearned wealth has been, for as long as history records, a great corruptor. It enables the holders to do things that nature would normally constrain; to take what they want without the trouble of labour, or even theft. It enables them, specifically, to forego the development of the moral restraints of people who must earn their livings, or husband what they’ve inherited. We have only to look at the Arab and Muslim world -- at the vast energy reserves of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Indonesia -- or at contemporary Venezuela -- to realize how profoundly corrupting this unearned wealth can be. And indeed, one of my arguments in extenuation of the failures of Islamic societies to seize the commercial and technological opportunities of the last century, has been to draw attention to their possession of oil. The obscene displays of wealth in the Gulf States, and the money that flows alike to radical mosques in England, and terror camps in Pakistan, are, in part, aspects of the same phenomenon: the rapid accumulation of unearned wealth. Conversely, the most impressive social and economic developments of the modern age (1492 and forward), were in countries bereft of natural resources. A Holland, or a Denmark, achieved advanced civilization (and finally even decadence) with nothing to work with except the sea, a few trees, and native wit. Similarly, the modern rise of Japan in the East was premised on almost complete freedom from the usual natural resources, and the need to trade for them. And so to Russia. The huge background fact we deal with, when we deal with Russia through the foreseeable future, is her unearned oil wealth. A society already morally crippled by three generations of communism, is now hit by the temptations of “free money.” And rather than having to work their way back into the esteem of civilized men (as Germans and Japanese had to do in the time after the last World War), the Russians are given the opportunity to “buy” respect, with new bombers and missiles. I mentioned Stirling engines at the beginning of this column. They are a form of closed-cycle piston external combustion engine, that work on heat differentials -- which can be supplied by any form of fuel or natural heat source whatever, from solar to geothermal to burning twigs. They were invented by a Scottish divine, the Rev Dr Robert Stirling of Perthshire, in the early 19th century, as an answer to the dangers presented by early steam boilers (see Wikipedia); and represent a technological road not taken through the 20th century, when our reliance on oil and gas became complete. Hybridized with advanced electrical batteries, they might even supply the torque, and the quick start-ups, that they’ve been missing until now; for they make first-rate continuous electrical generators. And I mention them because, we have got to find a way to flourish, in the West, without the slightest dependence on Arab, Russian, or anybody’s, gas and oil. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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