Fossil Fuels = Achilles’ Heel: Enemy targets our weakness
- Consuming too much, controlling too little. The U.S. consumes 25% of the world’s oil production, but controls less than 3% of the supply.
- Terrorist Attacks Increasing on Oil Infrastructure. In 2006, al Qaeda staged an attack against the oil processing facility at Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia. Although the attack failed, it caused a 3.6% spike in global oil prices and proved that the world’s oil infrastructure is an Achilles’ heel through which terrorists can strike at American interests. Fewer than 50 attacks against oil and gas occurred before 9/11. By 2005, 265 major attacks took place; by 2006 that number reached 344.
- Osama bin Laden has targeted our oil infrastructure: “One of the main causes for our enemies’ gaining hegemony over our country is their stealing our oil; therefore, you should make every effort in your power to stop the greatest theft in history.”
Climate Change Hits the Homeland
- Tropical Storms and American Cities. Climate Change causes tropical storms, like Hurricane Katrina, which displaced 1.1 million Americans and destroyed a great city.
- Drought and Water Supplies. Climate Change causes drought, which threatens to dry up the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies 70%-90% of the irrigation water used by major grain producing states such as Texas, Nebraska, and Kansas.
Climate Change is a “Threat Multiplier” Increasing Conflict
- The Long War Gets Longer. Climate Change creates the conditions that will make the “Long War” even longer.
- Resource Wars – Darfur is the tip of the iceberg. Competition over resources can lead to conflict, as we have seen in Darfur, and it can lead to fragile or failed states where terrorists and extremist groups can step into the vacuum. This instability provides an opportunity for terrorists to exploit the situation and establish safe havens for operations, i.e. Afghanistan in the 1990s and Somalia today.
- Mass Migration and Safe Havens. Climate change causes drought, the disappearance of drinking water, and a rise in sea levels. Billions of people live near coastal plains that could end up underwater. This would cause the mass-migration of millions and create instability with ungoverned spaces where extremists and terrorists can flourish.
Oil Addiction Means the U.S. must fight just to keep the lights on
- Iraq and Afghanistan. The longer the U.S. remains dependent on fossil fuel, the more the U.S. will have to engage in tough fights just to protect our energy supplies.
- Oil States are Failed States. Of the top ten holders of oil reserves in the world as of April 2008, all but one are considered to be failed states or in danger of becoming failed states. If and when major oil-producing states fail, that is where the U.S. military will have to go next.
- Patrolling Sea Lanes for Petroleum. The U.S. Navy budgeted $28.1 billion to patrol sea lanes alone in FY2009—much of that patrolling is to keep trade, particularly oil, flowing.
- As Former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey declared, “this is the first time since the civil war that we’ve financed both sides of a conflict.” (30 January 2006)
