1
Ukraine's plans to join NATO and install NATO bases on its territory, the massive US investment in dollars and weapons to create neo-Nazi paramilitary units in Donbas, its suspicious laboratories that investigate biological weapons, the Russian culture of half of its population. Little is said about the purpose of the conflict: to veto Russia's hydrocarbon market in Europe.
2
Fossil energies, which currently supply 78,4% of the world's energy consumption (https://goo.gl/Pc2WuA), are not renewable and their depletion or unaffordable use is inevitable. This was foreseen in 1956 by geostrategist Marion King Hubbert. The extraction of hydrocarbons, the fundamental engine of development in the hegemonic countries since the end of the 2000th century, is becoming progressively more scarce and costly, and is tending towards a “peak” or “top”. Experts calculate it with the energy return rate, resulting from dividing the amount of energy produced by a source by the amount needed to extract it. When the two are equal, extraction becomes unaffordable and declines sharply. Hubbert placed this decline around the year 1960; discoveries of new reserves after XNUMX delayed it, but the increase in consumption brings it ever closer.
3
Some organizations and researchers claim that we have already reached this peak of exploitation of fossil energy. The International Energy Agency calculates that by 2025, 13 million barrels of oil will be missing to cover the world's daily demand. Antonio Turiel, from the Csic, calculates a decrease in production of more than 50% in the coming 25 years, from 69 million barrels per day today to 33 million in 2040 (https://culturacientifica.com/2019/05/ 03/the-peak-oil tanker/). These figures do not mean that hydrocarbons will run out, but rather that they will be increasingly scarce, their extraction more expensive and their profitability lower, to the point of becoming uneconomic.
XNUMX
These figures are the engines of today's world. The resounding calls of the Glasgow Conference to suppress carbon emissions do not arise from a generous decision by big capital to stop consuming hydrocarbons, but from a desperate search for alternative sources in the face of the announced decline in their production. The Ukraine conflict incites the European Union and NATO against Russia to prevent it from selling its liquefied gas to Europe through Nordstream 2, thus forcing a captive market for the very expensive fracking hydrocarbons from the United States. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, the brutal harassment against Venezuela are theft of hydrocarbons or roads for their transportation.
5
Installed in the reality of the oil decline, let us examine how prepared the countries are to live it or rather survive it. The first global place in proven reserves corresponds to Venezuela, with 503.806 million barrels. Saudi Arabia follows in second place with 260.000 billion barrels, just over half. The third place corresponds to Canada, with 171.000 million barrels. They are followed by Iran with 157.800 billion, occupied Iraq with 143.000 billion, Kuwait with 104.500 billion, the United Arab Emirates with 97.800 billion, Russia with 80.000 billion, the dismembered Libya with 48.360 billion, and in a melancholy tenth place, the United States, the first consumer of the world, with only 38.200 billion. The gigantic China ranks 14th, with 25.000 million. The almost thirty countries of the European Union occupy the pitiful rank 22nd, with 5.718 million barrels, and the United Kingdom 27th, with 3.600 million barrels (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Pa%C3%ADses_por_reservas_probadas_de_petr%C3%B3leo). Gas reserves are quite similar. A look at this table explains why the largest consumers of fossil energy on the planet, the deprived United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, have been in league for more than a century assaulting, destroying, blocking, intervening, occupying, stealing, coercing and chaosing the countries that produce it. Einstein Millán points out that, according to the International Energy Agency, the proven oil reserves of the United States at the end of 2020 were 38.200 billion barrels (MMBbls), and that at the average extraction rate between that year and today, they would have been reduced to 32.900 MMBbls, which means that, at the current rate of 11.500.000 BPD, in less than 8 years it would have consumed all its crude reserves. Oil or life, threatens the outlaw, and sometimes takes both.
6
Let us look at this decline from the perspective of capitalism, which pursues the greatest benefit at any cost, ecological, social, cultural or human. The anarchy of the dividend above all else has led to energy looting, to the hyper-concentration of capital, to the consumerism of minorities at the expense of the impoverishment of all, to the recurrent crisis that is only alleviated with wars that unleash worse crises. Perpetuating this unbearable state of affairs requires consecutive alliances of the countries that devour more fossil energy to plunder those that produce it, with the eventual sacrifice of the weakest plunderers (as is the case today with the European Union). This requires increased military spending, which would be applied to the chaos of countries that cannot be controlled and the destruction of their economies (as in Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Russia or Venezuela). The parallel neglect of social investment would cause chaos even within the dominant countries; the deepening of the energy scramble would lead to the threshold of world conflict. The uncontrolled burning of hydrocarbons would produce, before its depletion, the terminal consequences of the collapse of civilization and the feared greenhouse effect.
7
It would be suicidal for the countries that own natural resources to give away their territories to transnationals immune from local taxes, laws and courts. Another world is possible. We are in time to oppose to the present apocalyptic scenario a socialist world, with a planned economy exempt from economic crises, application to agriculture of funds previously destined for arms, basic needs covered for the entire population and progressive and rational substitution of the increasingly scarce fossil fuel for alternative energies under social control. Let us now choose the world that we are going to leave to our descendants, or if we will ultimately have a world to bequeath.
