The People’s Republic of China has surpassed the U.S. in energy usage. Seems like only yesterday when CMike was berating me for negatively comparing Chinese output of CO2 to that of the U.S. That’s a first-place we really didn’t need 
(Note: I had this title last night, when I read the New York Times article discussed below and started to write a post… then procrastinated until everybody else in the world had posted about it waited to consider other viewpoints. So even though Spencer Ackerman and probably others have riffed on the same obvious gag, I’m not changing it!)
In an apparent burst of nostalgia for the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney administration, when anonymous “senior administration officials” would bluff high-profile journalists for major newspapers into peddling dubious propaganda (somehow puffed up into sounding like a major scoop), the New York Times reported last night:
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
Showing that a Democratic president is now in office it’s no longer the early 2000s, even mainstream journalists have reacted to the NYT “scoop” with skepticism bordering on outright scorn. Meanwhile, among progressive bloggers, the reflexive hue-and-cry has predictably arisen: This is just a pretext to stay in Afghanistan forever to control its mineral wealth, just like we’re staying in Iraq forever to control its oil!
Which might be more persuasive were it not for the fact that we aren’t staying in Iraq forever (even as wrangling over forming a government continues, the withdrawal of U.S. troops is proceeding on schedule, with American influence fading concomitantly), and Iraqi politicians — who, unsurprisingly, covet the benefits of the country’s black gold for themselves — never have gotten around to signing over major oil fields wholesale to U.S. corporations.
Nor do I think Obama wants to stay in Afghanistan forever — certainly not long enough for him to reap the downsides of an endless, unsuccessful war while U.S. megacorporations in future decades garner the benefits. To me, the president’s seemingly contradictory announcement last December of an immediate escalation combined with a hoped-for exit timetable was clearly designed to mimic Dubya’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq… that is, not so much a plan to win the war as an attempt to postpone the inevitable while being able to say we gave it our best shot (and, perhaps, take public-relations advantage of any unexpected lucky breaks, as occurred in Iraq).
In fact, although today’s NYT story is undoubtedly propaganda of some sort, its intent may be the opposite of what everyone is assuming. Instead of providing an excuse for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, what if it inspires other forces in the region to hasten our exit? Karzai is known to be greedy and dishonest; why would reports of vast mineral wealth encourage him to be a loyal and scrupulous American puppet rather than tempting him further to ditch his former benefactors and cut a deal with the Taliban to split the booty?
Even more intriguing is the Chinese angle acknowledged by the Times:
At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.
Anyone else get a whiff of Br’er Rabbit from that passage? “Oh, no, whatever you do, don’t push us out and entangle yourselves deeper in Afghanistan’s problems — please, anything but that, China!”
Hell, if we could get out of the business of providing armed security for Chinese-owned copper mines and lure the People’s Republic into taking our place, battling the Taliban and miscellaneous warlords for control of all those buried minerals, that would be nearly a best-case scenario at this point. (It would be even more entertaining if the reported mother lodes turned out to be illusory… hasn’t someone written a science-fiction novel or something to that effect?)
That’s my conspiracy theory, and I intend to stick with it.
Has this ever happened before – a public US Corporation willingly forsaking revenue and profits in order to do the right thing? What is the world coming to?
I was naturally suspicious a few years back when Rupert Murdoch decided to build a McMansion in Beijing, but now I’m certain there is something evil afoot there – the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman just used the term ‘fair and balanced’ in a discussion regarding the U.S.’s concerns that China is deliberately undervaluing the yuan in order to maintain the flow of under priced goods to the U.S. It’s pretty clear from the context that he means it exactly in the ‘Fox’ sense – whatever we want or believe is “fair and balanced, so screw you!”
My previous post about alternative energy technology being manufactured in China attracted a fair bit of discussion. Beyond the snark, the U.S. does indeed have legitimate concerns about how China conducts its business.
The yuan needs to float freely against the dollar and the euro – like a real currency. Right now they have a built in mechanism to ‘not be undersold’ by U.S. goods.
Why is the U.N. still giving them development aid? If they can afford to loan us trillions of dollars, then can afford to lift themselves out of poverty.
We need to enforce environmental concerns with excise taxes. Chinese pollution doesn’t just stay in China – their crap comes wafting in the air and affects everyone. They don’t want to commit to emissions caps? Well estimate their emissions, put a price on them, and attach the price to their cheap goods. They won’t come to the table unless we force them to come to the table.
I could go on in the same vein about labor concerns, sustainable sourcing of resources, etc. Right now China is acting like the ‘bad boy’ of the planet, and will continue to do so if there are no consequences.
We may have invented the solar cell, but China has taken the lead in manufacturing solar panels – and wind turbines as well, to add a little salt into the wound.
President Obama, in his State of the Union speech last week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on energy. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I know you don’t either,” he told Congress.
That’s just rhetoric, Mr. President, Congress wants whatever their corporate masters tell them to want. And in spite of what Justice Alito may have been muttering during your speech, that’s regardless of where those corporate masters may live. Multinationals just follow the money.
…Far East. I’m really happy for the Chinese, really I am, when I hear that their economy is booming again, although admittedly I’d be happier if our own recovery wasn’t jobless. Still, Horace Greeley’s advice to a job seeker: “Go West, Young Man,” is relevant once again, assuming you go so far West that you are in the Far East.
There is a growing trend for young job seekers to look for work in China. It’s only a matter of time before the “Chinese Only” and the “Red Brigade” Minutemen movement arise to protest American illegals sneaking over to the new land of opportunity.
The ‘big news’ today today was non-news – how the leaders of the G-8 agreed that they’d work to keep the global average temperature from rising 3.6 degrees F (even though it went up 1/2 that already). But as you’ve already suspected, they wouldn’t agree on any particular mechanisms to make that happen. More hot air we didn’t need.
To top it off, neither India nor China would agree to any climate management deal.
With leaders like these, who needs enemies? They’ll destroy the planet faster than any alien invaders ever could.
I just had to chuckle when I read this article about the U.S. is refusing to send 17 Chinese Muslim Guantanamo detainees to the PRC for “fear they might be tortured.” As opposed to the coddling they are getting at Gitmo? Maybe they are just jealous of the PRC, afraid their techniques will do a better job of extracting fantastic tales of imagined conspiracies than the waterboarding, stress positions and other “Bush League” methods we employ?
Seriously, how could a government PR person issue a statement like that with a straight face?
