Oil and Water

As the events of Israel's war in Lebanon, as well as the US war in Iraq, and interest in Iran and Syria play out, and the rhetoric of "war on terror", or "sectarian violence" get bandied about by just about everyone, it is critically important that we understand something. The major underlying factor in all of this, really, is the conflict for dwindling, but essential resources.

Michael Klare, in the not-so-new-anymore book Resource Wars, talks about this issue much more cogently and in detail than I could. But I think it's worth talking about here, given the present situation.

Most of us take both oil and water (less so oil these days) for granted. We fill up our gas tanks (and, perhaps lately, cringe) and we drink our water from the tap or the bottle. But we don't often think much about were it came from, and what had to happen in order for us to get it.

All lefties know that protest cry "no blood for oil" - we have understood for a long time that the US interests in the MIddle East are about oil, and easy access to oil. There is a good article in Energy Bulletin this week about the relationship between the war in Lebanon and oil. I think that most of us understand that Condi's "birth pangs of a new Middle East" are about a Middle East that the west (US in particular) can control, in one way or another, so that it's rich oil resources will be available for us.

Less known is the issue of water. There have been conflicts between Israel and Lebanon over water for years. MyDD asks some very pointed questions about this issue, and I'd have to concur with their point of view. There is a great page on mideastweb that talks about this issue as well. MyDD asks about the relative use of water by Israel and the surrounding countries, as well as the Palestinians. I can't answer this question specifically, I think that would take a lot of research, but I did find a really cool database of the Land and Water Development Division of the FAO (Food and Agriculture organization) of the United Nations (thank God that we have the United Nations.) Anyway, here are some interesting cogent facts from that database. (If you are a data analysis fan, play with it, it is really amazing.)

Israel has had a mean population density of 280.6 inhabitants per square kilometer over the course of 1995-2005. Lebanon has had a density of 341.5 inhab/square km for that same time period. However, Israel has drawn an average of 76.65 % of it's available renewable water resources, while Lebanon has drawn 20.37%.  (Israel has a GDP of 123,526 million USD, and Lebanon has a GDP of 22,052 million USD) In the end, it's all back to issues of how we live our lives. We can't escape that a lifestyle (like we, or Israel live) creates stresses on our environment and resources that cannot be sustained, and, in the end, will cause war and suffering.

Unless people start talking plainly about how the resource-intensive western lifestyle directly and indirectly causes many of the problems we are seeing in our world today we will keep going around and around issues of "terrorism" and "sectarian violence" and this and that, and ignore the elephant in the room.

technorati tags:water, oil, israel, lebanon, middleeast, environment, resources, un