The high cost of oil is driving the public and politicians to adopt policies that the environmentalist movement has opposed for the past 40 years.

Paul Kennedy is listing the multiple global reversals in reaction to global warming and even despite of it:

• The major return of many governments to nuclear power - with dozens of new reactors being planned.
• The revival of the construction of coal-fired plants in industrial nations.
• The return to extensive wood-firing in the global north.
• The intensifying of slash-and-burn forestry in the tropics.
• The prolonged dung- and kerosene-burning in India - by the poorest of the poor.
• And the increased drilling and extraction in environmentally delicate zones offshore, along the North Alaska slopes, and even in a great swathe of upper New York State by the United States.

He wonders whether the organizing powers of the environmentalists will be sufficient in these troubled times to fight back efficiently.

The escrow issue to him, however, is ethanol as gas alternative:

Then there is the highly controversial move to increase that alternative-energy “flavor of the month,” ethanol, particularly in its least sensible form, that of producing the fuel from corn. Not only is it far less efficient than the sugarcane-to-ethanol process, and not only does it benefit the agricultural and business special interests backing it to a disproportionate extent, but it also has - at least in the case of the United States - a bad displacement effect.

With farmers in the American Midwest turning virtually into monoculturalists, converting thousands of acres of soybean and wheat crops into corn, the price of the former is correspondingly driven up by the reduced supply.

And he is pointing to

…the growing possibilities of political and social turmoil as a consequence of costlier fuel and pricier food - something about which the World Bank and the World Food Organization has been warning and which at last the G-8 nations have placed high on their agendas.

Read the full review by Paul Kennedy (The New York Times)

Paul Kennedy is the J. Richardson Professor of History and the director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He is currently writing a history of World War II.

Additional links:

• McCain Sets Goal of 45 New Nuclear Reactors by 2030 (The New York Times)

• Where does he find the energy? (about UK-energy-minister Malcolm Wicks)
• As oil prices rise, nations revive coal mining (in Japan)
• Inclusion and treatment of the rural sector in energy models (dung-burning and soil fertility loss)
• Slash and burn (wikipedia)
• The big pander to big oil (offshore oil and gas drilling along much of America’s continental shelf)
• State’s Natural Gas Boom Is No Stick In The Mud (The Bulletin, Philadelphia)

• Ethanol fuel (wikipedia)
• Fuel’s gold - Turning corn into ethanol may not be worth it (by Richard A. Lovett)

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