Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File

AT: Resource Wars 1/2

First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an abundance of natural resources is more likely to contribute to conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil wars and insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some 100 armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend. Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in Darfur, why have scores of environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N. World Food Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-wracked Malawi has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands of people, generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami, one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars. Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural disasters.

The combination of rising resource consumption and unpredictable population growth is liable to exacerbate conflicts throughout the globe as resource-dependent nations become desperate to retain access to foreign-based commodities. Two persistent factors have driven resource scarcity. First, resources have geographical, ecological, and climatic limitations that mankind cannot control, as Waltraud Queiser Morales states in "Sustainable Development and Human Security." There are about 1047.7 billion barrels of proven oil reserves left in the world; once this supply is expended, according to Michael Klare in Blood and Oil, humans have no way of creating more oil and will have to either switch to alternative fuel sources or invent synthetic replacements. Second, resource scarcity stems from, in the words of Waltraud Morales, "...the social and political conditions of inequality and injustice that humankind has created and perpetuated in its struggle for power and dominance globally and within states." George Kennan vividly illustrated the risks and rewards of resource inequality in a secret policy brief written for American leaders at the beginning of the Cold War: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population...Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security." Franklin Delano Roosevelt anticipated Kennan's argument during the closing months of World War II and organized a now-infamous summit with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. This meeting cemented the special US-Saudi relationship by ensuring US access to Saudi oil and Saudi access to American arms. Although Saudi proven oil reserves are substantial - about 25% of the global total - they will assuredly not last forever and are contingent upon a whole host of unstable social and political factors, including the repressive nature of the Saudi regime. This has led some analysts to predict that the US military will soon be converted into a glorified "oil-protection service." Underlying this prediction, however, are some fundamental assumptions about resource conflict that need to be considered in more detail.