Contributors

Friday, March 07, 2014

The Long-Term Solution to the Russia Problem

There are all kinds of people critiquing the president's response to Russia's annexation of the Crimea. Republicans are blustering about it, but what do they expect Obama to do? Target Russians ships in the Black Sea port with cruise missiles? Send Americans troops into Simferopol and take the parliament building? Drop nuclear bombs on Moscow?

As I mentioned previously, in the short term economic sanctions are the only way to make Russia pay.  However, some people believe that Putin is actually losing: the situation in Ukraine is a sign of his weakness, not his strength. In Ukraine Putin is only succeeding in uniting ethnic Russian and Ukrainians against a dictator, and that may be inspiring Russians in Russia to defy Putin's tyranny.

But if they're wrong, and Russia keeps pulling this sort of crap, what about the long term? How do we prevent Russia — and countries like Iran — from throwing their weight around?

Russia is inherently unstable. Its people are unhappy. In the conversion to capitalism the vast majority of Russians have been left out in the cold. They don't live in a democracy. Their elections are rigged, even though Putin would probably still win if they were fair because Russians love strong men and long for stability, and they think he can provide that. Putin throws people in jail for criticizing his government. He lords over an oligarchy of corrupt officials who use their control over state assets to make themselves and their buddies wealthy.

But Russia has power today for one reason alone: oil and gas. It's like the Middle East. If the Middle East had no oil, they'd be an insignificant backwater that no one cares about, instead of the center of a never-ending conflict that keeps drawing us in.

The New York Times advocates using exports of American natural gas to undermine Russia's economic stranglehold over Europe. We need to go much further than that.

Since oil and gas are fungible commodities that can be bought and sold the world over, our dependence on fossil fuels enables the bad actors of the world. Countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq have power over us because they have oil.

If we want to undercut their influence, we need to reduce the importance of fossil fuels. Not simply by producing more oil and gas ourselves — because no matter how much we produce, we'll never be able to fuel the entire world. The best we can do is knock the price down a bit. And those bad actors will simply crank up production to make up for the loss. The price of oil will go down more. China and India will buy up the cheaper oil, build more infrastructure, make their people a little richer, start buying a lot more oil, and then the price goes up again. Then Russia starts using fracking technology and suddenly they have a lot more oil and gas to sell.

No, we need to develop other sources of renewable energy. Not just electricity production from solar and wind, but other alternatives such as fuel production plants that produce methane from bacteria or liquid fuels from algae. Energy production systems that we can build and license to other countries that will free them from dependence on the Middle East and Russia. These efforts have long been undermined by energy companies in the United States; that should stop right now.

As long as we have a fossil-fuel based economy, the oil barons of the world will have outsized influence over the rest of is. Oil is currently the ultimate power, and ultimate power corrupts ultimately.

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