[The Vector] James Woolsey on Renewable Energy and National Security – Part Two

This is a continuation of The Vector’s coverage of James Woolsey’s position in the imperative to move to renewable energy based on national security concerns.

You’ve got both the terrorism and enhancing of the bad guys — What Tom Friedman calls “Fill ‘er up with dictators,” and all the issues associated with that.

First of all, oil, like gold before it, has the effect that Paul Collier at Oxford, and Tom Friedman cite sometimes called the “oil curse.” Generally it’s just that an autocratic state, when it depends for a huge share of its income on a commodity that has a lot of economic rent attached to it, that rent accrues to the central power of the state essentially. So you tend not to have representative institutions like legislatures and you tend to have a much more difficult time getting out of an autocratic structure than with a broad-based economy.

If you look at evolution, the examples I usually use are Taiwan and South Korea. They were tough dictatorships, but as they prospered and built up a middle class — and this happened to them a lot faster than it happened in Europe in the medieval and early modern times — it was a similar phenomenon. The middle class builds up, it’s diversified, it starts wanting economic liberties and that transmogrifies after a while into political liberties and it tends to gravitate toward freer institutions. That tends not to happen when you’ve got a lot of economic rent associated with a commodity that you’re heavily dependent on. As Larry Diamond pointed out in his book, if you look at the 22 countries that count on two-thirds or more of their national income from oil, it’s fair to say all 22 of those countries are autocratic kingdoms or dictatorships.

And I haven’t compared that list with Freedom House’s list of the forty basically – those that Freedom House calls “Not Free.” There are about 120 democracies in the world, I mean not perfect, but nonetheless regular elections and another 20 countries like Bahrain that are reasonably well and decently governed, even though not democratically so. And then you’ve got 40 really bad guys. And I’m pretty sure that list of 22 in Larry Diamond’s book is virtually all from the list of 40 bad guys — or “Not Free,” in Freedom House’s terms.

So you’ve got that effect, which is, like anything in this area, not a clear bright line, but the countries that export a good deal of oil like Canada and Norway that are clear democracies are not in this category of two-thirds of their national income depending on oil.

Then if you look at other numbers, set out in places like Mort Halprin’s book The Democracy Advantage, it’s pretty clear that democracies don’t fight each other. They occasionally get really pissed off, but they mainly choose up sides and argue about trade sanctions and stuff. It’s not impossible but it’s really hard, even going back into the 19^th century, but certainly since 1945, finding democracies fighting each other. They just don’t.