Asia Times — Erik Prince’s plan for Afghanistan’s rare metals revealed

Leaked pitch to Trump administration warns of China’s goal to control key tech resource

Resources wars?

Asia Times
Erik Prince’s plan for Afghanistan’s rare metals revealed

Jeff Desjardins — Where Do Raw Materials Come From?

May surprise.

Visual Capitalist
Where Do Raw Materials Come From?
Jeff Desjardins

Steve MacMillan — Is the Arctic home to the “New Great Game”?

The Arctic holds an estimated 13% (90 billion barrels) of the worlds undiscovered conventional oil resources and 30% of its undiscovered conventional natural gas resources, according to an assessment conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Canada, Russia, the U.S., Denmark (Greenland), and Norway are the five littoral Arctic states, with four of these states members of NATO, an organisation led by Norwegian born Jens Stoltenberg. The Arctic council is a “high-level intergovernmental forum” which consists of the five littoral states in addition to Iceland, Sweden and Finland. 

Control of the territory is a hotly contested issue among Arctic states due to its economic treasures, with a significant portion of the Arctic outside the control of any nation at present. The ability and effectiveness of the Arctic states to cooperate and discuss issues related to the region will determine the nature of this competition. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) – which the U.S. hasn’t ratified – stipulates that each littoral Arctic state has sovereign rights over a maximum of 200 nautical-miles (or their exclusive economic zone) from their northern baseline. “In the exclusive economic zone, the coastal State has sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources”, as stipulated by Article 56, section 1.(a), of the UNCLOS.…

As the Arctic unfreezes, it comes into play geopolitically and geostrategically.

First appeared:http://journal-neo.org/2015/02/10/is-the-arctic-home-to-the-new-great-game/

New Eastern Outlook
Is the Arctic home to the “New Great Game”?
Steven MacMillan

Frans van Houten — The Circular Revolution

Just as ecosystems reuse everything in an efficient and purposeful cycle, a “circular” economic system would ensure that products were designed to be part of a value network, within which the reuse and refurbishment of products, components, and materials would ensure the continual re-exploitation of resources.

Project Syndicate
The Circular Revolution
Frans van Houten | Chief Executive Officer of Royal Philips

Like all major transitions in human history, the shift from a linear to a circular economy will be a tumultuous one. It will feature pioneers and naysayers, victories and setbacks. But, if businesses, governments, and consumers each do their part, the Circular Revolution will put the global economy on a path of sustainable long-term growth – and, 500 years from now, people will look back at it as a revolution of Copernican proportions.

Paying attention to land (natural resources, ecology) as a crucial economic factor that is finite and fragile. Is private property a sufficient incentive for appropriate stewardship? Not under the current institutional arrangements that promote unlimited growth and profit based on freely exploiting resources. 

The real tragedy of the commons is turning out to be overuse, depletion and degradation due to privatization under contemporary economic liberalism (neoliberalism) as a socio-economic and political theory. The problem is traceable to power structures, institutional arrangements, negative externality, adverse selection and perverse incentives that market-based theories do not take into account in pursuing innovation and efficiency based on the assumption of (near) perfect competition.

Brahma Chellaney — The Battle for Water

The sharpening international geopolitical competition over natural resources has turned some strategic resources into engines of power struggle. Transnational water resources have become an especially active source of competition and conflict, triggering a dam-building race and prompting growing calls for the United Nations to recognize water as a key security concern.

Project Syndicate
The Battle for Water
Brahma Chellaney | Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research

Michael T. Klare — Entering a Resource-Shock World How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

Two nightmare scenarios -- a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change -- are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in timeall regions of the planet will be affected.
To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.

Tom Dispatch
Entering a Resource-Shock World 
How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion
Michael T. Klare | Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars and The Race For What's Left.

The vise is tightening. When Klare says, "We aren't there yet," the reality of the magnitude of the situation has been largely concealed from a public that is in denial of this anyway and willing to be let off the hook as long as possible, even though that will exacerbate the consequences. Several military establishments, including that of the US, have said that this is the greatest threat to peace and security in the coming years.

The preppers may be crazy, but not completely so. Moreover, the "everybody for themselves" approach assures wider disaster than if coordination and cooperation are applied to these emerging challenges.

I wonder about coordination and cooperation though. Today I was driving behind a pickup with a bumper sticker reading, "I'll keep my guns, money and freedom, and you can keep the "change."  A lot of people seem to believe that if they don't change, the world won't either. The sad thing is that there were several young kids in the truck. It's their future that is not being priced in.

Greg Palast — Hugo Chavez vs "The Network"

Third World nations are not supposed to keep the dollars paid to suck out their oil and mineral blood. For every dollar US consumers pay the Saudis for their oil, about $1.24 is given back as Saudis return the funds by purchasing US Treasury debt or hunks of US banks, CitiCorp for one.

In 2005, the US spent $227 billion in Latin America, sapping its properties and resources. But the money turned right around and, added to the funds sent to Miami by Latin America's elite, immediately became a $379 million loan to the US Treasury and financiers.

Argentina leant the US at 4 percent interest, then had to borrow its own money back at 16 percent – the whirring wheel, this grinder, left school teachers in Buenos Aires hunting in garbage cans for food. Riots followed and – in Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and elsewhere – this led to tanks in the street, currency collapse, crisis and the “rescue” by the IMF. Rescue meant forcing the mass sell-off of state industries, from oil to water systems, to the crushing of labour unions and to swallowing the whole bottle of poisons kept by the elite of the Northern Hemisphere for just such occasions.

And that was the plan. Literally. I've held the proof in my hands, about five thousand pages of financial agreements, all labelled “confidential” and “not to be distributed except by authorized persons”, which bore benign titles like “World Bank Poverty Reduction Strategy, Argentina.”

Why would the IMF, World Bank and the bankers not want to make their wonderful plans for reducing poverty public? It was for the same reason the finance ministers who signed the documents didn't even tell their own presidents: they were in fact “reduce-to-poverty” plans, complete resource surrender.

Greg Palast
Hugo Chavez vs "The Network"

Neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and neo-imperialism at work.

Water now not only an economic good but also a strategic good, rather than a free good?

On Wednesday, the United States intelligence community unveiled a first-ever assessment of global water-security issues.

A declassified version of the document, which looks forward through 2040, suggests that "during the next 10 years, water problems will contribute to instability in states important to U.S. national security interests."

According to one of the assessment's lead authors, Major General Richard Engel, water-stressed countries, being forced to focus on pressing internal issues, are increasingly unable to support U.S. policies and strategic interests.

While the assessment does not foresee water being a main instigator of state-to-state violence or state failure in the next decade, beyond that "water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage." In addition, "water shortages and pollution probably will harm the economic performance of important (U.S.) trading partners."

Read it at IPS Inter Press Service
Water Conflicts Move Up on U.S. Security Agenda
By Carey L. Biron