What’s at Stake in an Economy with Low Oil Prices

In the past, low oil prices have been seen as a boon, particularly at the gas pump. They’ve been credited with boosting economies and stirring growth. But recently oil prices have dropped so low that warning bells rippled through global markets, and they remain volatile. What does all this mean for countries and companies? How big is the risk?

For answers, I talked to Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group and author of Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World. An edited version of our conversation is below.

HBR: Do you see sustained low oil prices as a risk? How so, and how large?

Bremmer: Markets have been diving on low oil prices recently not because the traditional understanding is broken; it is still true that low oil prices are good for the U.S. economy as well as for Europe, China, India. All of these consumers are going to benefit. The problem is that the IMF has been downgrading growth. They’re concerned about monetary supply, a Chinese slowdown, crises around Europe, and also that U.S. growth is not quite as robust as you’d like it to be.

The risks in lower energy prices have a lot more to do with sustainability of some of the governments around the world that are really dependent on commodity revenues for their own legitimacy and power. Venezuela is going to default in the next six months if the Chinese don’t find the wherewithal to bail them out significantly. Russia, as a big oil producer, is feeling real strains — nothing destabilizing yet, and Putin is in total control, but taxes and inflation are going up. Nigeria is going to need a new IMF program.

Most worryingly, of course, are the petro states in the Middle East and the emerging-market producer countries with brittle institutions that are trying to stay stable when the one thing that provided them legitimacy — the ability to write really big checks — is falling apart. Plus, we have Iranian sanctions coming off, which is going to lead to a lot more Iranian production, a lot more Iraqi production, and more Libyan production. These prices are going to stay low for some time. This is structural.

There has been hand-wringing about a possible connection between sustained low oil prices and the risk of another global recession. Could oil prices actually be driving increased risk of a slowdown?

I don’t think so. I know people say that every 7–8 years on average we’ve had a recession in the postwar era, and the last one was in 2008, so we’re due. People see all of the economic constraints in growth around the world. These gain some momentum in the news, then seeing oil prices dive makes people grow more negative. But that’s very different from saying we’re on the cusp of another global recession, and it doesn’t feel like we’re entering that kind of environment right now, oil prices or no.

Do you think lower oil prices could slow the transition away from fossil fuels, the demand for electric vehicles, the shift to wind and solar, and other renewable sources of energy?

Clearly, the shift in price pushes out the date that you expect these things to really expand and become large market participants globally, but I don’t think there’s any possibility the transition to renewables will just stop or slow dramatically. We’re well beyond that point. Governments around the world are very much onboard with the notion of climate change and believe that it’s going to get worse. Industrial renewables are still going to be huge.

Keep in mind that if you’re China, you need everything. The growth and energy demand in China is immense. They’re investing more in nuclear than anyone around the world. They’re not going to stop doing that because energy prices are low. They know they need it. They’re going to do huge amounts of wind, a huge amount of solar, and that’s going to continue to drive a lot of research and to generate technological benefits in the economy as well.

In your tweets and commentary from Davos, you remarked on something called the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” How is this connected to what’s going on with oil?

By the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” people mean things, like automation and AI and genomics and 3D printing, that are going to transform every sector and take jobs out of economies. Most people I spoke to at Davos thought that this transformation would happen within 10 years, that we’ll see dramatic changes in the way we think about these sectors and in labor.

I generally agree, but the revolution is already hitting energy, right now. Seems like just yesterday we thought we had peak oil, we thought we were running out, that it was in the hands of traditional producers. Suddenly, overnight, it’s in the hands of a number of entrepreneurs unleashed on the U.S. market. Within the course of just a few years, frackingwent from being viewed as never-going-to-happen to a world-changing technology.

America is now the largest energy producer in the world. The problem is, if you’re Saudi Arabia, it’s not labor that makes your economy work, it’s oil. A year ago, if you talked to Saudi leaders, they would have told you, “Oh, this is a pipe dream,” pardon the pun. They didn’t prepare for this over the past decades when times were good. Now time has suddenly turned against them very quickly. For them, this Fourth Industrial Revolution is not only disruptive, it’s disruptive in a big way, immediately. More

 

© Climate War Room

Here’s Why Al Gore Is Optimistic About the Fight Against Climate Change

Al Gore has something of a reputation as the Cassandra of climate change. But amid the doom and gloom—melting glaciers, ever-rising carbon levels, accelerating species extinction—the former vice president has been positively sunny of late.

Why? Solar energy. “There is surprising—even shocking—good news: Our ability to convert sunshine into usable energy has become much cheaper far more rapidly than anyone had predicted,” Gore wrote recently in Rolling Stone. “By 2020—as the scale of deployments grows and the costs continue to decline—more than 80 percent of the world’s people will live in regions where solar will be competitive with electricity from other sources.”

Now a new report substantiates Gore’s optimism. Research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts renewable energy will account for 49 percent of the world’s power by 2030, with another 6 percent coming from carbon-free nuclear power plants. Solar, wind, and other emissions-free sources will account for 60 percent of the 5,579 gigawatts of new energy capacity expected to be installed between now and 2030, representing 65 percent of the $7.7 trillion that will be invested.

Gore is right that solar is driving the shift away from fossil fuels, thanks to plummeting prices for photovoltaic panels and the fact that solar fuel—sunshine—is free.

“A small-scale solar revolution will take place over the next 16 years thanks to increasingly attractive economics in both developed and developing countries, attracting the largest single share of cumulative investment over 2013–26,” the report states.

Solar will outpace wind as an energy source, with photovoltaic power accounting for an estimated 18 percent of worldwide energy capacity, compared to 12 percent for wind. That’s not surprising given that a solar panel can be put on just about any home or building where the sun shines. Erecting a 100-foot-tall wind turbine in your backyard usually isn’t an option.

In the United States, solar is projected to supply 10 percent of energy capacity, up from 1 percent today. In Germany, though, solar and wind will account for a whopping 52 percent of all power generated by 2030, according to the BNEF estimate.

These are all projections, of course, based on the existing pipeline of projects and national policies and involving a certain amount of guesswork.

The big wild card is what happens in developing nations like China and India, where energy demand is expected to skyrocket with a burgeoning middle class. Energy consumption will grow to an estimated 115 percent in China and 200 percent in India over the next 16 years. (Falling birth rates in the West mean that energy use will drop 2 percent in Japan, for instance, and 0.2 percent in Germany.)

Whether the world kicks its reliance on coal-fired electricity will depend in large part on what kind of energy choices China and India make. China installed a record amount of solar capacity last year and has set ambitious goals for ramping up renewable energy production.

But old ways die hard. While the Obama administration has proposed regulations to slash carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, on the other hand, is considering financing a 4,000-megawatt coal-fired power station in India.

The good news, though, is that individuals around the world can make a difference with their personal power choices. According to BNEF, much of the solar energy to be generated over the next 16 years will come from solar panels installed on residential roofs. More

 

© 2014

How will geo-political unrest in the Middle East affect Cayman's Energy Security?

Will the battle for Iraq become Saudi war on Iran?

Be careful what you wish for could have been, and perhaps should have been, Washington’s advice to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states which have been supporting Sunni jihadists against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus.

The warning is even more appropriate today as the bloodthirsty fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) sweep through northwest Iraq, prompting hundreds of thousands of their Sunni coreligionists to flee and creating panic in Iraq’s Shiite heartland around Baghdad, whose population senses, correctly, that it will be shown no mercy if the ISIS motorcades are not stopped.

The outbreak of civil war in Iraq has oil traders nervous. Crude oil trading on the NYMEX Thursday gained more than $2 per barrel and has so far continued its climb Friday morning, going as high as $107.68 for WTI and Brent Crude to $113.02.

Such a setback for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been the dream of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for years. He has regarded Maliki as little more than an Iranian stooge, refusing to send an ambassador to Baghdad and instead encouraging his fellow rulers of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman — to take a similar standoff-ish approach. Although vulnerable to al Qaeda-types at home, these countries (particularly Kuwait and Qatar) have often turned a blind eye to their citizens funding radical groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the most active Islamist groups opposed to Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani commented on June 12 on the latest crisis in Iraq, making it clear that Iran will intervene at the appropriate time to combat terror. According to a transcript of the speech released by the Islamic Republic News Agency, he said, "The Islamic Republic of Iran will not tolerate this violence and we will not tolerate this terror and as we stated at the UN, we will fight and combat violence, extremism and terrorism in the region and the world."

Currently on vacation in Morocco, King Abdullah has so far been silent on these developments. At 90-plus years old, he has shown no wish to join the Twitter generation, but the developments on the ground could well prompt him to cut short his stay and return home. He has no doubt realized that — with his policy of delivering a strategic setback to Iran by orchestrating the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus showing little sign of any imminent success — events in Iraq offer a new opportunity.

This perspective may well confuse many observers. In recent weeks, there has been a flurry of reports of an emerging — albeit reluctant – diplomatic rapprochement between the Saudi-led GCC and Iran, bolstered by the apparently drunken visit to Tehran by the emir of Kuwait, and visits by trade delegations and commerce ministers in one direction or the other. This is despite evidence supporting the contrary view, including Saudi Arabia’s first public display of Chinese missiles capable of hitting Tehran and the UAE’s announcement of the introduction of military conscription for the country’s youth.

The merit, if such a word can be used, of the carnage in Iraq is that at least it offers clarity. There are tribal overlays and rival national identities at play, but the dominant tension is the religious difference between majority Sunni and minority Shiite Islam. This region-wide phenomenon is taken to extremes by the likes of ISIS, which also likely sees its action in Iraq as countering Maliki’s support for Assad.

ISIS is a ruthless killing machine, taking Sunni contempt for Shiites to its logical, and bloody, extreme. The Saudi monarch may be more careful to avoid direct religious insults than many other of his brethren, but contempt for Shiites no doubt underpinned his Wikileaked comment about "cutting off the head of the snake," meaning the clerical regime in Tehran. (Prejudice is an equal opportunity avocation in the Middle East: Iraqi government officials have been known to ask Iraqis whether they are Sunni or Shiite before deciding how to treat them.)

Despite the attempts of many, especially in Washington, to write him off, King Abdullah remains feisty, though helped occasionally by gasps of oxygen — as when President Barack Obama met him in March and photos emerged of breathing tubes inserted in his nostrils. When Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi — and, after his elder brother’s recent stroke, the effective ruler of the UAE — visited King Abdullah on June 4, the Saudi monarch was shown gesticulating with both hands. The subject under discussion was not revealed, but since Zayed was on his way to Cairo it was probably the election success of Egypt’s new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, considered a stabilizing force by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Of course, Sisi gets extra points for being anti-Muslim Brotherhood, a group whose Islamist credentials are at odds with the inherited privileges of Arab monarchies. For the moment, Abdullah, Zayed, and Sisi are the three main leaders of the Arab world. Indeed, the future path of the Arab countries could well depend on these men (and whomever succeeds King Abdullah).

For those confused by the divisions in the Arab world and who find the metric of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to be of limited utility, it is important to note that the Sunni/Shiite divide coincides, at least approximately, with the division between the Arab and Persian worlds. In geopolitical terms, Iraq is at the nexus of these worlds — majority Shiite but ethnically Arab. There is an additional and often confusing dimension, although one that’s historically central to Saudi policy: A willingness to support radical Sunnis abroad while containing their activities at home. Hence Riyadh’s arms-length support for Osama bin Laden when he was leading jihadists in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, and tolerance for jihadists in Chechnya, Bosnia, and Syria. More

One of the reasons that I have been lobbying and submitting reports on the need for an energy policy and the need for alternative energy to the Cayman Islands Government for the last seven years is because of the possibility of geo-political instability triggering conflict in the Middle East.

This may have come to pass. As you will have read above the insurgency has moved out of Syria and into Iraq. Civil war appears to have broken out, with Iraq's most senior Shia cleric has issued a call to arms after Sunni-led insurgents seized more towns. The call by a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani came as the militants widened their grip in the north and east, having seized Mosul and Tikrit and threatened to march south, towards Baghdad.

The question is whether Saudi Arabia will offer help to the ISIS insurgents. Currently on vacation in Morocco, King Abdullah has so far been silent on these developments, but the developments on the ground could well prompt him to cut short his stay and return home. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy asserted that the Saudi military parade on April 29 marked a message to both Iran and the United States. Institute fellow Simon Henderson said this marked the first time Riyad displayed its Chinese-origin CSS-2 ballistic missile, designed to contain a nuclear warhead. King Abdullah has no doubt realized that — with his policy of delivering a strategic setback to Iran by orchestrating the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus showing little sign of any imminent success — events in Iraq offer a new opportunity. Saudi Arabia's defense budget according to Deloitt, stands at $16 billion dollars.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani commented on June 12 on the latest crisis in Iraq, making it clear that Iran will intervene at the appropriate time to combat terror. According to a transcript of the speech released by the Islamic Republic News Agency, he said, "The Islamic Republic of Iran will not tolerate this violence and we will not tolerate this terror and as we stated at the UN, we will fight and combat violence, extremism and terrorism in the region and the world."

Given that Iraq is OPEC's second largest producer and that Brent Crude is already at a nine month high, the possibility is that oil prices could rapidly escalate to $150 per barrel is high.

What effect would this have on the Cayman Islands you may ask. If we have civil war in Iraq, which already appears to be the case, and if the ISIS takes Baghdad and continues south to the oil rich areas we could see $150 per barrel oil. However, if conflict spreads further afield in the region, which conceivably could see the Straights of Hormus closed, we could see oil at $300 per barrel. Editor.

 

 

© 2014