No righteous ones

I was thinking of writing something about the recent conflict in Georgia, but Uri Avnery, of Gush Shalom, said it pretty well already in a very insightful article:

. . .
This is the historical background to the recent spat between Georgia and Russia. There are no Righteous Ones here. It is rather funny to hear Vladimir Putin, whose hands are dripping with the blood of Chechen freedom fighters, extolling the right of South Ossetia to secession. It's no less funny to hear Micheil Saakashvili likening the freedom fight of the two separatist regions to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. ...

I am not entirely certain if the peoples, writ large, of both Abkhazia and South Ossetia actually wanted full independance from Georgia. Everything I've read and heard over the past few weeks seems to indicate that, but I don't have a familiarity with the politics to really tell.

Let's pretend he's not a war criminal

That is, however, the key to the conflict. No matter what a vile, evil, unspeakably brutal murderer Vladimir Putin is, the morality of the enterprise rides on that - if the people of South Ossetia wanted independence, and were indeed being violently oppressed by Saakashvili's army, then all the hand-wringing from NATO is either irrelevance or hypocrisy: they can't castigate Russia for intervening in Georgia when America is sitting in Iraq.

Pacman in the Desert

As everyone knows, the world isn't making anymore oil. We may never "run out," but supply will eventually dwindle to the point that widespread use won't be feasible. Its a question of "when" not "if." The same goes for natural gas, coal, and anything else that we dig out of the ground and burn by the trillions of tonnes.

The discussion in North America over this has been fueled (haha) partly by environmentalism, but also by paranoia. The world's largest proven reserves of oil are on the Arabian peninsula, especially in the part ruled by those odious Saudis. While I despise them for their self-serving perversion of religion, disregard for human rights, and intolerable kowtowing to their great protector Uncle Sam, the feeling amongst populist politicians in the West seems to be that they don't kowtow enough.

I used to wonder what the Saudis would do when their oil ran out. They've a population of 20 million surviving in the desert. How would they import food without the foreign revenues?

Someone over there has evidently had some brains. This is a highway outside Riyadh. The green circles are irrigated fields. You can look closer just by zooming in on Google Maps, where I got that shot.


All is not peachy, however. 70% of the kingdom's potable water comes from desalination. How do you desalinate water? You heat it up. And what do you suppose the Saudis are using to heat it? Not oil, but natural gas, which they have lots of, but wisely do not export (even I am willing to give them this much credit).

Like I said, though, it will all eventually run out. Back in the 1980s, Saudi Aramco's magazine engaged in some self-congratulatory musing about how they would just switch to solar energy production and continue merrily along. After all, what does the peninsula have, if not an inexhaustible supply of sunshine?

After all, how did that desert get so darn hot to begin with? Hmm . . . I wonder if it will get hotter . . .

Ironic, isn't it? The same fuels that are making that desert bloom may also one day make it wither. They're going to need to drink plenty of fluids.