While my career in recent years has focused on politics, especially in the Balkans and Middle East, I have a long history with energy issues. They were already big in 1972, when I was on the secretariat for the first UN Conference on the Human Environment. Even then global warming was on the agenda. I worked in the mid-1970s at the National Center for Analysis of Energy Systems at Brookhaven National Laboratory and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, handled energy issues as Science Counselor of the US Embassies in Rome and Brasilia.
In 1984 I became director of ‘energy consuming country affairs’ at the State Department, a role that included representing the United States at the International Energy Agency’s Standing Committee on Emergency Questions.
It was while oil prices were low in the mid-1980s that we convinced our IEA partners to put in place the ‘coordinated early stock draw’ procedures that are today an important part of the global response to an oil supply disruption.
But proud as I am of that achievement, I’ve come to believe that we missed opportunities to go much further in building up civilian responses to the problem James Mina and I discuss in my
Survival article, ‘
Circumventing Hormuz’. Over-reliance on military instruments has been costly and counter-productive. We should long ago have pressed non-IEA oil importers (especially China and India) to increase stocks (and coordinate their drawdown) and oil exporters to ensure supply by building pipelines and using them to their maximum capacity.
The current increase in US oil and gas production, while it does not insulate us from the economic harm due to an oil-supply disruption and the resulting price spike, provides an opportunity to beef up these civilian responses, redistribute burdens and lower American military costs. It also provides an opportunity to make protection of oil flow through Hormuz a multinational responsibility, with contributions from major Asian oil importers. This would relieve some of the burden on the US Navy and make it less likely Iran will ever disrupt Gulf oil supplies.