Our Third World America

I've found when you talk to oil company types about the mideast that they barely recognize any possibility they're exploiting anyone. "Before we showed up," they'll say, "these countries weren't even doing anything with all that oil. And they could never have used it properly without us."

Whatever the moral merits of this perspective, it's always the case that third world countries fail to capture the value of their own resources. That's almost the definition of being third world. The important profits don't flow to the people on whose land the resources are found (who often get some low fixed price rather than a meaningful percentage), but to the companies from elsewhere which understand how to exploit the resource.

That makes perfect sense to us when it involves "American" oil companies operating in the mideast. I wonder how much sense it will make to us in the future?

SWEETWATER, Tex. — The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks’s ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades that span as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way... Texas, once the oil capital of North America, is rapidly turning into the capital of wind power...Supporters say Texas is ideal for wind-power development, not just because it is windy. It also has sparsely populated land for wind farms, fast-growing cities and a friendly regulatory environment for developers... “Texas could be a model for the entire nation,” said Patrick Woodson, a senior development executive with E.On, a German utility operating here. Much of the boom in the United States is being driven by foreign power companies with experience developing wind projects, including Iberdrola of Spain, Energias de Portugal and Windkraft Nord of Germany. Foreign companies own two-thirds of the wind projects under construction in Texas.

It would be interesting to read really serious business journalism about where the money from wind power goes. Certainly as it's presented in this article, this phenomenon doesn't bode well.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Posted at February 24, 2008 08:03 PM

