Corporate greed, blood for oil and similar rot.

Focusing on "corporate greed" and "U.S. imperialism," issues beloved by the left and anti-neocons, obscures the real problem pertaining to world energy supplies -- bureaucratic inefficiency, i.e., not enough corporate control:

Although we might be accustomed to thinking of the major integrated energy companies such as BP, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch/Shell as embodying the oil business, in reality governments control most of the world’s oil and gas reserves. National oil companies, such as Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, have legal monopolies, often backed by constitutional provisions, on producing some 75% by volume of the world’s known or probable oil fields. Gazprom, although publicly-quoted, is majority owned by the Russian state and packed with President Putin’s placemen; it alone controls a quarter of the world’s known natural gas reserves.

Hamstrung by corruption, used as piggy banks by short-sighted governments, and lacking the spur of competition, the performance of these state industries has rarely proven as impressive as that of the private sector. . . . With the Kremlin consolidating control of oil and gas under the umbrella of Gazprom, arbitrarily confiscating the assets of Russian businesspeople and excluding foreign companies, the prospect for Europe having Russia as a reliable energy supplier looks bleak.

. . . Conspiracy theories denouncing Operation Iraqi Freedom as a grab for Iraq’s energy (even though foreigners remain barred from owning fields by the new constitution) are widely held among the EU’s politicians and public. Meanwhile the silence has been deafening as Putin has systematically dismantled Russia’s nascent democracy and killed a quarter of a million Chechens (out of a population barely over a million) in the indiscriminate military bludgeoning of the oil-rich region.

“The Lights Are Going Out All Over Europe.” By Peter Nolan , TCS Daily, 1/11/06 (emphasis added).