China’s Next Step Toward World Domination

I deal in energy for the same reason I would have otherwise gone into medicine. Because, like healthcare, people will go without a lot of other extras before sacrificing electricity, fuel, transportation, heat/ac, etc. Nations are no different. As I have said many times, the history of 20th Century warfare has been inextricably intertwined with the drive for finding and securing sources of energy.

When he became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911 Winston Churchill led the transitioning of the Royal Navy from coal-fired to fuel-burning ships of the line; suddenly the need to secure sources of oil far from the British Isles led to Great Britain’s wider presence on the high seas…something that did not go unnoticed by the Kaiser in Germany, helping push the two powers into a disastrous conflict. In 1941, Japan, suffering under the crippling impact of a US oil embargo, decided they had no choice but to invade the oil-rich Dutch East Indies—but to do so unmolested they also had to take out the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and capture our military bases in the Philippines, the latter of which stood astride the shipping lanes. And so the USA was plunged into a world war. In 1942, Hitler sent his powerful Army Group South onto the steppes of Southern Russia and into the Caucasus region in a drive to capture its petroleum facilities…he would lose an entire army, and with it the war, in the burning rubble of Stalingrad.