Transcript: I think access to water is a human right. So, that’s the beginning point. Yes, I think people need to have water, because you cannot survive without it. You cannot go more than a day or so without water, so in my mind that’s human right. You cannot also feed yourself without water, water is absolutely essential for the production of food. So, even if you have enough water for drinking that’s only the beginning of it, now you must have water to produce food, so in that sense it is a human right. Oil is different. I don’t think you have a right to oil, especially oil to drive a inefficient vehicle when you can be traveling by other means by public transportation, by walking, by bicycle. I do think that communities have an obligation to provide people with energy options that get them out of their cars, so that we should be using this time of high gasoline prices and economic recession to rethink the way we organize our communities to invest in better public transit, to built bike paths, to give people energy options, other than the ones that we rely on, so that we can come out of this time stronger as a community, as a nation, and face the future in better shape, because we will never go back to the time of oil plenty, that time will never go back again, it is finished, it is over for all time.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: I think some of what we can anticipate is already happening, I mean you have to think in terms of the economic strata in the American population poor people, and working people are already suffering, they already cutting back. I read stories everyday in the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal of working people who are having a very hard time. The trucking, industry, farmers, working people who have long commutes, have to cut back on everything in their life, just to pay for gas, now that will work itself up from the working people, blue collar people, farmers and artisans who drive long distances, even the middle class will start suffering and work its way higher and higher, all of us will start suffering in various ways. I think summer vacations are going to be very problematic, air travel will become much more costly. So, in all kinds of ways we will start experiencing all kinds of hardships in our lives. Small business will shut down, resorts will shut down, and all this will then ripple out of cross the economy and I think the recession that we are already experiencing will go deeper and more severe.

Recorded on:  3/14/08

Transcript: We having oil crisis today. It’s going to get worse. I think that we have a situation today where is the result of higher demand, which is produce by growing competition for oil from between the older industrial powers on one hand and the rising powers like China on the other hand, and slow down in this supply are discuss at and the inability of the oil industry to pump out more, but we could have other factors making this situation even more severe. We could have another bad hurricane season, like we had with Katrina and that’s likely given global warming and the intensification of severe storm activity in the Gulf of Mexico or we could have a war with Iran, which Vice President Cheney seems determine to trigger or some other crisis in oil producing country, Nigeria for example or somewhere else, that would double the price of oil from what we have today. Either any of the combination of those, if two or three of them happened simultaneously will be in very bad shape.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Question: Which alternative-energy source is the best?

Transcript: We, have to face a short term problems of liquids, because especially in this country we are so dependent on motorize vehicles that is the short-term crisis. We are running out of oil for cars and trucks and buses and planes and everything else. We need a liquid alternative. So people tell me, well lets have more wind power and more solar power, which is very appealing. Some people say nuclear power too, but none of those are going to solve our short-term crisis of liquids, and so for liquids I think the most promising is second generation Ethanol. Not Ethanol derived from food crops like corn, but Ethanol derived from the corn stocks and woodchips and other biomass using enzymes what’s calls cellulosic ethanol. This was very promising to me, but we do not have a single functioning cellulosic ethanol plant in commercial scale, cellulosic ethanol plant in this country at this time.

Question: What would it take to get us there?

Transcript: A lot of money, a lot of investment too. I mean the technology is ready, no, I shouldn’t even say that, its on a laboratory scale we have this technology, but we have to move it to commercial scale production and a lot of investment money has to be put into this. This I think is the priority, so that’s the short term crisis of liquid the transportation fuels I think is bio - developing nonfood crop bio fuels. Looking into the future the most promising strikes me is solar power, because I think that’s where the most progress is being made to harness the power of the sun, but there is a mismatch between where the sun is strongest in the American Southwest and where they need is greatest which is in Northern California, in the Midwest and in the Northeast and we don’t have the transmission lines and the infrastructure and so on, so there too, you need a lot of investment and so forth.

Recorded on: 3/14/08 

Question:  Which will run out first: oil or water?

Transcript: We will always have a supply of water, the problem is that the demand for water is increasing very rapidly and we are not going to have enough to supply the amounts needed by a large part of the planets population. Also the problem with water is not that we are going to run out of it, that it is unevenly distributed on the planet, so there is always going to be enough water up in northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia where there aren’t many people, at least there aren’t many people now. Where as in North Africa and in Central Asia and in Middle East where population rates are the highest on the planet, water is very scarce and with global warming it is likely that water will become even more scarce. So, you have a collision between rising population rates and possibly diminishing supplies of water, that is the flashpoint as far as water goes. That is what worries me.

Question: Which problem is easier to fix?

Transcript: Oil is fixable if we move dramatically to adapt alternatives energy policies, but as I say oil is something that this country in particular is very addicted to using and we were very reluctant to make dramatic changes. When I say “we” the American people in general, now there are plenty of people who have made changes, they have traded in their gas guzzlers for hybrid or they go to work on bicycles and so on. So, people are beginning to make changes, but many more will have to do so. What worries me about United States is that we have militarized our oil dependency and we are already engaged in these force to protect our supply of oil. So far countries around the world haven’t been quite so ready to militarize their water policy. So, we have to try to keep things that way. There is a connection between the two and its an unfortunate one, which is that the greater supply, potential supply of water on earth is the oceans, lot of water out there, but to convert saltwater into freshwater is very energy intensive and energy is the thing we are running out of. So, to make a technological shift, we have to find some new sources of energy that are not going to damage the environment and we haven’t solve that one yet. So, actually the priority could be to develop environmentally friendly non-greenhouse gas submitting sources of energy. If we could do that then we might be able to solve the water problem as well. So, that in my mind is a priority, lot of people working on this in laboratories around the world, but not on a scale large enough to solve the problem in the next decade or so, in my mind that’s the greatest priority for all of us on the planet today.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: I would say that the democratic candidates at this point Senator Clinton and Senator Obama have virtually similar policies, which call for a rapid and big increase in the development of petroleum alternatives in greater conservation of energy. There is no difference between them on these issues. So, either one of them on these issues on my mind would be equally attractive. I think they don’t go far enough quite personally, I think they need to go much further. Bear in mind that for a dramatic change in policy to take place, we need a Congress that is free of influence from the oil companies and not just the oil companies, but the big coal and the natural gas companies and the rest. We are going to need much greater emphasis on petroleum and energy alternatives and without a clean sweep of Congress we are not going to make the kind of progress that we need, so we need political reform that is much broader than just the new president and I think that is going to take time. It is going to require political campaign reform. Now, there been efforts in that direction and in fact Senator McCain has been a supporter of that in the past, I think he has backed away from that, but he was once a supporter of that effort. We need much more of that.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: Yes, and as we speak Vice President Cheney is preparing to leave for a trip to the region, which I think has among another purposes to prepare to lay the groundwork for possible the US military action against Iran. He has said on many occasions that the US may well need to use military force to eliminate the threat posed by Iran to the safety of the region, to the strategic threat pose by Iran to the safety of the region and language very similar to the language President Carter used in his Carter Doctrine speech of January 23rd 1980 that this is a vital interest of United States to keep the flow of oil flowing, Vice President Cheney has used very similar language.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Question: Did we go to Iraq for oil?

Transcript: Well, first of all I think that the war in Iraq that began 2003 is a continuation of the war that began really on August 2nd 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and President Bush Senior at that time said that the presence of Iraqi forces in Kuwait post a threat to Saudi Arabia in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf and this was strategic threat to America's vital interests in accordance with the Carter doctrine of 1980, which says at anytime like hostile power threatens to flow of oil from the Persian gulf that is a threat to America’s vital interests, we will respond with military force if need be and when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait that is exactly what he said and so we are going to respond. Now, at the conclusion of that first Persian Gulf War, President Bush the elder said “Well, we not going to invade Iraq, we are going to bring down Saddam Hussein through economic warfare.” The sanctions regime that continued under President Clinton, but he made clear and President Clinton made clear that the purpose of those economic sanctions was regime change in Baghdad to get rid of this potential threat to the security, the stability of the entire region and the stability of the entire region was crucial, because of the importance of the flow of oil from the gulf to the rest of the world. Not just Iraq's oil, but the entire region. The current President Bush decided in 2002 that economic sanctions were failing in their intended mission to eliminate Saddam Hussein and thereby ensure the security of the oil flow from the Persian Gulf and that it would be necessary to resume the conflict where it had ended on February 1st 1991, on the Kuwait boarder with Iraq. That is the way I interpreted that the war of 2003 is really a continuation of the war of 1991, with the same purpose to eliminate the threat of Saddam Hussein posed to the safety of the entire region and its oil flow in accordance with the Carter doctrine.

Question: If we went there for oil, is that okay?

Transcript: Well, I think it is not okay in the sense that we have become addicted to foreign oil as a diversion from the essential task of freeing ourselves from dependence on petroleum, number one. Number two, I think that we delude ourselves into thinking that military force can ensure the protection of oil and I think that the lesson of the current war in Iraq is that military force does not ensure the safety of oil. In fact it has the opposite effect, it makes the threat greater not lesser and that we are paying an extraordinarily high cost in human lives and in dollars, I mean $3 trillion we are speaking now to protect oil, if that was added as a tax to the price of gasoline, now we would be paying two times as much of the pump for the gasoline that we pay and I just think that this is scandalous as well as being immoral

Question: What happened to Iraq’s oil?

Transcript: Well, as I say I don’t believe that the war in Iraq is about Iraq’s oil per se, it is about the safety of the flow from the entire region. So, President Bush could argue and he is hinted at this, he know that by attacking Saddam Hussein we have made the region safer and in fact oil continues to flow from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, all this time, so he could claim that we have seen a benefit from this, but the cost to American taxpayers of this oil has been humongous.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: Oh, now this is again very contentious issue. We in this country have built of our strategic petroleum reserve, there are some in Europe, China is just beginning to create one, India doesn’t have one. So, anytime it’s happen to it is bye-bye forever probably, the chances of filling it up again a pretty slight, so I think it would be a mistake to do that except in an extreme emergency and we are going to have lots of those.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: We're already beginning to see that. I should say that Saudi Arabia may be able to increase its production there is so lot of debate among specialists in the field about this. The Saudis claim that they could increase their production, but many experts say that they are concealing the truth about their ability to increase their output, that in fact their major fields are in decline and then in new fields that they are bring online will be needed to compensate for their decline of their older fields. The same thing is true in Russia, it is older fuels are in decline, they are bringing online newer fields and the far east of Sakalin island, but those fields probably will be needed to compensate for the decline of their older fields. So, there really aren’t too many other places where you are going to see an increase and those are going to be hotly contested.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: Well, they are really a very few countries left in the world that are capable of adding to the world supply of oil. Most of the oil producers are in decline, so that handful of countries that are able to increase oil areAzerbaijan and Kazakhstan and the Caspian Sea area, maybe Iraq, in the Persian Gulf and we know what problems are faced in Iraq and then Africa, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria and not too many other countries really. Maybe Venezuela may be Colombia, but that is about it.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: Well, I don't  think that we want to look to them as an example of what they are doing right. China and India have relied even more than we do on coal to supply their energy and coal produces even more carbon dioxide for unit of energy achieved, than oil does. So, that is not something that we want to follow, in fact we need to work with China and India to persuade them not to use coal or if they use coal to use environmentally friendly coal burning technologies, which we are not even using sufficiently in this country. So, coal is not route that we want to go and we don’t want them to use that, because the planet that we will really be in jeopardy if they continue to do that. What troubles me about China and India is that they are going on in automobile buying spree as they are rising middle class goes out and the first thing they want to do is buy car. Now, that is very hard for us in this country to say no cars, we can have cars, you can't have cars, because that is go on increase the pressure on world petroleum’s supplies until we start doing something about our own car addiction and obviously we are not doing anything about that, so they look at us, they see our TV shows, our Hollywood movies and they say “Cars, that is the good life, that is the American way of life, we want that too” and they are going out and buying cars like crazy. China is becoming world’s number 2 auto market after the United States. They are expected to have hundreds of millions of new cars on road over the next 25 years, this will be a disaster and that's what is driving their huge increase in demand for petroleum. It is increase in car ownership and India’s following along and as they buy cars they need more petroleum and because neither China nor India has large domestic reserves of petroleum, they have to go out and get it from the same sources of supply as the United States. And here is the where the problem lies and I have alluded to this earlier they are especially China competing with the United States in this geopolitical struggle for influence in the oil producing areas, just as the United States is trying to ensure access to supplies in places like just as United States seeks to obtain sources of supply in troubled areas like Africa and the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia, so is China and just as we tried to cement our ties with governments, friendly governments in those areas with supplies of arms. China is doing like wise and they are competing with us, there is arms competition that goes along with the pursuit of oil and this is the sort of thing that I would call them new Great Game like the Great Game that led up to World War I and has made very worried.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: Well in the sense that I think we certainly understand that we cannot continue to rely on petroleum as a major source of energy. Now, there are two dimensions to our addiction to petroleum, by the way let’s start by saying that petroleum is our largest single source of energy about 40% of our energy comes from petroleum. This is higher than almost any other major economic power, most of the countries rely on other sources of energy or a bigger spread or a greater spectrum of energy. We are very petroleum dependent and this is partly, because we were once a major petroleum producer, it was once abundant and cheap. So, it was natural to rely on oil, but that ended in 1970 when we became a net, well when our domestic energy production peaked and we started relying on imports. So, we have a problem that we were very dependent on petroleum. Now, there are two problems with our dependence on petroleum. One is that we have together from foreign countries and that ties our foreign policy very much to obtaining more and more oil from other countries, many of which are unfriendly or dangerous or hostile. And that has led to the militarization of our foreign energy policy. I spoken a little bit about that, on one hand, and there is a high cost involved in that. Also, there is very big economic cost in the sense that we are exporting more and more dollars to pay for imported oil and those dollars that we spend are the largest single factor in our balance of payments deficit and that is contributing to the weakening of US dollar with respect to other currencies, which is contributing to the economic slowdown we are seeing in this country. So, our depend on foreign oil is a problem. On the other side of the coin, or the other dimension of this, is that oil, like other fossils fuels, produces carbon dioxide and insofar as we continue to rely on petroleum, we are going to continue to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we are going to have a problem reducing our green house emission. So, we have a double problem now, we want to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions and we want to cut back on our reliance on imported petroleum. The only way to do that is cut back on our use of petroleum period and at this stage in the game we really have no plan in place to do that, and that is why I say all these efforts for energy independence that rely on domestic sources of petroleum are dangerous delusion. They are leading us to think there is a petroleum solution, there is no petroleum solution, there is only non-petroleum solutions.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Question: What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong?

Transcript: Well, I think America has been sleeping that is putting in a nutshell. We had a major energy review in 2001, when President Bush first took office, he asked his Vice President Dick Cheney to convene an energy review, it was called the National Energy Policy Development Group, the NEPDG, they issued a report on May 17, 2001, shortly before 9/11 and the essence of that report was to lets keep doing what we have always been doing only more of it. I mean the one dramatic innovation they made is essentially was to let's drill in ANWR, the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, everybody knows about that. The fact is that, if you drill everywhere in sight in Alaska, it would add one million barrels of oil a day to our daily consumption or 20 million barrels a day. So that would make very little difference in our supply. They really didn't say very much more, except to keep producing more oil, consume more oil, more natural gas, more coal and more nuclear power, there was very little incentive made to develop alternative sources of energy. Now, meanwhile many other parts of the world, especially in Europe and Japan have given far more incentives to develop energy alternatives, wind power, solar power, biofuels, and to emphasize conservation in various ways through tax penalties for high gas guzzling cars, that also by building high-speed trains, like you have in Europe and public transportation. None of that, absolutely none of that has been happening in this country. So, now it is seven years later we are in worse shape than we were in 2001 to face an energy crisis. From my perspective this is one of the worst things that the Bush administration has done. I don’t want to blame it all on President Bush. The Congress Democrats and Republicans has largely gone along with this, because there are lot of powerful economic interests in favor of this state has go and we really need a shake up.

Question: Are we doing anything right?

Transcript: Well in just the past year Congress has moved a little bit more swiftly to develop bio fuels to demand increased automobile efficiency, but it is really very little and it is very late. So, we have to go move much more quickly. I should say that as a result of grassroots pressure in states and municipalities, you see a lot of progress in the Pacific Northwest and New England, areas other states have begun demanding that public utilities insist that much more of their electricity generation be produced by renewable fuels, so you do see progress at the state and municipal level, but not at the federal level.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript:  That is the very important question to consider. I think that we all understand just how important resources are, especially at a time like now, when the price of oil is rising, so we are all made aware of this on a daily basis and I think we have come to appreciate the importance of having an adequate supply of resources. Two things are happening right now that makes this more significant and those two things are that the competition for resource s are intensifying. It is an intensifying, because we have this sudden emergence of powerful new economic competitors, namely China, but also India, Brazil, Mexico and other developing countries with a ravenous need for resources to supply their economic growth, now in one hand, so that is a striking new development and on the other hand we are beginning to see a - I won’t say a disappearance of vital resources, but are slackening in the ability of the earth to supply us with more, that is where there is a sharp divide emerging between this ravenous new demand coming, the ability of the planet and resource producers to supply this expanding demand. Both of these things are happening at once. We experience in that in our lives in high prices. When you have a sharp increase in demand and a narrowing in this supply, prices go up. That's one way we know that this is happening.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: I think the more likely conflicts will be over water, there will be more frequent, more numerous, more widespread, but the risk of conflict involving the big powers is greater over oil and natural gas and uranium, because the survival of the great powers is at stake. So, I think the risk of conflict is lesser in the case of the US, China and Russia. They are going to be much more cautious, so I don’t think the likelihood is very high and percentage terms. I think the risk of conflict over water is 100%, because it is going to become very scarce in many areas of the world and people will become desperate, but I don’t think the US, China and Russia are going to go to war for water, I think that just practically 0% likelihood. However, when we talk about oil, gas, uranium; those are essential to the survival of the great powers and there is this not 0% risk that they will stumble into a conflict.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: Well, I think that we should be thinking in terms of World War I, not World War II, not World War III or Korea or Vietnam, these are the kinds of wars that we're accustomed to thinking about, but think more about World War I and the events that proceeded it. That's the kind of situation we are looking at in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea and  Africa. Those were all conflicts over geopolitical struggles over resources, what was called the “Great Gain” in those days and that case it was the struggle between the British empire and Russian empire in the same areas of the world, Central Asia in particular, and they were very much about the control of imperial territories, and they led to these kinds of clashes in these far-off areas over territory, over controls of key bases, of passes, the Khyber Pass, and that sort of thing. Well, this is the kind of struggles that are now taking place in the Caspian Sea region, in Central Asia, to some degree even beginning in Africa and certainly in the Persian Gulf region where the US, Russia and China are all jockeying with each other for geopolitical advantage and could lead not to intentional conflict, not to a deliberate decision to go to war. I don’t think that is going to happen, but to unintentional conflict, to miscalculation, to bad decisions and the heat of panic, precisely the kind of situation I was describing where a local ethnic apprising of some sort in Tajikistan or a Kyrgyzstan or Azerbaijan overnight leads to unintended conflicts between US and Russian troops, without anybody thinking ahead that something like this could happen.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Transcript: Now, remember central Asia was under Soviet rule for many decades and before that it was part of the Czar’s empire. This is an area of many different ethnic groups the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Kazaks, the Kyrgys and to some degree the territories that these groups inhabited were never really clearly demarcated. They're nomadic people, so they have traditional lands, but the Czars came in and said okay, this is where we are going to draw the lines and then the Soviets came in and drew the lines, and they don’t really bear close approximation to where the particular people live. So, there are a lot of competing claims to where their territory should be. In these areas lie uranium, lie natural gas, and coal and oil. So, there are some struggles underway as to who should control what of these valuable areas. So, you could have fights in the future that a territorial over, who should get these prized areas. Now, on top of that you have a situation where most of the governments in these areas are control by people who were once part of the Soviet bureaucratic machine. They look and smell like old Soviet bureaucrats, right? They claim to be democrats, but they are really not, they are really very authoritarian and with the new wealth coming from oil and natural gas, well most of that money winds up in the hands of their friends, relatives, and cronies and a lot of the wealth disappears into hidden bank accounts somewhere, I am thinking particularly of the family of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of Kazakhstan, which is the wealthiest of these countries. Meanwhile most of the people in these countries are not getting any wealthier, since the breakup of the Soviet Union. These are also predominantly Muslim countries. They have been a target of the Muslim, Islamic fundamentalist movements of past decade or so. I am talking of groups associated with Osama Bin Laden and Al-Quaeda and some of the other extremist movements that we've heard of. And these groups are finding some sympathy among the people of these areas who find the governments to be corrupt, to be insensitive to their needs, to be pocketing all the money and giving it to their cronies. So in the future, you could have uprisings like the kind we've had another countries that are fueled by Islamic propaganda, but really at heart are about the mal-distribution of resource wealth, kind of life what I was talking about in the Niger delta area where the elites claim all of the resource wealth, conditions of deteriorating, the masses of the people are getting worse off, not better, conditions of deteriorating and this is exactly the kind of fertile atmosphere in which extremist movements take off and this is what I worry about. This is an area of geopolitical competition between three great powers. This is the one part of the globe in which the United States, Russia and China are all competing for influence at the same time. The United States, after the break up the Soviet Union, saw this is an area to gain geopolitical advantage and new sources of energy. So, first President Clinton and now President Bush have made an all-out effort to gain influence in the stands as their called Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, if I get them all right, but Russia which use to control this area under the Soviets and before that Czars also wants to control this area, but now you have the third factor in here, China which is very worried about instability at its back door, the Chinese region of Xianxang, which is the Muslim majority area in it is extreme west and it is one part of China that is predominantly Muslim, they are very worried about instability in this area, so it wants to have a see on what goes on the Central Asia and it has growing economic interests in this area, also wants to tap into the resource riches of central Asia has also become involved. So, you have three great powers all seeking geopolitical influence at once. The United States is providing military aid, Russia is providing military aid and now China has stepped in collaborating often with Russia through a new organization known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or the SCO. And the SCO jointly with China and Russia together provide military aid to this Stans. If this isn’t enough, both the United States and Russia have established military bases in region, namely in Kyrgyzstan, they have about 50 miles apart a US base on one side of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan and a Russian base on the other side. I mentioned all of this, because you have to imagine a situation in the future with the some kind of upheaval in Kyrgyzstan between one political faction against the other, the military breaks apart and somehow or another Americans soldiers and Russian soldiers get caught up in the conflict and overnight we have a shooting war.

Recorded on: 3/14/08

Question: Will we see more wars over resources?

Transcript: Well we are in the midst of many conflicts over resources today and I do believe they will be more of them and they will become more feirce with time, that is partly because resources themselves are becoming more scarce, because population is growing, but also because global warming will make many of these resources more scarce and the effects will become more severe and things like water will start running out. For example, in Africa there is a very severe conflict underway in the Niger Delta area of southern Nigeria, this is a conflict between the people of the Niger delta. This is where most of the oil is extracted for producing most of Nigeria’s oil. Most of the money from that oil goes to the central government in  Abuja, the capital. That is were the elites that have ruled to Nigeria are located. Very little of the money from that oil goes back to the people in the Niger delta most of who live on a dollar a day, unemployment is 70% or more, the people are desperate and they have risen in revolt against central government. Now, what they are demanding is that more of the oil rents, the revenues from oil production, come back to them and it’s a ugly war, a lot of sabotage, attacks on government facilities, kidnapping of oil company personnel. So, I would say there is conflict underway there today. And the United States is involved indirectly, because we provide arms to the Nigerian government. We have military advisors over there. So, in this sense there are conflicts underway already. When you talk about water, there are disputes of all kinds underway within country so far, we don’t hear a lot about these conflicts, but I think that wars over water will become much more severe in the coming decades. Now, let's look Darfur. Darfur, everybody knows about Darfur. This is a extreme humanitarian disaster. Now, the conflict in Darfur has many causes. There are disputes between the government and the rebel forces that are trying to gain were control over the area of Darfur. So, there is a political side to this dispute, but behind the role is the fact that with global warming, the area is becoming dryer, and the people who herd cattle, that is one of the traditional sources of income in the area, those people are finding harder and harder to feed their cattle, they are intruding into the areas of farmers and they are finding farming harder and harder, because there is less and less rainfall, as less water. So, there is also a resource dimension to that conflict, a water dimension to that conflict. Pitting the pastoralists, the cattle herders against the farmers and to some degree on one side the government is backing the pastoralists, the rebels are backing the farmers, so these two things are intermeshed in Darfur. And I think that is the way many of the conflicts in the future will look. They won't be either or, they will be a mixture of ethnic and religious disputes on one hand and resource disputes on the other.

Question: Where will the flashpoints be?

Transcript: Well when we talking about energy, we are talking primarily about the Middle East, the Caspian Sea basin of the former Soviet Union and Africa, those are the places where oil is most concentrated and where the conflicts who become more intense. Other sources of energy that are in dispute are natural gas. Natural gas is pretty much found in the same locations as oil. Uranium, now it is also going to becomes scarce, as we shift more to nuclear power and there is greater emphasize on nuclear power these days that means the demand for uranium is going to go up, uranium is a lot of that is in Central Asia and in Africa, so those will be sites of likely conflict. Now, when we are talking about water that's going to be focusing on areas that are very dry, here we are talking about North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, but also in Central America, parts of Latin America, even conceivably in the United States.

Recorded on: 3/14/08