US base in Australia: China on notice
Published: 16 November, 2011, 18:06
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard speaks with US President Barack Obama as they arrive for a Parliamentary Dinner at Parliament House in Canberra on November 16, 2011 (AFP Photo / Jim WATSON)
Up to 2,500 US marines will be permanently stationed in Australia within the next six years under a new agreement between the two countries. The move comes as Pacific region’s major player, China, is rapidly boosting its military might.
The news was announced jointly by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and President Barack Obama, who is on a nine-day diplomatic tour of the Asia Pacific.
“This region is of great strategic importance to us” said Obama. “We will make sure we are able to fulfill our leadership role in the Asia Pacific region.”
“Our alliance has been a bedrock of stability in our region, so building on the alliance through this new initiative is about stability,” said Julia Gillard.
The agreement comes against the backdrop of a rapidly-militarizing China that also figures to be a major player in the region.
Although Obama said he welcomed China’s rise, he also issued a warning: “We will send a clear message to them that we think they may need to be on track, in terms of accepting the rules and responsibilities of being a world power.”
Although the Chinese defense budget is notoriously opaque, experts guess that the country has tripled its spending over the last decade, and now trails only the US in its military expenditure.
The Chinese navy is now in possession of its first aircraft carrier – an old Soviet vessel purchased from Ukraine that has been refitted with modern weapons. It also presented a new stealth fighter – the J-20 – on the eve of a visit by US defense officials earlier this year.
Although the US has voiced no plans to construct its own base in Australia, and the initial marine contingent will be only 250, the agreement includes plans for a greater presence of US Navy and Air Force.
The marines are also expected to provide combat training not just for Australian soldiers, but those from other countries from the Pacific Basin.
In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Hugh White, the former Deputy Defense Secretary labeled the deployment “very significant and very risky” for Australia.
But former Defense Minister Kim Beazley has refused to countenance alarmist scenarios. “The Chinese have gotten used to the fact that Australia and the United States have a very close military relationship. They expect nothing different,” he told the local media.
Nonetheless, after a decade where US attention has been absorbed by the Middle East and Afghanistan, this is yet another sign that the country is turning its eye to the Pacific Basin.
Obama has pushed for a greater role for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade alliance of mostly Western-leaning economies that has aroused the suspicions of China.
It has also beefed up its existing bases and naval presence, largely in anticipation of ever-growing disagreements around the lucrative shipping lanes in the South China Sea, which are subject to wrangles between China and other regional powers.
The marine deployment is merely the latest step in a strategy that has been termed the “Comeback to Asia.”
Whether the policy will be anything other than a symbolic show of support for US allies is another question. Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment told the Washington Post that “The US has no ability to keep China out or to keep China down.”
US Marine base for Darwin
November 11, 2011
“I think this is a very signficant and potentially risky move for Australia” … Hugh White. Photo: Reuters
BARACK OBAMA is to announce that the US will begin rotating Marines through an Australian base in Darwin in a permanent new military presence, intensifying the alliance in a sign of heightened concern about China.
He is scheduled to make the announcement with the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, when they visit Darwin next Thursday during Mr Obama’s first visit to Australia as president. The 26-hour visit will mark the 60th anniversary of the ANZUS alliance.
The Marines are the chief US ground combat force in the Pacific theatre, the so-called ”tip of the spear”.
Two-thirds of all US Marines are based in the Pacific, with big concentrations at US bases on Okinawa Island in Japan and Guam, a US territory 2000 kilometres north of Papua New Guinea.
”This is all about the rise of China, the modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army and, particularly, it’s about the increased vulnerability of US forces in Japan and Guam to the new generation of Chinese missiles,” said Alan Dupont, the Michael Hintze professor of international security at Sydney University.
”The new Chinese missiles could threaten them in a way they’ve never been able to before, so the US is starting to reposition them to make them less vulnerable. Australia’s ‘tyranny of distance’ is now a distinct strategic advantage.”
Professor Dupont, a former Australian Defence official and intelligence analyst, said the ”Australian strategic rationale is that we are also hedging against increasing Chinese military power and their capacity to destabilise maritime trade routes. And we want to get closer to the US.
”There’s no doubt at all the Chinese will have serious reservations about this”
Mr Obama and Ms Gillard are not expected to argue that China is a factor in the decision. ”This is a strong gesture that even in the face of budget constraints, the US reaction to the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan deployment is not to go home but to pivot” into the Asia-Pacific, according to the former deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, Jim Steinberg.
But Hugh White, a professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University and a former deputy secretary of defence, said the decision would have deep consequences for Australia’s relations with China.
”I think this is a very significant and potentially very risky move for Australia. In the view from Beijing, everything the US is doing in the western Pacific is designed to bolster resistance to the Chinese challenge to US primacy.
”In Washington and in Beijing, this will be seen as Australia aligning itself with an American strategy to contain China.”
Mr Obama and Ms Gillard are to say the US will not build a new base for the Marines but will use the Robertson Barracks, the Australian base near Darwin.
But the base is home to about 4500 Australian soldiers and has capacity for only a couple of hundred more. The facilities will need to be expanded to accommodate the US Marines on rotation, whose numbers are expected to build.
Such a decision has been under consideration for some years. The Marines are to use the base for training. ”They want to be able to fly helicopters, drop out of planes and shoot at things, and you can’t do that in crowded Okinawa,” in the words of Mike Green, a former top Asia adviser in the George W. Bush administration.
The Greens oppose any expansion of the US military presence in Australia. By using an existing Australian base rather than building a new US one, the Pentagon considers the new presence will be more ”politically sustainable”.
The then US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said last November in Melbourne: ”We don’t want to do things that would be politically difficult for the Australian government. We want to enhance the alliance, not create controversy.”
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They have returned
China should worry less about America’s “containment” strategy and more about why the neighbours welcome it
Aug 12th 2010 | from the print edition
SYMBOLIC gestures come in all shapes and sizes, but few as imposing as that of the USS George Washington, a ship more than three football-pitches long, and capable of carrying 85 aircraft and more than 6,200 people. But even symbols of such massive heft can be interpreted in various ways. The George Washington has just been in the South China Sea, off the coast of Danang, once home to one of the American army’s biggest bases in Vietnam. Fifteen years after the opening of diplomatic relations, and 35 years since the end of the Vietnam war, the carrier’s visit, and the joint naval exercises that followed, were striking tokens of reconciliation. But observers in China saw a different sort of gesture: not so much a handshake with a former enemy; more a brandished fist towards a potential one, their own country.
Vituperative Chinese commentators detected an old bogey: an American attempt to “contain” China by bolstering alliances with its neighbours. China’s leaders were more restrained (or perhaps just slower off the mark). But the South China Morning Post reported that Hu Jintao, the president, was in enough of a huff about this and other slights to contemplate delaying a visit to America. Just when the ice that formed after the Sino-American climate-change tiff in Copenhagen in December seemed to have melted, a new chill has set in. “Sweet-mouthed” American politicians, lamented Global Times, an English-language Chinese newspaper, “stab you in the back when you are not looking.”
Chinese analysts can point to an impressive array of American “provocations” to justify their fulminations. They cited reports that America is in talks on nuclear co-operation with Vietnam, and that, in an apparent reversal for its non-proliferation efforts, the Obama administration is not insisting that Vietnam forswear enriching its own uranium. As with America’s 2008 nuclear deal with India, China scented double standards.
They have returned
China also faced an unsettling experience in July, at the annual ASEAN Regional Forum organised by the Association of South-East Asian Nations. This usually soporific security talking-shop, held this year in Hanoi, saw Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, declare the South China Sea a “national interest”. When 12 of the 27 countries there spoke up for a new approach to solving their maritime disputes, China sniffed co-ordination—nay, conspiracy—especially when Vietnam swiftly stepped up its protests about Chinese activities in disputed waters.
Before her jaunt to Vietnam, the George Washington had been taking part in joint exercises with South Korean forces. Respecting Chinese sensitivities, she did not exercise in the Yellow Sea, just off China’s coast. But a Pentagon spokesman has said she will do so “in the near future”. This comes as America’s ties with South Korea have been strengthened—and China’s frayed—by the destruction of a naval vessel, the Cheonan, in March. South Korea and America, backed by an international inquiry, have blamed the sinking on a North Korean torpedo. The North has denied responsibility and China has refused to finger its awkward ally.
As the American navy has roamed China’s neighbourhood, senior officials have fanned out over Asia. In Indonesia Robert Gates, the defence secretary, upset human-rights activists and delighted the government by resuming links to Kopassus, the army’s special forces. William Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, has been to four South-East Asian countries.
It all amounts to what Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington think-tank, has called “the most comprehensive burst of diplomatic and military activity in Asia, particularly South-East Asia, in decades” from an American administration. It is not surprising that many in China see all this as part of a new containment doctrine. Many in America do, too. By this analysis, Barack Obama took office committed to good relations with China, and ready to welcome it as a great power in return for China’s accepting the global responsibilities that go with that status. Then a series of setbacks convinced him to stand up to China with a more muscular strategy. The “sweet mouths” spout charm just the same; but containment is now the game.
That is far from how the administration presents it, however. It argues it is merely reasserting a “national interest” and traditional role in East Asia, a region neglected by an America distracted by terrorism and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Absent without leave, America helped foster an overblown perception in the region of America’s decline and China’s ascent. It is now putting that right. In Mr Paal’s phrase, America’s recent Asian diplomacy is “not aimed at China, but has implications for China”.
A container has several sides
That may be too nuanced a distinction for the Global Times’ leader-writers. But those implications are indeed worth pondering. China seems to have digested one already: that the swagger, bordering on arrogance, with which Chinese officials were throwing their weight around in the region and in the West in the depths of the financial crisis created unnecessary alarm. These days, courtesy is back in vogue.
Another implication is that rather than simply rail against America, China could do more to prevent its neighbours providing such fertile ground for the “seeds of distrust” it sows. That would demand greater clarity over China’s real strategic aims, and a willingness to discuss them in multilateral forums. On the South China Sea, for example, it is hard to know exactly what its claim is based on. Yet its ships sometimes treat the sea as a Chinese lake; its maps show a great lolling tongue of Chinese sovereignty stuck insolently out at the South-East Asian littoral states. No wonder those countries welcome American aircraft-carriers. The trouble is, of course, that if China were clearer about its aims, they might welcome them even more.
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Beware the South China Sea
July 15, 2011
By Douglas H. Paal
inShare0
The last ASEAN Regional Forum sent shockwaves through the region. A year on, have the US and China found a way of preventing an escalation in the region?
Solving South China Sea Spat
South China Sea Conflict? No Way
South China Sea Is No Black Sea
Why China Wants South China Sea
How Taiwan Can Upstage China
When I was a student in the Naval Officer Candidate School, learning to drive ships, I was taught about the hazards of the South China Sea, where our instructors told us to stay away from those dangerous islands and shoals. Today, it’s one of the most heavily trafficked waterways in the world. The islands and shoals are still there, but now more heavily contested amid territorial and maritime disputes. The watchword for the United States more than ever should be ‘caution, dangerous waters!’
This is a timely warning because the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) is about to hold its annual foreign ministers’ meeting in Bali. The previous meeting in Hanoi last July sent shockwaves through the region when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared US support for ‘a collaborative diplomatic process by all claimants for resolving the various territorial disputes without coercion,’ implying that Beijing departed from the Declaration of Conduct for the South China Sea (DOC) of 2002 and further suggesting that Beijing was muscling its outlandish territorial claims individually against the three other major claimant states in the area, in violation of the DOC. Clinton offered her ‘good offices’ to provide a forum for dealing collectively with issues among the claimants.
China reacted badly at first to Clinton’s engagement on the South China Sea and in some of the finer details—such as not giving Beijing prior warning—her intervention might have been handled more diplomatically. But in the end, it was timely and effective. She got Beijing’s attention and the support of most of the region for a common effort to resist China’s efforts to exploit the weaknesses of smaller counterparts through one-on-one confrontation.
Beijing hasn’t yet given up on its one-on-one approach, but it is encountering more unified resistance and adjusting its tactics. The history of the territorial claims issues in the South China Sea is long and extremely complicated. They involve overlapping tensions about control of islets and shoals, rights to territorial waters and exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and access to their fishing and mineral resources. There are also disputes about the meaning of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which is itself supposed to provide rules for the settlement of disputes about the control and use of the area.
China is caught between two forces. One is the political need to stick to broad and individually questionable claims for the islands and their adjacent waters based on history, formerly represented by Beijing’s nine-dashed line surrounding the islands of the sea and implying sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea. The other is the attractiveness of relying on existing international law and making narrower UNCLOS-based claims that stand a better chance of being respected, a path toward which Beijing seems to be moving. In today’s newly strong China, buoyed by nationalism, careers will not be advanced by denying plainly and publicly the legitimacy of the nine-dashed line inherited from the last days of the Kuomintang government in 1947. Outsiders’ calls for the Chinese to clarify the situation can be viewed by some in China as offering a choice of suicide or war. But when China has had to meet UNCLOS deadlines to file partial claims, it has mostly played cautiously by the rules of UNCLOS, as it interprets them, or sought to avoid confronting them.
For their part, the other major disputants (Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia) came to their legal claims fairly late in the game, mostly after soundings suggested in the 1970s that hydrocarbons may be present in commercially valuable quantities. But these are also complicated by colonial legacies and concessions, and patterns of customary use by fishermen and sailors over the centuries. Even a non-claimant, Singapore, was drawn into the diplomatic tussle when China sent a naval vessel through the South China Sea to Singapore last month and attempted to suggest the city state was legitimating China’s claims. Singapore’s foreign ministry spokesman was compelled to denounce the manoeuvre and call for China to clarify its oversized claims.
No one appears to have a compelling legal claim in all respects. Vietnam and the Philippines argue that the territorial claims over uninhabited or marginally inhabitable islets don’t have standing comparable to their claim to divide the northern part of the South China Sea between them based on their continental shelves and EEZs. China makes bolder claims for the islets to strengthen its case. The South China Sea is thus a cat’s cradle of international law that, left unresolved, could invite pre-emptive use of force by the strong over the weak.
Washington’s interests in the South China Sea are usually characterized by officials as ‘freedom of navigation’ and ‘peaceful settlement’ of the disputes. Beijing says 70,000 vessels pass peacefully through the South China Sea every year, so freedom of navigation isn’t an issue. But Beijing also asserts (along with a handful of other nations, including Malaysia) that EEZs don’t permit military reconnaissance without the authorization of the EEZ sovereign. Beijing attempted to sever a towed array dragged by the intelligence collection ship USNS Impeccable in 2009, and has made its unhappiness with frequent US reconnaissance one of the ‘obstacles’ to normal military-to-military relations with Washington. As a major naval power, the United States can’t be expected to ever accept in its entirety China’s expansive definition of its EEZ, let alone its self-imposed limitations on naval use of EEZs.
‘Peaceful settlement’ is an important mantra for Washington because the alternative—military action—would be devastating to the stability of the region. The relatively weak, developing economies of Southeast Asia have depended on the United States first to provide protection in the Cold War, and then to offer a balance to rising Chinese power. Up to now, this has permitted them to avoid an all-out arms race in the region with its attendant costs and frictions. If the United States were to opt out of the South China Sea dispute, its regional influence and ability to protect its interests will decline, and regional stability could be lost—hence the Obama administration’s correct decision to speak up last year.
In preparation for the ARF ministerial meeting, Beijing and Washington conducted ‘Asia-Pacific consultations’ in Hawaii on June 25, a new form of meeting that had been agreed to at the latest Strategic and Economic Dialogue in May. Going into the session, the Chinese lead participant, Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, struck a tough posture against the United States trying to multilateralize what China considers strictly bilateral disputes. Following the meeting there were no public references to the South China Sea, but the US spokesperson said they had ‘open, frank, and constructive discussions.’
China’s relatively quiet disposition since the consultations, taken together with its increasingly UNCLOS-observant approach to the issues, suggests the two sides may have found some unannounced and probably ambiguous understanding to avoid escalation for the time being. This would be in keeping with the reduced confrontational posture taken by Beijing since last December, following a year in which Chinese ‘assertiveness’ in defending or advancing its far-flung interests in the South China, East China, and Yellow Seas sparked a regional backlash.
With upcoming exchanges of visits by the US and Chinese vice presidents to follow the state visit of President Hu Jintao last January, the two sides each have an interest in managing their tensions. This is further reinforced by the impending political year of elections in the United States and the 18th Party Congress in China.
The Obama administration’s resorting to consultations and evident effort to restrain the rhetoric preceding the ARF ministerial are constructive in nature. These methods are all the more appropriate in the dangerous waters of the South China Sea.
Douglas H. Paal is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously served as vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase International and as the unofficial US representative to Taiwan as director of the American Institute in Taiwan. This is an edited version of an article that was originally published by the organization here.
“The United States is the No. 1 country in the world for energy resources. … We are the king daddy dogs when it comes to energy.”
Michele Bachmann on Saturday, August 27th, 2011 in a campaign event
Michele Bachmann says U.S. is No. 1 in the world for energy resources
Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann greets supporters at the Calistoga Bakery Cafe in Naples, Fla., during a Sunshine State swing. (AP Photo/Naples Daily News)
During an Aug. 27, 2011, appearance in the central Florida town of Poinciana, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. — a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination — made a striking claim about the United States’ energy resources.
According to an Associated Press story, Bachmann said that “the United States is the No. 1 country in the world for energy resources,” arguing that, in shale deposits alone, the United States easily outstrips the total oil supply of Saudi Arabia. “That doesn’t even include … all the oil in Alaska.”
Bachmann added, “Instead of thinking we are beggars out here begging for oil and for energy, we are the king daddy dogs when it comes to energy. The radical environmentalists have demanded that we lock up all our energy resources. President Bachmann will take that key out of the door. I will unlock it.”
Several readers asked us to look at whether the U.S. is in fact “the No. 1 country in the world for energy resources.”
First, some background on how energy resources are measured. We found a concise explanation in a report issued on Nov. 30, 2010, by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress. (According to a different Associated Press article, Bachmann actually cited the CRS report during her Poinciana event.)
“It is important to keep in mind that naturally occurring deposits of any material, whether it is fossil fuels, gold, or timber, comprise a broad spectrum of concentration, quality, and accessibility (geologic, technical, and cultural),” CRS wrote. The report’s authors suggested visualizing this notion as a pyramid — a small amount of easily recoverable resources at the top, with increasingly large deposits that are more and more difficult to extract toward the base of the pyramid.
Energy experts use a variety of technical terms that describe how easily and how economically feasible it is to extract a given resource. Here are a few of the more common terms, in descending order of cost-effectiveness:
• Proved reserves. This refers to estimates made with “reasonable certainty” to be “commercially recoverable” under current economic and governmental conditions.
• Undiscovered, economically recoverable resources. These are resources that are expected to be found eventually based on geological features of a given location and which are likely to be economically feasible once recovery proceeds.
• Undiscovered, technically recoverable resources. These are resources that are expected to be found eventually based on geological features of a given location and which are likely to be recoverable but which will not necessarily be recoverable on an economically feasible basis.
We looked at detailed international comparisons compiled by the Energy Information Administration, the statistical office of the U.S. Department of Energy. We’ll look at the data for three fossil fuels — petroleum, natural gas and coal. We won’t look at renewable energy (such as biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar or wind) because it’s difficult to make international comparisons for renewable energy that countries could potentially harness.
Petroleum: U.S. petroleum reserves are relatively small — less than 21 billion barrels. By comparison, the top four are Saudi Arabia (263 billion barrels), Venezuela (211 billion), Canada (175 billion), and Iran (137 billion).
Natural gas: The U.S. does better on this score. It has 273 trillion cubic feet of proved reserves, ranking fourth in the world behind Iran (1,046 trillion cubic feet), Qatar (896 trillion cubic feet) and Saudi Arabia (276 trillion cubic feet). All told, the U.S. accounts for 4 percent of the world total.
Coal: This is where the U.S. can lay its most plausible claim to be “king daddy dog.” The EIA’s international comparison — which uses the more relaxed standard of recoverable coal rather than proved reserves — the U.S. has 260 billion short tons of coal. Its closest competitors are Russia (173 billion short tons) and China (126 billion short tons). The U.S. possesses a whopping 27 percent of the world total.
Using a different data set, we also looked at the world reserves of uranium, the material used for nuclear reactors. According to the World Nuclear Association, the U.S. has 342,000 tons of “known, recoverable” uranium. That’s 6 percent of the world total, ranking sixth in the world behind Australia (23 percent of the world total), Kazakhstan (15 percent), Russia (10 percent), South Africa (8 percent) and Canada (8 percent).
In its report, CRS made a couple attempts to make the kind of comprehensive, international comparison Bachmann made. Doing so requires some mathematical adjustments so that the figures for oil, natural gas and coal can be added together. This is done by adjusting the numbers for the amount of energy each resource produces. The unit of measurement CRS used is “barrels of oil equivalent.”
CRS concluded that the U.S. had about 973 billion barrels of oil equivalent in its reserves, which ranks first in the world. Russia was a close second at 955 billion and China a distant third with 475 billion.
The U.S. also ranked first using a different measurement — one that takes the reserves total from the previous calculation and adds to it technically recoverable (but not necessarily economically feasible) undiscovered oil and natural gas. CRS did not include technically recoverable, undiscovered coal in this calculation, even though it could be a substantial resource, because it found the data too speculative.
By this measurement, the U.S. also ranked first in the world with 1.3 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, once again narrowly leading Russia, which had 1.2 trillion. Saudi Arabia, China and Iran ranked third, fourth and fifth, trailing the U.S. and Russia by large margins.
These two comparisons demonstrate that Bachmann has justification for saying that “the United States is the No. 1 country in the world for energy resources.”
“Directionally, I think she is right,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy Forum at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. “We have giant energy resources here.”
At the same time, the CRS report offers caveats that undercut such a broad-brush conclusion. Here are some of them:
• Uncertain measurements. Not only is the science of estimating reserves and potentially recoverable resources subject to conjecture, but there’s no guarantee that every country’s data is reliable, since not every nation has put the same effort into researching the question — or, if they have, they may not be interested in sharing accurate information with economic rivals. In addition, the data is old, CRS says. “There has been no reliable source for estimates of undiscovered oil and natural gas resources internationally since the U.S. Geological Survey completed its World Petroleum Assessment in 2000,” CRS wrote.
• The role of coal. The United States’ top ranking owes much to its lead in coal. But coal’s uses are limited since, barring some undiscovered technological advance, it cannot be used to power automobiles and other vehicles. “Not now nor in the near future will coal be a fuel source for transportation, as oil is,” said Robin Dutta, research associate at the University of Delaware’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy. Because of this, Dutta called it “a false comparison” to compare, say, Saudi Arabia’s reserves to those in the United States.
In addition, coal’s future viability as a fuel is somewhat in question because it is believed to be a major contributor of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Many scientists believe that the impact of carbon dioxide emissions poses a serious ecological threat by promoting climate change, particularly on a long-term time scale.
• How economical will extraction be? There are large and potentially recoverable troves of fossil fuels in the United States, but there’s a question about whether, and how soon, they’ll be economically viable. Citing oil shale and methane hydrate resources as examples, CRS said that “the uncertainty associated with estimates of those deposits is too great to produce meaningful comparisons. … The final tally would have very little meaning considering the difficulties in estimating those resources.”
Also unknown is how much of an environmental cost there would be to extraction, or how much government investment would be necessary if the industry considered it uneconomical on its own terms.
• Non-fossil fuels. We noted that the CRS study didn’t measure nuclear energy or conventional forms of renewable energy such as solar, wind or biomass. Nor did it include more experimental technologies, such as energy from ocean waves, or even nuclear fusion. In the long term, one or more of these technologies may become more important than the fossil fuels we’re assessing here — but we don’t know which one, or what nation will be best positioned to take advantage of the new methods.
With its many windy and sunny locations, the U.S. could conceivably continue as the “king daddy dog” into a new era of renewable energy. But saying that today would be more speculative than certain.
Our ruling
Bachmann can point to some very specific numbers from a credible source — CRS — that place the United States first in the world in fossil-fuel reserves. But while she cited this big number from the CRS report at Poinciana, she also glossed over a number of caveats that raise questions about the significance of the No. 1 ranking.
The U.S. lead is predominantly due to its large stores of coal, yet coal’s environmental effects pose a question mark for the future use of these resources. Meanwhile, for both coal and other fossil fuels, there’s continuing uncertainty about whether the U.S. will be able to exploit these resources in a way that’s economically feasible. Finally, there’s no way of knowing which renewable or experimental energy sources will become important in the future, and as a result, whether the U.S. will be well placed to dominate the field.
We find Bachmann’s statement supportable based on available statistics, but the statistics may not be completely reliable. Some of the estimates include resources that would not be tapped if companies found it more profitable to exploit resources outside the U.S. We consider Bachmann’s statement to be accurate, but find that it leaves out important details. We rate it Half True.