# Peak oil and Islamic fundamentalism **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 13, 2007, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894 "2007-12-13T19:38:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894/1 "2007-12-13T19:38:05Z")
Will the power of Islamic fundamentalism decline as the world’s oil production begins to decline? Fanaticism alone isn’t enough to advance a radical agenda. You have to have the capital to finance your fanaticism if you want to be anything more than merely a local nuisance. Fred Phelps is a pain in the ass, but his poverty puts severe limits on how much mischief he can cause. Fortunately, fanaticism in the modern world tends to be self-correcting. Ideological or religious extremism tends not to be economically viable in the long run. The result is continual market pressure toward either moderation or marginalization of more extreme views. Ultimately this is what did in the Soviet Union, for example. So … has the petroleum bounty of many Muslim nations created a temporary buffer that insulates them from the economic consequences of their ideology? Saudi Arabia is not a China or an India. It’s not building its prosperity step-by-step by creating a profitable industrial base as part of an integrated market economy. Instead it’s maintaining its repressive ideology while living off the profits from selling its oil. But sooner or later (more likely sooner) the oil will run out. How much would we worry about the threat of radical Islam if Saudi Arabia’s economy more closely resembled Sudan’s? Darfur is a tragedy, but it’s a LOCALIZED tragedy. **Will dwindling oil reserves rob fundamentalist Islam of its consequence-free funding, forcing a move to either moderation or marginalization?** (And lest you think I’m just picking on the Arabs … I think a similar process is at work with the United States. The crippling of most of the major powers in World War II left the United States with a tremendous economic lead on the rest of the world. This “cushion” has allowed ideology to trump pragmatism for decades in American politics. I think we’re in the middle of a major self-correction on that front as well … but that’s a subject for a different thread … .) ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894/2 "2007-12-13T20:16:52Z")
Insofar as the civilized world is forced to shift to other energy sources, the financial backing, and thus power, of Islamic Fundamentalists will inevitably decline. It’ll take a while, though. ---
**Author:** ![brazil84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8491ac/32.png) [@brazil84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brazil84)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894/3 "2007-12-13T20:53:18Z")
I agree. Also, without the oil there, there will be a lot less incentive for Western nations to involve themselves. So it is likely that a lot of the anti-U.S. sentiment will die down. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894/4 "2007-12-13T22:29:22Z")
I look forward to the marginalization of the arab world. I wonder what will become of the elites? Will they move to Switzerland? The Arab world (sans oil) will be poor, backward, and of no interest to world affairs. That is probably a good thing. ---
**Author:** ![Menocchio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9de053/32.png) [@Menocchio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Menocchio)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894/5 "2007-12-13T22:55:30Z")
No, loss of oil won’t stop Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism began when the Muslim world realized that they’d been outpaced by the West, and some of them decided that the reason why was that they had strayed from Islam, and were thus being punished by God. I don’t see even greater poverty and desperation reversing that. Not by itself, anyway. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894/6 "2007-12-13T23:07:14Z")
To the contrary. As oil production declines (that is, as the cost of pumping each barrel increases), the importance of what remains in the ground becomes even greater. Iraq, in particular, will become a much more important global oil source – if and when things quiet down enough to allow pumping & export to resume at something near pre-invasion levels – because it has more remaining; its production has been artificially depressed for decades, for the sake of shoring up global prices. As Greg Palast notes in [_Armed Madhouse,_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525949682/sr=8-1/qid=1154309833/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-8683277-1203300?ie=UTF8) Chapter 2, “The Flow,” Iraq has 74 known oil fields and only 15 in production. in 1927, the major oil company execs met at a hotel room in Belgium and signed an agreement: The Anglo-Persian company (now British Petroleum) would pump almost all its oil from Iran; Standard Oil, under the name of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia; Anglo-Persian would drill in Iraq’s Kirkuk and Basra fields but it would drill very little. > [@](#): > > When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to drill lots of wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them where, wrote a company manager, “there was no danger of striking oil.” In the early '60s, the frustrated Iraqi government canceled the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and nationalized the oil fields, but that didn’t solve the problem. > [@](#): > > . . . The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq’s production at a sum equal to Iran’s, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller than Iraq’s. The excuse for this quote equality between Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn’t. > > To keep Iraq’s Ba’athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam’s war against Iran and giving the dictator $7 billion for his “Islamic bomb” program. And since the invasion, of course, the question of Iraq pumping in excess of OPEC production quotas has not even arisen. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894/7 "2007-12-13T23:08:33Z")
[QUOTE=Menocchio] No, loss of oil won’t stop Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism began when the Muslim world realized that they’d been outpaced by the West, and some of them decided that the reason why was that they had strayed from Islam, and were thus being punished by God. I don’t see even greater poverty and desperation reversing that. Not by itself, anyway. [/QUOTE] I agree. Religious fanaticism tends to do well under adverse conditions, not badly. What I expect will happen, is that it will become even stronger in the areas where Islam is already strong, but lose much of the power it has outside of those areas. As for the Islamic world losing any of it’s hatred for America, perhaps but I doubt it. It’ll be generations before the memory of what we’ve done to them begins to fade. And that’s ignoring all the religiously motivated hatred piled atop of their legitimate grievances. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/peak-oil-and-islamic-fundamentalism/429894/8 "2007-12-13T23:09:00Z")
[QUOTE=ralph124c] The Arab world (sans oil) will be poor, backward, and of no interest to world affairs. That is probably a good thing. [/QUOTE] How? It wouldn’t make terrorism any less of a problem. Islamic extremists are motivated by humiliated pride. If they grew poorer that would just make it worse.