John Robb crunches the numbers and discovers that terrorists and other criminal non-state actors have more than twice the control over the world’s oil supplies as the Saudis.
The control over the price of oil is in now in the hands of global guerrillas — the open source, system disrupting, transnational crime fueled, sons of global fragmentation covered by this author. These actors can now, at will, curtail the supply of oil through low tech attacks on facilities in Iraq, Nigeria, central Asia, and India. The amount of oil effectively under their control exceeds five million barrels a day, more than Saudi Arabia’s two million barrels a day of swing production.
The believes that, as a consequence of this and other factors, “$100+ a barrel oil is not unforeseeable.” And, if that isn’t enough to scare you, he argues persuasively that there’s precious little that we can do about any of this.
Update: If it makes you feel any better, the Iranian mullahs control 10 percent of the world’s oil supply.
