Energy: the new thirty years' war | Michael Klare for TomDispatch

We are heading for a global succeed-or-perish contest among the energy big hitters – but who will be the winners and losers?A 30-year war for energy pre-eminence? You wouldn't wish it even on a desperate planet. But that's where we're headed, and there's no turning back.From 1618 to 1648, Europe was engulfed in a series of intensely brutal conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years' War. It was, in part, a struggle between an imperial system of governance and the emerging nation state. Indeed, many historians believe that the modern international system of nation states was crystallised in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which finally ended the fighting.Think of us today as embarking on a new Thirty Years' War. It may not result in as much bloodshed as that of the 1600s, though bloodshed there will be, but it will prove no less momentous for the future of the...

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