A prayer for a dead pope and a dying planet

These days, there is little that happens in the world that does not have a direct or indirect impact on oil prices. So is there any direct relation between the death of Pope John Paul II and unholy oil?

Not really unless you consider the fact that Opep, as the group is known in French and Spanish, is an anagram for pope. So there is your link but a tenuous one, I agree. In fact of all the things that the incomparable John Paul II talked about, the price of crude oil and its recent dizzying heights was not one that I ever recall he touched. His was a spiritual not a material world.

Last week, news of his deteriorating health topped news headlines, followed closely by reports about yet another record achieved on oil markets, driven by demand as the East's awakening giant economies catch up with the consumer-led lifestyle of the West.

This may sound far fetched and entirely coincidental but the world's seemingly insatiable appetite for things bigger and faster, be they cars or mobile phones, has coincided with a decline in church attendance in the Western world.

In the UK, churches are being converted into apartment houses while others are being turned into restaurants. The Muslim world is different in that religion is a way of life and there is no perceptible decline though the trend of religious extremism is on the rise.

But it is the West that sets consumer trends even if their wish list is manufactured increasingly in China, Taiwan or South Korea.

The United States accounts for a quarter of the world's energy consumption. China is fast catching up with the American consumer and will overtake the United States as the biggest importer of crude oil in a couple of decades.

I heard at an energy conference this week that there is one factory starting up in China every 26 days. China and India are sucking in base metals and commodities at a rate few would have predicted a few years ago. Even with the massive increase in energy use, their per capita consumption remains relatively low compared with the industrialised world, which means there is scope for even more growth.

The Chinese also still burn more coal than can be healthy for the environment. The world as Pope John Paul II would have liked to see it is being turned into a rubbish bin and the ground that he famously used to kiss on disembarking in a new country is being flooded or parched as a result of climate change.

The debate is still raging as to how much this is a direct result of human activity on the planet but burning fossil fuels is surely no cure.

Yet nothing seems to dampen the world's appetite for crude oil and this week saw new records achieved on futures markets.

All this has happened despite the efforts of a right-wing, conservative administration in Washington to make America more secure on the energy front by diversifying its sources of supply.

Control of Iraq was supposed to be one way of achieving that. By installing a democratic government in Baghdad and opening up its oilfields to international oil companies, not just the Chinese and the Russians, the US was supposed to have found a counterbalance to Saudi Arabia, which was seen as more vulnerable to extremist dogma.

The church-going George W. Bush's self-confessed Christian conservatism actually led a lot of like minded Americans to back his foreign policy in the belief that he was leading, to use his own words, a "crusade" against the forces of evil. In the post 9/11 era, this was interpreted as a battle against extremist Islam.

The battle lines were set and the fault lines are still there three years later. Pope John Paul II did much to try to ease these tensions by reaching out to the other major religions to try to heal wounds that have festered for decades if not for centuries.

His death has robbed the whole world and not just the Christian portion of it of a great theologian.

The war against Iraq, the anti-US insurgency threats of more attacks against oil-producing Arab Gulf states by followers Al Qaida is lumped in as part of the so-called geopolitical factor that is responsible for some of the premium we calculate in today's oil price.

Add to that Chinese and Indian demand growth as well as other wrinkles like the lack of new refining capacity, the tightness of oil production capacity and predictions of doom and gloom by energy pundits, and you can see why oil prices are heading north. If anything, Pope John Paul's death is likely to deepen this religious faultline.

The late Polish pontiff may have been an unbending conservative but he believed that was the path to preservation of the church. Some disagreed with his views on birth control but he was the world's biggest defender of every human being's right to life.

There is a difference between his well-intentioned conservatism and the neo-conservatism that has become a dominant political doctrine.

The neocons of Washington are no great environmentalists. They see nothing wrong with drilling holes in Alaska's wildlife refuge or flooding the world with cheap Iraqi crude - a word which derives from the Latin crudus, meaning raw, rough, cruel - to force oil prices down and bring Opec producing countries to their knees. All except Iraq that is, which is supposed to provide the "crudus" for this purpose.

That has not happened yet and the formation of Iraq's government, where jobs are being allocated to sects rather than to people, just proves the point that religion is playing a bigger part in politics than it should. A secular Iraq is being politicised along sectarian lines and that cannot be a good thing.

The ousted Saddam Hussain did great environmental damage when he flooded the southern marshes, home to the Marsh Arabs who opposed him and his minority Sunni Muslim regime. The irony is that this same region is believed to be home to the biblical Garden of Eden, where life began.

The writer is Middle East editor of Platts, energy information division of the McGraw-Hill Companies. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Platts.