Think-Tanks'Press

Liberal democracy and capitalism have been the two commanding political and economic ideas of Western history since the 19th century. Now, however, the fate of these once-galvanizing global principles is increasingly uncertain.

After the end of the Cold War, however, four structural challenges emerged to endanger the future of democratic capitalism: financial instability, technological disruption, widening social and economic inequality and structural weaknesses in democratic politics. If the West cannot overcome these challenges, they will, over time, spread to the rest of the world and undermine open polities, economies and societies.

Both democracy and capitalism are relatively recent developments in the long history of the West. They represent even more recent developments in the considerably longer history of the East. Both represent the enduring idea of freedom. Yet both rest on increasingly fragile political and economic institutions.

China’s heft in the global crude oil market exerts profound global effects across the energy, environmental, and human well-being dimensions. Yet comprehensive, high-frequency, reliable, and publicly available data on China’s domestic oil flows and inventory movements are essentially inaccessible.

Making high-quality satellite imagery available to the broader global energy research community can help crack open the “Great Wall of Secrecy” and improve data transparency and insights into the inner workings of the world’s second-largest crude oil market.

First and foremost, satellite data showing oil inventory changes would help fill in currently massive gaps in the publicly available data on changes in crude oil storage levels in China.

A simple model suggests that obtaining monthly high-resolution satellite views of China’s key oil storage infrastructure points (refineries and stand-alone crude oil and refined product tank terminals) could cost roughly $4.5 million per year, or about $1.1 million per year if monitoring were done quarterly.