blood for oil
Today, with all the oil spilling out over the Gulf of Mexico and ruining livelihoods and killing sea life and provoking nervous ha-ha-only-serious jokes about burning hurricanes over Texas, it seems appropriate for me to talk a little bit about oil, and why it is so important.
Oil gets a bad rap. Deservedly so. It's toxic, flammable, and foul in odor. It is used to kill people, sometimes in gruesome ways. When it spills, it causes massive pollution (like we're seeing now). When it burns, it produces large amounts of carbon dioxide, which erodes the ozone layer, causing the ice caps to melt, speeding up our own extinction. Wars are fought over it. Dictators grow rich over it. It is, these days, virtually synonymous with war and money--two of the greatest contemporary causes of human suffering.
So why bother? Why kick up such a fuss about oil? What is so precious about this stuff that BP must feel the need to salvage its crop by skimming off the spill--why are they building new wells in the Gulf of Mexico, for that matter--rather than devoting all of their time and money to making the spill go away? You never see this kind of trouble rise up over potatoes, despite them being more obviously essential for human survival. Poor countries fight wars over water and diamonds, and are ignored by all but the least jaded diplomats at the U.N. General Assembly. Why does the whole world listen when an offshore rig explodes or a tanker tips over? Who gives a shit, outside the Middle East, if Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait? (Remember, we care enough about human rights violations to send a strongly worded letter, but if Darfur proves anything, not enough to step on other superpowers' toes to send in troops over that alone.) Surely we can live with oil prices being a little higher for our gas-guzzling SUVs. Surely our oil billionaires will be no less happy with a little less lucre lining their pockets--cleaner skies and safer oceans would be worth it.
To frame the importance of oil in such questions, as well-intentioned folks do, is to entirely miss the point, as worthy of consideration as these issues are. It is tragically shortsighted to see the use of our world's resources on a purely personal level. Sure, if someone raised the price of oil just for you, and no one else, you would probably be pissed off, but merely inconvenienced. If you live in a big city, maybe not even that. You can afford to drive a little less often, get a little exercise. You could move a little closer to work--your commute is excessive anyway. You could bike or walk to get around. You could take a subway train (which runs on electricity). You could take fewer vacations. What's the big deal? Surely not worth speeding our own extinction, draining our government coffers, and killing thousands of innocent people.
But now think about what happens when a major source of oil is destroyed, and the price of oil goes up everywhere. Everywhere everywhere, not just at your gas station or your state or even your country. Think about everything you've ever bought or owned, everywhere you've gone, everything you've done. The medicines you get at the drugstore, or at the hospital, are synthesized from chemical processing plants sometimes an entire continent apart, transported across the country via an airplane. (And what do airplanes run on?) Most of the vegetables you see at the grocery store arrive via truck or ship or boat. That potato sitting in your pantry? Driven to the supermarket by a truck--even "locally produced" could be many miles away. The weatherproof paint that keeps the elements from eating through your roof? The lubricant for failsafes in a nuclear power plant? The contents of a jar of Vaseline? Petroleum-based polymers.
Think about what happens when the water main delivering water to your town springs a leak. Sure, the water is local and the pipes are local. But the pipes and replacement parts? Raw materials are mined out of the earth by diesel-powered vehicles, which are delivered to the factory by a truck, which are delivered to your utility company by a truck, which needs another big truck just to carry them over to the site of the leak, which in turn needs a diesel-powered steam shovel to dig in a hole so the bad pipe can be replaced. And that's one of the simpler things we get from the machine of oil-age manufacturing.
Think about what goes into building a bicycle. Might even build it yourself, by hand, so that it isn't produced in a factory in China and then flown over on an airplane. Nice way to reduce your dependence on oil, right? Well, where do you think the raw materials for the frame come from? Or the rubber (which is not the plant rubber you learned about in school) for the tires? The lubricant for the ball bearings? Can you claw aluminum out of the earth with a pick, and smelt and refine and mold it in your back yard? Do rubber trees grow where you live, and if so, do you know how to extract and mold rubber from them? Not to mention the smooth, flat roads that make bicycling possible. What are they made of? Asphalt--a petroleum byproduct.
Boycott BP? A noble goal--but a virtually impossible one. If you live in the UK, which BP serves, you literally cannot buy any good or service, be it from halfway across the world or just across the street, without some part of its production, manufacture, training, knowledge, or whatever having been directly or indirectly influenced by the trade in BP oil. As you similarly cannot, unless you live as a hermit and grow all your own food and refuse all goods and services both public and private, survive in America without partaking of the services provided by Exxon-Mobil or Sunoco or Texaco or what have you.
Oil is the lifeblood of modern civilization. Trucks, ships, planes, and trains all run on oil. You can't make anything without moving stuff from place to place, and the only feasible way to do that across large distances requires oil. You can't build or repair or maintain infrastructure, communications or transportation or information, without oil. Sure, you can grow crops without oil, you can set your own concrete and lug each brick to the roof, you can Robinson Crusoe some tools together for fixing stuff and patch everything up with rusting sheet metal like they did in Taipei in the fifties. You can. Theoretically. Can a city of two thousand do it, without infrastructure equal or superior to that produced by oil? Twenty thousand? Two million? Can a state of twenty million? A country of thirty-five million? A world of eight billion?
This is why the peak oil hypothesis is so scary. It's not just a matter of people being able to get to work, or governments being able to build and maintain tanks and fighter planes. It's not just a matter of people wanting cheap shit flown all over the world via the global economy instead of paying a little more for stuff made within walking distance. We, and every industrialized nation in the world, are highly specialized. If the price of oil suddenly goes up ten dollars a barrel, the price of food, water, and everyday necessities--even seemingly unrelated ones, or ones that aren't made from oil--all shoot up. The price of all goods and services, even those that don't require trucks or ships, will be affected also. If the price goes up another twenty dollars a barrel, countries start going to war over the remaining supply. If the price goes up another twenty dollars a barrel, you have children dying of curable diseases, widespread civil unrest, people starving to death in the streets--look what has happened to countries where the supply of oil is scarce enough, or tightly controlled enough, that oil has indeed gone up by that much. And if the price of oil goes up yet another twenty dollars a barrel...well, let's just say it won't matter what the price of anything is by that point.
It's true that as recently as a hundred years ago, the world ran just fine without oil. We don't live in that world anymore. Sure, you can plant enough turnips to feed most of the country without oil. But how are you going to get them to people? (I doubt even the entire current horse population of America would be up to the task.)
On a smaller scale, it should also be obvious why countries so jealously guard their own oil supply. Since you can't drill a hole in the ground just anywhere and get it--at least, not enough to run a country--countries that do not have access to a significant amount of oil resources within their territory must be dependent on those that do. Consider Dubai, a tiny Arab emirate in an occasionally politically unstable region that has nothing to offer the world but a ridiculous supply of oil. It is one of the wealthiest cities in the world, far surpassing that of our own New York City in sheer decadence, because of its control of that one resource. Look at countries like Iraq, Iran; before the first Gulf War most Americans probably could not have found Kuwait on a map--note how they are always in our newspapers, despite atrocities of similar and greater scale being committed throughout oil-poor Africa. Look at the former Soviet Union, and at the United States, and at China--all big enough oil producers to offset, but not ignore, the importance of Middle Eastern oil, and how this resource alone gave each of these countries an overwhelming military and political advantage over its neighbors, allowing each to dominate its neighbors at pivotal moments in the twentieth century. (Remember that an Allied oil embargo did more to stifle Japan's ability to fight World War II than the atom bombs did--that's why they hit Pearl Harbor in the first place.) So dependent we have become on oil--our oil, foreign oil, our control of the oil market relative to other countries--that the trade in oil has become prosperity itself.
When you are dealing with trading in huge sums of money, as my former employer did, on a far larger scale than can be fathomed by even multinational corporations, only a few markets matter. One of them is currency, one of them is gold, and the most important of them is oil. (And gold is a mere baseline compared to the others--it is used as an indicator that the others are failing...)
Oil is our spice melange. He who controls the oil controls the infrastructure, and he who controls the infrastructure controls THE YOOOOONIVAAAAAAAAAARSE the global market. We rail against it, protest against it, demonize it, but unless we (gradually, gently) find a cheap, sustainable alternative we are completely and utterly dependent on it. The peak oil folks call it an addiction, but I say it is worse than an addiction. Addiction is a personal choice, a personal problem. But subtle changes in the price of oil, this one resource that we have come to rely on to serve virtually all our transportation energy needs, could literally bring about the end of civilization as we know it. And we don't even need to be at peak oil to get there. There could still be millions of gallons of it running through the veins of the earth, and all it takes is a little shift in the numbers--a couple ill-timed corporate mergers, a severe enough market meltdown, or a war in the Middle East escalating out of control--and all of a sudden, prices for things you never would have thought had anything to do with oil are going through the roof, and you're shooting your neighbors over your garden tomatoes.
This, far more than the American political balance of power or the Second Gulf War or even the threat of human extinction caused by global warming, is why we need viable alternative energy sources now. Plural. In competition with one another, from diverse natural resources. All of the doomsday scenarios bandied about by the media and by various conspiracy theorists are pretty awful, but they pale in comparison to the potential for sudden and total economic collapse. Thankfully, we're nowhere near that point at the moment (why do you think we keep our oil barons so fucking rich), but, well, it unnerves me, sometimes, that the fate of the world hangs day to day on a single shimmering black strand. And if that strand ever breaks...
That's the rationale behind "Drill, baby, drill," really. Jefferson warned us against "entangling alliances" that would lead us into foreign wars; the more domestic oil we have, the less we have to be involved in the affairs of Iran, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Russia, and so forth. The more oil we produce within our borders, the less we are at the mercy of other oil-producing nations (hey there OPEC) and the more they are at ours. But is it worth despoiling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska? Is it worth risking the environmental devastation we're witnessing now in the Gulf of Mexico, and the endangerment of the livelihoods of millions of people who live along the Gulf Coast?
What if it means we don't have to keep sending weapons to Israel (we can still support them diplomatically or with our own military forces already stationed nearby), or forever wait for just the right ideological excuse to get involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait? What if it means we can chase down terrorists in places like Saudi Arabia, or gain some leverage to get China to back down from keeping us out of Darfur, or pressure Dubai into getting more humane working conditions for a million Indian laborers? Is it worth it then?
To plagiarize one of my least favorite American poets:
so much depends
upon
a sixteen wheel
truck
glazed with rain
burning
beside the blackened
seagulls
Oil gets a bad rap. Deservedly so. It's toxic, flammable, and foul in odor. It is used to kill people, sometimes in gruesome ways. When it spills, it causes massive pollution (like we're seeing now). When it burns, it produces large amounts of carbon dioxide, which erodes the ozone layer, causing the ice caps to melt, speeding up our own extinction. Wars are fought over it. Dictators grow rich over it. It is, these days, virtually synonymous with war and money--two of the greatest contemporary causes of human suffering.
So why bother? Why kick up such a fuss about oil? What is so precious about this stuff that BP must feel the need to salvage its crop by skimming off the spill--why are they building new wells in the Gulf of Mexico, for that matter--rather than devoting all of their time and money to making the spill go away? You never see this kind of trouble rise up over potatoes, despite them being more obviously essential for human survival. Poor countries fight wars over water and diamonds, and are ignored by all but the least jaded diplomats at the U.N. General Assembly. Why does the whole world listen when an offshore rig explodes or a tanker tips over? Who gives a shit, outside the Middle East, if Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait? (Remember, we care enough about human rights violations to send a strongly worded letter, but if Darfur proves anything, not enough to step on other superpowers' toes to send in troops over that alone.) Surely we can live with oil prices being a little higher for our gas-guzzling SUVs. Surely our oil billionaires will be no less happy with a little less lucre lining their pockets--cleaner skies and safer oceans would be worth it.
To frame the importance of oil in such questions, as well-intentioned folks do, is to entirely miss the point, as worthy of consideration as these issues are. It is tragically shortsighted to see the use of our world's resources on a purely personal level. Sure, if someone raised the price of oil just for you, and no one else, you would probably be pissed off, but merely inconvenienced. If you live in a big city, maybe not even that. You can afford to drive a little less often, get a little exercise. You could move a little closer to work--your commute is excessive anyway. You could bike or walk to get around. You could take a subway train (which runs on electricity). You could take fewer vacations. What's the big deal? Surely not worth speeding our own extinction, draining our government coffers, and killing thousands of innocent people.
But now think about what happens when a major source of oil is destroyed, and the price of oil goes up everywhere. Everywhere everywhere, not just at your gas station or your state or even your country. Think about everything you've ever bought or owned, everywhere you've gone, everything you've done. The medicines you get at the drugstore, or at the hospital, are synthesized from chemical processing plants sometimes an entire continent apart, transported across the country via an airplane. (And what do airplanes run on?) Most of the vegetables you see at the grocery store arrive via truck or ship or boat. That potato sitting in your pantry? Driven to the supermarket by a truck--even "locally produced" could be many miles away. The weatherproof paint that keeps the elements from eating through your roof? The lubricant for failsafes in a nuclear power plant? The contents of a jar of Vaseline? Petroleum-based polymers.
Think about what happens when the water main delivering water to your town springs a leak. Sure, the water is local and the pipes are local. But the pipes and replacement parts? Raw materials are mined out of the earth by diesel-powered vehicles, which are delivered to the factory by a truck, which are delivered to your utility company by a truck, which needs another big truck just to carry them over to the site of the leak, which in turn needs a diesel-powered steam shovel to dig in a hole so the bad pipe can be replaced. And that's one of the simpler things we get from the machine of oil-age manufacturing.
Think about what goes into building a bicycle. Might even build it yourself, by hand, so that it isn't produced in a factory in China and then flown over on an airplane. Nice way to reduce your dependence on oil, right? Well, where do you think the raw materials for the frame come from? Or the rubber (which is not the plant rubber you learned about in school) for the tires? The lubricant for the ball bearings? Can you claw aluminum out of the earth with a pick, and smelt and refine and mold it in your back yard? Do rubber trees grow where you live, and if so, do you know how to extract and mold rubber from them? Not to mention the smooth, flat roads that make bicycling possible. What are they made of? Asphalt--a petroleum byproduct.
Boycott BP? A noble goal--but a virtually impossible one. If you live in the UK, which BP serves, you literally cannot buy any good or service, be it from halfway across the world or just across the street, without some part of its production, manufacture, training, knowledge, or whatever having been directly or indirectly influenced by the trade in BP oil. As you similarly cannot, unless you live as a hermit and grow all your own food and refuse all goods and services both public and private, survive in America without partaking of the services provided by Exxon-Mobil or Sunoco or Texaco or what have you.
Oil is the lifeblood of modern civilization. Trucks, ships, planes, and trains all run on oil. You can't make anything without moving stuff from place to place, and the only feasible way to do that across large distances requires oil. You can't build or repair or maintain infrastructure, communications or transportation or information, without oil. Sure, you can grow crops without oil, you can set your own concrete and lug each brick to the roof, you can Robinson Crusoe some tools together for fixing stuff and patch everything up with rusting sheet metal like they did in Taipei in the fifties. You can. Theoretically. Can a city of two thousand do it, without infrastructure equal or superior to that produced by oil? Twenty thousand? Two million? Can a state of twenty million? A country of thirty-five million? A world of eight billion?
This is why the peak oil hypothesis is so scary. It's not just a matter of people being able to get to work, or governments being able to build and maintain tanks and fighter planes. It's not just a matter of people wanting cheap shit flown all over the world via the global economy instead of paying a little more for stuff made within walking distance. We, and every industrialized nation in the world, are highly specialized. If the price of oil suddenly goes up ten dollars a barrel, the price of food, water, and everyday necessities--even seemingly unrelated ones, or ones that aren't made from oil--all shoot up. The price of all goods and services, even those that don't require trucks or ships, will be affected also. If the price goes up another twenty dollars a barrel, countries start going to war over the remaining supply. If the price goes up another twenty dollars a barrel, you have children dying of curable diseases, widespread civil unrest, people starving to death in the streets--look what has happened to countries where the supply of oil is scarce enough, or tightly controlled enough, that oil has indeed gone up by that much. And if the price of oil goes up yet another twenty dollars a barrel...well, let's just say it won't matter what the price of anything is by that point.
It's true that as recently as a hundred years ago, the world ran just fine without oil. We don't live in that world anymore. Sure, you can plant enough turnips to feed most of the country without oil. But how are you going to get them to people? (I doubt even the entire current horse population of America would be up to the task.)
On a smaller scale, it should also be obvious why countries so jealously guard their own oil supply. Since you can't drill a hole in the ground just anywhere and get it--at least, not enough to run a country--countries that do not have access to a significant amount of oil resources within their territory must be dependent on those that do. Consider Dubai, a tiny Arab emirate in an occasionally politically unstable region that has nothing to offer the world but a ridiculous supply of oil. It is one of the wealthiest cities in the world, far surpassing that of our own New York City in sheer decadence, because of its control of that one resource. Look at countries like Iraq, Iran; before the first Gulf War most Americans probably could not have found Kuwait on a map--note how they are always in our newspapers, despite atrocities of similar and greater scale being committed throughout oil-poor Africa. Look at the former Soviet Union, and at the United States, and at China--all big enough oil producers to offset, but not ignore, the importance of Middle Eastern oil, and how this resource alone gave each of these countries an overwhelming military and political advantage over its neighbors, allowing each to dominate its neighbors at pivotal moments in the twentieth century. (Remember that an Allied oil embargo did more to stifle Japan's ability to fight World War II than the atom bombs did--that's why they hit Pearl Harbor in the first place.) So dependent we have become on oil--our oil, foreign oil, our control of the oil market relative to other countries--that the trade in oil has become prosperity itself.
When you are dealing with trading in huge sums of money, as my former employer did, on a far larger scale than can be fathomed by even multinational corporations, only a few markets matter. One of them is currency, one of them is gold, and the most important of them is oil. (And gold is a mere baseline compared to the others--it is used as an indicator that the others are failing...)
Oil is our spice melange. He who controls the oil controls the infrastructure, and he who controls the infrastructure controls THE YOOOOONIVAAAAAAAAAARSE the global market. We rail against it, protest against it, demonize it, but unless we (gradually, gently) find a cheap, sustainable alternative we are completely and utterly dependent on it. The peak oil folks call it an addiction, but I say it is worse than an addiction. Addiction is a personal choice, a personal problem. But subtle changes in the price of oil, this one resource that we have come to rely on to serve virtually all our transportation energy needs, could literally bring about the end of civilization as we know it. And we don't even need to be at peak oil to get there. There could still be millions of gallons of it running through the veins of the earth, and all it takes is a little shift in the numbers--a couple ill-timed corporate mergers, a severe enough market meltdown, or a war in the Middle East escalating out of control--and all of a sudden, prices for things you never would have thought had anything to do with oil are going through the roof, and you're shooting your neighbors over your garden tomatoes.
This, far more than the American political balance of power or the Second Gulf War or even the threat of human extinction caused by global warming, is why we need viable alternative energy sources now. Plural. In competition with one another, from diverse natural resources. All of the doomsday scenarios bandied about by the media and by various conspiracy theorists are pretty awful, but they pale in comparison to the potential for sudden and total economic collapse. Thankfully, we're nowhere near that point at the moment (why do you think we keep our oil barons so fucking rich), but, well, it unnerves me, sometimes, that the fate of the world hangs day to day on a single shimmering black strand. And if that strand ever breaks...
That's the rationale behind "Drill, baby, drill," really. Jefferson warned us against "entangling alliances" that would lead us into foreign wars; the more domestic oil we have, the less we have to be involved in the affairs of Iran, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Russia, and so forth. The more oil we produce within our borders, the less we are at the mercy of other oil-producing nations (hey there OPEC) and the more they are at ours. But is it worth despoiling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska? Is it worth risking the environmental devastation we're witnessing now in the Gulf of Mexico, and the endangerment of the livelihoods of millions of people who live along the Gulf Coast?
What if it means we don't have to keep sending weapons to Israel (we can still support them diplomatically or with our own military forces already stationed nearby), or forever wait for just the right ideological excuse to get involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait? What if it means we can chase down terrorists in places like Saudi Arabia, or gain some leverage to get China to back down from keeping us out of Darfur, or pressure Dubai into getting more humane working conditions for a million Indian laborers? Is it worth it then?
To plagiarize one of my least favorite American poets:
so much depends
upon
a sixteen wheel
truck
glazed with rain
burning
beside the blackened
seagulls