Along with many leftists who believed that public protest could actually influence policy decisions, in February 2003 I attended a rally against the War in Iraq.

“No Blood for Oil” was emblazoned on signs as a simplistic cry of indignation against the suffering Bush wished to visit upon the Iraqi people, challenging the just-as-simplistic reasons for going to war, weapons of mass destruction, and Iraqi liberation. Of course, I had driven my car to get to the rally, had eaten pesticide treated food produced thousands of miles away for breakfast, and bought a CD later that afternoon. I also attend the University of Texas at Austin, which, with Texas A&M, keeps education affordable due to joint ownership of oil prospects in Texas. I had raised my voice in protest, but had lived my day in complacency.

Sonia Shah’s book Crude: The Story of Oil brings this point home. As consumers, we have learned how to deploy an exquisite form of doublethink — we have embraced the softer side of BP, Exxon, and Shell, easily forgetting the death squads that marched through Nigeria, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill that constituted one of the worst human-made disasters in history, and the mounds of evidence supporting theories of global warming.

Shah is a freelance writer who has contributed to magazines such as Zmag, In These Times, The Progressive, and The Nation, and is the former editor of Nuclear Times. The overlap of science and progressive politics make Shah quite adept at creating a multi-faceted study of how science, politics, and economics merge in forming the hegemony oil has over everyday life and worldwide geopolitics.

Shah spent over a year interviewing oil executives, experts, workers, and anti-oil activists, studying all publications concerning oil and energy, and basically became the central interlocutor of all things oil. What she discovers is that though we may want a world free from the ravages of CO2 emissions and repressive regimes the U.S. supports for access to oil, oil companies in collusion with the United States government have made the costs seem too great. Perhaps the price we pay is already too great, but oil companies in league with the media and the government work tirelessly to keep us from realizing it. This is the story of oil, the story of misdirection, promises, and misinformation. This is also the story of our society.

Sacred oil

Fascination with the properties of hydrocarbons predates even the most zealous Standard Oil executive’s starry-eyed visions. More than 2,000 years ago, a prophet named Zoroaster founded a religion, in part upon the worship of fire. The fire that inspired this worship was the result of natural gas flares that accompanied the seeping oil in what is now Iran. People would put the black liquid in water and see signs of the future, carefully coded in the shifting shapes. Oil was mystical, plentiful, and indeed, useful. It could be used to seal roofs and boats and as a base for “Greek Fire,” a weapon of war that spread fear amongst enemies of Persia. This is the framework Shah sets up for an understanding of oil’s first entrance into human lives. From mysticism to war, it seems that oil’s role has changed very little in the ensuing millennia.

The Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were supposed to strip away the mystical aspects of natural resources, leaving only rational empirics of efficiency and energy production. The new appeal to reason made the rise of the nation state, the steam engine, and capitalism seem natural, or even inevitable. These institutions are imbibed with just as much mysticism as the Koran, the Bible, and the Torah. Their existence rests on a mythology of constructed truths: capitalism expands wealth to provide for all, the nation-state was the natural outgrowth of the inevitable desire for a balance of power, progress is our destiny. In pursuing destiny, trampling other, less civilized cultures was a small price to pay.

At first, coal fueled this revolution. As coal began to dwindle, oil, called the “excrement of the devil” by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) co-founder, Juan Perez Alfonso, became the heir apparent to the throne of energy. It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing oil’s rise as natural, just as it is easy to believe there are no alternatives to the nation-state or to capitalism.

But as with all historical phenomena, the rise of oil was more a matter of luck than a natural progress. We have built a cult of what Sonia Shah calls petrolife. For Americans and oil companies, oil is more life-giving than a mother’s milk. Each American consumes about three gallons of oil per day, requiring it for food, transportation, heating, entertainment, medicine, housing, and perhaps much more. It seems we have no choice but to worship oil, and to do anything to secure that the free-flow of oil continues unabated, for our very lives rely on it. Every aspect of American life is infected by oil — but was this necessary or even likely 100 years ago?

Many commentators on our culture of oil consumption see this reliance as a natural and even inevitable part of life. The transition from coal to oil seems just as naturally progressive as the switch from train to car culture. But such equations are based on a fundamental flaw in logic. While the current configuration of American society can effectively be traced back to the emergence of oil-based capitalism, this was not the only option prior to the development of industrial society. Shah’s most striking revelation is in showing how absolutely contingent the original growth and continued expansion of petrolife has been. What if, after oil began to peak in Pennsylvania and Texas, President
Franklin Roosevelt did not decide to court Saudi princes for more secure oil? What if the Arab oil embargo had lasted months instead of days? Though these counterfactuals may not provide us with insight into our current dependence on gluttonous consumption, they do point us to consider how indeed we may transition away from unsustainable growth to sustainable consumption.

Banality of production

Shah takes great pains to illustrate how oil is literally raised from the dead to bring new life. Beginning with the natural history of the formation of oil deposits from the corpses of hundreds of millions of prehistoric creatures, the mixture of oil and death does not end there. The oil industry has the highest level of industrial accidents and deaths. Since maintenance and safety precautions cut into ever-dwindling profits, workers toil on oil rigs that are literally floating death traps. Shah tells the stories of frozen hydraulic systems that are meant to raise and lower lifeboats on rigs in the North Sea, and of wind gusts that have collapsed entire rigs. Have these incidents resulted in greater regulations or more safety requirements? Oil executives have made sure these stories do not reach the media, and without any public outcry, government officials are wont to avoid action.

The oil industry spills 1,000 barrels of oil for every billion it transports. Beyond the infamous Exxon-Valdez oil spill that permanently debilitated the Alaskan coastline, oil tankers routinely expunge oily ballast water, and are so tipsy when unloaded that their cargo leaks. Even the spectacular oil spills, such as that of the Prestige in 2002, fade from our view much more quickly than environmental groups would like , as Greenpeace accounts in ”Year One of the Prestige Oil Spill”. Even as the damage remains obscured or forgotten, thousands of animals and people who live in these areas cannot afford such ignorance and avoidance. But, as Shah rightly points out, since oil is the greatest shipped commodity, it remains largely unregulated, save for symbolic gestures when the disasters are too large to ignore.

The most egregious crime occurs on land, not at sea. After oil production peaked in the United States in the 1970s, U.S.-based oil companies began to search the world over for more abundant oil supplies. The Middle East, South America, and Africa proved to be the most reliable prospects. Oil companies, corrupt regimes, and even legitimate governments pumped oil out of the ground and repaid the pillage with murder, destruction, and mass suffering. The most in-depth account Shah provides concerns the activities of Shell in Nigeria. Shell entered Nigeria under the auspices of bringing wealth, prosperity, and stability. But when their goodwill was met with protest, they helped to organize and deploy death squads, razing entire villages and publicly executing leaders of the resistance, as evidenced in the Human Rights Watch Report, “The Price of Oil.”

Shah carefully details murder in the pursuit of oil in areas as diverse as Nigeria, Columbia, and Chechnya, but the striking inhumanity is also evident in understated observations, such as Chevron’s choice to turn an old slave port into an oil terminal.

This is what distinguishes Shah’s account from any other. This story of oil refuses to disconnect the current status of oil as a bringer of industrial grandeur from the oil spills from the death squads from the science and economics that drive an industry. The story is infinitely more complex than anyone can reasonably comprehend. What made Shell executives believe that mass slaughter was an appropriate response to popular dissent? And why do we as consumers still not boycott Shell or turn away in horror, even after we have heard the story? To invoke Hannah Arendt’s perceptive observation, the totalitarian horrors of Nazi Germany were less driven by blind hatred than it was by the “banality of evil.” During the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt recounted how Eichmann was a very effective bureaucrat who merely went with the flow of the times. The banality of oil consumption may not take the form of organized mass slaughter, but genocide, environmental destruction, and even global warming which threatens much of the life of the planet are the results of our mindless consumption.

Shockingly, oil company executives often believe that they are truly bringing good to the world. They are the saviors, able to overcome difficulties in extraction, easily crushing rival energy producers. With such a messianic belief that oil will truly solve the problems of poverty (through establishing oil markets), famine (through oil-based pesticides), and indeed, social antagonism (through petro-dollars, everyone wins), it is not hard to imagine how a little genocide now and then may not seem so bad. This is why Shah’s project is so critical today — only in demystifying the belief that economic progress is the panacea to the world’s ills can we begin to think of solutions to the daily suffering that occurs on a global scale.

Refining oil, refining knowledge

Some of the most troubling information in this book concerns how oil companies have a virtual monopoly on understanding all aspects of their resource. Faulty statistical models create over-inflated estimates of oil reserves in order to keep investment in oil companies high; according to one estimate, unexplored Greenland has more oil than the entire Middle East. Why would oil companies continue to risk their prospects in a region where insurgents routinely attack pipelines when land abandoned by even the Vikings holds enough oil to keep America in the black for decades?

Entire university departments are subsidized not by the government, but by oil companies. Whole technologies have been developed to make exploratory drilling less costly and less financially risky. Oil companies actively seek scientists, economists, and geologists who will tell them what they want to hear. Once they hear it, the oil companies make sure that their experts are heard over any dissenting clamor by those who have yet been bought off.

If anyone doubts this production of knowledge, Shah provides us with two words that should silence any naysayers: global warming. After scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, confirmed that CO2 emissions were responsible for the slow warming of the planet, oil companies scrambled for scientists who would be willing to counter these claims.

Some rogue scientists joined with Big Oil to begin a campaign of misinformation, undermining the credibility of the models, data, and conclusions of the consortium. Global warming does not exist, and if it does, it’s necessary to stop the oncoming ice age. I’m reminded of the doctors hired by tobacco companies who reported that cigarettes decrease the incidence of certain cancers. Oil companies have been more successful than King Tobacco in their propaganda campaign, fabricating debate and successfully assuaging consumers’ fears that they were poisoning the planet. Perhaps some healthy debate is necessary, but when that debate is funded by the deep pockets of parties with vested interests in the findings, it is easy to see that the public sphere has been sold to the highest bidder.

The crunch

Fortunately, we may not have hundreds of years of oil to fuel our wager with global warming. Shah’s expose joins no less than five other major books published in the last few years, such as The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, Out of Gas by David Goodstein, The Party’s Over by Richard Heinberg, Blood and Oil by Michael Klare, and The Coming Oil Crisis by C. J. Campbell,  warning of the inevitable peak in oil production. The oil peak, as Shah explains, is the point at which we have consumed more oil than is left in the ground. Even with better technologies for extracting the remaining oil, the law of diminishing returns will rule the days until we truly run out of oil. Estimates for the world oil peak range from 2005 to 2050 for the more concerned experts, and as consumption continues to grow worldwide, the crash is not something we can ignore for much longer. Regardless of when the crunch comes, the years leading up to the end of oil will be characterized by violent geopolitical struggles for the remaining resources, so long as we remain tied to petroculture. Michael T. Klare gives a thorough account of the reality of these coming resource wars in ”Crude Awakenings” from the November 11, 2004 issue of The Nation.

Shah joins these authors in approaching the coming oil crash with cautious optimism. At some level, it does seem that the only thing that will stop our gluttonous oil consumption in the United States is to be cut off. Tales of oil spills, global warming, and genocide have proven ill-equipped to guilt us into giving up our current habits. Oil will first become cost-prohibitive to the majority of America, and will then disappear altogether. This will inevitably bring crisis, and given our current level of preparation for a transition to another energy source or another way of life, it may be worse than any of us can imagine.

Indeed, in the face of mounting evidence of the peak, the Bush administration has decided to invest in methane, ethanol, and coal development, both of which require oil in production. Producing ethanol gas from corn requires almost the same amount of oil as producing petroleum gas. Yet, this is what President Bush funds instead of supporting renewable energies such as solar and wind power. The politics of energy consumption have put us on a collision course with the oil peak, and things will only become more violent. The violence we have exported to oil-rich regions around the globe will return to us with a vengeance. The price we pay for oil may be measured in our blood as well.

What separates Shah from authors who bemoan the coming end to the age of oil is the investigative journalism at the heart of her accounts. Mixed in with the fact sheets are very in-depth narratives of the individuals who are central to the functioning of the oil machines. From the oil rig workers who luckily escaped catastrophic accidents, to professors who churn out the new batch of engineers to be consumed by the industry of consumption, one begins to see much more clearly how no one remains innocent in oil production. Through her investigation of the science, history, politics, and economics of oil, Shah provides a plethora of information in a very straightforward and digestible form. Readers must think twice about their consumptive habits. At its core, Crude reminds us that everything has its price, and the costs are more hidden than we think.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“No Escape From Dependency” by Michael Clare
URL: http://alternet.org/envirohealth/20701/

“Scholars to Working America: Sacrifice Your Children for Oil and Empire” by Paul Street
URL: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5319

“China Invest Heavily In Sudan’s Oil Industry” by Peter Goodman
URL: http://www.genocidewatch.org/SudanChinaInvestsHeavily23December2004.htm

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Crude: The Story of Oil by Sonia Shah
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Blood and Oil by Michael Klare
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The End of Oil by Paul Roberts
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Out of Gas by David Goodstein
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The Coming Oil Crisis by C. J. Campbell
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