Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the connections between oil, economic development and political realities. Peter Maass (brother of my father's friend) has reported on oil issues from over 15 countries, and this book is a brilliant summary (in 230 pages!) of his nearly 30 years of experience reporting on war, oil and corruption. The book begins with a vivid image from the early days in the occupation of Baghdad, when American soldiers protected Iraq's Ministry of Oil and let looters invade the National Museum. Maass then makes his key observation: It's not as simple as that. In the next chapters, Maass explores ten different themes: 1. Scarcity: Saudi Arabia, peak oil, and the need for the Saudis to maintain the image of limitless supply, even as it's falling. 2. Plunder: Equitorial Guinea, where the president/dictator steals his people blind, with the help and encouragement of US banks and oil companies. (Theft occurs in three ways: bribes to give access to oil, skimming oil royalties, and profits from businesses that serve oil companies.) 3. Rot: Nigeria, where the local people grow poorer as oil is pumped from under their land. Shell Oil leaves a few token "developments," but these are often cruel jokes -- hospitals without staff or medicines or generators without gasoline. There's also a strange dance between rebels and the government/Shell. Rebels steal oil to sell, and the government lets them ship it out. Why? It's a cheap pay off, to let the rest of the oil go by free. 4. Contamination: Ecuador and Texaco's terrible environmental damage. As with Equatorial Guinea, this country was naive with oil firms, so they got the worst cut of royalties and the cheapest extraction technology, which meant gas flares and oil spills. The government was no better when they took over, but they probably did not make a conscious choice to use that technology. 5. Fear: Azerbaijan and the culture of abuse among oil executives. Maass cites Milgorm's 1960s experiment, where students were happy to torture others, as long as an authority figure told them it was ok. This same "passing the buck" psychology allows oilmen to abuse oil sources to get a few pennies more profit. See previous post here. 6. Greed: Texas isn't even protected from its own oil companies when they can make a quick buck. More on oil companies desire to cut corners and a prescient (or perhaps trend-spotting) take on a series of stupid moves by BP, each of them resulting from an emphasis on short term profits, and each of them resulting in long term damage and death. The Deepwater Horizon Spill was no accident. 7. Desire: Iraq and America's desire for their oil. Except that the US was incompetent at taking it over. And the American goal of democracy flies in the face of conventional wisdom -- friendly dictators are much easier partners in the oil business. Maass concludes that Iraq's oil was important, but other goals also mattered. 8. Alienation: How S

Peter Maass's survey of the world that crude oil has created in the countries that are rich in this resources is the product of the best kind of investigative journalism: the kind that digs deeply into an issue and produces a timely and shocking story. "We may wish to forget about oil," Maass writes, "but oil will not let us." And while we in the West have made ourselves hostage to oil as part of the development of modern consumer-oriented society, the countries that produce it are paying a different and still higher price: chaos, warfare, corruption, torture, environmental degradation, the abuse of human rights. Worst of all, they are doing it to satisfy our own need to consume that oil. Maass travels through Guinea (one of the most under-reported African nations of all, and one from which is ejected after only two weeks of reporting) and Nigeria to look at the political consequences of oil 'ownership' in Africa; he examines environmental issues in Ecuador where a lack of environmental regulations enabled the industry to ignore leaking crude oil pipelines for decades; and at the heart of this book is the Iraqi conflict, which he covered as a reporter for the New York Times Magazine. Just as he carefully explores the manifold ways in which crude oil -- resources that should have been a valuable national asset, bringing prosperity -- proves far more of a curse than a blessing. There are few people he doesn't talk to an effort to shed light on this paradox -- oilmen themselves, revolutionary leaders and warlords, geologists and sheikhs -- and there are no easy or obvious answers. But that's not the point of this book, which aims to get us to recognize what is done and the price that is paid by others for the oil we consume without a thought. Just as the refining process transforms crude into gasoline, the "clear fluid without which our civilization would collapse", so "a corollary process of political refining occurs to sanitize the truth of what's being done to keep oil in the hands of friendly governments." If Daniel Yergin's survey of the oil industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, is the definitive look at the business of oil, this book could well become the definitive survey of what oil's importance has meant to the world. Our prosperity has been built on oil; oil has been the ruin of millions of others. Maass's recommendations are basic and straightforward -- such as introducing transparency to oil contracts in such a way that corruption becomes impossible to mask -- but are likely to harder to implement than to propose, as Maass does indirectly knowledge in noting theh willingness (even eagerness) of Chinese companies to do business with regimes that North American and European can't or won't work with to obtain oil. This is a fascinating and impeccably-written book; perhaps its only flaw is the fact that Maass doesn't explain why the possession of crude oil hasn't been as toxic to countries like Norway, Canada o

Peter Maass makes the point here that the modern oil industry relies extensively on fraud, bribery, deceit, and force to obtain oil. In many oil-producing countries, it simply isn't possible for honest, ethical businessmen to win oil contracts. Don't like these brutal tactics to acquire the black gold? Then perhaps it's time to work on transparency in oil contracting. Reconsidering America's near-total reliance on petroleum for transportation would also be in order. Maass says very little about global warming. Part of the message he's trying to get across is that even if global warming turns out to be a myth, we still have plenty of reasons to cut back on fossil fuel usage. "Crude World" is not a scholarly study, but it is well worth reading. Maass doesn't talk much about how to break the American automobile addiction. This might not be as hard as it sounds, given that the automobile industry is the beneficiary of thousands of laws and regulations favoring cars over other forms of transportion, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of subsidies each year. For more on this, see The High Cost of Free Parking and Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape.

"We're addicted to oil," said George W. Bush, as though that was some kind of revelation. Well, it actually might be to most Americans. If asked, the majority of the public would probably say they only use oil to fuel their car or heat their home. In fact, oil is the essential ingredient in 100% of all our possessions, and most of our activities. No food is eaten without massive oil inputs. No iPods or flat screen TV's entertain us without oil to make them, deliver them, and fuel them. Even if we all biked to work, the roads themselves are made of oil. If we actually stop to think about it, our oil need is beyond an addiction, for if the will is there, a junkie can be weaned from his fix. Oil is more like the water a fish swims in, so familiar and so necessary, it's not even noticed. Or, as Peter Maass says in his outstanding book Crude World, oil is oxygen. In the U.S., we consume 21 million barrels of oil a day, but we produce only about 9 million. The rest comes from other countries - many of which are not our friends, and are not democracies. It is this foreign supply of our daily fix that gets the bulk of Maass's scrutiny, and it's an eye-opener, to say the least, because oil has a paradoxical way of making the people who live in most countries that export it poorer, not richer; the oil curse, as it's called. With their slick corporate PR campaigns (BP - "Beyond Petroleum") and unlimited lobbying budgets, the oil companies are able to project a high-tech, consumer-friendly image as benign providers of clean energy. That may be mostly true in the United States, with its advanced legal, political, and regulatory system. But what happens to these ostensibly fine corporate citizens when they can extract oil in poor third world countries? Here Peter Maass blows the lid off their carefully contrived corporate image, with intimate and devastating personal portraits of exploitation in action. Maass blithely walks into the most dangerous civil wars, jungles, and guerrilla training camps to show countries like Equatorial Guinea, where a tiny fraction of the population aligned with the brutal dictator Teodoro Obiang skim virtually the entire gross revenues of the country, while the remaining people live in filth. To ensure their continued access to the country's riches, ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil, Chevron, and others treat Obiang as a valued friend and enlightened leader. U.S. officials like Condoleeza Rice treat him as a confidante, and our own banks help him launder his plundered wealth. And that's only one story. Maass takes us around the world as the story changes and fascinates, but the conclusions are the same. Crude World is a cook's tour of the devil's kitchen, and is too riveting to put down. Every American should read it, and know where his daily fix really comes from. We can't get off of oil today, but we might just move a little bit faster if we think about how many people have to starve for us to fill our SUV's.