The Great Oil Debate We Need to Have
Jack Dresser, Ph.D.

To any Americans with lingering doubts about the Bush administration’s dishonesty, these should be put to rest by the recently exposed Downing Street memoranda. Yes, Bush, Cheney and the neoconservative hawks intended to seize Iraq long before 9/11, which they deceitfully twisted into a phony sales pitch for war.  Yes, nearly 1,800 Americans and over 100,000 Iraqis have died to date as a result.  Many Americans now feel that, given a Democratic Congress, Bush and Cheney would be impeached by the House, removed from office by the Senate, and possibly tried for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (which the administration refuses to recognize for that reason).

But what has been their motive?  Are they driven by corporate greed and/or a psychopathic lust for world power, like James Bond’s criminal organizational adversary, Specter?  The answer is undoubtedly yes, but there’s more to it.  The real demon is much larger and much older than the Bush administration.  It is the “military-industrial complex” that originated in WWII, grew bloated during the cold war, and now represents over half of America’s economic base with the cold war justification conveniently repackaged as the “war on terror.”  And it runs on oil.  Dependent upon this shrinking and irreplaceable natural resource, its survival instinct is focused on seizing as much as possible of this crucial remaining nutrient, while ironically consuming vast amounts in the process which will hasten its own demise.

Yes, the administration’s motive was oil.  We must stop pretending.  We must stop the euphemistic chorus about spreading liberation and democracy.  We must face and debate the real issues. Most of the world’s remaining oil reserves are controlled by Islamic states: Saudi Arabia and other nations of the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Indonesia, and of course, Iraq. Oil is their principal marketable commodity, which is being wasted flagrantly by the West – especially by America – with profits extracted by Western oil companies and their own corrupt autocratic rulers who were installed and supported by U.S. and other Western political and corporate interests. In arid Arabia, oil is all they have and it won’t last much longer. Their more aware citizens are understandably furious and desperate. As has been usual throughout human history, religion is being used as a simplistic proxy motive by those who understand the real stakes to manipulate into violent action those who don’t. The Bush administration is using religion in precisely the same way.

Remember the romance of “wildcat” oil strikes in Texas and Oklahoma in the 1930s?  The exhilaration of George C. Scott and Faye Dunaway in the film, Oklahoma Crude?  We haven’t heard any stories like that lately, have we?  This is because oil is a finite, exhaustible, nonrenewable, once-in-an-eon storage system for millions of years of solar energy.  Columbia University and U.S. Geological Survey geologist M. King Hubbert, while employed as chief of research for Shell Oil in the 1950s, developed mathematical models of oil field production and depletion, represented as a bell curve.  He presciently calculated that oil fields under typical extraction rates will produce increasingly for about 40 years, after which productivity declines and the oil obtained decreases in quality with corresponding increases in extraction and refining difficulty and expense.  Since most U.S. oil fields were discovered in the 1930s, he correctly predicted that domestic supplies would peak about 1970 and decline thereafter.  Hence our much-discussed current “dependency on foreign oil” (currently about 60%) which political leaders urge that we reduce.  However, less often discussed is the necessity to reduce our dependency on oil altogether, since the world’s other oilfields are subject to the same bell curve as ours.  The Saudi oil fields upon which American energy optimism depends were first developed 40-50 years ago.

The implications of this are not trivial. Modern industrial society’s dependency upon oil is enormous.  Everywhere we see plastics, derived from oil.  All trucking, shipping, and air transportation, all import and export trade, are oil-dependent.  Almost all manufacturing uses energy derived directly or indirectly from oil.  And worldwide supplies are already beginning to diminish while worldwide demand increases, causing escalating cost. Airlines and other energy-dependent industries are forced to cut costs in other areas, resulting in pension defaults and movement of labor costs to cheaper labor markets elsewhere.

Dick Cheney has arrogantly declared, “The American way of life is not negotiable.”  Ironically and I presume unintentionally, he was correct.  Nature does not negotiate.  And it is nature that will bring to a close the age of inexpensive hydrocarbon energy in the not too distant future, and with it the current American way of life.  There is no known or likely substitute equivalent to hydrocarbon energy as a transportation fuel source. The SUV, clothes and court shoes imported from China and Indonesia, winter grapes flown in from Chile, petroleum-intensive feedstock and fertilizer based agribusiness, throwaway consumerism, and the commuting suburban lifestyle that separates home, work, and shopping by long distances are all predicted to fade inexorably into history.

So what should we do?  That is the debate we should be having. That is the debate we should have had during the last election instead of a media obsession with the sidebar topics of same-sex marriage and 35-year old Swift Boats.  The Bush/Cheney solution is a continuation of decades-long U.S. policy to delay the inevitable crisis by grabbing as much of the world’s oil as possible through economic bribery, political strong-arming, CIA manipulations and small-scale covert violence such as coups and assassinations, and if necessary, the large-scale violence of war.  The Democrats have advanced no comprehensive solution.  Neither party has honestly addressed the issue before the American public or the world with whom we will share the looming crisis.

Analysts who have examined the problem in depth urge at least two major courses of action, neither of which will salvage our profligate habits of energy consumption but may at least permit most of us to survive.  First, we must use our remaining hydrocarbon energy platform to develop alternative, renewable energy sources while we can still do so.  To buy ourselves the necessary time, we must drastically reduce our current squandering of hydrocarbon energy.  Secondly, we must increasingly develop smaller, self-sufficient, community-based economic units.  Europe already is far ahead of the U.S. on both counts, with extensive renewable energy development and independent community-based economies the long-established cultural norm.  You’re unlikely to find running shoes from China or Chilean grapes in the villages of Tuscany, Provence or Crete, and you will see few gas-guzzling vehicles.

We have vast wind and solar power potentials in eastern Oregon, the geothermal power potential of our Cascade volcanic range, and the tidal power potential of our long coast.  Western Oregon with its large, productive agricultural valleys is also well suited to develop self-sufficient local and regional economies.  In the absence of national leadership choosing a peaceful preparation path, Oregon could provide a model and, in so doing, assume a position of national leadership in facing reality and forcing an open national debate between violent/competitive vs. negotiated/cooperative models of response to this impending revolution in the global economy.

For readers wanting to investigate these issues, good starting points are oil industry investment banker Matthew Simmons’ book, Twilight in the Desert,  James Kunstler’s book, The Long Emergency, and the websites www.fromthewilderness.com  and www.permatopia.org.  All provide gateways to numerous other information sources. Succinct summaries are also provided by Michael Klare in the July 3, 2005 Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com) and Tom Halstead in the July 1, 2005 Washington Spectator ( www.washingtonspectator.com).
 
 

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Copyright 2004 Jack Dresser, Ph.D.