Oil poisoning humankind -Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil

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BOOK REVIEW
Oil poisoning humankind
Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil by Peter Maass

Reviewed by Jim Ash

One thing that quickly becomes clear from reading Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, is that its subtitle is misleading. Violent twilight? A reader might expect to be heading into the territory of writer James Kunstler, who argues that a coming global shortage of oil is going to turn our petroleum-powered lives upside down, and leave stranded suburban families relying on their vegetable gardens for survival.

But in Crude World, American journalist Peter Maass is actually sending a different message. Like Kunstler, Maass seems to be a believer in the theory of Peak Oil, meaning he thinks the days of relatively cheap petroleum are coming to an end. But far from

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seeing this twilight of oil as a disaster, Maass sees it as a saving grace. It will force us to end our addiction to a substance that has poisoned our natural environment and our politics, and made life measurably worse for millions.

For Maass, oil is a curse. This may seem like a fairly safe claim to make, at least in certain respects. Few would argue that petroleum and its by-products aren't destructive to the environment, for example. But Maass takes the argument deeper, and in some unexpected directions, to show that - from the moment it is extracted from the ground, all the way down the chain until the moment it is poured into the oversized gas tank of a sports utility vehicle - oil is pure poison.

He does this by taking the reader on a guided tour around the world that oil made - our world. And he certainly seems the man for the part of informed travel guide. A foreign correspondent out of the old school, Maass has traveled to some of the world's most dangerous places for magazines like Atlantic Monthly and Slate. Along the way, he covered the war in Bosnia extensively and turned his experience into a book called Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War.

His method in Crude World is a series of snapshots of different parts of the world, showing the ways in which oil has affected these places. The chapter headings Maass uses for these vignettes - such as "Plunder", "Contamination" and "Mirage" - make it clear what his conclusions are.

One bit of conventional wisdom that is quickly overturned is the idea that oil is a blessing for the countries that possess large reserves of it. Mass argues convincingly that this is almost never true. He looks at the experience of poor countries like Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria to show that - on balance - they would have been better off to leave the crude in the ground. The only real benefactors were the big oil companies that swept in to exploit the new "plays", and the crooked governments of those countries and their cronies, who absconded with most of the royalties.

Maass explains how even the actual extraction creates few jobs for the natives of poor countries because of the unusual nature of the petroleum industry: it isn't labor intensive, and the workers it does require need to have specialized skills, which big oil finds it easier to provide via imported help from India and the Philippines. The only locals that usually make out are the prostitutes that flock to the boomtowns created by the extraction process.

But Maass isn't out to grind an axe against the usual suspects in the oil story, the western oil giants like Shell, BP and Chevron. Certainly their behavior is often reprehensible, and Maass provides plenty of detail in this area. But they are doing what corporations are legally required to do - maximizing their profits - in some of the most corrupt regions of the world. And Maass argues that the nationalized companies that are replacing them as the largest oil outfits in the world, the CNOOCs and Gazproms, are every bit as greedy, resistant to regulation and predatory to the environment.

Maass' dispassionate refusal to single out villains is one of the strengths of Crude World. The problem for him isn't a particular company, country or person. In fact, the author expects people and their institutions to be greedy and short-sighted. The problem is the sticky substance itself: oil. As a concentration of pure wealth and power, oil is simply too dangerous to handle, because it magnifies all of our worst tendencies. Oil is like Sauron's ring in Tolkien's trilogy: even those who try to use its power for good will find themselves drawn to the dark side.

Another of the book's selling points is how sharply written it is. Even if you don't agree with Maass, you'll be compelled to finish the tour with him just to get more of his cynical, razor-sharp observations. The author's skill as a stylist is highlighted in a chapter called "Desire", on America's bloody engagement with Iraq over the past few decades. At 37 pages, it's a mini-tour-de-force that punctures another cherished myth about the US obsession with Iraq: that it's all about the oil.

Of course, Maass writes, oil was certainly a factor in the US attacks on Iraq. Is there anything that it isn't a factor in? But his study of the debacle of the US occupation, in which Baghdad's only refinery was left unprotected and was stripped bare by looters, suggests that there may not be an entirely logical rationale behind the invasion of Iraq. As Maass memorably writes in the chapter's conclusion:

Neither [former US vice president Dick] Cheney's motives nor the motives of the administration he served can be distilled into one word. WMD [weapons of mass destruction], democracy, religion, Oedipus, oil - America was like a drunk fumbling with a set of keys at night. (pg 161)

And what of the twilight of oil? As mentioned earlier, Maass subscribes to the Peak Oil theory. It holds that global oil production has passed its peak because the low-hanging fruit - the high-quality crude in easily accessible surface fields - has already been plucked. What's left is harder, more dangerous and more expensive to extract.

This means that in future, accidents like Deepwater Horizon - which spewed frightening quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico - will be more common as the oil giants exploit ever-more marginal sources in an effort to maintain their production rate. But even this won't be enough, because global consumption will continue to rise. The result will be a skyrocketing price per barrel, and the end of the era of cheap oil.

Where does this fact leave us? Where we should have been in the first place, according to Maass: a "world in which the priority is not getting oil but getting off oil". Maass is no Kunstler: he thinks the twilight of oil will take years to play out, meaning we have time to avoid Kunstler's most apocalyptic predictions. And Maass believes that we already have all of the necessary technology in place to begin the transition to a post-petroleum world. What has been lacking so far is the will. Luckily, we won't have a choice for much longer.

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil by Peter Maass. Knopf; 1St Edition edition (September 22, 2009). ISBN-10: 1400041694. Price US$27, 288 pages.

Jim Ash is a Canadian writer and editor.

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