The oil world and its villains

In a new book, journalist Peter Maass takes a voyage into the troubled regions of the world and finds oil corrupting almost everything it touches

CLIMATE change and worries about energy security have been the two dominant forces behind a growing popular resentment of the hydrocarbons sector in recent years. But, suggests Peter Maass, a New York Times journalist, there remain more basic and equally compelling reasons why the world should conquer its addiction to oil. From Iraq to Texas, to Central Asia, to west Africa, oil and the companies that seek it bring havoc and violence in their wake, he says.

Maass’ book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, is a disturbing depiction of the corruption, degradation and destruction that have come to be such frequent bedfellows of the oil industry. The premise of the book is not new. Armed with information from controversialists such as peak-oil guru Matthew Simmons, Maass argues that the geological fact of depletion is drawing the world’s biggest firms and most rapacious energy consuming nations into a battle for the remaining resource. It is an unseemly and, in Maass’ description, almost an apocalyptic battle, whose victims are the pillaged denizens of degraded areas such as the Niger Delta.

The oil companies aren’t the only villains of his piece. Governments (in particular the US) have tilted their foreign policies towards the pursuit of oil, with little regard for the consequences, he argues. Indeed, although Maass concludes that the pursuit of oil was a part of the motivation for the US-led invasion of Iraq, he notes that such geopolitical strategising is often at odds with the wishes of the companies themselves, for which war is an inconvenience when business can be accomplished better without it.

Petroleum Economist