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Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil

Crude World

Review by Michael Peel

Published: October 26 2009 05:22 | Last updated: October 26 2009 05:22

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil
By Peter Maass
*Allen Lane £20, 288 pages*
FT Bookshop <;: £16

There’s a polemical directness to *Crude World*, Peter Maass’s tour of big
oil and its myriad vices. Each of the 10 chapter headings comprises a single
word. They begin with Scarcity and end in Mirage, taking in Plunder, Rot and
Alienation on the way. The industry in the US is a `carnival of sin’, he
says. Maass quotes approvingly former US White House official Harold Ickes,
who, in the 1930s wrote in his diary that `an honest and scrupulous man in
the oil business’ was `so rare as to rank as a museum piece’.

This is the spirit that informs a short, sharp book that saw Maass visit 11
countries, building on previous articles from half a dozen other `oilcentric
nations’. It’s a lot to pack in to a work of 200-plus pages. The pace is
sometimes breathless. But Maass – a journalist and author of a book on the
former Yugoslavia – succeeds in portraying an energy crisis mostly ignored
or misunderstood in the developed world.

*Crude World* serves as a warning to middle America – or indeed middle
Britain, middle China or middle India – that decades of wanton consumption
have created the seeds of the economic, environmental and moral destruction
caused by the oil industry. `The end of the suburban lifestyle, hinged to
two-car families and commutes to work, school and Walmart, will be just the
first casualty,’ Maass writes. There is more than a hint of glee when he
argues that a decline in crude production looms in the medium-term, and `Big
Oil is getting the reward it deserves: after more than a century of power
and indecency, it is shrinking’.

Each chapter highlights a dark facet of the oil world, whether that’s
militant uprisings in Nigeria, pollution in Ecuador, corruption in
Azerbaijan or the fetid embrace between leading US companies and the
dictatorial government of Equatorial Guinea. A recent British court case
about oil trader Trafigura spilling toxic waste in Ivory Coast was another
reminder of the price the industry has at times exacted on poorer nations.

Maass is sceptical that producer nations will continue fuelling the west,
China and India. He argues that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer,
is a source of uncertainty because it isn’t transparent about its oil
resources, for example. And his visit to an Iraqi refinery reveals how
unprepared the US was, post-invasion, to protect the oil infrastructure it
was said to so desire.

In Russia, he finds a country where `crude oil and political power are
umbilically connected’. He quotes two experts who fear it could become, at
worst, a dictatorial rentier state along the lines of Angola.

The price of this broad scope is that the narrative is sometimes hurried and
avenues are left unexplored. In Equatorial Guinea, he notes, `the ruling
family, the government and the business elite are one and the same’. Though
of course, even the US has seen father and son presidencies and former oil
executives at the top of government.

A chapter on the industry’s leaders flirts with glibness when it observes
that one executive was `not averse to becoming rich’ or that oil managers as
a class had a moral compass that `did not always point in a moral
direction’.

The author ends on a semi-hopeful note, with a visit to a Californian wind
farm, which he sees as part of a better future after `the violent twilight
of oil’. Three decades ago, he recalls, US President Jimmy Carter demanded
the `moral equivalent of war’ in the realm of energy, but this plea `went
nowhere’. After this helter-skelter tour of an industry that is at once
frighteningly powerful and strangely vulnerable, Maass has no doubts about
the harshness of the age awaiting us if we continue to look away from the
dark side of our crude world.

*Michael Peel is author of `A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines And
Paramilitaries At Nigeria’s Oil Frontier’ (IB Tauris)*

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress