The Great Game
The search and extraction of oil was and is the “great game”. Oil and its by products have been central to the development of the world. A large chunk of modern life is to quote the author “oil’s spawn” – heating, transportation, fertilisers that underpin production of food, plastics, PET etc.
The need for oil has been central to economics and geo-politics for centuries. In the film Three Days of the Condor (referred to in Crude World), an older more cynical CIA operative (Cliff Robertson) tells a younger researcher (Robert Redford) why American will support murder for petroleum: “Ask’em when they are running out. Ask’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask’em when their engines stop. Ask’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ‘em.”
"Crude Oil" is not a book about oil per se but an interesting and sometimes insightful picture of what oil does to countries that have it. It also looks at the operations of oil companies actively involved in exploration and extraction of oil and their activities in these countries.
The book is organised loosely around the themes of oil scarcity, problems of oil wealth (plunder, rot), oil revenue driven political ambition (empire, mirage) and environmental cost (contamination). There is also coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq (fear, greed, desire). It relies on anecdote drawn from the author’s interview and travel. Well written and compassionate towards the individuals portrayed, Crude Oil is an interesting read although there are no original or unexpected revelations.
The book is strongest when it deals with specific local problems, such as the problem of production and political and social costs of oil in the Niger Delta. It is weaker when it tries to extrapolate from the specific to the general and draw broader conclusions about the nature of the oil industry and its problems.
For a history of oil, Daniel Yergin "The Prize" is hard to go past. What Mr. Maass, a journalist, does is provide colour on the effects and difficulties that resource wealth and the world’s insatiable demand for energy imposes on countries and people from a human perspective. As the polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote” “[oil] anetsthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts”.
An Iraqi character tells the author: “The whole world is built around oil, so let’s talk about it honestly.” Unfortunately, dealing with oil and the related issues of non-renewable resources is neither easy nor high on anybody’s current agenda. "Crude Oil" illustrates this reluctance to confront the issues abundantly.
© 2010 Satyajit Das All Rights reserved.
Satyajit Das is author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2010, FT-Prentice Hall).
