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The oil world and its villains
Derek Brower, Petroleum Economist
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 book’s central thesis – that our thirst for oil has brought devastation around the world – is compelling because of Maass’ gifts as a story-teller and reporter. This is an account from the frontline of the energy question and its thorny ethics. The solutions Maass offers in a short conclusion – more alternative energy, conservation, and more adherence by companies to campaigns like Publish What You Pay – are worthy, but feel banal compared with the startling portraits of the main narrative.
His book won’t be easy reading for anyone who works in the oil sector. The industry’s underbelly is crude, ugly and dirty. Anyone can look up the price of a barrel of oil, but Maass shows us some of the true human price. The industry should worry about both costs…
(February 2010)
The Oil Drum reviewed the book earlier last year here.
Interview: Joel Salatin
Gaby Wood, The Guardian
Joel Salatin is pulling on his braces. He’s just had his picture taken wearing a suit – our photographer wants to show that he’s not just a hands-on local farmer but also a new- era businessman – and now he’s getting back into his work gear: muddy jeans, straw hat, and a farmhand’s shirt that reads, in embroidered script, “Roy”.
“Roy?” I ask.
Salatin follows my gaze to his chest and laughs. “The cleaner sells unclaimed ones for 50 cents each,” he explains. “I might be Pedro one day, and Roy the next.”
Such is the unpredictable world of Joel Salatin, hero of the new local food movement, feted for his ingenious chemical-free farming methods and admired for his outspoken articulacy on the horrors of industrial food.
We are at Polyface, the small farm his family has run since he was four years old (Salatin and his wife Teresa now have two grown-up children of their own, who also work there). The rambling white clapboard farmhouse – a gold plaque above the fireplace designates it a historic landmark, built in the 1750s – stands in an absurdly picturesque landscape in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. On the January day we visit, 24 inches of snow have fallen in a few recent hours and turned the surrounding fields into rolling white patchworked dunes dotted with black cows. And as if its children’s-book looks were not enough, the roads have names like Cattleman and Sugar Loaf and Buttermilk Spring…
(31 Jan 2010)
What are your top green books?
Leo Hickman, The Guardian
“What’s your favourite ‘green’ book?” I get asked this question quite a bit and I always struggle for an answer. It presents the same problem as when you’re asked to name your favourite song of film: the answer tends to change by the hour.
It would be much easier to compile a list of the top 50 books, which is exactly what the University of Cambridge’s programme for sustainability leadership has just done. It asked its alumni – “around 2,000 senior leaders from around the world who have participated in its sustainability programmes over the past decade or more” – to list some of their favourite “sustainability” books.
The result is a pretty comprehensive rundown of the most influential and thought-provoking books of all time. There are many classics – Silent Spring, Fast Food Nation, The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, Small is Beautiful, A Sand County Almanac – but there are also a few omissions, too. Where’s Henry David Thoreau’s Walden? Where’s Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded? Where’s Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature?
And should fiction be allowed onto the list, too? How about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Or Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang?…
(27 Jan 2010)
Several thought-provoking comments follow on the Guardian about what books were left out of the list and why. -KS
We Need a Food Revolution: Oprah with Michael Pollan (VIDEO)
Paula Crossfield, civil eats
On Wednesday, Michael Pollan appeared on Oprah to discuss the food system and the film Food, Inc. At the beginning of the program, entitled “Before You Grocery Shop Again: Food 101,” Oprah said that she saw Food, Inc., and it inspired her to host this discussion. “We all have to start paying more attention to what we’re putting in our bodies,” she said. “Do you know where you food really comes from? What’s been added, what’s been taken out? What goes down before they put a label on it?” Interspersed throughout the show were clips of the film, including the film’s introduction on the disconnect between our idea of food production and its reality; chicken production, featuring a farmer speaking out against the industry; and a family that can’t afford to eat real food and is forced to choose fast food.
Pollan explained how “the less we spend on food, the more we spend on healthcare,” siting statistics that show that in 1960, we spent 18% of our income on food and 5% on healthcare nationally, while we now spend 9% of our income on food and 17% on healthcare nationally. They got into the nitty gritty about the western diet and its pitfalls, and Oprah got a laugh when she exclaimed, “the low-fat kick made everybody fatter!”
When Oprah asks Pollan what he eats, and he speaks in favor of cooking: “I think cooking is really key because it’s the only way you’re going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us,” he said. “The fact is, so far corporations don’t cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat and sugar—much more than you would ever use at home.” The best line in the program came from Oprah: “We need a food revolution, because people want the corporations to cook for them because it all boils down to convenience.” Pollan agreed, saying that when you understand what it takes to make the food we are currently eating, “you lose your appetite.”..
(29 Jan 2010)
Includes links to the video of the interview and comments -KS
DIRT! The movie (video and text)
film website
DIRT! The Movie–directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow–takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth’s most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility–from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.
The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, “dirt is very much alive.” Though, in modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been disrupted. “Drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt.”
DIRT! the Movie–narrated by Jaime Lee Curtis–brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.
DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: “When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked.” But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action…
(January 2010)
The trailer is online. -BA
The No Money Man (video)
Jon Henley, Mustafa Khalili and Michael Tait, Guardian
Jon Henley spends the day in Bath with Mark Boyle, who last year decided to stop spending money … on anything … at all … ever. And guess what? He’s doing rather well for himself.
(25 January 2010)
Related:
The cashless man responds to your comments
My year of living without money
Isaac Asimov: The Nightmare Life Without Fuel
Isaac Asimov, Time
Americans are so used to limitless energy supplies that they can hardly imagine what life might be like when the fuel really starts to run out. So TIME asked Science Writer Isaac Asimov for his vision of an energy-poor society that might exist at the end of the 20th century. The following portrait, Asimov noted, “need not prove to be accurate. It is a picture of the worst, of waste continuing, of oil running out, of nothing in its place, of world population continuing to rise. But then, that could happen, couldn’t it?”
-TIME editors
So it’s 1997, and it’s raining, and you’ll have to walk to work again. The subways are crowded, and any given train breaks down one morning out of five. The buses are gone, and on a day like today the bicycles slosh and slide. Besides, you have only a mile and a half to go, and you have boots, raincoat and rain hat. And it’s not a very cold rain, so why not?
Lucky you have a job in demolition too. It’s steady work.
Slow and dirty, but steady. The fading structures of a decaying city are the great mineral mines and hardware shops of the nation. Break them down and re-use the parts. Coal is too difficult to dig up and transport to give us energy in the amounts we need, nuclear fission is judged to be too dangerous, the technical breakthrough toward nuclear fusion that we hoped for never took place, and solar batteries are too expensive to maintain on the earth’s surface in sufficient quantity.
Anyone older than ten can remember automobiles. They dwindled. At first the price of gasoline climbed—way up. Finally only the well-to-do drove, and that was too clear an indication that they were filthy rich, so any automobile that dared show itself on a city street was overturned and burned…
(25 April, 1977)
Science fiction great Dr. Asimov was ahead of the curve 33 years ago. -BA
