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June 18, 2002

Oil for Algernon

I'm sitting in my room at the Oakland Marriott. Tomorrow Sarah will take her board exams. I got to thinking while watching a documentary on the history of oil on the history channel, in conjunction with reading a little from Red Mars. In the book, the teraforming effort is in full swing. What do these two have to do with each other? Quite a lot.

It seems that over time we lose perspective of causality. Especially in todays world we tend to try and treat symptoms more than the problem. Often its just easier to pretend there is no problem, but sometimes the problem is just too far removed. This documentary on oil suddenly put a lot of our current plight into perspective. Specifically the two most pressing issues in our world today and how they are in fact related and may possibly share the same cause. These two things being our negative environmental impact on the world (global warming, lost species, etc..) and the current global/political tensions (ie. 9/11).

The history of the oil industry is quite interesting and I'm sure it fill smany tomes. Particularly of interest is how it was mostly started by America. We pioneered the finding, aquisition, and transport of oil. More importantly, we pioneered most of the ways oil is consumed. The rest of the world just followed. There were a couple things I found particularly intersting in this documentary. 1. Our choice of gasoline to fuel cars. 2. Our self-inflicted need to get oil outside of our country. Lets deal with them seperately.

1. It wasn't random that we chose gasoline to fuel cars, but it might as well have been. Up til the turn of the century, fuel was carosene. It was used to fuel lights mostly. A byproduct of carosene production (from oil) was a crude substance we called gasoline. For the most part, this gasoline was just burned as it was deemed worthless. It wasn't until someone figured out it worked great for fueling combustion engines that gasoline became an important comodity. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if some other fuel had been chosen. It took decades the the modern combustion engine to come into its own, just as it is taking decades for the modern electric car to be developed. If we had started developing alternative (less devastatingly wastfull) fuels for cars early on, who knows where we'd be. Certainly, we might have staved our impending ecological destruction of the planet as it once was. For, it was the combustion engine that really started the entire industrial revolution which was fueled by none other than oil. Which brings me to point 2.

2. Up until the 50s America did not seek out oil from any other countries. We mined enough oil to satisfy our need, thanks to huge oil deposits in Texas and Alaska. Now we can argue that we shouldn't have been using oil in the first place, but that was covered in point 1. Post WWII came an industrial leisure boom, where Americans had more money than ever to spend on ever more wastfull things, INCLUDING, the newly marketed, luxury car. With every American wanting these gas guzzling, tin lizzies, we needed more oil than ever. The problem was, we just couldn't produce enough for ourselves. The topic of post WWII consuption was briefly covered in one of my last 2 entries. I should go on in detail about my feelings of the false American Dream (especially in a post WWII context), but I'll leave that for later. Back to our insatiable need for oil. Where did we look (besides the ocean), the middle east. Prior to this point, we didn't deal with the middle east that much. We did some small time trading with them, but nothing big. We could live without them and visa versa. It wasn't until we needed their oil to keep our country running and they needed our money to keep their boigois comfortable that we began the mutually destructive relationship that has led to what happened on 9/11. Ok, I've made a huge leap there, but I think it follows without missing a beat. Almost all of the middle east's hatred towards us surounds our buttin in to their affairs. If we hadn't and didn't but into our affairs, they'd probably still not like us, but they wouldn't be openly trying to attack us... because, remember, to them, these are not attacks, they are in defense. Defense of us telling them how to live. Whether we're right or wrong is irrelivant to this argument. And our sole interest in the middle east, is oil.

So lets summarize. Had we chosen, or been wise enough to forsee the problems with choosing oil as our fuel dejour, we would not be here. Had we seen the problems with overconsuption and done something about it before needing to strip the world of its oil, we wouldn't be here. Where's here? A world where entire cities and countries are having to abandon their islands because rising water levels are threatening their lives. A world where America believes it is the moral/economic elite and the rest of the world wants nothing more than to be rid of us and shove our elitism back in our faces.

Finally, I want to post the question of whether we COULD have predicted this, and whether predicting it would have made a difference. What DROVE this whole thing. Money. Rockerfeller, owner of Standard Oil was the riches man in America. Many others followed. If there's one thing money CAN buy, its power and influence. Once people saw how much money could be made, no one could stop it. We were ENCOURAGED to consume as much oil, and as much everything we could find, as much as possible. By consuming, we stimulated the economy, making the rich richer, and the middle class richer (via trickle down economics) and the poor... well, they remained poor, only relatively more so. Had we know OIL would cause this much damage, nothing would have changed. By example, look at cigarettes. The 'experts' have known for 50 years how bad it is, but they also knew how much money could be made, and that proved more important.

On a seperate note, I started thinking about how I learn the most by linking things I'm learning that may appear unrelated. This made me think that we should be on the look-out for lessons such as we should have (and be) learning from our consumption illness which has brought about our current pestilance. I am reminded of the NASA programmers who, upon finding a bug, to intensive research into how that bug was introduced in the first place, and more importantly, how it was missed. They use that information to try and find other bugs they may have introduced or missed in similar fashions. We too can learn from our mistakes in this way. Its all probably academic though... few things change.

Posted by wonko at June 18, 2002 12:20 PM

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