11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent overview and history, September 16, 2005
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Politics of Oil (Paperback)
I'm just a few chapters into this book, but I was enjoying it enough so that I wanted to make a brief comment. I'll probably write a more thorough review later.
This book presents the history of oil, and how it came to dominate the politics and policy of the entire world in just the last century. There is some interesting history in that the authors discuss how the oil industry actually originated in Romania. By the time of the first oil well in the U.S. in 1859, Romania was already mining 1000 metric tons of oil per year by means of open pit mines, since this was before effective drilling began.
Until then mostly all there was was oil seeps with oil coming up from the ground, and the occasional farmer using the gloppy stuff to lubricate an axel or two, and it was used in patent medicines. But there was no real industrial or widespread use even in heating or lighting, with whale oil being the main product there. Then because of some strange coincidences involving several people who were brought together, the first American oil well was sunk, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I notice one person here panned the book because of its perceived liberal bias, but it's really only a slight liberal bias in that sense. And the authors do mention that the evidence about Bush's "secret oil report" that supposedly influenced the discussion to invade Iraq that's discussed was only reported by a European newspaper. They don't claim it's actual fact.
But anyone who doesn't believe that the U.S.'s need for oil at least to some extent drives political policy is living in a very naive, political cloud-cuckoo land. We live in a world of increasing resource scarcity on many fronts now, and oil is just the most conspicuous of those.
So overall, a good book on the subject and one that I learned a good deal from.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent reader on a perplexing topic, December 2, 2003
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Politics of Oil (Paperback)
This book serves as an excellent guide to understanding the source for a host of national and international conflicts. The organization of the text is exceptionally useful, allowing you to breeze over parts that you may not be interested in (for me, this was the scientific aspect of oil development) and quickly understand the more engaging material (such as international relations and energy politics). An excellent basic guide that should be a must for all high school and college students interested in political science. It doesn't get a five stars from me because, at times, the material is almost too basic, but that's what this book series is all about. Excellent for a comprehensive review that covers the bredth, not necessarilly the depth, of the topic.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worth reading overall,, July 30, 2008
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Politics of Oil (Paperback)
The best part of this book is that it's a basic nuts and bolts look at oil in politics, which fills in a lot of holes in a reader's mind. The authors start, of course, with a very brief historical overview of the oil business which, while useful, could be had in significantly greater detail elsewhere. They then consider everything from national security and terrorism as it relates (or may relate) to oil to lobbying, economic issues and environmental issues.
A strength is the brief discussion of whether the war in Iraq was about oil. Whether it was or wasn't, it's a public perception and is worth thinking about. Another is a brief discussion of the Bush Energy Plan, part of which was classified. Whether recklessly serving oil interests at the expense of the rest of the economy was a Bush policy or not, the appearance of impropriety hangs over his policy. I also thought the complexity of oil pricing was well presented in chapter 18.
While I liked the book, there are some problems with it. One is that the authors make a few statements that are unsupported with evidence. In the first chapter, for example, they state that the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development), which they seem to call the OCED, is a consumer cartel for oil consuming countries. I've never understood the OECD this way and I don't think most would. Nor can I recall any time when the OECD acted to broker the collective oil imports of its member countries, so as to exert some downward pressure on the price of oil. Some members of the OECD are also oil producers (US, UK, Norway), which implies that these countries may not necessarily dislike high oil prices. The consumer cartel idea goes back to Richard Nixon, which he called for as a way to thwart the power of producer nations in increasing price, though it never went anywhere.
Another problem that cropped up a few times is the economic analysis of aspects of oil, which I found to be poor. Toward the end of chapter 17, for example, the authors discuss the role of the US dollar in the oil industry. They state that both the United States and oil producing countries depend on a strong dollar. This is the so-called dollar hegemony idea. Because oil is paid for in dollars, there is greater global demand for dollars among non-OPEC countries, which assists the US in financing its trade deficit. I'm not convinced that an absence of petrodollars would be a barrier to financing non-oil trade with the US. So long as countries want to export to the US, the US will not have significant problems here.
That oil is denominated in US dollars supposedly gives the US clear economic advantages, but this is not easy to see. If the US had to convert to other currencies to buy oil, they say, the US trade deficit would be worse. Wouldn't this depend on the relative strength of the dollar against other currencies? Because the euro is strong against the dollar, for example, EU economies gain a cost advantage when they convert into dollars to buy oil. This acts to partly off-set the high price of oil. If oil was denominated in another currency and the dollar was strong against that currency, then the US could achieve the same advantage. As it stands, the US economy gains no exchange-rate benefit or disadvantage at all from oil purchases, given that oil is denominated in dollars. It is also true that a weak dollar serves the interests of the US economy overall, especially when the economy is sliding into a recession. The weak dollar means that exports are cheaper and imports more expensive, both of which imply stimulation of the domestic economy (excepting for oil imports).
Better economic analysis of oil would have improved the book, though it is still a good read.
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