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Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History Hardcover – November 30, 2018
Catholic Herald Book Awards 2019 Finalist, Current Affairs
"Auzanneau has created a towering telling of a dark and dangerous addiction.”―Nature
The story of oil is one of hubris, fortune, betrayal, and destruction. It is the story of a resource that has been undeniably central to the creation of our modern culture, and ever-present during the darkest exploits of empire the world over. For the past 150 years, oil has become the most essential ingredient for economic, military, and political power. And it has brought us to our present moment in which political leaders and the fossil-fuel industry consider extraordinary, and extraordinarily dangerous, policy on a world stage marked by shifting power bases.
Upending the conventional wisdom by crafting a “people’s history,” award-winning journalist Matthieu Auzanneau deftly traces how oil became a national and then global addiction, outlines the enormous consequences of that addiction, sheds new light on major historical and contemporary figures, and raises new questions about stories we thought we knew well: What really sparked the oil crises in the 1970s, the shift away from the gold standard at Bretton Woods, or even the financial crash of 2008? How has oil shaped the events that have defined our times: two world wars, the Cold War, the Great Depression, ongoing wars in the Middle East, the advent of neoliberalism, and the Great Recession, among them?
With brutal clarity, Oil, Power, and War exposes the heavy hand oil has had in all of our lives―and illustrates how much heavier that hand could get during the increasingly desperate race to control the last of the world’s easily and cheaply extractable reserves.
- Print length672 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherChelsea Green Publishing
- Publication dateNovember 30, 2018
- Dimensions6 x 1.88 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101603587438
- ISBN-13978-1603587433
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If you want to understand the world you inhabit and the challenges it faces, it is difficult to overstate the importance of this book. Oil supplies the global economy with a plethora of essential raw materials, not just energy. Particularly since the beginning of the 20th century the evolution of industrial civilization has been driven by access to oil. But oil and other fossil fuels are one time, finite resources created by evolutionary processes that began more than one billion years ago. Their finite nature has long been understood – and feared – by those who derive wealth or power from control of access to fossil fuels.
The random distribution of oil by geological processes essential to its creation is the root cause of the ‘oil wars’ that have plagued Western Civilization since the middle of the 20th century. Auzanneau provides a concise description of oil’s origins, derived from his conversations with Bernard Durand, former director of the geology-geochemistry division of the French Petroleum Institute. He devotes a large part of his book to the “dark history” of oil - “dark” not just in terms of wars and political corruption but also in terms of ‘unknown’ to those of us without a serious scholarly bent or ‘inside’ connections.
But perhaps the real strength and importance of this book is its exploration of the consequences of what has been called ‘peak oil’. Prior to the introduction of ‘fracking’ most people understood ‘peak oil’ to mean the end of access to oil. As Auzanneau notes, the world will never run out of oil. But it is running out of access to cheap oil, except – and maybe even including - those few locations endowed by random geological processes with most of the world’s remaining oil reserves. The consequences of ‘peak oil’ understood in this sense (i.e. running out of access to cheap oil) should be of concern to everyone, not just politicians and the oil industry.
Much more is at stake than just the price of the gas we use to power our cars! There is so much in this book attempting to do more than just touch on the most important content would assume the proportions of another book. Perhaps the most important takeaway is the urgent need for a ‘shift’ (see The Shift Project) away from the use of oil and other fossil fuels for purposes, for which substitutes can be found, like personal transportation. This country and the world need to do this – and not just because the continued use of oil as a source of energy may soon render the planet uninhabitable. We need a shift for the more basic – and indisputable – reason: we will soon have no choice.
You need look no further than the book’s introduction for an overarching explanation of what is at stake:
Progress has long been considered a given: a guaranteed occurrence in human societies, a wheel that once set in motion continues to spin, aided only by human intelligence and innovation. But what really sparks or tempers progress?
The answer is energy potential—a physical reality measured by its capacity to change the nature of other things around it, to alter the order of the world, or to strengthen it. Each time that we put something in motion, each time that the state of something changes in one way or another, a flow of energy is in play. The economy—the framework around which our industrial society is ordered—and all of the technical progress it mobilizes are no exceptions.
In other words, energy is the ultimate universal currency. As Georges Bataille wrote in 1949, “Essentially wealth is energy: Energy is the basis and the end of production.” Without adequate energy sources, ingenuity would be rendered impotent, its fruits out of reach. Progress would not progress.
Today, fossil fuels provide four-fifths of the energy we use. (my bold)
P.S. For my second pass through this book I purchased the Kindle edition. If you like to highlight, take notes and follow references, it is much easier to do it with the Kindle version of the book.
P.P.S. Readers fluent in French might be able to assist with English translation of The Shift Project’s newsletter.
It is also very critical of the policies and actions of the United States government and oil companies - usually portrayed as indistinguishable - in the Middle Eastern oil producing regions. This retelling from the perspective of a Frenchman of the nation's history and involvement with Saudi Arabia and Iraq will be disturbing for many Americans. And illuminating.
Although much of the book would seem a negative portrayal of my country, I would argue that there is little bias in the presentation.
It is the detailing of the personal and professional relationships of the Nation's elite presented in close conjunction with descriptions of their conjoined financial interests and global commercial ventures, and the further descriptions of the military and clandestine political support for these ventures, that compelling argue that there was a corruption of both government and free enterprise by the oil men and the political elite. Often the same men it is persuasively argued.
Despite this detailing of the uncompromising venality and rapacity of the oil men, and their corrupting influence in geopolitics, the author emphasizes the immense benefits that ensued from accessing and developing this historically unprecedented and currently unequaled source of energy.
These guys are the extreme personification of an Adam Smith parable. They were solely concerned with personal gain, and were willing to corrupt the government of the most powerful nation in the world to increase their personal wealth, yet the hydrocarbon power they unleashed dramatically raised living standards and allowed or drove the population explosion of the last century.
Although in later chapters the book focuses on issues such and peak oil and global warming, I believe the book's major contribution is as history, particularly to the extent that reading it provides a context for and a greater understanding of current geopolitical issues, rather than as predicition
I recommend that anyone who wants to understand how we got here - and I believe that everyone should want to know that - read this book.
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Reviewed in India on July 12, 2019



