Roland Eyears

IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT OIL

As Published in Our Town

A Millennium ago, what petroleum seeped to the surface on its own had few known uses. When the Persians attacked Athens in 480 B.C., they shot arrows with flaming oil soaked tips over the walls. A hundred years the black gold was still being sold by traveling medicine men as a laxative and general curative. In 1861 Nikolaus Otto invented the first petroleum-burning engine, and traffic has been building ever since.

America became urbanized and machines began to replace animal power, oil was the principal fuel. Even as electricity pushed back the night, much of it was generated by oil - still the easiest energy source to store and transport. During most of the 20th century, extraction costs in the Middle East stayed under a dime a barrel, so prices were of little concern.

This nation consumes about 20 million barrels of crude a day, 60 percent imported. Our food travels an average of 1,300 miles from field to plate. Motor vehicles and airplanes eat nearly 14 million barrels daily. Over a thousand airliners will take off tomorrow, many burning over 1,200 gallons of fuel per hour. From crude flow pharmaceuticals, paint, dyes, surgical gowns, upholstery, tires, fertilizer, carpeting, clothing, foods, building materials, 90 percent of plastics, and much more. Our 5 percent of the world accounts for 25 percent of its energy consumption. That's no apology - just factual.

Stop the oil, make it too expensive, and ambulances don't roll. People die. Homes go unheated in winter. People die. Food production drops. People die. When energy prices spike, businesses must try to pass the increases through. But in a world economy with massive overproduction and cutthroat competition, price increases kill jobs. Crime in general and domestic violence in particular increase. Children go hungry, and their futures are lost.

Major nations do not wage war because someone's nephew took a bullet. Prior to Archduke Ferdinand's 1914 shooting in Sarajevo, Brits and Germans, neither of whom had a domestic source of crude, were already fighting over Middle Eastern oil fields.

A quarter century later, Hitler sent troops to seize Rumanian oil fields. He planned to take the Persian fields (Iran to the victims of government schools) by 1941 and the Russian the next year.

Sixty-three years ago, Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor. A primary underlying cause was FDR's naval blockade of Japan's oil supply. Having no domestic source of crude, the island nation verged on collapse.

Georges Clemenceau, French Prime Minister, 1917-1920, once stated, "A drop of oil is worth a drop of blood." If a foreign power shuts off your food supply, is it moral to declare war? If your answer is yes, apply the same question to oil? Death rates climb when an economy gets sick.

Strong evidence suggests that world oil reserves are overstated; further there have been no important discoveries in 25 years. Every major field has peaked, meaning that the remaining crude is getting expensive to extract. Most OPEC countries haven't been able to significantly boost production in 20 years. This includes Saudi Arabia where we get 17 percent of our requirements. Offshore rigs? They can cost $4 billion! All this would be bad enough if world demand were not projected to double within 15 years, led by China, the number two user of oil, where consumption jumped 40 percent in just the last year.

Crude has a very narrow range of equilibrium. If the supply is short as little as 1-3 percent, prices can explode. A 1-3 percent surplus can be a glut.

We really did have an exit strategy going in to Iraq - not to exit. Certainly, we are not chasing Osama. We could do that better in Pakistan or Paris. The Saddam was killing his own people argument is weak; there are worse tyrants. There were no WMD. Might we be there because (1) Iraq sits on an ocean of oil, (2) Islamic fundamentalists threaten "our" oil, and (3) the corrupt Saudi family, mostly of the fanatical Wahabi sect and hated by 95 percent of their people who also hate us, may be overthrown at any time, so we have to be ready to seize their oil fields? While our government blathers about withdrawing and leaving behind a western-style democratic Iraq, we are building 14 massive, permanent military bases there.

Several months ago, a man told me with pride in his voice, "It's not about oil this time." Sometimes it's about other things, too. But it's always about oil.