Finally here in New England we are back to comfortable temperatures, and the air conditioning is off. Since it was sunny, I was also able to cook both my breakfast and lunch in my solar oven. I know there are other things to think about on this lovely summer day. But finally I had a chance to finish an article I learned about recently, that was a very well-done exploration of American's use of oil.
This article came to my attention in a letter from Matt Savinar, who runs the site Life After the Oil Crash.
The article--or, actually, series--was recently published in the Chicago Tribune. The author is Paul Salopek.
A Tank of Gas, A World of Trouble is the name of the series. When I read the description of it, the setup reminded me of the recent book on America's food by Michael Pollan,
Omnivore's Dilemma. Like Pollan's efforts to follow our food through the process of getting it to us, Salopek's article follows the oil. It was a fascinating look at what is in our tanks, and how it is affecting us as well as the people who produce it for us.
The series is set up in chapters, and I'll excerpt a few tidbits here. But I encourage you to check out the whole series, as well as the Flash recording on the Tribune site.
About the project:
When Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek asked the industry if he could track crude flows from across the globe to a single gas station, the answer was unequivocal: It simply can't be done.
An industry spokeswoman reinforced that notion by referring Salopek to a Web site debunking popular legends. Snopes.com declared: "[B]y the time crude oil gets from the ground into our gasoline tanks, there's no telling exactly where it came from."
As it turns out, that's not always true....
One of the really fascinating things that I learned about the oil company strategies just from article is that one of the reasons they have been coy is that they don't want you to know where the oil specifically comes from is so that you can't effectively boycott it.
Chapter 1: The pay zone
.... Yet to truly grasp the scope of the crisis looming before them, Americans must retrace their seemingly ordinary tankful of gasoline back to its shadowy sources. This is, in effect, a journey into the heart of America's vast and troubled oil dependency. And what it exposes is a globe-spanning energy network that today is so fragile, so beholden to hostile powers and so clearly unsustainable, that our car-centered lifestyle seems more at risk than ever....
The author sets up the trek for the sources of oil and the producers by focusing on a single gas station in the midwest, and analyzing where the gasoline in their pumps came from. He also provides some background on Peak Oil.
Chapter 2: The frontier
....Binning pulled her black H2 Hummer into the station one Saturday afternoon when Qua Iboe crude from Nigeria made up about 26 percent of her $72 gas purchase. She was taking her son Parker, 8, to Little League. She estimated, sheepishly, that her vehicle gets 10 city miles per gallon, moderately better than a semitrailer truck.
"At first it's on your mind," Binning said. "But then you get so busy. I got screaming kids. My mom's got cancer. And I work as a real state marketer out of my house. So you forget." ....
<snip>
.... The medicine was free, distributed by health officials at the local school. The village wells were tainted with fecal matter. And people were dying of acute gastric infections, possibly cholera. Two children had succumbed that day. Another two would die the following week. The doctors were angry. They said this was by no means an exceptional occurrence.
Itak Abasi--"Foundation of God" in the local Ibibio language--is a rural slum festering atop a sandbar at the mouth of the Akwa Ibom River. Its hovels squat half a mile from the Exxon Mobil oil export terminal that supplied the bulk of African crude purchased by Marathon and sold in South Elgin. Since 1971, the facility, a sprawling tank farm, has funneled billions of dollars worth of petroleum to the United States. Itak Abasi seethes next door with neither plumbing nor electricity....
In this section we contrast a Hummer-driving suburban family with a family in Nigeria. I probably don't need to say any more about that.
Chapter 3: The war
....A former colonel in Saddam Hussein's army, Yousif, 49, works for Olive Group, a British security firm that specializes in oil field protection. He had just spent 18 months training 4,500 Iraqi recruits to patrol the nation's vital southern oil fields against sabotage and fuel smuggling.
But strange new faces were appearing at the checkpoints. They were the bearded members of local Shiite parties and their violent militias. His oil army was being infiltrated. In places like Rumailah, Iraq's boggling oil wealth was falling prey to sectarian greed....
And how are things going in Iraq? Flowers? Oil revenues? In Chapter 3 you also need to see the results of an analysis done by an expert about what the true cost of a gallon of gas should be. This was amazing to me.
Chapter 4: Last call
.... Not that they were especially thankful, however, for the likes of Trager. "Our oil is being sold in Chicago?" said a crusty village elder [in Venezuela], Ramon Barroso, clearly put off by the idea. "Too bad. Nobody here wants to feed the empire of that criminal George Bush." ....
<snip>
....Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration's senior diplomat, recently bemoaned oil's unsavory effect on foreign affairs.
"I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as secretary of state than the way that the politics of energy is--I will use the word `warping' diplomacy around the world," Rice told Congress in April. "It has given extraordinary power to some states that are using that power in not very good ways for the international system, states that would otherwise have very little power." ....
Condi is shocked that the politics of energy are warping diplomacy. HOW FREAKIN' RICH IS THAT???
I encourage you to read this series, I think it is a very illuminating study of American's use of oil and our world impact from this habit.