Oil Junkies Dug Ukraine's Grave
The petroleum industry is the Earth's roommate from hell, and it never moves out
Mike tried to be a good guy, but he was an accident looking for someplace to happen.
He lived rent-free with his old pal Mitch, who gave him a break because Mike seemed helpless to avoid heroin and other rough stuff that made his life miserable.
No good deed goes unpunished. Mitch often found money missing, or his car wrecked, his tropical fish dead, his girlfriend harassed, his landlord infuriated, his dishwasher leaking, his dog sick.
Mike didn’t seem to have been responsible, even indirectly, for some of those things. But when something went wrong, he was always around. He could blow a circuit breaker just by walking past the toaster.
There are just some people who are so out of balance that they seem to bring the tipping point to bad stuff wherever they go. These people often like narcotics, and much more than the narcotics like them.
When Mitch finally told Mike to hit the road, Mike left sadly, quietly closing the front door behind him.
The lock jammed, trapping Mitch in the apartment.
Of course.
In the history of bad things happening on a global scale, there’s something very similar to Mike the junkie in its ability to affect events.
Oil.
It’s lurking in dark corners everywhere. It was, somewhat indirectly, even a major cause of World War II. The passage of time has largely cheated it of the credit it deserves.
By 1940, Japan had been running wild in China for years, its war machine 80% fueled by American oil. The allies tried various sanctions until they hit on freezing Japanese assets in the west, effectively banning oil purchases.
Japan could try to replace U.S. oil with Southeast Asian oil, but not without getting the Americans out of the way.
Curiously, the Japanese bombed nearly everything in Pearl Harbor except the 4.5 million barrels of oil the Navy had stored there.
They hated to blow up something they wanted so badly, especially if they could dream of invading Hawaii and grabbing it.
Oil first became a really important component of death and destruction during World War I. Seven billion barrels of it fueled the conflict. Six billion were drilled in America.
Post-World War I peace conferences split up the Middle East mainly according to where the oil was.
That worked out pretty well, didn’t it?
Most of the Middle East’s conflicts have been fueled by oil. Perhaps the most ridiculously obvious case in point was the first Gulf War, which started when one Middle East country tried to steal the oil of another.
The U.S. wouldn't stand for that. If somebody’s going to steal oil, it had better be us.
Other wars readily described as oil wars include the Nigerian Civil War (The Biafran War, 1967-1970) and the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. Various horrible conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan would certainly have been less horrible if there wasn't oil there.
Oil revenue is now sponsoring Vladimir Putin’s knucklehead war in Ukraine. The United States, and many other countries, have tried to pull the rug out by stopping purchases. Maybe that will work. But any relief from oil war is only temporary.
As long as the tremendous worldwide thirst for petroleum exists, it's just a matter of time before it greases the skids to bigtime combat again.
The only way this ever ends is for oil to become less expensive than war.
That won't happen, in the short or long run, by getting more oil to market. The rule of supply and demand doesn't work so well here. The guys in charge aren’t interested.
The price of crude is going up now, yet U.S. oil companies aren’t exploiting their thousands of dormant drilling permits. They're just enjoying the burgeoning value of the oil they’re already pumping.
They'll use some of the profits to buy up their own stock, driving up the price, and then make even more money, without any new investment at all.
Meanwhile, the oil price keeps rising, and some of Europe’s economies may slow to a crawl.
The only way to make oil less bloody is for us not to need it so much.
Gas economy. Public transportation. Alternative fuels. Pretty much the same sorts of things that would make the Earth stop heating up.
But we don’t have to work on the root causes of global disaster.
We can be like Mike.
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Great post. And remarkable turns of phrase. Like the way your mind works, probably up to a point. But, the headline? Really? "Grave" is a bit dramatic and premature (hopefully inaccurate as well) and really doesn't rise to the quality of your great post. Or even draws that conclusion. Just sayin'.
Maybe Irv is right. Putin probably was counting on oil blackmail to enable his takeover of Ukraine. Of course, nuclear blackmail plays a bigger role.