Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil

Summary

A Q&A with Peter Maass

Question: What initially got you interested in the story of oil?

Peter Maass: Much of my writing life involved wars, and oil was often mentioned. "It’s all about oil," I was told. Or, "It’s not about oil at all." Oil is central to our world, but what role does it play in violent conflicts and the divide between rich and poor? My initial work began before 9/11 and when I searched Amazon.com for books on oil, the proffered list included more tomes on salad dressing and aromatherapy than on the liquid that was the oxygen of the global economy. Some excellent books had been published, of course, but mainly for academic or expert readers. I had found my subject--a book that would explain in compelling ways what we do for oil and what oil does to us.

Question: What surprised you most as you were reporting the story?

Peter Maass: My subject wouldn’t speak to me! Okay, that’s a joke. But seriously, oil, as the topic of a book, defied the norms of interrogation. It doesn’t have a voice, body, army or dogma of its own. How do you coax secrets from a liquid? I had to travel around the world and talk to all sorts of people--oilmen, warlords, politicians, economists, geologists, environmentalists, sheikhs, lobbyists, and roughnecks (that’s a partial list). The subjects we discussed ranged from history to law, corruption, engineering, culture, psychology, and justice (another partial list). I was prepared for complexity, but the reality I encountered was a multi-dimensional web of facts, ideas and guesses. I was journeying through an intellectual as much as a physical world.

Question: What's the most underreported story related to oil that you came across in your research?

Peter Maass: You know the cliché, "The devil is in the details?" With oil, the devil is in the generalities. There have been lots of studies on what oil does in country x or country y, or how financial speculators might drive up the price of oil, or how company z bribed a foreign official, but connecting the dots and seeing the system at work--that’s the under-reported story. Of course there is much that’s still not known--for instance, have we reached a peak in global output?--but my greatest problem was too much data. Putting the available pieces together, and trying to present it in a way that people will pay attention to--that’s particularly hard and hasn’t been done enough.

Question: There's an essential conflict here, which J. Bryan Williams highlights in your interview with him: "What are oil companies supposed to do? We don't create these places. Do we only develop oil in London or Paris? If so, we'll all be out there walking and stepping over piles of manure." Is oil production inevitably cursed, or is there a happy medium to be found where extraordinary pollution and/or human rights violations aren't at hand?

Peter Maass: It will be hard to turn oil into a blessing for every dysfunctional country that has it, but the downsides can be reduced. Transparency is key--publishing contracts and payments so that it is harder for corrupt officials to steal. Several movements are afoot to do this--one is called the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which is government-led, and the other is Publish What You Pay, which is non-governmental and backs mandatory disclosures rather than voluntary ones. It’s also important to track revenues once they’re in the system--are oil funds spent on military goods and phony contracts that enrich a president’s cousin? Watchdog groups are beginning to do this in some countries. These things will help, but let’s be honest--corruption is an ancient vice, and the fostering of good governance is an uphill endeavor in any country, whether it exports oil or peanuts. But we need to establish a baseline of sorts--utter kleptocrats and beyond-the-pale dictators should be opposed rather than tolerated for the oil they control.

Question: What do you see as the most necessary change that needs to be made to begin to curtail the strife that is associated with oil production?

Peter Maass: We need to curtail our appetite for oil. We already know that the burning of fossil fuels harms the atmosphere. We need to understand--and I hope my book provides some help on this--that our dependence on oil has warped countries that provide us with the substance. If we become less reliant on oil--which means becoming more conservation-minded and efficient, as well as developing renewable energy on a broader scale than is already underway--we will not feel a need to go to war for oil’s sake, or to support a dictator for oil’s sake. And if prices go down because the stuff is no longer so valuable to its consumers, perhaps the countries that have been harmed by oil will begin to recover. For all of us, consumers and suppliers, it will be a long and painful process. But it can be done.

(Photo © Erinn Hartman)