FUEL: THE 4-LETTER F-WORD

One thing that doesn’t make any sense is the average American’s feelings about oil. It’s more understandable why the big oil companies are hated, but the actual stuff, the product, should be revered as the mother’s milk of our society. If we ran out of oil for a week, this society would plunge into chaos. In a month we’d have large numbers of people starving. If we ran out of oil globally, billions of people around the world would be dead within a year. The era of cheap oil is so tied to the soaring populations of the last century, that some scientists call us “Petroleum Man.”
Another thing that doesn’t make any sense is America’s current refusal to grasp the political realities that come along with being dependent on the stuff. We are going out of our way to destabilize and antagonize the oil producers of the Middle East, and it can only hurt us. It’s like a heroin junkie trash-talking his dealer.
Maybe we’re just so used to being #1, that having to count on Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq to keep the world from an economic meltdown, just rubs us the wrong way. If you really want to understand what’s happening but you hate Exxon and air pollution, here are two slogans that might help: Oil is Life. National Security Means Protecting the Oil Supply.
One of the lessons we could possibly learn in Iraq is that you can’t run an oil industry in an occupied country that hates you. It’s too easy to sabotage the many miles of pipes. So if we need oil and they have it, and we can’t strong-arm them into giving it to us, we might just have to play nice. Remember, we’re the junkies and they’ve got the heroin. It’s not pretty, but it’s true.