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Blood for Oil?
* Retort , a group of writers and activists, considers whether oil was the reason for the invasion of Iraq
Capitalism presents itself, Marx said on more than one occasion, as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’. In a full-scale commodity producing economy, what comes to matter about each separate article is not so much its constellation of uses as its value as an item of exchange, its function as a ‘material depository’ (Marx again) of exchange value. The commodity’s value is generated from its shifting place in a complex, self-contained world of money equivalents. So that finally the usefulness of petroleum presents itself as merely the outward and accidental aspect of something more basic: the article’s price.
For all the talk lately about the emergence of a post-industrial economy – in which ‘information’ or ‘services’ are displacing the authority of any single material resource – the last few years have been an object lesson in just how vital to capitalist dreams of the future the control of a few strategic commodities still is. They are the motors of production, the ultimate hard currency of exchange. For that very reason they are subject to deep mystification. Oil is a ‘curse’, commentators say, it ‘distorts’ the natural course of development and encourages an economy of hyper-consumption and excess: golf courses in the Saudi desert, bloated shopping malls in Dubai and Bahrain. Democracy is ‘hindered’ by oil (as if cobalt promoted constitutional government), which brings about despotic rule and patrimonialism rather than statecraft and capitalist discipline. There is some truth in this, but it is a shallow view of things because it substitutes a narrow commodity determinism for the larger truths of primitive accumulation: the deadly complicity of guns, oil and money.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n08/reto01_.html
* The question of whether oil is worth spilling blood over has been quietly raised by the foreign office minister, Peter Hain. In a speech today to the Royal United Services Institute in London, Mr Hain notes that the cost of protecting the Middle East’s oil reserves, paid for mostly by the US and without which the west would grind to a halt, is as high as $25 (£16) a barrel – about the same as it costs to buy. Mr Hain, seen as an outrider for Blairite thinking, goes on to warn that no amount of money will guarantee petrol supplies to the west and consumers should be weaning themselves off the black stuff.
At present the world remains so dependent on oil for transport, it cannot stand any disruption in supplies. Remember the chaos and gridlock that the fuel protests brought to Britain? Tony Blair does and now recognises the explosive nature of rising petrol prices.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/oct/17/iraq.business
* When it comes to mixing oil and water, oceans suffer from far more than an occasional devastating spill. Disasters make headlines, but hundreds of millions of gallons of oil quietly end up in the seas every year, mostly from non-accidental sources §.
The graph below shows how many millions of gallons of oil each source puts into the oceans worldwide each year
Down the Drain: 363 Million Gallons
Used engine oil can end up in waterways. An average oil change uses five quarts; one change can contaminate a million gallons of fresh water. Much oil in runoff from land and municipal and industrial wastes ends up in the oceans. 363 million gallons §
Road runoff adds up
Every year oily road runoff from a city of 5 million could contain as much oil as one large tanker spill §.
Routine Maintenance: 137 Million Gallons
Every year, bilge cleaning and other ship operations release millions of gallons of oil into navigable waters, in thousands of discharges of just a few gallons each. 137 million gallons §
Up in Smoke: 92 Million Gallons
Air pollution, mainly from cars and industry, places hundreds of tons of hydrocarbons into the oceans each year. Particles settle, and rain washes hydrocarbons from the air into the oceans §.
Natural Seeps: 62 Million Gallons
Some ocean oil “pollution” is natural. Seepage from the ocean bottom and eroding sedimentary rocks releases oil.
Big Spills: 37 Million Gallons
Only about 5 percent of oil pollution in oceans is due to major tanker accidents, but one big spill can disrupt sea and shore life for miles §. 37 million gallons
Crude oil from a tanker that ran aground.
http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/peril_oil_pollution.html
* It is the worst case scenario anyone can possibly imagine. The extraction and processing of the finite fuels, oil and gas, are at the root of our industrialised and technological advanced society. Take the cheap oil and gas away and everything that is built on the availability of cheap, unlimited fuel collapses. Our complex, highly structured, regimented society depends ever more on the use of technology on complex logistics to ship goods around the world to meet consumer demands. Take away the power for that new technology and the world falls apart. What can we expect when we can no longer afford oil, when we can no longer run natural gas burning power stations, when the wheels of the UK economy literally grind to a halt.
Stranded
90% of all today’s transportation systems depend on oil. There is no other commodity which could replace oil (in the form of petrol or diesel) as a fuel to drive the millions of cars, freight vehicles and trains on Britain’s roads and railtracks. In fact the very roads themselves actually come from oil. 26 million tonnes of asphalt were produced in the UK in 1998 for use on British roads. Asphalt is not employed to make all road surfaces look dark grey but has been widely adopted as it is easily laid and rolled to give a smooth surface, enables easy drainage/run off, minimising skid risks, acts as a noise dampener and allows for coloured paints to be applied as road markings. No oil – no asphalt; no asphalt – no smooth water-proof road surfaces.
Perhaps more importantly aviation cannot be fuelled by any other source. Given the time and the money electric trains could replace all the diesel fleet of trains, given the time and money electric trams could replace conventional diesel driven buses, but no commercial aeroplane can possibly be run on any alternative fuel. So as oil becomes more expensive, budget airlines will cease to exist. Those two foreign holidays so many Britons consider as their “right” will become much more expensive.
Shipping all that food, all those electronic consumer goods from Korea and Taiwan, those cheap T-shirts and toys from China depends on oil. While shipping is far less energy consuming than aviation, those giant container ships are diesel and fuel oil guzzlers. Without a cheap supply of diesel and marine fuel oil Johnny doesn’t get his latest animated piece of plastic at Christmas but then millions of food aid recipients in the Third World will literally go without their daily bread and butter.
How will you get to work? In fact will you have a job to get to? What happens when there is a fire in your home, office, factory? Will the local authority have the money to put fuel in the tanks of the fire tenders, will the health board have the money to pay the exorbitant cost of what small amount of diesel or unleaded to fill up the tanks of the ambulances, the GP’s cars and the motorbikes of the paramedics? Will the police arrive in time to catch the burglars who have broken into your house while you were asleep? It is not like the “old days” when a patrol car could be dispatched but in a world where a gallon of petrol costs more than a weekly wage, the constables have a fair distance to walk or cycle from the station.
http://bnp.org.uk/peakoil/apocalypse.htm
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