Oil, Modern World, National Security

I'm still working my way through The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power and I wanted to type some things out in order to gain clarity and insight.

It's still a pretty good book, and certain things are beginning to fall into place for me.  It's like I knew part of the story, but I didn't know how all they connected until it was laid out for me like this.

And that is...odd.

I'm not quite sure how to explain it.  I grew up with what I assume most people my age did.  There's a sense that big oil is evil (and how can they claim they're suffering, and then post record profits during one of the worst years of the recession?).  There's a sense that we're ruining our environment, and the big oil companies are not willing to admit it or change anything because they'll lose money.  There's a sense that our foreign policy is dictated by moneyed interests.  That our values and morals as a nation are compromised by the dirty realities of oil, and money.

And there's a lot of resentment over that.

Growing up with all these competing ideas (I just laid one of the competing viewpoints, but there are others I didn't list) requires putting on some filters and finding a way to make sense of it all.  I am not so naive as to think we, as a nation, always do what is morally right.  Or that realpolitik doesn't affect our thinking.

Yet I disagree, on principle, with analysis that paints it black or white.  That says the rich are automatically greedy and self-serving.  One of my personal rules of thumb is that it's almost always more complicated than you think, with grey areas and ambiguities.  So (to go to more recent times) when I heard people claim our involvement in Iraq was all about oil I was somewhat skeptical.


I have seen what happens when large groups of people buy into conspiracy theories, and it isn't pretty.  You have to use critical thinking to sort through what is and isn't so, and that's hard.

But to bring this back to the book I'm reading - I haven't got to recent events yet.  I'm still reading about the post-World War II era.  There are odd parallels between what happened back then and the world of today.  Rising oil prices.  The sudden drop in oil prices as the markets are glutted.  Refusing to lower production in order to maintain market share.  The death of the Saudi Arabian king.

Yet from what I have read so far I've noticed two or three things.

Most importantly - Why is so much of this new to me?  This is our history we're talking about.  Great events of our time.  Things I knew about actually make more sense, appear to have a logic behind it that I can even, sometimes, agree with.  I mentioned that I tend to dismiss conspiracy theories, but it seems hard to believe that so much of our history is glossed over and overlooked.  Hard not to feel like it's somewhat deliberate, even.  In this case, btw, I'm not just talking about the history of oil.  I got a similar feeling when a friend loaned me a book on the history of labor in the US. 

Secondly - the oil industry reminds me of research into social dilemmas. The strive to make the market more predictable, to prevent over-production.  The pressure to get what you can while the getting is good.  The resistance to controls and attempts to work as a group to manage the industry.  (Except where I thought of these efforts as wholly good when it comes to conservation of water, or fishing industries, it's strange to apply to oil...especially since, as a consumer, I absolutely love it when oil prices drop.)

Third - and perhaps I should list this as 'most importantly', except the first point was the greater shock to me personally - if using oil gave us considerable war time advantages, i.e. ships could go faster and maneuver more quickly, etc...

Then why is getting OFF oil not considered a matter of national security?  Imagine if you had tanks that could go twice as long before refueling?  Isn't that a considerable battlefield advantage?  Imagine that you could fly a plane without refueling at all?  Again - considerable battlefield advantage.

I know there  have been moves in that direction.  I vaguely remember hearing discussion on hybrid tanks.  I know that is getting ready to fly a solar powered plane around the world.  (Not a military plane, but the technology is being developed).

There's been all sorts of developments in solar power and biofuels.  Batteries, wind power, and more.  The technology is getting there.

So what better time to make a real, sincere, concerted effort to convert our military to a more sustainable energy source?  Purely because of the considerable military advantage it could bring us?  Edited to add:  I am clearly not the only one who sees this.  So the question is are we doing everything we can to make the conversion?

Edited again: the last paragraph of this article mentioned the trouble with bringing renewable energy to Afghanistan.  From personal experience, one of the challenges is that the local people may steal solar power resources in order to use them for something else.

Business,Big Oil, Society, Etc.

I have moved on to another book, though since it is 773 pages of rather dense reading material I am not sure how long it will take me to finish it.  It's called The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. 

I picked it up because I've heard over and over again about how the war in  Iraq was over oil.  I was always rather skeptical of the claim, but I figured I ought to read up on the industry before deciding whether it's true or not.

It starts with a history of the oil industry, Standard Oil, Rockefeller, the Rothschilds, etc.  It brings up mixed feelings for me, so I'm blogging to sort it all out.

First of all, what I'm bringing to the table.  I heard about the trust busters in American history.  How monopoly was bad and stifled competition.  (This wasn't about oil, specifically, but I knew there was an era of legislation aimed at monopolies.  Broke up the telephone industry, as well as Standard Oil.) 

Then, in some of my public policy classes, I heard the argument that monopolies weren't all that bad.  That trying to break them up may not be such a big deal.  Good or bad?  I'm not entirely sure, that's part of what I wanted to think about when reading this book.

I also bring my own prejudice in favor of nested hierarchies, i.e. I think the best form of organization is layered so that the lowest levels make the decisions appropriate to their level, but within a coordinated whole.  Decentralized to an extent, but not to the point that there's wasted effort and gaps.

I also know that uncertainty is painful, and systems to reduce uncertain are good.  Up to a point.  They can also become so rigid and limiting that it becomes harder for anyone to make change (like China around the time of Empress Cixi).  It's like you may reduce variation in order to prevent some of the worst downturns, but you also generally level things out so that nobody has as much of an upturn, either.  (And you can open yourself up to those 'Black Swans' of the financial crisis fame, where you reduce uncertainty 99% of the time, but that 1% is a total disaster.)

In short, I have some inclinations and frameworks for reading this, but my mind is not entirely made up on what's 'right' or 'wrong'.

So anyways.  I sympathized with Rockefeller's aims initially.  This whole crazy boom/bust cycle was insane, and inefficient.  People would find oil, rush to develop it, destroy the golden goose in the process, glut the market, then go out of business as they were unable to turn a profit.  I can see why that would be hell on anyone trying to build a business, and why Rockefeller would see to stabilize the industry.  I can even, kind of, see why he would fight so hard to create Standard Oil.

But at what point has he succeeded at the original goal (i.e. reducing the uncertainty and wild craziness in order to build a profitable business) and started fighting to control the entire market out of more selfish and greedy reasons?  Did Standard Oil really have to own 90% or more of the market in order to achieve his goal?  Didn't he get what he wanted when they had 65% of the market?

(These questions, btw, are less about oil and more about our modern complaints against big business, and the way it crowds out small and more local businesses.  And it ties in with the modern economy, where most of us are dependent on wages paid by others.  Less freedom to do our own thing.  Which makes it harder to speak with an independent voice.)

Then there is the question of tactics.  At what point did Standard Oil cross the line from a reasonable pursuit of profit, and into (for lack of a better term) bad sportsmanship.  In sports, you want to see teams play their best.  Want to see them win by giving it their all, playing well, and maybe catching a lucky break here and there.  You don't want to see a team win by cheating, by injuring other players when the referee isn't looking, or paying someone off to lose, or paying someone to break the leg of a competitor.  Then winning is no longer about who is the better team, it's about who is better at cheating.

In the same way, businesses sell a product.  And the company that can make the better widget, faster, and at a lower price is the company that is playing a good game.  The one that isn't making a better widget, but decides to flood the market with widgets because they know they can survive the profit loss and hope it will drive the competition out of business is not actually a better business.  It's not winning by making better widgets.  It's winning by manipulating the game in order to drive out competition. 

This was the rise of big business, where they had the big budget that allowed it to survive cutthroat competition.  (On a certain level, it reminds me of biological eco systems.  There was a void in the eco-system for large predators, and it got filled.  Yet just because we now had wolves in the business eco-system, doesn't mean we stopped having foxes and other smaller predators.  And perhaps it's not about good or bad so much as what makes for a healthy and viable system.)

All of this is even more interesting given the recent drop in oil prices, and Saudi Arabia's claim that they will not reduce production.  Essentially it's their bid to maintain market share, just like what I am reading about from over 100 years ago.

I don't have any real conclusions right now, I just wanted to get some of this out of my head.

Two more things.  First - it was kind of shocking to realize that 'Big Oil' got its start not with the combustion engine, but with the drive to get better illumination.  We use electric light bulbs everywhere now, and it's hard to imagine how valuable kerosene was before electricity.

Second - so far the history of Big Oil is pretty much capitalism at it's worst. 

Evil, History, Making of the Modern World

I've been interested in history for a while now, and in some ways I have a keen interest in filling in the gaps of my knowledge.  I feel like certain books help assemble a puzzle, one that explains better the current state of affairs.

The book on Dowager Empress Cixi was like that, I knew peripherally about the Opium Wars.  I'd heard about the Boxer Rebellion, though I little understood what it was all about.  But the book that focused on her left helped set the stage for what I knew eventually would come to be.  World War II.  The Japanese invasion.  The constituencies that fought against the Japanese.  Even, at least a little bit, the rise of Mao.  (I saw a movie, years ago in college, I don't even know it's name.  It dealt mostly with an actor who was a eunich, and his unrequited love for a fellow actor...and it showed how the Cultural Revolution destroyed so much.  In a way, the book on the dowager empress helped show what was being destroyed.  And, to a certain extent, why.  The ancient traditions had history and symbolism, but they also were stultifying and made it hard to implement change.)

But that's more the prelude for the book I just finished.  King Leopold's Ghost.  I picked it up partly to fill in those gaps, but I probably wouldn't have picked it up without a more personal reason.  The company I work for has a number of employees from the Congo.  I think there's an organization that helps with refugees somewhere around here, because about ten years ago we had a lot of Vietnamese mixed in with the usual white and African-American employees.  Now we are seeing more and more from the Congo.  It's kind of silly, but I didn't even know that most of them spoke French until I had them as employees. 

So when I was browsing for a new history book to read, something about the Congo caught my eye.

It was a very good book, very detailed...

And the only word I can think of to describe King Leopold's rule is evil.

I don't use the word lightly.  I don't like exaggeration.  Yet the sheer greed, the willingness to paper over the human misery in pursuit of wealth...and even more than that, King Leopold's elaborate strategies to hide what he was doing...all leave me with no better word.

I do see some comparisons to my own experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, oddly enough.  The men drawn to work in the Congo remind me of so many of the contractors I met overseas.  So often they were men, divorced, looking to get paid a lot of money and willing to put up with dangerous conditions.

And yet there are differences, too.  I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing American atrocities, and I know it must have been horrible for the Iraqis and Afghans who didn't want us over there.  Yet I know so many American soldiers who deliberately tried to do a good job, and who were just as horrified as Americans back home about horrors like Abu Ghraib, or soldiers who killed civilians.

There wasn't the acceptance and tolerance of atrocity that King Leopold's men grew accustomed to.

I can also see why the Congo, of all the post-colonial nations, has struggled so hard to get to a stable point.  People tend to rule (and accept rulers) who are like what they know.  Just as Iraqis learned from and mimic Saddam Hussein, some of the Congo leaders mimicked King Leopold to a T.

Which kind of makes it even more depressing that we (as in, Western nations and America in particular) are so ignorant of history. 

How can we make sound policy when we are so ignorant of what led to the current situation in the first place?

History, China, 'Great Man Theory', Etc.

I just finished a book on Empress Dowager Cixi, in China, and my feelings are hard to describe.

First of all, I will say that it's a fascinating glimpse at a time in history that I, at least, did not know very well.  I've come to treasure books that help explain the transition from an older world to our new modern one.  That's part of the appeal of The Devil in the White City, though in an entirely different way.

The Empress Dowager was a pretty impressive leader, and her story leaves me with far too many lingering questions about 'what if?'

What if she had not died when she did?  What if she ushered in the changes she was promoting, first?

What if she had been able to lead in her own right, instead of through her sons?

What if she had found a successor who matched her capabilities?

Plus - how crazy is it, that she was judged so harshly by history?  At least initially.  Would you be capable of doing all that she did, knowing you would be judged poorly at the end of it?

I mentioned the Great Man theory in the title, and Empress Cixi reminds me of that, as well.  Would China have fallen earlier, if she hadn't taken the reins of power?  Did she change the course of history?  Or was it all somewhat inevitable.  After all, if she did make a difference she only postponed the fall of the Qing dynasty.

Overall, an excellent read.  I know we Americans are terrible at history, but it's nice to have some more context for the Opium Wars, the history leading to Hong Kong and Shanghai, what relations with Tibet were like back in Cixi's time...

I also thought it helped explain some of China's territorial claims, as well as it's historical relationship with 'client states' like Vietnam and Korea.