cheaper to produce than oil in the Gulf of Mexico. But Iraq is a mess right
now, unable even to police itself, let alone move ahead with reconstruction.
Oil facilities there are dilapidated after 20 years of neglect, and Iraq
needs about $30 billion to put things back together. When all that is
done, nationalism will ensure continued problems with the private industry
that is expected to help develop new oilfields.
A CHANCE ENCOUNTER AND A TOUGH
QUESTION TRIGGER A SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH
I started thinking about writing this book in late 2004 after a chat with
my neighbor, Madeline Brainard—one of those scholars who read The
Nation regularly. She was thin and looked worried most of the time, just
like most intellectuals, but she was brainy. Although she has a doctorate
degree from Princeton, she quit teaching at a college in upstate New
York to devote herself full time to teaching yoga in New York City.
One evening I was picking up my mail in the lobby of my apartment
building when she came in and we started chatting. It was our first meeting,
and after I told her that I was an oil markets reporter, she asked what
I knew about the coming peak in global oil production. I told her that
was a lie, that we always have and always will have oil. She refused to accept
my explanation. She had read an article in The Nation suggesting we
were on the verge of running out of oil.
I knew at once where she was heading, so I politely disagreed, but I
promised to investigate the issue later. Up to that point, I had depended
pretty much on sanitized information provided by oil companies about
their assets and reserves. It didn’t occur to me that the industry could
keep secret the fact that they had less oil reserves than what they were actually
telling the public. Neither did I expect the industry’s media to let
that happen.
However, in much of the news media these days, there’s a symbiotic
relationship between the seekers of news and the suppliers of news (in
this case, oil industry leaders and the reporters who cover them), so adequate
scrutiny is lacking. The problem with modern media is that they
consider themselves part of the establishment, and they generally don’t
want to bite the hand that feeds them.
After all, in today’s journalism few reporters get promoted for not seeking
the truth (whatever that means), but for getting exclusive interviews
and keeping everyone entertained. A regular interview with a company
12 INTRODUCTION