to align themselves with the oil industry—no surprise. There are many
other characters with less than adequate understanding of the issue, particularly
journalists and other think-tank paid commentators, who have
also chosen to partake in the debate and they are spread all over the map,
with nothing much to offer but their own political ideologies.
We have to be careful and say this debate isn’t new, but its intensity is.
The first phase of it started in the United States during the First World
War, in which the allied victory became known as the victory for oil.
That probably was a better way to put it because, given the heavy casualties
on both sides, the actual victory was pyrrhic, and it was achieved
mostly through the use of army trucks following the discovery of petrol,
or gasoline. As Pulitzer-Prize-winning energy writer Daniel Yergin tells
us in his seminal 1991 book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and
Power, the fuel shortage in 1917 came in the middle of the war and
caused a great deal of panic, particularly in Britain, but that was caused
by nothing more than the ability of the German forces to block supplies
to Britain. During the Second World War, for which oil remained crucial,
U.S. officials became more concerned about a dwindling supply of
its oil reserves. Yergin makes it clear that, even then, U.S. officials had
come to recognize oil as the most critical resource that would separate
top dog from underdog in international politics.2
Yergin writes: “The precipitous decline in new discoveries transfixed
and frightened those responsible for fueling a global war,” and goes on to
quote senior U.S. government officials as saying, “The time will come
sooner or later when the supply is exhausted.... If there should be a
World War III it would have to be fought with someone else’s petroleum,
because the United States wouldn’t have it. America’s crown, symbolizing
supremacy as the oil empire of the world, is sliding down over one
eye.” The allied military strategy in the Second World War was guided
by oil more than anything else. As the U.S. almost alone fueled the allied
war effort, using most of its own oil supply, fear of a shortage grew with
each passing day. To skeptics, these fears might have had no legs to stand
on, but government officials considered them real and justified, because
the U.S. became a net importer of oil rather than an exporter some 30
years later.
Along the way, in 1956, Shell geologist Marion King Hubbert mathematically
calculated a U.S. oil peak production in 1969, angering his employers
and sparking an even greater debate on “oil peak.” In any case, he
20 THE END OF OIL