‘Empire Of Oil’: Can Obama Or Mc Cain “Change” Anything?

Everything, it is said, is fair in love and war. Let’s admit it, we all are in love with “oil”. In the present long-drawn “war” we have allowed anything and everything to happen. In fact our “love” has turned into a naked “lust” for oil. And when “lust” takes hold of leaders and the public, they lose their sense of proportion and become virtually myopic (or blind) to the consequences of their actions.

So what can a Mc Cain or an Obama do under the circumstances? (Have a look here…) These thoughts occured to me when I recently went through a must-read book “Half Gone” by Jeremy Leggett. A powerful book that provides fascinating insight into the geology and politics of oil…and hope(?).

He writes: “Despite the defectors from the Empire of Oil, the growing dissent within it, little (has) changed. The Great Addiction remained…Barons of the Empire of Oil rode the planet in executive jets, more powerful than any president except perhaps the president of the Number One Nation State. But then he was one of them anyway.

“The most basic foundations of our assumptions of future economic wellbeing are rotten. Our society is in a state of collective denial that has no precendent in history, in terms of its scale and implications.

“Most US presidents since the Second World War have ordered military action of some sort in the Middle East. American leaders may dress their military entanglements east of Suez in the rhetroic of democracy building, but the long-running strategic theme is obvious. It was stated most clearly, paradoxically, by the most liberal of them.

“In 1980 Jimmy Carter declared access to the Persian Gulf a vital national interest to be proteced by ‘any means necessary, including military force.’ This the US has been doing ever since, clocking up a bill measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and counting. With such a strategy comes an increasingly disquieting descent into moral ambiguity, at least in the minds of something approaching half the country.

“The deeper the dependency on oil and oil money becomes, the worse the effects of the unforseen energy crisis will be when it hits, so the more America’s security is undermined, even as its government advances enhanced security as the rationale for the latest actions of the Pentagon’s global oil potection service.

“America is not alone in her addiction and her dilemmas.The motorways of Europe…Agriculture produce that could have been grown for local consumption rides needlessly along these arteries the length and breadth of the European Union.” And then we have the rising guzzling giants, including India and China.

The reason why Jeremy Leggett’s book is not yet another doom and despair treatise is that he “knows what he’s talking about…Leggett is not a Cassandra, but a scientist with decades of experience and an agenda for a future that, one hopes, will begin a debate about how to end the global energy crisis which is upon us.”

Here is a book review… “Half Gone stands apart from other peak oil books in combining an account of the impending peak (which Leggett estimates will occur 2006-2010) with that other fossil-fuel ugly sister, global warming.” And click here to read more comments or buy the book… To read Leggett’s articles in The Guardian please click here…

So in the light of ‘lust for oil’ when we read that President George W. Bush has given ‘amber light’ to Israel to attack Iran, it shouldn’t come as a surprise…More here…