On 'Crude World' by Peter Maass and other topics

Oil and its economic impact upon users and producers (addicts and suppliers) has been a topic of popular analysis by numerous authors over the decades. 'The Seven Sisters' was one such book that detailed the rise of the Rockefeller Standard oil monopoly and its break up. This book published in 2009 by Peter Maass is in the style of new journalism-with much global first person interviews with prominent persons in oil producing nations and other principal persons.

http://www.petermaass.com/books/crude_world/

I have yet to complete reading this book, and perhaps will resume reading later today. Skipping about a bit from Equatorial Guinea and a dictator that may have eaten the balls and brains of a defeated rival (those were the missing parts of the corpse) sent billions through Washington D.C. Rigg's bank, we discover interesting facts about Guinea and the insularity of the Texas oil men working the claim, learn of the corrupting nature of oil development on economics-I guess it produces dictators or Chavez' generally with the U.S. Government preferring the former and move beyond basic Hilbert peak production criteria to information about problems in over-producing oil fields and the effect on reducing oil available from the field.

With world oil supplies having reached peak production and demand increasing, the prospect for long range price increases is apparent, yet even more obvious is the deleterious effect of fossil fuel use on American national economic development through its excessive opportunity costs and pervasive corruption of the social order-making a trophic order relationship to the principal oil controller of fundamental political-economic importance.

Libya has 43 billion barrels of oil reserves, the U.S.A. an inflated 30 billion, Saudi Arabia 264 billion, and Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia are our largest suppliers of crude oil. The extent to which U.S. economic development and foreign policy is determined by access to oil is rather remarkable. The political difficulties involved in breaking off reliance on fossil fuels are obvious and fundamental. While Mexico and Canada could perhaps sell their oil to China if the United States were intelligent enough to invent a better way of producing and using energy nationally, the political ability to accomplish such a transition while good for the environment would be locally thwarted by vested interests like as not.