Petroleum is the Power Behind our Politics

The power of petroleum is supreme nationally and globally

Essay by S. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV, July 3, 2017

Why does petroleum, oil and gas, have so much political power? Why are they able to buck the interests of the population as a whole, such as the advance of renewables? Why can they walk all over landowners to get what is good for the fossil fuel industries and threaten the future of the human race with global warming?

When steamships were invented, they revolutionized warfare. Being able to ignore the way the wind blows and its vagaries gave steamships a huge advantage over wind driven ships. Petroleum driven engines were smaller, lighter, more easily controlled and eliminated the horrible job of shoveling coal into the boiler. These engines were adaptable to moving war machines on land too; tanks, trucks, artillery, and so forth, too. Adequate petroleum became necessary to wage war.

Immediately, the European nations and the United Stares began to make claims overseas where there was oil. Some by staking colonies, some by adroit manipulation of favored parties in nations possessing oil, such as the Saudi Family in Arabia.

Originally, coal was labor intensive. Think how many miners there were in the days of pick and shovel mining. Labor efficiency improved fostered by the labor movement. Coal operators from the days of Matewan to Don Blankinship and Robert Murray, have been able to make remarkable concentrations of wealth with the help of their workers. Today, however, there are more florists in the U. S. than miners! We now have less than 70,000 miners, less than 16,000 of which were involved in extraction, 0.019 percent of the nations work force, according to the Washington Post.

The same story plan applies to oil and gas. Originally rigs were built by hand, engine blocks were hauled by horses and site preparation was done by pick and shovel. Also petroleum has two extra layers of workers compared to coal or gas, those who refine the raw material into salable products and the low paid filling station workers (which makes up half the industry claim as jobs it produces). The total direct oil and gas job figure is somewhat less than 2 million, according to the Center for American Progress.

Several companies are working on methods to drill wells with an operator and one or more robots, which will further reduce the need for workers. So petroleum creates great wealth, but mostly, and increasingly, for the wealthy. This translates into political power in our system, where candidates must raise money for publicity. To coin a phrase, they go where the deep pockets are. The accumulated wealth also creates goodwill with investors and banks, which increases petroleum’s power.

The United States has been described as ”an oil company with an army.” The country exported oil for many decades when oil use first began, and it quickly moved to control other nations oil, as demand increased and our reserves were exhausted. The “oil company with an army” bit refers to these manipulations and the size of our military, which is famously the largest in the world, larger than the next ten nations combined (or all the other nation’s military, depending on what your read).

Our military takes over half the disposable budget for the U. S. We can’t afford to maintain and improve the infrastructure (the locks and dams that are necessary for the export of our agriculture, one of our most reliable exports, the bridges on our highways, the water systems of our cities and towns, and such). We can’t afford top quality secondary schools (but tiny Finland can). Our Internet is not top level (South Korea’s is). We can’t afford inexpensive health care for our people. The money goes to the huge military with 10 or so aircraft carrier battle groups and 800 installations in 70 countries. For comparison, Britain, France and Russia have 30 overseas installations between them. Big military isn’t the only source of U. S. financial problems, of course. See here.

Petroleum people work very hard to make us think there is no viable alternative, that oil and gas will be the mainstay for the indefinite future. I read this morning that Tesla has a backlog of 400,000 orders for it’s Model 3 at $35,000 each, and production is just now starting this summer. People bought them on faith. Tesla is riding high on the future.

How are renewables doing? Here is a quote from Adam Vaughan, Environment Editor of the Guardian newspaper:

Last year, for the first time, renewable energy accounted for more than half of new power generation worldwide…. China is expected to build more than twice that global amount in the next five years, driven by its thirst for more electric power capacity, public anxiety over air pollution and the need to fulfil its climate change pledges.

The world is changing, and Europe is no longer the big driver of green energy growth that it once was. “In the next five years, the People’s Republic of China and India alone will account for almost half of global renewable capacity additions,” says the IEA in a new report.

…. renewables are forecast to provide just over a quarter of the world’s electricity by 2021….

The accumulated wealth of the petroleum industry is used in another way: advertising and public image. You can’t fail to be impressed by all the advertisements. Night after night on TV, in the newspapers, radio, everywhere. Ads can be slanted to what ever they want; including pipelines and the idea the petroleum is the only alternative (see illustration). This income for the media makes the individual newspapers, radio stations and TV stations avoid stories that might offend petroleum companies and thus cause them to withhold advertising revenue.

One use for petroleum is largely ignored, its use in making plastics. The world is polluted with diverse present day plastics. Eight million tons of plastics are dumped in the oceans every year. Plastic is cheap and versatile, even the world’s poor can use it. It clutters beaches. Tiny pieces in the oceans are ingested by water living creatures, poisoning both fish and the creatures that they feed on.

The petroleum produced plastics are not easily digested by microorganisms, like biological materials. It damages essential life services. There is a desperate need for plastics that decompose to prevent this problem. This will mean starting with plant based materials and some new chemistry, which the industry fears.

It is easy to conceive of renewables for electrical generation – in fact, that is a technology undergoing rapid improvement. Electrical cars are here and will grow by market forces. Even an electrical semi-truck has been announced. Nikola has announced $2.3 billion of preorders for a 2,000 HP semi-truck, 7,000 paid reservations for the $375,000, to be unveiled December 2.

However there seems to be a hard core of machines that will need petroleum. They include earthmovers, farm equipment, and significantly, war machines. They involve huge energy needs and the supporting infrastructure for electricity driven machines is not available everywhere, nor portable.

Large ships, or submarines for under sea travel, where there is no air, now can use nuclear power, perhaps more could be adapted to such power. But small ships, tanks, mobile artillery, armored personnel carriers, overland trucks and the like cannot be easily adapted to electrical power.

In 2016 the U. S. imported 10.1 million barrels of oil a day from about 70 countries. We export 5.19 million barrels, mostly refined products. The net for our use is 4.87 million barrels a day. Do you suppose if we did not need imports, and other nations did not need our exports, we could reduce the military and concentrate our nation’s wealth on infrastructure as well as treating our ill and aged citizens with greater decency? Do you suppose we could do our share to avoid the worst of global warming and have a more civil place for people to live?

>>> Tom Bond is a retired professor of chemistry and resident farmer near Jane Lew in central West Virginia.

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