The Religion of Green
Text by Drew Gowing | November 2010
America the Beautiful wasn’t built merely on pride, grit or a pious call to freedom. In fact, these attitudes are common among the working class and those, in particular, who’ve found themselves on the wrong end of history. Rather, it was built upon a random, yet to be discovered, and practically stumbled upon commodity known as - Petroleum.
That the northeastern region of the young United States was richly endowed with waterpower and coal deposits was critical to the country's early industrialization as well as to the North's eventual victory in the Civil War. It was the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania in 1859, however, that would turn the US into the decisive actor on the global stage. Oil extraction and exports fueled American prosperity in the early twentieth century - a time when the country was the planet's leading producer - while nurturing the rise of its giant corporations.
It should never be forgotten that the world's first great transnational corporation - John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company - was founded on the exploitation and export of American petroleum. Anti-trust legislation would break up Standard Oil in 1911, but two of its largest descendants, Standard Oil of New York and Standard Oil of New Jersey, were later fused into what is now the world's wealthiest publicly traded enterprise, ExxonMobil. Another descendant, Standard Oil of California, became Chevron - today, the third-richest American corporation.
Oil also played a key role in the rise of the United States as the world's preeminent military power. This country supplied most of the oil consumed by Allied forces in both World War I and World War II. Among the great powers of the time, the US alone was self-sufficient in oil, which meant it could deploy massive armies to Europe and Asia and overpower the well-equipped (but oil-starved) German and Japanese militaries. Few realize this today, but for the architects of America's victory in World War II, including president Franklin D Roosevelt, it was the nation's superior endowment of petroleum, not the atom bomb, that proved decisive.
Having created an economy and military establishment based on oil, American leaders were compelled to employ ever-more costly and desperate measures to ensure that both always had an adequate supply of energy. After World War II, with domestic reserves already beginning to shrink, a succession of presidents fashioned a global strategy based on ensuring American access to overseas petroleum.
Sadly, it would seem, over half a century later, their vision has become a reality: as the crude that once fueled the American Superpower, is now an illusive curse upon which the American economy careens. We are the #1 consumers of energy in the world, yet rely on 65% of that energy from others. In fact, when we sat down with John Hofmeister, the former President of the Shell Oil Company and proponent for Citizen’s for Affordable Energy, he said “We’ve had promises from 8 Presidents and 18 Congresses that we would be pursuing energy independence – but really what we are pursuing is enough military might to access our energy supplies elsewhere [Shell Oil Company’s John Hofmeister: Exclusive, page 26]. And the propaganda centered in and around being “Green” seems more to have promoted our collective ignorance, rather than direct our practical attention toward the science and its solutions [The Religion of Green, page 16].
For my part, it was only recently, on vacation to Asia, in fact, when I tried to get this picture of me on the illustrious Black Sea. It is, of course, one of the 5 major oil transits in the world today and represents our co-dependence on energy in the Caucasus. I sat with a smile on my face for nearly 5 minutes while we waited upon a parade of Oil Tankers--en route from Russia to the Americas--to pass. There were others, in queue, waiting to have their picture taken too, as we held out for the uninterrupted view. Finally, my partner raised and focused the camera this one last time. “Oh, screw it!” he said, surrendering to things as they are, “Just say cheese.”
