Fuel for corruption, conflict, addiction
Oil is tearing Nigeria apart. It’s bankrupting the United States morally, if not economically. It backstops dictators spanning the grotesque Teodoro Obiang, president of Equatorial Guinea, Russia’s chilly chief Vladimir Putin and the canny, showy Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. It keeps anything but respectable company but, because of its clout and the global addiction to oil, its grip is tight. These are some of the lessons Peter Maass hammers home in his angry, bravely reported “Crude World,’’ a look at countries with oil and the extractive companies that largely define their politics, the United States included.
In “Crude World,’’ Maas, who has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times, examines the nexus of politics and commerce at the dark, nasty heart of oil. In chapters starkly titled “Plunder,’’ “Rot,’’ “Contamination,’’ “Fear,’’ and “Mirage,’’ he tracks oil to fields in Africa, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and West Texas, illustrating how deeply it corrupts.
“A core feature of the resource curse . . . is that although the oil industry dominates an economy, it creates few jobs,’’ Maass writes in “Mirage,’’ his chapter on the power Chávez has amassed through manipulation of oil from Venezuela. “Refineries can cost billions of dollars to construct, but once they’re up and running, perhaps a few hundred workers are needed to monitor [these high-tech facilities].’’
Maass doesn’t like or trust oil companies, even when they suggest familiarity with social conscience. He vividly reports on the gap between the “rot’’ the oil companies trigger in societies they exploit and the image they aim to present. Nowhere is the contrast starker than in the Nigerian villages of Oru Sangama (a slum illuminated by toxic flares of natural gas) and its sister village, Elem Sangama. Shell built the latter, equipping it with a health clinic and a generator, but there’s no medical equipment or doctor, and no gas - just like in Oru Sangama. Shell, Maass suggests, is playing a game in the name of responsibility. If it weren’t for the oil they siphon off Shell lines, Oru Sangama’s residents would be even poorer. It’s a political compact, based on turning a blind eye, that maintains oil’s sway. “Shell presents itself as a saddened bystander to social collapse,’’ Maass writes.
To Maass, oilmen like former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond and Lukoil president Vagit Alekperov are political manipulators expert at masking their greed for oil. Former president George W. Bush also falls into that category, he suggests. “Just as cars cannot run on unrefined crude,’’ he writes in a chapter about the Iraq war, a conflict he believes ran on oil, “political systems choke at the unfiltered mention of war for oil.’’
Among the few heroes in this largely bleak book are Steve Donziger, a lawyer pursuing a lawsuit against Chevron for what “environmentalists regard as the oil world’s Chernobyl,’’ a toxic waste pit of “drilling’s afterbirth’’ in the Oriente region of Ecuador, and José Toro-Hardy, a Venezuelan economist who considers his country’s oil-based prosperity a sham because it can’t be sustained.
After this whirlwind tour of places where oil rules, Maass suggests a cure. He calls for conservation, use of alternative energy sources like wind, and work toward reversing global warming; the world should be governed by the intent not of getting oil, but of getting off oil, he says. The conclusions are predictable, idealistic, and vaguely comforting. What’s more compelling is the reporting Maass has done from places ruined by dependence on a substance that, he argues convincingly, kills more than it liberates.
Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer from Cleveland. 
