Oil, Power, and War - Matthieu Auzanneau

Oil, Power, and War

A Dark History
Buch | Softcover
672 Seiten
2020
Chelsea Green Publishing Co (Verlag)
978-1-60358-978-9 (ISBN)
24,90 inkl. MwSt
Catholic Herald Book Awards 2019 Finalist, Current Affairs



"Auzanneau has created a towering telling of a dark and dangerous addiction.”—Nature



The story of oil is one of hubris, fortune, betrayal, and destruction. It is the story of a resource that has been undeniably central to the creation of our modern culture, and ever-present during the darkest exploits of empire the world over. For the past 150 years, oil has become the most essential ingredient for economic, military, and political power. And it has brought us to our present moment in which political leaders and the fossil-fuel industry consider extraordinary, and extraordinarily dangerous, policy on a world stage marked by shifting power bases.



Upending the conventional wisdom by crafting a “people’s history,” award-winning journalist Matthieu Auzanneau deftly traces how oil became a national and then global addiction, outlines the enormous consequences of that addiction, sheds new light on major historical and contemporary figures, and raises new questions about stories we thought we knew well: What really sparked the oil crises in the 1970s, the shift away from the gold standard at Bretton Woods, or even the financial crash of 2008? How has oil shaped the events that have defined our times: two world wars, the Cold War, the Great Depression, ongoing wars in the Middle East, the advent of neoliberalism, and the Great Recession, among them?



With brutal clarity, Oil, Power, and War exposes the heavy hand oil has had in all of our lives—and illustrates how much heavier that hand could get during the increasingly desperate race to control the last of the world’s easily and cheaply extractable reserves.



 



 

Matthieu Auzanneau is the director of The Shift Project, a European think tank focusing on energy transition and the resources required to make the shift to an economy free from fossil fuel dependence, and also from greenhouse gas emissions. Previously he was a journalist, based in France, and mostly writing for Le Monde. He continues to write his Le Monde blog, Oil Man, which he describes as “a chronicle of the beginning of the end of petroleum.” The original French edition of this book, Or Noir: La grande histoire du pétrole, was awarded the Special Prize of the French Association of Energy Economists in 2016.  Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. He is the author of several influential books on resource depletion including Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century Of Declines.

Foreword
Introduction

I
. . . to 1945
Germination

1 A Seed Is Planted

2 John D. Rockefeller, the Power of Petroleum, and the Spiral of Expansion

3 Sharing the World Market: The First Attempts, at the Cradle of Royal Dutch Shell

4 The Automobile: American Oil Regenerates Capitalism

5 The Tank: American Oil Feeds the Victorious Fighting Machines of the Great War

6 The Roaring 1920s: Consolidating the New Empires

7 Birth of a Petrol-Nation: Iraq

8 The Majors Band Together: A Secretly Planned Industry Weathers the Great Depression Unscathed

9 The Persistent Alliance of Big Oil with Nazi Germany

10 The Enablers of the Second World War


II
1945-1970
Spring

11 After Yalta: The United States and Saudi Arabia Seal their Alliance

12 Washington Gives Absolute Power to American Petroleum

13 Big Oil's Planetary Empire and the Rockefellers' Hegemonic Ambitions

14 Big Oil Asserts Itself: A Matrix of Political Power in Washington

15 Saudi Arabia and Gabon: Nations Spoiled by Oil

16 Cartel Against Cartel: OPEC's Painful Emergence

17 The Leapfrog Effect: Algeria, Biafra, and Libya

18 The Golden Childhood of the Oil-Made Man



III
1970-1998
Summer


19 OPEC: Scapegoat for a 1973 Oil Crisis Made in the USA?

20 Oil Money: After Neocolonialism, a Perilous Symbiosis

21 The Second Oil Crisis: A Deadly Vortex of Power Is Unleashed Around the Persian Gulf

22 The Long Iran-Iraq War: A Lose-Lose Game Orchestrated by the Reagan Administration?

23 The Oil Countershock: The Frenzy of the Reagan Years, the Collapse of the USSR, and the BCCI Scandal

24 Dear Saddam: The Gulf War, the Fate of the Iraqi People, and the Long-Term Interests of Uncle Sam

25 Planetary Harvest: The Time of Scandals

26 Grandeur and Decadence: The Explosion of Opulence, Misery, and the Human Footprint


IV
1998-20??
Autumn


27 Oil's Future Decline Is Announced: The Persian Gulf Returns to the Center of the Chessboard

28 September 11, 2001: A Rogue Pearl Harbor

29 Shocks and Ruptures: The Occupation of Iraq and Crisis of 2008

30 Winter, Tomorrow?


Afterword

Appendices
The Oil Corridor
The Price of Crude Oil: 1861-December 2016
World Production of Petroleum and Substitutes: Historical and Projected
Production by Region, 1965-2013
The Oil Majors
The Persian Gulf Giants

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Erscheinungsdatum
Vorwort Richard Heinberg
Zusatzinfo 8-page color insert
Verlagsort White River Junction
Sprache englisch
Maße 153 x 229 mm
Gewicht 934 g
Themenwelt Sozialwissenschaften Politik / Verwaltung Europäische / Internationale Politik
Technik Elektrotechnik / Energietechnik
Wirtschaft
ISBN-10 1-60358-978-3 / 1603589783
ISBN-13 978-1-60358-978-9 / 9781603589789
Zustand Neuware
Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt?
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich