<A Study of BLOOD AND OIL>

by Michael Klare

<After three weeks of detailed reading and re-readings of the first 5 chapters of Michael Klare’s book “Blood and Oil”, five participants in a Step It Up - Belchertown, MA followup forum have drawn a few conclusions.>

1) We are all part of this present problem of the over consumption of other people’s resources. Finding ways to convince us all to curtail our demands for a piece of the “easy energy pie” will require serious institutional changes.

2) The military use of U.S. oil to fuel the “Allied Success” that ended WWII had shown that oil was the source of ‘power’, and that the U.S. could not continue to be the protector of the world based solely on it’s own oil because the level of oil removal had been so great that it was obvious that our oil was a finite resource. (Unfortunately, the leaders have consistently avoided the corollary to this – all oil is finite so its use needs to be carefully controlled to avoid misuse and unintended consequences.)

3) Dwight Eisenhower’s quote “beware of the military industrial complex” was prescient because as Klare has made vividly obvious the past half century and more has been a period dominated by a paranoia based on the fear that some other power would corner the petroleum energy sources of the world to the detriment of the U. S. A. military mission. This paranoia has led us to take a variety of postures over that time first to declare that the energy sources of the world were of strategic importance to the “free world” (specifically the United States of America) and because of that the military would become involved as needed to guarantee the availability of those resources to us and our allies.

4) The complexity of gathering these energy products on a continuing basis required the flexibility and resources of private enterprise rather than a completely government run activity. This situation was further solidified by the client base of the U.S. congress which demanded that they, the corporate interests of the U.S., be part of the exploitation of such a valuable asset base no matter where it occurred. Thus developed a partnership between very large corporate interests and the military side of the U.S. government. This partnership goes back to the end of WWII when President Roosevelt met with the Saudi King Ibn Saud on February 14, 1945 to form the basis of a long term commitment for U.S protection of the Saudi royal family in exchange for access to their oil. The pattern has repeated itself in various forms wherever oil was found.

5) The wealth that flowed from the extraction of oil has resulted in the entrenchment of the powerful in those areas and the estrangement of the rest of the population, with increasing levels of resentment developing between the haves and the have-nots.

6) The serious universal negative consequences of the extraction of oil should be the corner stone of dialogue advocating major efforts to convert all societies to a sustainable energy base.

Along the way there have developed some unforeseen consequences that stand out starkly for us all.

1) The global climate change disaster is a direct result of the global adoption of the high energy economies that developed as an adjunct to the military use of energy.

2) All societies have been touched in ways that have caused the demise of many long standing practices that were much less environmentally damaging than those that involved the exorbitant use of energy. In many cases these changes involved either such massive loss of old practices or the aggressive theft of property for other uses that whole societies were eliminated in the name of progress.

3) The supplanting of old sustainable practices resulted in the continuing destruction of natural habitat for many of the other species that share the biosphere with us.

4) The desire to maintain the dominant global power base blinded those in power to the eventual unfolding of these and other consequences. So that while the oil sources were developed for maintenance of military superiority, the commercial exploitation of those resources guaranteed that whatever sources were found would be quickly tapped for maximum production and that the “benefits” of the new easy life-style would be spread as widely as possible for the most rapid economic gain for the private developers of the resources.

5) The economic bases of most human economies have changed in ways that impede adoption of sustainability as a decision base for future life.

6) The military control over the U.S. civilian economy has reached a point of no return. This monopolization of federal resources guarantees the continued aggressive protection of the supply and delivery of oil until all profitable sources are exhausted regardless of consequences.

7) The unfortunate myopia of all administrations since WWII to these consequences continue unabated even though there is now no doubt about the outcomes from the widespread adoption of the high energy life-style. It would be political suicide for a U.S. presidential aspirant to declare that the U.S. should develop a “Manhattan project” to return most of the world’s population to sustainable life-styles.