Black - Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History

Acknowledgments

Many of us in the field of environmental history trace our own efforts to the work of a few select scholars of the past thirty years. I am particularly fortunate that I can claim that my work grows not only from the writing of Donald Worster, but also from his person. For those of us who have benefited from his generosity and intellect, we also owe a debt to his partner, Bev. Together, they have helped to inspire a new generation of historians. I dedicate this book to them because of all that their hard work has made possible for me and for others.

The preparation of this manuscript benefited from my students in courses in global environmental history and the input of a few anonymous reviewers and of colleagues including Adam Rome, John McNeill, Bill Bowman, Ty Priest, Joe Pratt, David Nye, Ed Levri, Joel Tarr, and Marty Melosi. In recent years, many of us have worked hard as a group to broaden the consideration of energy by historians and, in particular, the consideration of energy within a global context. I especially salute the care of Richard Tucker in helping me to bring the manuscript over the finish line.

I wish to acknowledge the hard work of Susan McEachern and everyone at the press, as well as at my home institution of Penn State Altoona. Todd Davis, Ken Womack, Carolyn Mahan, Ian Marshall, and the rest of my good colleagues continue to make it a wonderful place to teach, write, and learn. And, as always, Chris, Ben, and Sam are where it begins and ends. I offer a particular shout-out for Bens work on the figures contained in these pages.

Finally, though, I will never look at this book without considering Hal Rothman, the UNLV historian who died in 2007. He possessed a knack for providing context and perspectivethe big pictureas well as for speaking his mind. As we drove near Anchorage, Alaska, in the late 1990s, I had finished writing Petrolia and was ready to turn to other, less gritty topics. He turned to me and said: Youre always going to be the oil guy, you know. You gotta keep writing about oil. We all lost Hal entirely too early; however, I feel blessed that I, ultimately, could follow a bit of his sage advice.

Prologue

Dependence, which is tied closely to supply, is the core feature of humans contemporary relationship with petroleum. Initially, oil flowed so freely that a barrel cost just a few dollars. Oil was so cheap that we used it not just for fuel but also to simplify the manufacture of everyday products, ranging from toothpaste to water bottles. Most often, these were products that we first made without petroleum, but cheap crude made them less expensive. In other words, we looked for ways of making crude more integral in everyday human life!

When for a variety of reasons the price paradigm shifted during the late twentieth century and petroleums value skyrocketed, nations dependent on oil found themselves at the mercy of a new world order. This current situation is our crude reality.

The worlds voracious demand for consistent supplies of crude propelled its status beyond that of a mere resource to one of a critical actor, capable of shaping an entire way of lifea culture. The following pages tell the story of the construction of our petroleum culture to the point where, today, humans in most developed nations can be said to exist within an ecology of oil in which fundamental needs and practices of our species would be impossible without it. An ecology, however, does not stop with just utility; our ecology of oil also includes the larger implications and issues created by using crude. Recognition of this totality offers the best promise for helping us create a more sensible energy future.

We must understand the history of our life with oil because of the story that plays out all around us in the early twenty-first century. In short, our dependence places us on an inevitable collision course with petroleums finite supply. Unfortunately, just by reading the daily news, we each have a front-row seat to a dramatic energy transition. It may come in the form of headlines announcing that China Becomes World Leader in Alternative Energy or Oil Prices Rise above $100 per Barrel with No End in Sight or BP Found Negligent in 2010 Gulf Spill. Large-scale issues growing out of our ecology of oil, such as climate change, might also define our future in the form of changing weather patterns or rising sea levels. And, finally, the larger lessons of our crude reality might come in accounts of events that seem to have very little relation to oil.