Review: Oil
Oil, Anatomy of an Industry by Matthew Yeomans is a Cliff’s Notes to the tremendous importance of oil and the oil industry in creating and maintaining American life and supremacy.
This fast-paced opens with a tongue-in-cheek attempt by Yeomans to avoid oil for one day. It is, to say the least, an impossible task. Oil is modern life.
A chapter on Energy Wars is a Google Maps of current U.S. military deployment — placing the Bush Administration’s redeployment of U.S. troops to areas near Sao Tome, Equatorial Guinea and Uzbekistan clearly against these nations’ future oil prospects.
The book gives solutions to our “oil addiction” short shrift, with a “blueprint for a new energy future” taking all of three pages, yet overall it’s a solid look at the history and near-term future for our most important natural resource.
One solution mentioned, championed recently by Thomas Friedman, is the institution of a much higher national gas tax. While a political non-starter, Oil also detailed the UAW’s role in helping the auto industry defeat Senator Richard Bryan’s 1990 attempt to raise every vehicles fuel efficiency by 40%.
It’s frightening that the good Ole U.S.A. is so set in its ways that it cannot experiment in a meaningful way with ending its relationship with Oil.
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