Crude World

By Peter Maass

The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has brought new attention to the huge costs of our oil dependence. In this stunning and revealing book, Peter Maass examines the social, political, and environmental impact of petroleum on the countries that produce it.

Every unhappy oil-producing nation is unhappy in its own way, but all are touched by the “resource curse”—the power of oil to exacerbate existing problems and create new ones. Peter Maass presents a vivid portrait of the troubled world oil has created. From Saudi Arabia to Equatorial Guinea, from Venezuela to Iraq, the stories of rebels, royalty, middlemen, environmentalists, indigenous activists, and CEOs—all deftly and sensitively presented—come together in this startling and essential account of the consequences of our addiction to oil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 22, 2009
• ISBN: 9780307273192

Reviews for Crude World

[janepriceestrada · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights.” – J. Paul GettyWith chapters divided by region, [Crude World] examines the effects of the oil industry on oil-producing states. Each section was very interesting in and of itself, but ultimately it felt like a series of newspaper articles that never really coalesced into a common unit. This combined with the fact that most of the information is neither new nor surprising made it a mediocre read. Here’s some sad but interesting quotes:Equatorial Guinea: “‘Almost everything has to be imported,’ Paces explained… I pointed to the small rocks that had been lined up to denote the shoulders of a dirt road on the site. ‘Those are local rocks, but importing them would be cheaper.’”Nigeria: “According to official statistics, between 1976 and 2001, there were, on average, more than five spills a week in Nigeria, but according to unofficial estimates, the true figure could be ten times higher.”Oriente region, Ecuador: “The first offering from Texaco, in exchange for permission from the Indians to look for oil, was a delivery of bread, cheese, spoons, and plates. (The Indians threw out the cheese because it smelled so peculiar.)”Moscow, Russia: “I dined at a posh restaurant one evening with a banker who needed, midcourse, to make a business call. He faced a problem because he knew his cell phone was bugged and he assumed mine was, too. So he borrowed a phone from another diner, a total stranger.”

[gbelik_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The series of essays in this book profile oil producing countries and show how the world of oil fosters corruption, distorts the economy, encourages conflict and alters values. Until oil has less value, the countries that produce it will be subject to forces its wealth creates. A well written and thoughtful discussion.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I put this book on my "politics" shelf because although Maas considers the economics of petroleum, the focus of his argument is that, as Lord Acton wrote "power tends to corrupt", and oil is power in most meanings of that word.

[janemarieprice · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights.” – J. Paul GettyWith chapters divided by region, [Crude World] examines the effects of the oil industry on oil-producing states. Each section was very interesting in and of itself, but ultimately it felt like a series of newspaper articles that never really coalesced into a common unit. This combined with the fact that most of the information is neither new nor surprising made it a mediocre read. Here’s some sad but interesting quotes:Equatorial Guinea: “‘Almost everything has to be imported,’ Paces explained… I pointed to the small rocks that had been lined up to denote the shoulders of a dirt road on the site. ‘Those are local rocks, but importing them would be cheaper.’”Nigeria: “According to official statistics, between 1976 and 2001, there were, on average, more than five spills a week in Nigeria, but according to unofficial estimates, the true figure could be ten times higher.”Oriente region, Ecuador: “The first offering from Texaco, in exchange for permission from the Indians to look for oil, was a delivery of bread, cheese, spoons, and plates. (The Indians threw out the cheese because it smelled so peculiar.)”Moscow, Russia: “I dined at a posh restaurant one evening with a banker who needed, midcourse, to make a business call. He faced a problem because he knew his cell phone was bugged and he assumed mine was, too. So he borrowed a phone from another diner, a total stranger.”

[keithakers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I heard this guy speak at the recent ASPO-USA conference. He's good. This book is very much "human interest" journalism -- no need to worry about charts and graphs here, or tortuous explanations of depletion rates. He goes to Africa, central Asia, and all over the world to talk to people affected by oil and the oil industry. He said that writing this book was more difficult even than writing about war, because at least in a war there are people shooting at each other which you can write about. The book was very revealing to me, about how totally corrupt even an oil-rich society can be, and how no one is really "in charge" of figuring out how oil should best be used, either in this country or anywhere else, either. It's just really chaos -- everyone is in there trying to exploit it before it's all gone, which will likely be sooner than we think, we're probably close to or past the point of "peak oil."

[jcvogan1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A stupid and shallow treatment of the subject. He is a very entertaining author, so if you already know a good bit about the subject there are a few entertaining anecdotes. However, if you don't know much about oil you will finish this book more ignorant than you started.

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Are there better ways to meet our energy needs than the ever more frantic search for the world’s rapidly decreasing oil reserves? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is both “yes” and “no” because, while there certainly are cleaner ways to generate the energy that makes the world go around, the transition from oil to those cleaner sources might just bankrupt the planet during the transition process. In "Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil," Peter Maass explains the impact of our oil addiction on those supposedly lucky countries having enough oil to export it to the rest of us. Most of the world’s remaining oil reserves will be discovered in, and exported from, third world countries. Unfortunately, the governments of those countries are most often manned by thugs and thieves who claim the oil riches for themselves and their families. These criminals might be quick to loot their country’s oil reserves but they are slow to plow any of the oil proceeds back into the country’s infrastructure in ways that would improve the lives of their fellow citizens.Peter Maass devotes chapters to Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Ecuador, Russia, Iraq and Venezuela. Maass finds that these countries have one thing in common other than their vast supplies of crude oil. Each of them suffers from the “resource curse,” which states that countries whose economies are too closely tied to the exportation of a natural resource, such as oil, are doomed to “lower growth, higher corruption, less freedom and more warfare.” Doubters only need review the list of countries at the beginning of this paragraph to judge the accuracy of this “curse.”Maass effectively argues that none of the petty dictators, thieves and kings could have looted their countries on their own. Without the enablement of Big Oil, it simply could not have happened. Oil companies have always shown a willingness to work with anyone able to guarantee them the contracts needed to extract oil, turning a blind eye to what happens in the producing country despite the billions of dollars the companies pump into government hands. Seeking an edge, oil companies have been known to bribe government officials with huge amounts of cash, high-paying “consulting” jobs, building rents, and “charities.” “Whatever it takes” seems to be the motto of many who spend their lives in search of the next huge oil field.But all of this is overshadowed by the brutal wars fought by consuming nations to gain or guarantee access to the steady supply of reasonably priced crude oil so critical to the world’s economy. While Maass admits that the United States invaded Iraq for reasons in addition to oil acquisition, he correctly points out that the protection and control of Iraq’s oil fields quickly became a top priority of America’s occupying forces. Keeping the huge Iraqi oil reserves in friendly hands, even if not directly in the hands of American oil companies, clearly impacts America’s national security. Because the job of America’s military is to protect the country’s national security, and because every other major power feels the same way, fighting over the oil of producing countries is not likely to end before the oil runs dry.The picture Peter Maass paints might not be pretty, but it is realistic. He knows that the world’s dependence on petroleum is likely to last another several decades but he urges us to make oil’s twilight as “short as possible.” Sadly, until reasonable alternatives to oil are found, we remain “complicit in the forms of violence – physical, environmental and cultural – that are the consequences of its extraction.”(I write this as someone who has worked in the oil industry, and in several different oil producing countries, for the last 37 years.)Rated at: 4.0

[billpilgrim_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Maass persuasively shows how in most cases, countries that have oil reserves are negatively impacted by it. It often corrupts the politicians, who steal the oil money, such as in Equatorial Guinea, the wealth is often spent in counterproductive means to placate the citizenry, such as in Venezuela, where social programs are funded that will not do enough to help the majority of the people, at least how those programs are presently constructed, or in Saudi Arabia, where the money has flowed to Islamic fundamentalists and supports jihad. In Ecuador, the oil companies left behind massive environmental degradation of the Amazon rainforest. Other chapters are focused on Russia, Iraq, Nigeria, and the good old USA, (where former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond earned an average of $140,000 each day he served in that capacity).I was already aware of most of the information presented here, at least on a superficial level. But, having it all together like it is in this book makes it even more clear how we must end our dependence on oil as a nation and world-wide, and not only due to the effect using the fossil fuel has on global warning.