This weekend I saw the movie Syriana, which is one of the best movies I have seen in years. The depth and complexity of its plot showed how simplistic hollywood movies are. More importantly, it also gave one the sense of how important oil is to our economy and our economic and government systems.
Would we invade Iraq just for oil? You bet we would, although the average person wouldn't know that.
And we can expect to see more turmoil due to our complete dependence on oil for our lifestyle and our economic systems combined with the complete lack of federal leadership on energy.
This article provides a lot of detail on our changing relationship with oil.
I found it interesting to note how much more oil we use than other counties like China. Considering how much flak we give China for using up all the oil and for pollution, I was surprised to see that we use 3x as much oil as they do.
Of course none of these supply and demand questions take global warming into account. At least not yet.
In Oil's New Era, Power Shifts To Countries With Reserves
Middle East Consumes More As U.S. Seeks Security; 'Higher Prices for Years' What Sen. Lugar Saw in Libya
June 14, 2006
There is more to today's oil crunch than temporary jolts to supply and demand. What is also roiling the energy world is an enduring shift in the balance of power between the fuel-guzzling West and oil-rich developing countries.
Since World War II, the industrialized world has relied on stable and affordable supplies of crude to fuel economic growth. The U.S., Europe and Japan together needed more oil than they could produce. The developing world had plenty of oil, but little use for it and few alternative markets. So industrialized countries tapped the cheap resources of poor ones.
Now this mutual dependency is unraveling and a new order is taking shape, turning the tables on America, its allies and other big energy consumers. Major exporting nations have concluded that they have more leverage than ever before over consuming countries.
Two forces are behind this change. The accelerating industrialization of the billion-person economies of China and India means that global energy demand is likely to keep growing rapidly for years to come. And just as important, the world's top crude-producing countries are keeping a tighter grip on their spigots.
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Major Western oil companies are also struggling to adjust. Ninety percent of the world's untapped conventional oil reserves are in the hands of governments or state-owned oil companies, far more than was the case several decades ago. It doesn't appear that the planet is running out of crude, as proponents of the "peak oil" theory have argued. But some oil experts foresee the big Western oil companies running out of easy-to-tap oil, and most of them are already turning to harder-to-recover reserves.
