Commentary
During President George H.W. Bush’s 1991 Persian Gulf War, protesters took up the slogan, “No Blood for Oil”—the filthy, lucrative, greenhouse gas-producing commodity being an obscene cause for anyone to die for. But oil is not the devil’s venom all too many have been convinced it is.
The black gold pumped from deep underground has often been called the lifeblood of the world economy, but even celebrating it as that does not do it justice. Perhaps more than anything else, it is a manifestation of the ingenuity that liberty fosters, whose benefits then spread to all humanity. Petroleum was made use of
in antiquity for some construction, heating, and even medicinal purposes, but before the industrialized age it was to almost everyone nothing more than a sludgy nuisance. Today, every day, it delivers the food that feeds billions; powers the vehicle that races to your home to take your loved one to the emergency room minutes after you call 911; allows billions to commute to jobs that would not exist were they not able to make the trip; and keeps them warm in the winter both at the workplace and within their homes with their families.
And fossil fuel is cheap (as long as the left is not allowed to
inflate its price)—cheaper than any of the green alternatives, alternatives that will not be price competitive for a very long time. Serious disruptions in the global availability of this most abundant liquid on the planet second to water would cause economic collapse. Depression, mass unemployment, starvation, riots, political upheaval, and vulnerability to foreign aggression can all be expected if major shortages forced the price of gasoline to become prohibitive.
Once these realities are appreciated, blood for oil looks a lot different. Russian President Vladimir Putin would not today be bombing civilians in Ukraine in his quest to restore the territory of the Soviet Union had Europe, in particular Germany, not allowed itself to become so dependent on Russian natural gas, oil’s sister fossil fuel. That dependence, in turn, would not exist if the nations of the free world hadn’t for decades been viewing the subject of petroleum through the most distorted ideological lens. Ukrainians’ blood is spilling because European governments hate oil.
At nearly 10 million barrels a day, Russia is second only to the United States in
oil production; in continental Western Europe only Italy makes the top 40 at barely 100,000 barrels per day. German dependence on Russian energy goes
way back to the Cold War, a component of what was hailed at the time as an enlightened appeasement strategy toward the Soviet Union. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviets were providing about a third of West Germany’s natural gas, expanding from 1.1 billion cubic meters in 1973 to 25.7 billion cubic meters in 1993. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline, beginning operations in 2021, brought gas directly from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. The German Chancellor behind the project, Gerhard Schröder, was so tight with Putin that he’s now reaping his personal financial reward as chairman of Russia’s Rosneft petroluem company since 2017, and in February becoming a director of Gazprom, owned by the Russian government.
Germans have long been living in, to use the German, a “Narrenparadies”
—a fool’s paradise. As the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Felix K. Chang has pointed out, “even as renewable energy sources have become a bigger part of the country’s energy mix, Germany has been unable to wean itself from coal and natural gas.” The naivete in extending such dangerous economic links brought the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt,
hailed by the Nobel Committee as “the great Peace and Reconciliation Chancellor of Germany.” The year before, Brandt had signed a non-violence agreement in Moscow in which, as the committee president stated during the peace price ceremony, “both countries declared that they do not have territorial claims on other countries” and “would respect the integrity of all other countries within their present boundaries,” plus “mutual wishes for more economic, technical and cultural co-operation.” Of course at that time, Ukraine was behind the Iron Curtain. It took an ex-KGB officer’s war crimes to bring on the far-too-late rude awakening, and Germany has now postponed Nord Stream 2 indefinitely.
Germany long ago went fanatical on green energy with its “Energiewende” (energy transition) policy, shunning fossil and nuclear, with former chancellor Angela Merkel 11 years ago beginning a phase out of all nuclear power plants, originally to be completed in 2022. Underlying the policies that have now left NATO countries in Europe disinclined to bite too hard the Russian hand that supplies so much of their energy is the false article of belief that fossil fuel depletion is around the corner.
The United States alone has
nearly a century’s worth of natural gas left, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And from 2016 to 2018—a mere two years—the U.S. Geological Survey
revised its estimate of recoverable crude oil in the Wolfcamp section of the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico from 20 billion barrels to 46.3 billion barrels, due to technological improvements in extraction methods; we may have far more than the nearly half century of crude available in the world.
Yet Chicken Littles have been warning of the oil running out in the next generation going back at least to the 1950s. Marion King Hubbert, a geologist who advocated the forced abolition of representative government and the free market, and having scientists and engineers rule the world, forecast in 1956 that oil production would peak in the early 1970s. But new technologies like hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling have blown peak oil theory out of the ground like a gushing oil well. In 2017, the United States
exceeded the 10 million barrel-per-day mark for the first time since 1970.
The war in Ukraine that has killed thousands so far and sent millions from their homes is the consequence of allowing environmentalist ideology to rule European energy policy, and being trapped for decades in a state of denial about Putin’s malevolent nature, despite his invading Crimea in 2014, assassinating political critics, like arranging the poisoning of journalist Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive isotope in 2006, and the year before that
stating that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
The war on fossil fuels has already shed a great deal of blood over the issue of oil, with further blood to come elsewhere if countries continue to let green misconceptions blur their vision.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
