by Sonia Shah
The rig was considered unsinkable.
The ship’s able captain boasted forty years of nautical experience, but unlike most other vessels afloat in the sea, the captain didn’t have ultimate authority over the Ocean Ranger. The person in charge of the ship wasn’t a mariner, but an oilman. Even while drilling miles away from solid ground, “land-bound, oil-field tradition prevailed,” as the Washington Post described. Once anchored for drilling, the captain wasn’t even required to be on board the Ranger.
The captain watched, dismayed, as routine seagoing protocols fell by the wayside. Reports that the Ranger had discharged a hundred gallons of diesel fuel went unreported to the Coast Guard. The drilling workers wouldn’t show up for their lifeboat-skills training. No pumps or alarms stood at the ready should the ship take on water. The captain, Karl Nehring, sometimes complained to the chief oilman about the various safety breaches. “Who’s in charge, Karl?” he’d point out belligerently.
Fed up, Nehring resigned in January 1982.30 Six weeks later, in a howling blizzard kicking up fifty-foot waves, the Ocean Ranger capsized and sank, killing everyone on board. A wave laden with chunks of ice smashed a porthole, splashing water on electrical panels and short-circuiting them. The valves that controlled the level attitude of the rig started to go haywire and the vessel tilted forward into the waves, taking on more water. Lacking survival suits or Coast Guard-approved lifeboats, eighty-four workers plunged into the waters, where the frigid temperatures struck them unconscious then killed them fifteen minutes later.31
Back on land, newly made widows took in the news. “I felt like my insides were made of paper, very white paper. I would even walk carefully in case something might rip inside,” recalls one.32
A year and a half later, the vessel bubbled up to the surface once more. Obscenely it emerged from the depths, upside down, pontoons jutting into the air. Tug boats attempted to tow the monolith farther out to sea. But the Ranger couldn’t be pried from the Grand Banks. It broke free over the banks’ southern tip, and sank once again.33
Such tragic mishaps were compounded by expensive errors. In the early 1980s, oil companies spent over $2 billion building a gravel island fourteen miles off the north coast of Alaska and drilling into the freezing waters, looking for what they hoped would be an oilfield as big as the ones in Saudi Arabia. But the moving rock layers had tilted, and the migrating oils had spilled out, either being entrapped somewhere else or simply leaking and dispersing at the surface. The oil had been there, but the trap had failed. “We drilled in the right place,” said one oil company executive. “We were simply 30 million years too late.”34
All told, the stream of oil from the industry’s discoveries after 1970 comprise less than a third of the oil powering humans and their machines, most of it from small fields that would peak and deplete rapidly.35 In some instances, oil companies would end up burning more fuel digging and pumping oil from deeply buried fields than the sought-after wells themselves would provide.36
Yet it would make huge amounts of money for the companies. After all, the industry could wow its investors with finds of 500 million barrels or even less. At twenty bucks a barrel, such a find was a $10 billion asset. In terms of potential profit for the companies, these finds surely deserved the superlatives heaped upon them by companies and the news media. But in terms of global oil supply, world oil consumption, or the global distribution of oil resources—500 million barrels could slake today’s global thirst for oil for about a week and was less than 0.1 percent of the amount of oil collected under the Middle East—the finds were miniscule.37
The Arab oil embargo, for all the panic and mayhem it triggered, had cut the flow of oil to the world market by a measly 7 percent, as non-OPEC suppliers upped their oil production to counteract the OPEC cuts. Had Western oil consumption been anything near temperate, this temporary constriction in the flow of oil may have been vaguely tolerable.38 Instead, successive Western administrations lived in fear of a repeat of the 1970s oil shocks, shaping their military budgets, foreign policies, and economic packages in order to counter the perceived threat of its return.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rockefeller’s Ghost
AS THE 1980S rolled around, inflation started to let up. New oil from Alaska, the North Sea, and elsewhere started to tip the scales away from OPEC oil, which by the early 1980s accounted for roughly one-fifth of the daily American oil diet.1 By the time Ronald Reagan took the White House, the country was instructed to go back to doing what it did best: driving cars around and shopping. Reagan brushed off the cautious energy conservatism of the 1970s like unsightly dandruff. He ostentatiously removed the solar panels on the White House roof,2 and let the energy efficiency requirements pioneered in the 1970s expire. The country didn’t need an energy policy, Reagan thought, just “strategic reserves and strategic forces,” as his budget director put it.3
By the end of the 1980s, the price of oil had fallen below the price of bottled water, and a network of American military bases, aircraft carriers, and warships ringed the Middle East’s oilfields, guns at the ready should any trouble arise.4
In August 1990, the wrath of the Carter Doctrine fell upon Iraq when it attempted to annex neighboring oil-rich Kuwait. The United States responded with deadly force, followed by a regime of sanctions and years of aerial bombing.
Amenable Gulf countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were armed to the teeth so they could help the United States take on any trouble from Iraq, Iran, or other potential troublemakers in the Gulf. Between 1990 and 1997, the United States handed over more than $42 billion worth of weapons and ammunitions to these countries, in the largest arms transfer from any single supplier to any one region of the world ever, according to international security expert Michael T. Klare.5
After the dismemberment of Standard Oil, the world’s first Big Oil company, the company’s constituent parts survived separately as Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Sunoco, and Conoco. In 1999, amidst increasing demand for oil, Exxon and Mobil merged. Two years later, Chevron merged with Texaco. Rockefeller’s ghost was rising; Big Oil was back.6
By 2001, oil companies penetrated slicks of oily rock in more than eighty countries from four thousand oilfields.7 The lucrative hunt put the oil industry, valued at between $2 and $5 trillion, in control of almost a sixth of the global economy.8 ExxonMobil’s returns on investments made over the past three decades were nearly triple that of other top companies.9 In 2004, after a spike in the price of oil, ExxonMobil posted the highest one-year operating profit of any company in U.S. history.
That year, humans burned over 29 billion barrels of oil. North Americans were by far the most prolific. On average, each American man, woman, and child accounted for nearly 3 gallons of oil consumption every day of the year, compared to the average Italian, who burned less than 1.5 gallons a day, the average South African and Brazilian less than 0.5 gallons a day, and the average Chinese just 0.21 gallons a day.10
The business of domestic trade in the United States relies almost completely on diesel-burning trucks, which convey 70 percent of the nation’s goods from remote factories and farms. In 2003, trucks traveled five times as far as the average car with about one-quarter of the fuel efficiency—just over 5 miles to the gallon. But their numbers paled in comparison to the armadas of cars.11
The American automobile market had been technically saturated by 1990, when the average American household owned one car for each of its licensed drivers. And yet, Americans kept buying more cars. The population growth of cars shot ahead of the population growth of the humans, with a new car rolling into driveways every three seconds whereas new babies appear only every eight seconds.12
Gone are the “family pleasure drives” of the 1950s. In 2004, American adults spent more time in their cars—over two hours a day—than with their own children.13 Yet all the extra driving isn’t transporting Americans any farther. Between 1995 and 2001, Americans spent 10 p
ercent more time in their cars but traveled the same number of miles. Americans’ beloved cars were meant to herald liberation, yet the faster this freedom spread, the more often drivers found themselves trapped in congestion. Americans burn over half a billion barrels of oil a year just getting to work; they burn another 12 million barrels idling in traffic.14
The way Americans live chains them to their cars, whether beloved or not. “I have to have my car,” complained one driver. “I need it to get to the hospital, or see my family, or take my wife to a nice dinner,” the eighty-year-old man said. “It’s not a luxury. It’s a big part of my life.”15
Belching fumes into the air, crashing into each other, cars and trucks kill more than seventy thousand Americans every year.16 And the cars are growing. Rather than continue their losing competition with more efficient Japanese cars, U.S. automakers tweaked the towering vehicles originally designed for the military into luxury four-wheel-drive cars dubbed “sports utility vehicles” and marketed them to sporty urbanites and safety-conscious families.
Between 1980 and 2000, automakers spent $80 billion advertising large cars and trucks, and between 1995 and 2001, the number of suvs on American roads doubled while vans and pickups increased by more than 20 percent. “You put a few more bucks into a car, enlarge it, and sell it for a lot more money,” explained a marketing director from Chrysler. “There was no actual customer need for four-wheel drive,” added a Jeep executive. “All of the suv market was psychological.” The gas-guzzling suvs had been classified by Congress as “light trucks,” and thus were exempt from the more stringent fuel economy standards required for passenger cars, regulators perhaps reasoning that suvs would never appeal to anyone outside of farmers and horse-owners. But by the time sales had started to skyrocket among urbanites, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found it difficult to crack down. As an unnamed EPA official admitted to New York Times auto reporter Keith Bradsher: “We don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs for the domestic [auto] industry.”17 With an average fuel efficiency 20 percent less than the average passenger car, suv sales pulled down the average fuel efficiency of the nation’s light vehicles, which declined steadily from 1988 onwards.18 Even when sales of suvs stumbled in 2005 in the wake of high fuel prices, automakers remained steadfast in their commitment to the oversized vehicles, with Chrysler planning to launch no fewer than 4 new Jeep models in 2006.19
More stringent fuel efficiency standards alone would probably not stem the oil bonanza in any case. Many technologies that let energy be used more efficiently had had the vaguely counterintuitive effect of actually increasing energy consumption, a turnaround noticed by scholars over a century ago. In 1865, many believed that technological progress in making engines more efficient and the like would reduce future coal consumption. But in fact just the opposite occurred. The more efficiently energy could be harnessed, the more savvy marketers would encourage people to consume. Energy analysts called it “Jevons’ paradox.” More efficient refrigeration technology led manufacturers to market bigger refrigerators, and more fuel-efficient cars led Americans to step up their leisure driving, they found. As long as more efficient technology drove prices down, the technology stimulated more energy consumption, not less. 20
Today, crude has become so indispensable to American society that even temporary interruptions in the flow of oil can seem dire.
On July 30, 2003, for instance, a pipeline carrying gasoline from Tucson to Phoenix ruptured and had to be shut down, depriving Phoenix of one-third of its gasoline supply. Panicked drivers waited in lines at gasoline stations for hours, only to find the pumps had run dry. “I never knew that gas was going to seem like gold,” said one alarmed suv driver.21
Bereft of cheap plentiful gasoline for their commutes to work, many Phoenix residents were forced to improvise. Within the living memory of some Phoenix residents, automakers and oil companies had felt they had to trick commuters into driving cars rather than taking public transit, but now, stumbling onto exotic-seeming public buses, Phoenix residents had little notion about how to behave, prompting local newspaper reporters to offer helpful tips. “As the bus approaches, signal the operator to stop,” read one bit of news media advice, “by waving.”22
The state’s worried governor looked at the lengthening gas lines and cancelled her own travel plans, assuring Phoenix drivers that the gasoline supply would be quickly restored and that rationing “is nowhere near the top of the list” of solutions to the problem.
Although it isn’t easy to opt out of Western car culture, neither is it impossible. Frank Hewetson, father of two, built extra seats into the back seat of his car. “The school run, if you are doing it just you and one kid,” he proclaimed, “is fairly outrageous.” And so, every day, he’d round up five more kids to pile into his car and drive to school, figuring he was at least helping remove a few cars from the congested roads. But then he’d be forced to drive on to work, “sitting there alone in the car, feeling really guilty.” And once at work, he’d sometimes have to drive more.
Luckily, his employers had an old black tank in the corner of the yard. Every so often an outfit that collected the leftover cooking oil from fish-and-chip shops and converted it into biodiesel would come and pour the fuel into the tank. Hewetson didn’t feel so guilty driving the company car around, burning old recycled fish-and-chip-shop oil rather than gasoline. Plus, he added, the exhaust smelled like french fries.
Along with domestic trade and the daily grind, the daily bread has become a daily toll for the oil industry. In 2003, industrial farmers around the world spread over 85 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer on their lands, requiring over half a billion barrels of petroleum.21 In the end, the petrofoods they produced provided just one kilocalorie for every ten kilocalories put in to grow them, a complete reversal from the times when humans stalked their prey and tilled their small plots, expending one-tenth the energy they’d reap in food.23
Nitrogen fertilizers increase yields at first, but over time, farmers have had to apply more and more in order to sustain the incredible bounty of the first harvests. The potent runoff of this excess of nitrogen poisons both land and water.24
Today, Americans eat food that has typically traveled between 1,500 and 2,500 miles to get from the farm to their plates. With abundant plastics for packaging and plenty of cheap oil and trucks, the network of factories, farms, and supermarkets that keeps Americans fed has had no reason not to spread out lazily. Centralized supermarkets ensure that even organic and locally grown foods incur a petroleum cost. If nearby farmers want to sell food to their neighbors through the local store, they must ship their produce hundreds of miles to and from centralized inspection centers first.25
Plastic packaging makes it possible for these foods to remain somewhat edible, but long-distance petrofoods are by necessity more processed and homogeneous than seasonally available local foods. American hybrid corn is a good example. Almost a fifth of the country’s arable land is planted with corn, a crop that requires more petrofertilizers and pesticides than any other, packing more than a half-gallon into every bushel.26 It isn’t that Americans eat so much corn, as corn. American fossil-fuel-grown corn is an abundant feedstock to process and transform into myriad processed foods. Most animals raised for meat are fed corn, even if they then require antibiotics to tolerate the illnesses to which the corn diet makes them vulnerable. Even farmed fish are fed corn. Syrup made from corn saturates sodas, sweets, and snacks.27
The predominant activity of the modern industrial economy has become combustion. No less than 40 percent of the matter pumping through American society’s veins is oil; 80 percent of its wastes are the smoky end-products of combustion. “Modern industrial economies, no matter how high-tech, are carbon-based economies,” the World Resources Institute reported, “and their predominant activity is burning material.”28 The amount of energy in the crude oil that goes into U.S. refineries and chemicals factories is matched, one to one, with the amount
of energy they need to consume to keep functioning.29
On the smoky margins of this global bonfire, Frank Hewetson, a tall, balding, fit man in his thirties, dons a dry suit and life jacket, and throws himself into the freezing North Atlantic, directly into the path of a giant tugboat pulling a towering oil rig into place. He floats in the water for hours, leaning his head back and staring at the stars. In the pit of his belly, he can feel the shock waves of seismic surveyors’ blasting airguns, an experience he describes as surreal.
He delays the ships, for a time, but eventually Hewetson gets carted off.
As an activist with Greenpeace UK, Hewetson and his colleagues resist Western carbon-burning culture in a most visceral way. Their plans include campaigns much more ambitious than simply freezing in the dark North Atlantic sea; Hewetson and his colleagues board and occupy oil rigs themselves, using the most high-tech materials and machines produced by the hydrocarbon economy to do it.
“If the rig was working, we would be fairly worried about going anywhere near it with our petrol boats,” he says.30 So, slowly, they move in with their diesel boats, with their sparkless ignition systems. If the weather is good, they maneuver the small boats near the gigantic steel legs of the rig. Beams, giant chains, and pipes dangle from all directions in the shady waters under the rig. The waves pound the little boat. The currents under the rig threaten to capsize the boat, sucking it under the rig’s metal maze.