Burning the Midnight Oil; or, A Blog is Risen

It's Halloween night, and I'm breathing life back into this blog, which has lain dormant for over eight months. Spooky, I know.

From now on, I hope to write more frequently and informally in an effort to achieve this blog's original goal, which was not to write insightful commentary or recount the travails of travels but rather to improve my writing through practice. While these days I get to do a lot more writing at work, I definitely miss having an outlet for personal reflection and sharing thoughts with others.

I'm starting with a few words about my most recent obsession: The Prize, Daniel Yergin's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil and its impact on civilization during the 130 or so years since its widespread commercialization. This is a book that I felt drawn to in part because of my burgeoning interest in energy journalism, which itself is predicated on a realization of the importance of oil and other sources of energy as a driver of our local, national and global economy. With the Senate preparing to take up climate change legislation soon and global efforts to reduce carbon emissions slated to culminate in Copenhagen in December, our energy consumption and production patterns will likely experience major changes in the years ahead. In order to understand where we are and where we're going, I figure it's key to understand how we got here.

Mind you I'm only on page 100 (out of 908 in all and 773 of text), but I'm already fascinated by the story of oil; it's easy to get wrapped up in the "oil enthusiasm" that so captured the hopes and dreams of those who hoped to strike it rich, and the few who actually did so. As Yergin points out, the story of oil is closely tied to the story of capitalism at every twist and turn, in all its positive and negative connotations. Not only do you have the John D. Rockefeller who built up an empire from a modest produce and meat trading business, but also the one who ruthlessly gobbled up competitors who agreed to absorption and drove those out of business who refused.

I didn't know that oil was first commercialized primarily for kerosene, or that the nascent oil drilling business originated in western Pennsylvania (followed soon after by Baku in present-day Azerbaijan). It's hard not to admire those visionaries who realized that the future of the oil business was in integration; it was fruitless to control distribution and refining if you didn't have control over production, and vice versa. The barons of industry realized they had to control it all, and their efforts quickly transformed into oil companies still recognizable today: Royal Dutch, Shell, Gulf, Texaco, Sun. Later, the breakup of the Standard Oil Trust would lead to another set of familiar players: Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Continental and others.

Still, at that point in the game, the early twentieth century, oil was primarily used as an illuminant, although the automobile industry was rapidly opening up a new market. While a catalyst for wealth and progress, oil had not yet reached the point of geopolitical significance. To put it another way: oil was a maker of men, but not yet of a maker of nations.

Describing the efforts of Shell magnate Marcus Samuel to popularize oil as a fuel for transport, Yergin writes: "Here, on the eve of the twentieth century, he looked ahead to prophesy, and rightly so, that oil's great future would be not as a source of illumination, but as a source of power."

I'm not sure if Yergin intended "power" here to have a double meaning, but it certainly encompasses two Merriam Webster definitions: "a source or means of supplying energy" and "possession of control, authority, or influence over others."

It's hard to imagine a world economy that didn't hinge on oil, but that was the panorama at the beginning of the twentieth century. (As Yergin notes in his introduction, a crucial moment in the history of oil came later, on the eve of the First World War, when Winston Churchill, then Britain's Home Secretary, decided to refit the Royal Navy to run on fuel oil instead of coal.) State-owned oil companies, which today are some of the biggest players in the oil business didn't yet have a rationale for existence; a Hugo Chavez or a Lazaro Cardenas (who nationalized Mexico's oil sector) were not only unimaginable but unnecessary.

Even if the world one day finds a way to replace its oil habit, it's likely that access to energy resources (whether from hydroelectric, geothermal, solar or wind power or biofuels) will still underpin the global economy and drive geopolitics. However nostalgic or indulgent, it's nonetheless striking to look back on a world where oil was just oil and not yet "a source of power."