Book Notes: Blood and Oil

Notes on Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum

Michael Klare, 2004
Read November-December 2006

Here’s the book in a nutshell: The Bush/Cheney administration decided in 2001 that the United States should meet her ongoing oil needs by ensuring access to oil supplies. That includes expanding domestic production, but those supplies are limited. So we must act diplomatically and militarily where necessary to get our oil. Unfortunately, the current and future big oil locations are in unstable areas, and fighting is likely to be involved.

… and that’s about it. And I already knew all that, or at least figured it was probably the case. So the book wasn’t very exciting. All in all, it was fine; well researched; solidly written. But not much new if you follow this stuff, and not a compelling read. The lurid title is not representative of the book.

Some selected points:

The 2001 National Energy Policy document that Cheney’s team put together listed these locations as good alternatives to the Persian Gulf:
· Mexico
· Venezuela
· Colombia
· Russia
· Azerbaijan
· Kazakhstan
· Nigeria
· Angola

You wouldn’t exactly call any of those countries stable. Development in most of those will be dogged by political uncertainty, crime, and corruption. Klare cites that in the single year of 2000, Nigeria’s state-owned oil company lost over four billion dollars due to crime and corruption. Unfortunately, oil development is correlated with increasing violence and corruption, as it increases economic inequality and decreases stability.

The most interesting chapter was the penultimate one, Geopolitics Reborn, which discusses American, Russian, and Chinese moves around the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions. All three countries are building alliances with and pouring arms into unstable countries. Klare doesn’t predict that superpower warfare will break out, but he doesn’t like it. China's dog in the Persian Gulf hunt is that if the U.S. controls (implicitly or explicitly) the flow of oil from that area to China, then they have leverage to apply to Taiwan or other points of disagreement.

The last chapter details what Klare thinks we should do:

• move towards a policy of autonomy and integrity


• autonomy – we can’t be held hostage by a single oil supplier


• integrity – we don’t provide aid and arms to countries that don’t meet our ideals


• tighten efficiency standards to reduce oil consumption


• develop energy alternatives, funded by a tax increase on gasoline

Sounds good to me.