Oil: "the excrement of the devil" and some of its works

It's gotten a little lost now that we are living in a world turned upside down by coronovirus, but we're also in the backwash of some kind of global oil price war. No wonder the great casino on Wall Street has gone bonkers.

Just what's going on with the oil business seems murky. That psychopathic Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia has been locking up his relatives, perhaps to seize the throne prematurely, and somehow his antics turned into a bidding war with Russia over who could pump and sell the most oil at lower rates. Global prices took a nose dive, which might seem like a good thing when you have to fill up the car, but it's not so simple.

Lower gasoline prices will benefit consumers and lower transportation costs for businesses. However, they are very bad for U.S. oil producers. Highly indebted fracking firms may not be able to obtain further bank loans or perhaps even stay in business. States such as Texas and North Dakota, where fossil fuel extraction is a big part of the economy, would face hard times.

"The excrement of the devil" wags the dog that is the world economy; our current apparent collapse into recession may have as much to do with a couple of dictators' fossil fuel fixations as financial barons fearing the flu.

We're fortunate that someone does know a great deal about the history and machinations of the oil economy -- and where Trump and Russia fit in it all. MSNBC's news host Rachel Maddow has a story to tell.

Her new book Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth consists of 29 chapters of good yarns, episodes in fossil fuel villainy. In this vivid denunciation of the cruelty, corruption, and crackpot lunacy of the oil extraction industry, she spells out the horrors in a well-crafted romp about lone wolf drillers, corporate kleptocrats, and vicious dictators, all the way from Pennsylvania fields, to fracking quakes shaking Oklahoma, through Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, and Venezuela, to Vladimir Putin, Rex Tillerson and Donald Trump. She writes:

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night. But the political impact of the industry that brings us those things is also worth recognizing as a key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we're now living through.

I don't mean to be rude, but I also want to be clear: the oil and gas industry is essentially a big casino that can produce both power and triumphant great gobs of cash, often with little regard for merit. That equation invites gangsterism, extortion, thuggery, and the sorts of folks who enjoy these hobbies. It's practitioners have been lumbering across the globe of late, causing mindless damage and laying the groundwork for the global catastrophe that is the climate crisis, but also reordering short-term geopolitics in a strong-but-dumb survival contest that renders everything we think of as politics as just theater. ...

And so she goes on to lay out in a series of related vignettes what she concludes: Russia's kleptocrats, finding themselves rulers of a collapsed country with no productive economic assets but a backward oil industry, have been "driven to distraction" and have worked to ensnare the world in the international chaos we suffer from -- "the new world disorder."

This is a provocative, thoroughly researched, book, well worth reading. ...I read this as an audiobook while driving across the country last fall. As it happens, one of the few semi-hopeful eruptions of outraged citizens taking back power from the oil barons that Maddow recounts took place in a state we drove through. For decades, Oklahoma's schools were starved of resources because of the refusal of oil barons, fracking cowboys, and corporations to pay taxes on their wealth. The plutocrats even won a provision in the state constitution to require a three-quarters vote to raise their taxes. But Oklahomans have been fighting back.

What happened was democracy. "In politics, money most often trumps merit," says Mike Cantrell, the independent Oklahoma oilman who finally got fed up with the lousy funding and bucked Big Oil in his state. "But constituency trumps everything." After years of killing cuts, the constituency finally started to kick up enough of a fuss that pols started to worry about the damage to their elective selves if they stuck to the status quo. Starting in early 2018, months of walkouts, strikes, and rallies by students, teachers, and parents across the state finally gave Oklahomans in elective office enough courage to punch the bully in the nose. Or at least be seen trying to throw that punch if they wanted to keep their seats.

In the spring of 2018, the legislature approved a series of tax raises (with the needed three-quarters majority in both houses) to increase funding in public education, including a teacher pay raise of close to 15 percent, across the board. Key was a hike in the energy production tax from 2 percent to 5 percent ...

Reading Blowout, I knew what these signs along the Oklahoma highway meant: democracy in action.