Matthew Yeomans didn't realise how much oil pervades our lives until - while researching a book - he tried living without it for 24 hours
From the moment we wake in the morning to the moment we go to sleep, oil controls our lives. Its influence reaches far into politics, international affairs, global economies, human rights and the environmental health of our planet. The most obvious way that oil dominates us, of course, is transportation. Oil powers 97 percent of America's transportation needs and over half the oil consumed daily goes to keeping cars and trucks on the road. That's one barrel out of every seven used in the world. Not surprisingly, the United States has more automobiles than any other country; in fact, it has more cars and trucks than it has people.
But oil is far more important to modern society than simply as fuel for our automobiles and aeroplanes. Oil provides heat in the winter for millions of homes and it accounts for 40 per cent of our total energy needs. Without oil there would be no plastics, nor many of the chemical-based medicines we take for granted. Perhaps most important, we would go hungry without oil: commercial agriculture would grind to a halt without oil to run farm and food processing machinery or to make fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.
To better understand oil's impact on our lives, I devised a little experiment. I would spend a day without oil. How hard could that be? After all, I was living in Brooklyn so I'd already won half the battle; I'd leave the car parked on the street and hope I didn't pick up a parking ticket.
I began in the bathroom. I'd have to carry off the rough and ready look this morning, as petroleum products play a role in my shampoo, shaving cream and deodorant. There was also going to be a lot of water to clear up - my shower-curtain is also an oil product.
Brushing my teeth became a far less appealing experience without the benefit of toothpaste, whose ingredients include petrochemical-enhanced artificial colouring and mineral oils. (But at least I still had my own teeth. If I'd worn petroleum-based dentures, I'd be gumming my way through this particular day.)
As it was, I was going to have to make do with only limited vision as both my contact lenses and plastic lens eyeglasses came from petrochemicals. And I'd have to skip putting on lip balm; that's petroleum oil. Worse still, I'd have to dress my six-month-old son in cloth diapers instead of disposable ones. (What a day to have made the switch to solid food!)
Next came the problem of what to wear. Typically, I live in sneakers but not today - I had to search out an old pair of non-rubber soled leather shoes. It was raining outside but I had to forgo any waterproof outerwear. Gore-Tex, it turns out, is yet another genius invention of the petrochemical industry.
I left my house and immediately encountered another problem. All New York streets are paved with asphalt, the sticky by-product that remains after refining crude oil to extract its more lucrative properties, such as gasoline and heating oil. Lacking powers of levitation, and with not an inch of grass in sight, I had to admit defeat on this point. I traipsed slightly forlorn to my neighbourhood café for breakfast. Eggs and coffee came courtesy of a non-stick pan and a heat-resistant glass pot - products of the petrochemical industry. Defeated again. At least I could pay in cash. All credit and debit cards are oil products.
On my return home, I realised this wasn't going to be the most productive day of my working life because I couldn't use the computer or telephone, both of which depend on oil-based plastics to function. Neither could I kick back and listen to music or watch a movie - CDs and DVDs also contain oil. Perhaps then I could just go and play a round of golf? Stuck again: golf balls contain polybutadiene, another petrochemical.
The list of off-limit items continued. Bandages, blenders, garbage bags, glue, pacemakers and pantyhose (the latter two not being items I needed on this particular day) all got their start as oil. This whole day-without-oil thing was beginning to give me a headache. Perhaps I should just take a few aspirin and forget about the whole thing. You guessed it: aspirin is another proud legacy of oil.
I'd been writing stories about oil for nearly a decade before I began fully to appreciate its power. At first, I viewed oil as just another big industry, albeit one ruled by some of the largest multinational companies on earth. But over time I started to realise that oil was a lot more important than just business.
The main reason that it took me so long to appreciate the power of oil was because it flowed so deeply through my life. This was the industry that had built those cool supertankers that mesmerised me as a child growing up on the coast of Wales, and the same industry whose gas stations gave away coin collections commemorating all my favourite English soccer teams. For a while, my family even made special trips to one Esso gas station to collect free drinking glasses (I think my mother is still using them). As a teenager, I was taught how North Sea oil was the lifeblood for a British economy that was sinking otherwise into a pit of moribund industry. And on my first visit at age 15 to the US, I fell in love with American cars and car culture. Life in America seemed so fast, so supercharged, compared to back home, and it left an indelible mark on my teenage mind - so much so that I would later settle in New York.
At the same time, this industry was responsible for an oil spill that wrecked the coast near my home. It flooded Alaska's Prince William Sound with millions of barrels of oil from the Exxon Valdez within months of my arrival in the US. Later, I would see the full extent of oil pollution and destruction when I travelled the fringes of the Amazon rain forest and met whole communities whose lives had been ruined by oil.
These contradictions had filtered through my brain for years as I followed the oil industry from afar, but it wasn't until the months immediately following the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC that I started to consider the larger role of oil on our global society.
I started to notice how so many of the stories I read each morning in the newspaper were connected to oil. There were the obvious ties between Osama bin Laden's anti-US jihad and America's military presence in Saudi Arabia - a hangover of the Gulf War and U.S. commitment to protect Middle East oil supplies. And there was the increasing military deployment of the US forces in the countries that surround the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Then there were the environmental and energy policies of the Bush administration, which sought to pump new life into America's domestic oil industry while rejecting many of the environmental controls that the rest of the world seemed to agree could combat global warming.
And then there was Iraq, and the US government's bellicose drive to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Opponents of the Bush administration inside the US and all over the world were convinced that this was a war over oil. At the same time, both the US and the UK government of Tony Blair were adamant that oil played no role in the push to putsch Saddam.
The Bush administration's pre-emptive war seemed both preposterous and crass even without the benefit of hindsight that we now enjoy. But I couldn't buy the no-blood-for-oil argument. The US had spent the previous 20 years cultivating relationships with other producing nations and it didn't have to invade Iraq just to satisfy its own oil needs. However, I was convinced that oil played some crucial role in the geopolitical maelstrom surrounding Iraq that neither the pro- nor anti-war crowd was addressing.
That was when I decided to undertake this journey through the world of oil that has now formed the basis of my book. The purpose of the journey was simple - to understand and explain in straightforward terms the ways that oil has come to control our lives.
This text is extracted from Oil: Anatomy of an Industry, by Matthew Yeomans, published by The New Press (£14.95 in UK)