FPIF-PetroPolitics Special Report
January 2004

PetroPolitics Conference Report

By Miriam Pemberton

Foreword

There was some irony in the news from early December 2003 that Halliburton, the oil field services company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, was charging the U.S. government inflated prices to import oil into Iraq. The administration’s confident pre-war prediction that Iraqi oil exports would finance post-war redevelopment has now become a distant dream. But in the meantime, while positioning themselves to tap into Iraq’s oil reserves, politically connected U.S. oil corporations are supplying oil to Iraq, and gouging U.S. taxpayers in the process.

As our essay on Oil Politics makes clear, the Bush administration’s dreams of remaking the Middle East are intimately connected to fulfilling the goals of its National Energy Strategy (not to mention those of its friends in the oil business) to gain control of more sources of foreign oil. This goal is in turn related to a military strategy requiring new foreign military bases and new interventions to secure those supplies. Beyond this strategy’s poor record thus far in Iraq, it is a loser on many other fronts. Begin with the fact that every year the world uses four times as much oil as it finds—the supply is running out. The world has no other choice but to shift its sights to other energy sources.

It is also a losing strategy for oil-rich countries like Iraq. If and when the Iraqi people manage to find their way to a just and peaceful future, and to secure their oil fields for production, they should look around them before banking their economic recovery on oil wealth. The global record, as outlined in the essay on Oil and Development, shows that countries most dependent on oil exports are among the most economically troubled, the least democratic, and the most conflict-ridden in the world.

Perhaps above all, though, it is a losing strategy for the planet and its people. The weight of scientific evidence makes clear that drastically curtailing global fossil fuel burning, long before supplies run out, is necessary to avoid a future wracked by the catastrophic consequences of global climate change.

These conclusions are supported by the just-completed review of World Bank lending, which recommends that the Bank end all support for the oil industry by 2008.

This is an important step toward breaking the world’s addiction to oil. Finishing the job will require new alliances across social movements and across borders. Lately the problem of oil has emerged as a potential connection between the work of the peace, environment, anti-corporate globalization, development and labor movements. This text tries to draw the big picture of the problem, by bringing its elements together in one place. For years renewable energy advocates have said that the barriers to a clean energy future are political, not technical. That has never been more true than it is today We hope this text will inform common work among these movements in removing the political barriers to a sustainable energy future.

Producing this text has been a group effort. In addition to the principal authors, these people had a hand in it: Julie Ajinkya, Frida Berrigan, Tonya Cannariato, John Gershman, Janil Greenaway, Steve Kretzmann, Erik Leaver, Katrina Managan, Nadia Martinez, Talli Nauman, Jim Vallette, Emira Woods, and Daphne Wysham. Thanks go to the following foundations for their crucial support: the Educational Foundation of America, the Open Society Institute, and the Rockefeller Family and Associates.

Miriam Pemberton, editor

The Institute for Policy Studies and the Interhemispheric Resource Center are nonpartisan, nonprofit 501c3 organizations that do not endorse any candidate for any office.

Table of Contents

Foreword

What is PetroPolitics

Oil & Politics
Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of the World’s Oil

Fact Sheet: The Oil Industry: Well Connected

Oil & Climate Change
Global Warming Backgrounder

Fact Sheet: Greenhouse Gas Producers: U.S. Leads the Field

Oil & War
Fueling Conflict

Fact Sheet: Oil and War

Oil & Development
The Global Record

Fact Sheet: Oil and Poverty

Alternatives to Oil
Toward A Global Energy Transition

Fact Sheet: Subsidy Shift

introduction | politics | climate | war | development | alternatives | resources
FACT SHEETS: industry | greenhouse gas producers | oil & war | oil & poverty | subsidy shift