Long live oil.(social, economic, and military importance of petroleum)

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 13

MRS. Kerry's reference to "greed for oil" can be passed over, and is being passed over, as routine political hyperbole. But maybe the time has come to examine the words and their meaning. This is so because "oil" is widely used as the great engine of human avarice. In years--and centuries--gone by, the devil word was "gold." It was gold that brought out the reserves of evil in men. It ranked with and even exceeded love & sex. Oil could not, of course, go through hobgoblinization until its uses were discovered. But now it is used as the commonplace agent of evil.

What needs to be said about oil is that it is worth fighting for. We would all agree that without air and water life instantly ends. Without oil, life does not end, but life radically changes.

If one contemplates oil as simply an agent of energy, the idea becomes instantly clearer. Every advance by mankind against the material duress of life is most easily expressed in terms of energy spared. Electrical power is generated in part by running water and by nuclear energy. But mostly it is created by oil and gas. What is it that a people is willing to fight for? The security of home and hearth come first, and that is achieved mostly by weaponry; but weapons that seek to have their effects beyond the range of a cartridge of gunpowder do so, on battleships and airplanes, by the propellant force of oil.

If you are willing to die in order to protect your local hospital, then you must be willing to die for oil, because without oil, your hospital won't take you beyond a surgeon's scalpel, and a surgeon is helpless without illumination, which is provided (mostly) by oil.

To say that we must not fight for oil is utter cant. To fight for oil is to fight in order to maintain such sovereignty as we exercise over the natural world. Socialism plus electricity, Lenin said at the outset of the Soviet revolution, would usher in the ideal state. He was wrong about socialism but not about ...