openDemocracy: Oil and American politics by Godfrey Hodgson

openDemocracy

Oil and American politics by Godfrey Hodgson

This is not about oil”, said Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush’s secretary of defence, as America prepared to invade Iraq. Few objects have had greater priority in the Bush administration’s public-relations campaigns than the insistence that the United States invaded, not for any basely selfish or self-aggrandising reason but for one of a series of high-minded motives: to spread American ideas of democracy, to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or to take Saddam’s boot off the throats of the Iraqi people. There is no need to disbelieve any of those idealistic motives. But the fact is that the Bush administration’s foreign policy is indeed “about oil”. Many non-Americans have grown up with the idea that American power derives from unlimited reserves of cheap oil, coal and natural gas; the picture of an America which could afford to leave the lights on all night in the skyscrapers and drive SUVs to its hearts’ content dies hard. In fact, the United States is now dangerously dependent on imported energy. To take just two examples: by 2004 US oil production, at 5.4 million barrels a day, was only slightly ahead of the then 5 million barrels in the British and Norwegian sections of the North Sea; in the same year, the US’s natural-gas reserves (189 billion cubic feet) were not much more than 10% of Russia’s.

The point is easily grasped by a simple historical timeline. In 1940, the United States produced over two-thirds of all the world’s oil and natural gas (Saudi Arabia, in contrast, had drilled its first successful well in the previous year, and as late as 1946 Saudi production was only 3% of the US’s):

* in the late 1940s, for the first time, the US began to import oil
* in the 1950s, 10% of US oil consumption was imported
* in the 1960s, 18% of US oil consumption was imported
* in 1972, US oil production began an irreversible decline
* in 1973, the share of imports in US oil consumption reached 30%
* in 1976 imports reached 40%
* by 2000, the year in which George W Bush was elected, imports reached 53%
* by 2004, the end of George W Bush’s first term, imports were 57% of consumption
* the administration’s own experts warn that by around 2025, the United States will have to import more than two-thirds of its oil and gas; current trends suggest that point may be reached even earlier

Conservative politicians in the United States don’t like to talk about these facts, and conservative columnists rarely mention them. After all, what if a “lone superpower” runs out of gas, like a stranded humvee?