I just finished listening to the audiobook version of volume 2 of Shelby Foote's three-volume opus The Civil War, A Narrative. I finished volume 1 a few weeks ago. This is a second reading for me as I originally read all three volumes about twenty years ago. Since it looks like it will be some weeks before I get my hands on volume 3, I think I'll write a few things about the first two volumes now.
For starters, I'd recommend that people not be intimidated by the heft of these volumes. The late Shelby Foote was a master at taking massive amounts of material and presenting the results in a lucid and engaging manner. Once you pick up his account of the Civil War, you will find it very hard to put down.
Otherwise, I'll limit this post to three main points.
My first point is that, unlike most books on the Civil War, the sheer size of Foote's history is about the only thing I've ever run into (short of the 100 odd volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion) that gives the reader a notion of the true scope of the conflict. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with the war has heard of Chancellorsville, Manassas, Vicksburg and Shiloh. How many people, though, have heard of Pea Ridge, Bristoe Station, Port Hudson, or Kelly's Ford?
There were probably a couple of hundred of these mostly unknown, often desperate and bloody fights. Some of them, in fact (such as Pea Ridge and Port Hudson), were battles of critical importance. Yet the Civil War was so large that a battle had to be absolutely titanic for people to remember it. Foote describes dozens of these forgotten engagements in the scope of his history and, yet, manages to keep his history interesting, despite the obvious hazards involved in discussing countless battles that not many people have ever heard of.
My second point has to do with the quality of both the leaders and the soldiers who fought on each side.
It's impossible not to be impressed by the boldness and skill consistently displayed by Robert E. Lee and his generals. The problem is that the focus on Lee's victories has created an impression that all of the South's military leaders were in the same league as Lee. Foote makes it clear that they weren't.
The focus on the way Lee consistently ran rings around Federal opponents has also created an impression that Federal leadership was fairly inept. Sometimes it was. Often, though, it was anything but. To give an example, when it comes to leadership, no bold and dazzling maneuver ever made by Robert E. Lee ever surpassed the way Grant advanced on Vicksburg.
As for the soldiers, history has remembered many events such as the Federal rout at Bull Run, McClellan's retreat on the Peninsula and the collapse of Howard's corps at Chancellorsville and, then, at Gettysburg. The impression has come down to us that, unlike their Rebel opponents, the Yankees were often inclined to run.
Well, often enough, they did. So to though, as Foote points out, on occasion after occasion the Rebels did the same thing in just as embarrassing a manner. In fact, easily the most inexcusable rout of the war, a tale well told by Shelby Foote, was the collapse of a veteran Confederate army on Missionary Ridge.
For those who are not familiar with this fight, it happened just outside Chattanooga Tennessee, in late November of 1863. Ordered to make a frontal assault on a line of rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, 20 to 25,000 men of the Federal Army of the Cumberland, did as ordered. They were not ordered to assault the ridge itself, though. Missionary Ridge was held by the bulk of the Rebel Army of Tennessee and regarded, by both sides, as impregnable. Turns out it wasn't. The Federal infantry, ignoring the orders of their leadership, just kept on going, stormed the impregnable 500-foot high ridge and utterly routed the Confederate Army of Tennessee.
Then there is another, fairly unexpected, matter that even the most casual reading of The Civil War, A Narrative makes clear.
Pretty much everybody familiar with the history of the Civil War is familiar with Lincoln's endless search for a general who would fight. Eventually he found his man in Grant.
Much less often remarked upon, though, is the interesting fact that after the death of the well respected but not exactly successful Albert Sidney Johnston (killed in April of 1862 at Shiloh) Davis had exactly the same problem in the West as Lincoln had in the East. Beauregard, Joe Johnston, Pemberton, Bragg, and others came and went and, in the case of Joe Johnston, came again and went again as Davis also hunted for a leader who would fight.
Years back a historian named Kenneth P. Williams wrote a multivolume history called Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War. Well, to his credit Lincoln found one but it certainly took him long enough to do it. In Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis found a general in the East in only about a year but, in the West, he never found one at all. The result was an endless series of Confederate disasters in the West.
The Civil War is to America what the Illiad is to Greece. If you want to learn about it, you can't do better than to read Shelby Foote's The Civil War, A Narrative.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
A Drive to New York
Funny all the things you realize whenever you take a ride from Point A to Point B. All you have to do is keep your eyes open and your brain engaged.
For many years I've heard people ranting all about how we depend too much on our cars. We ought to build mass transit, they say, and isn't it a shame that city to city passenger trains have all but disappeared? In my case, that theory got put to the test this last weekend. Not for the first time I drove from suburban Washington to suburban New York and back. From this experience and others it has become sadly clear that trains have serious limits.
There are, of course, places where mass transit makes a lot of sense. Many trips into Washington D.C. have made it obvious to me that, without the Washington subway system, the city would be jammed into a perpetual state of gridlock. When I need to go downtown on a workday, I wouldn't even dream of driving a car.
The key here seems to be density. If there are a lot of people in close proximity to each end of a train ride then a railroad connection may be justified.
In theory, that means that city to city rail transit should also make sense. In the real world, though, It doesn't seem to work that way. It does, of course, if you are a business traveler going from city center to city center. If the cities involved are close enough together, like Washington and New York, going from Union Station to Penn Station simply beats the living daylights out of going from Reagan National Airport to LaGuardia. The train is comfortable and, if you take it, you don't have to endure the cab ride from LaGuardia into Manhattan. Even the expense, particularly if you are on an expense account, is endurable.
Then there's travel for the rest of us. How many people who live in the Washington area live near Union Station? How many people who live in the New York area live in close proximity to Penn Station? Not a lot, I can tell you. Many (most?) of us have to travel ten, twenty or even thirty miles just to get to the station. Twenty-first century metropolitan areas cover a lot of land area.
So, in most cases, the only way to travel from one city to the other is to drive. This is even more the case if you are driving as a couple or have kids. The one person, one way, non-premium fare from Washington to New York is over $60. Make it two people, two ways and you end up spending about $250. just for city to city transportation. Moreover, you then have to get to and from the station. From where I live - Silver Spring, Maryland - that means a cab to the Metro station and a subway to Union Station on the Washington end. On the New York end it means getting off of Amtrak in New York and getting onto the Long Island Railroad, followed by a cab or family pickup upon reaching my Long Island Railroad destination. Last weekend, this was my sister's house in Amityville. Also keep in mind that all of this entails constantly nursmaiding a lot of luggage.
Driving to Amityville and back isn't a piece of cake either. For one person to drive there and back in a reasonably fuel-efficient car (I drove a Honda Civic this past weekend) it can cost about $40. in gas and $40. in tolls. But for two people or three or four the rate stays about the same. Moreover, when you get to your destination, since you have your own car with you, you can make side trips - pretty important if, like my wife and I, you're visiting a whole bunch of people, none of whom live anywhere close to a railroad.
In other words, for all but a limited class of travelers, city to city rail transportation is not an option and, very likely, can never be an option. That's actually too bad because the drive is dreadful.
Depending on traffic, it can easily take five or five and a half hours each way. As for scenery, there are some pretty stretches of road (example - crossing the Susquehanna River on the Tydings Bridge) but they are balanced by some areas of absolutely stunning ugliness. Examples of the latter include the drive through Baltimore, the area around the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the entire section of the road that starts around the southern tip of Staten Island and ends at the western boundry of Long Island's Nassau County.
This last makes a point about the wonders of urban life.
New York may be one of the great cities of the world and Manhattan is, indeed, awesome but surrounding Manhattan is the industrial region in northeastern New Jersey and the often ugly and always congested boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens (ugly from the highway anyway - and often ugly even when you get off the highway). People complain a lot about sprawl and often seem to want to return to a vanished golden age when everyone lived within the boundaries of relatively compact cities. If New York is any example, that's fantasy. I can't see any way that you can have Manhattan without the miles and miles of industrial and residential sprawl that surrounds it. It's the industry that supports the beloved central city. As for the surrounding outer boroughs, if you don't have them, you don't have housing for the workers needed to make Manhattan viable.
So what else can you learn when you keep your eyes open on the drive between Washington and New York? Well, there's a lot you can learn about government and about infrastructure - some of it a bit surprising.
Take the roads. Everyone loves to hate the New Jersey Turnpike and everyone loves to point out how corrupt and incompetent the government of New Jersey happens to be. Well, I know little about the New Jersey government but, at this point in my life, I've probably driven the round trip length of the Turnpike from the Delaware River to New York at least a hundred times. You know what? The Turnpike is an excellent road. It's a toll road but the tolls are comparatively reasonable and the revenue from them seems to be well spent maintaining a New Jersey Turnpike that, overall, is well designed and well maintained. There are regular rest stops along the highway and, if you break down, the road seems to be patrolled by guys whose job it is to pull to the side of the road and help you. I don't know what this service costs but, when you need it (within limits), who cares? How many other roads offer such service?
Then, to take a comparison, you cross the Verrazano Bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn. Crossing is free heading west to east but costs you $9.00 going from east to west. What's the money spent on though? Certainly not on the upkeep of the bridge. The Verrazano is one of the great suspension bridges of the world but it's a safe bet that one day it's going to collapse for the lack of a paint job. I'm not joking here. Thirty years ago the elevated West Side Highway in Manhattan was closed after a truck fell through the roadway. The highway's steel supports had simply rusted away because the authorities hadn't protected them by painting them on a regular basis.
Not painting economically essential structures so that they will eventually collapse seems to be the way things are done in New York City. On the way home, my wife and I made a side trip into Queens to go to a wool store on Jamaica Avenue. While my wife bought wool, I waited outside and, with nothing else to do, started eyeballing the Jamaica Avenue El running about twenty feet over my head. You would not believe the rust I saw. I'm not taking esthetics here. I'm talking about serious structurally damaging rust on critical economic infrastructure.
To get back to tolls, there were other tolls on my Washington to New York drive besides the ones I've already mentioned. Some are reasonable. Others, though, really drive home the absolutely amazing rapacity of certain governments.
Here I'm talking about Delaware.
To go about 90 miles on the well designed, well maintained New Jersey Turnpike you are charged $4.25 each way. On the well designed and, mostly, well maintained 110-mile section of I-95 going through Maryland, there is one $5.00 toll, charged to northbound travelers only.
In the middle, though, you have Delaware.
Delaware is a state that is proud that it does not charge sales taxes to its citizens. Obviously, the citizens like this. The merchants like it too, since this lets them lure shoppers away from Maryland and Pennsylvania. Well, fair enough. If Maryland and Pennsylvania wish to use their sales taxes to put local merchants at a competitive disadvantage, it may be foolish but that's not any problem of Delaware's.
Still, like all governments, Delaware needs to raise revenues. How do they do it? Well, one way they do it is to pick the pockets of out of state residents.
About 12 to 15 miles of I-95 are routed through the northern fringe of the state of Delaware. Since this section of the road is, mostly, useful to get through Delaware rather from one Delaware destination to another, it doesn't take a genius to realize that it's more likely to be frequented by out of staters than locals.
So what kind of road is it? Overall, I think it accurate to say that it is the most poorly designed and most poorly maintained section of I-95 between Washington and New York (actually, from other trips I've taken, I'd lay odds that it is the most poorly designed and maintained section of I-95 between Florida and Maine).
If you run into traffic jams between northern New Jersey and the Washington Beltway, the tie-ups will most likely be located in Delaware. In fact, often they are actually caused by Delaware - specifically by the too-narrow toll plaza you go through every time you pass through the state. For little over a dozen miles of badly maintained, often congested, road you are hit with a $3.00 charge each way. If the infamous Jersey Turnpike charged this much per mile, my $4.25 toll would be about $18.00. I know it sounds like the most dreadful pun but on I-95 the state of Delaware really does engage in a most blatant form of highway robbery on a daily basis. Moreover, since their victims tend to be people from other states nobody seems to be in a position to do anything about it - even though I-95 is a federal, not a state, highway.
When you take a long drive, as your transmission goes into "Drive" your brain often goes into "Neutral." You only keep your eyes open to see signs, potential hazards, and golden arches. You shouldn't. Just keep your brain in "look at what's around me" mode. It's amazing the things you see and the things you realize.
For many years I've heard people ranting all about how we depend too much on our cars. We ought to build mass transit, they say, and isn't it a shame that city to city passenger trains have all but disappeared? In my case, that theory got put to the test this last weekend. Not for the first time I drove from suburban Washington to suburban New York and back. From this experience and others it has become sadly clear that trains have serious limits.
There are, of course, places where mass transit makes a lot of sense. Many trips into Washington D.C. have made it obvious to me that, without the Washington subway system, the city would be jammed into a perpetual state of gridlock. When I need to go downtown on a workday, I wouldn't even dream of driving a car.
The key here seems to be density. If there are a lot of people in close proximity to each end of a train ride then a railroad connection may be justified.
In theory, that means that city to city rail transit should also make sense. In the real world, though, It doesn't seem to work that way. It does, of course, if you are a business traveler going from city center to city center. If the cities involved are close enough together, like Washington and New York, going from Union Station to Penn Station simply beats the living daylights out of going from Reagan National Airport to LaGuardia. The train is comfortable and, if you take it, you don't have to endure the cab ride from LaGuardia into Manhattan. Even the expense, particularly if you are on an expense account, is endurable.
Then there's travel for the rest of us. How many people who live in the Washington area live near Union Station? How many people who live in the New York area live in close proximity to Penn Station? Not a lot, I can tell you. Many (most?) of us have to travel ten, twenty or even thirty miles just to get to the station. Twenty-first century metropolitan areas cover a lot of land area.
So, in most cases, the only way to travel from one city to the other is to drive. This is even more the case if you are driving as a couple or have kids. The one person, one way, non-premium fare from Washington to New York is over $60. Make it two people, two ways and you end up spending about $250. just for city to city transportation. Moreover, you then have to get to and from the station. From where I live - Silver Spring, Maryland - that means a cab to the Metro station and a subway to Union Station on the Washington end. On the New York end it means getting off of Amtrak in New York and getting onto the Long Island Railroad, followed by a cab or family pickup upon reaching my Long Island Railroad destination. Last weekend, this was my sister's house in Amityville. Also keep in mind that all of this entails constantly nursmaiding a lot of luggage.
Driving to Amityville and back isn't a piece of cake either. For one person to drive there and back in a reasonably fuel-efficient car (I drove a Honda Civic this past weekend) it can cost about $40. in gas and $40. in tolls. But for two people or three or four the rate stays about the same. Moreover, when you get to your destination, since you have your own car with you, you can make side trips - pretty important if, like my wife and I, you're visiting a whole bunch of people, none of whom live anywhere close to a railroad.
In other words, for all but a limited class of travelers, city to city rail transportation is not an option and, very likely, can never be an option. That's actually too bad because the drive is dreadful.
Depending on traffic, it can easily take five or five and a half hours each way. As for scenery, there are some pretty stretches of road (example - crossing the Susquehanna River on the Tydings Bridge) but they are balanced by some areas of absolutely stunning ugliness. Examples of the latter include the drive through Baltimore, the area around the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the entire section of the road that starts around the southern tip of Staten Island and ends at the western boundry of Long Island's Nassau County.
This last makes a point about the wonders of urban life.
New York may be one of the great cities of the world and Manhattan is, indeed, awesome but surrounding Manhattan is the industrial region in northeastern New Jersey and the often ugly and always congested boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens (ugly from the highway anyway - and often ugly even when you get off the highway). People complain a lot about sprawl and often seem to want to return to a vanished golden age when everyone lived within the boundaries of relatively compact cities. If New York is any example, that's fantasy. I can't see any way that you can have Manhattan without the miles and miles of industrial and residential sprawl that surrounds it. It's the industry that supports the beloved central city. As for the surrounding outer boroughs, if you don't have them, you don't have housing for the workers needed to make Manhattan viable.
So what else can you learn when you keep your eyes open on the drive between Washington and New York? Well, there's a lot you can learn about government and about infrastructure - some of it a bit surprising.
Take the roads. Everyone loves to hate the New Jersey Turnpike and everyone loves to point out how corrupt and incompetent the government of New Jersey happens to be. Well, I know little about the New Jersey government but, at this point in my life, I've probably driven the round trip length of the Turnpike from the Delaware River to New York at least a hundred times. You know what? The Turnpike is an excellent road. It's a toll road but the tolls are comparatively reasonable and the revenue from them seems to be well spent maintaining a New Jersey Turnpike that, overall, is well designed and well maintained. There are regular rest stops along the highway and, if you break down, the road seems to be patrolled by guys whose job it is to pull to the side of the road and help you. I don't know what this service costs but, when you need it (within limits), who cares? How many other roads offer such service?
Then, to take a comparison, you cross the Verrazano Bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn. Crossing is free heading west to east but costs you $9.00 going from east to west. What's the money spent on though? Certainly not on the upkeep of the bridge. The Verrazano is one of the great suspension bridges of the world but it's a safe bet that one day it's going to collapse for the lack of a paint job. I'm not joking here. Thirty years ago the elevated West Side Highway in Manhattan was closed after a truck fell through the roadway. The highway's steel supports had simply rusted away because the authorities hadn't protected them by painting them on a regular basis.
Not painting economically essential structures so that they will eventually collapse seems to be the way things are done in New York City. On the way home, my wife and I made a side trip into Queens to go to a wool store on Jamaica Avenue. While my wife bought wool, I waited outside and, with nothing else to do, started eyeballing the Jamaica Avenue El running about twenty feet over my head. You would not believe the rust I saw. I'm not taking esthetics here. I'm talking about serious structurally damaging rust on critical economic infrastructure.
To get back to tolls, there were other tolls on my Washington to New York drive besides the ones I've already mentioned. Some are reasonable. Others, though, really drive home the absolutely amazing rapacity of certain governments.
Here I'm talking about Delaware.
To go about 90 miles on the well designed, well maintained New Jersey Turnpike you are charged $4.25 each way. On the well designed and, mostly, well maintained 110-mile section of I-95 going through Maryland, there is one $5.00 toll, charged to northbound travelers only.
In the middle, though, you have Delaware.
Delaware is a state that is proud that it does not charge sales taxes to its citizens. Obviously, the citizens like this. The merchants like it too, since this lets them lure shoppers away from Maryland and Pennsylvania. Well, fair enough. If Maryland and Pennsylvania wish to use their sales taxes to put local merchants at a competitive disadvantage, it may be foolish but that's not any problem of Delaware's.
Still, like all governments, Delaware needs to raise revenues. How do they do it? Well, one way they do it is to pick the pockets of out of state residents.
About 12 to 15 miles of I-95 are routed through the northern fringe of the state of Delaware. Since this section of the road is, mostly, useful to get through Delaware rather from one Delaware destination to another, it doesn't take a genius to realize that it's more likely to be frequented by out of staters than locals.
So what kind of road is it? Overall, I think it accurate to say that it is the most poorly designed and most poorly maintained section of I-95 between Washington and New York (actually, from other trips I've taken, I'd lay odds that it is the most poorly designed and maintained section of I-95 between Florida and Maine).
If you run into traffic jams between northern New Jersey and the Washington Beltway, the tie-ups will most likely be located in Delaware. In fact, often they are actually caused by Delaware - specifically by the too-narrow toll plaza you go through every time you pass through the state. For little over a dozen miles of badly maintained, often congested, road you are hit with a $3.00 charge each way. If the infamous Jersey Turnpike charged this much per mile, my $4.25 toll would be about $18.00. I know it sounds like the most dreadful pun but on I-95 the state of Delaware really does engage in a most blatant form of highway robbery on a daily basis. Moreover, since their victims tend to be people from other states nobody seems to be in a position to do anything about it - even though I-95 is a federal, not a state, highway.
When you take a long drive, as your transmission goes into "Drive" your brain often goes into "Neutral." You only keep your eyes open to see signs, potential hazards, and golden arches. You shouldn't. Just keep your brain in "look at what's around me" mode. It's amazing the things you see and the things you realize.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Oil on the Brain
The other day I finished Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline by Lisa Margonelli. This journalistic survey of the worldwide oil industry attempts to make two points.
The first concerns the ogres who rip us off at the pump.
Ms. Margonelli begins her book at a local gas station. Gas stations are simple places, right? Well, if you don't know anything about them (I can't say I know much) they certainly seem to be. Learn something, though, (as the author took the trouble to do) and you find that running a gas station is not just hard work but also a remarkably risky and complex job. So, for that matter, is being a distributor who sells gasoline to gas stations or running the refinery that sells its gasoline to distributors. Drilling for oil isn't a piece of cake either. Unhappily, for the people who love to believe that we are victims of vast conspiracies, all too many of the oil industry employees Ms. Margonelli portrays in her book seem to be over-worked and under-paid. As for their, mostly small, businesses they function in such a ferociously risky and competitive environment that they are poorly cast in the role of ogre.
How about the big oil companies? They're still evil, right? Well in some ways maybe but, mostly, no. They too are caught between customers who want the world for a dollar a gallon and scapegoating by third world governments who themselves are characterized by a mix of corruption, incompetence and greed.
So where's the villain? Doesn't a good story need a villain? Yes it does and this leads to Lisa Margonelli's second point. It's not the people and it's not even the companies. It's the product.
Basically, oil is different than other commodity. There is something about its current indispensability that makes dealing with it at all, on virtually any level, a deal with the devil. To hammer home her point the author focuses on the oil state. She looks at four dreadful examples in particular - Venezuela, Chad, Iran and Nigeria.
Absent oil, none of these countries has ever had a lot going for it economically. Chad, in particular, is and always has been an economic basket case. The discovery of oil, then, should be economic salvation, shouldn't it?
That's the problem. It rarely seems to be. Indeed, it is often the exact opposite. Petroleum has the power to distort governments and economies to such an extent that, instead of creating wealth, oil often ends up creating conflict, corruption, environmental degradation and even more poverty.
As she does with the various players in the oil industry itself, the author's portrayal of the people caught in the web of the oil state is extremely sympathetic. Actually, in fact, I thought she was a little too sympathetic in her portrayal of the Iranians but, in terms of the overall point she is making about the oil state, that's neither here nor there.
It's easy to blame oil companies for every evil relating to oil. However, it is governments who are responsible for the well being of their people, not oil companies. So, if you want scapegoats, by all means blame the oil companies. If you want explanations, though, things turn out to be more complicated.
Basically, when oil is discovered in a poor country no government can refuse to give in to the temptation to exploit the discovery. Neither can oil companies fail to do what it takes to produce oil wherever they find it. After all, they cannot live without new supplies of oil. As for the population, naturally they expect to benefit from the windfall brought by oil. How could they not? So people innocently put up with the depredations necessary to extract the stuff.
Somehow, though, the ending is rarely happy. Local industries cannot compete with the salaries paid by the oil companies. So they die. Governments don't need to tax their populations to raise revenue. Sounds great but this also means that they do not need the cooperation and support of their populations in order to raise tax revenues. The result is usually autocracy - "no representation without taxation," as the saying goes. However, flush with money but lacking the institutions capable of handling their newfound wealth, the spending of oil state governments is often irresponsible and invariably corrupt. The result is tragedy.
So what's the solution to the dilemmas presented by oil? In the author's eyes there is only one solution. The world must wean itself off the stuff. Fair enough. It's not a particularly original conclusion but, given that she has done her homework, Ms. Margonelli can make it with some authority.
She uses alternative fuel developments in China to illustrate the direction she believes we should move in. My own sense is that her choice of location is interesting but a bit problematical. Yet, the direction the author clearly feels we should move in - to transition from an oil to a hydrogen based economy - is very probably (if it is technically possible) our best long term option.
Oil on the Brain was an easy and enjoyable read. Whoever knew that a chapter on gas station operations could be so interesting? Still, it deals with serious problems and draws serious conclusions.
The universal craving for endless quantities of petroleum in a world of limited supply has turned oil into the economic equivalent of an addictive drug. We need to get beyond scapegoating people and industries and start to deal with the reality of our addiction.
The problem is that, however destructive oil may have become, there are no panaceas. So going cold turkey is not really an option. Yet we do need to develop other fuels. This is hardly an original argument but Oil on the Brain does make it a persuasive one.
The first concerns the ogres who rip us off at the pump.
Ms. Margonelli begins her book at a local gas station. Gas stations are simple places, right? Well, if you don't know anything about them (I can't say I know much) they certainly seem to be. Learn something, though, (as the author took the trouble to do) and you find that running a gas station is not just hard work but also a remarkably risky and complex job. So, for that matter, is being a distributor who sells gasoline to gas stations or running the refinery that sells its gasoline to distributors. Drilling for oil isn't a piece of cake either. Unhappily, for the people who love to believe that we are victims of vast conspiracies, all too many of the oil industry employees Ms. Margonelli portrays in her book seem to be over-worked and under-paid. As for their, mostly small, businesses they function in such a ferociously risky and competitive environment that they are poorly cast in the role of ogre.
How about the big oil companies? They're still evil, right? Well in some ways maybe but, mostly, no. They too are caught between customers who want the world for a dollar a gallon and scapegoating by third world governments who themselves are characterized by a mix of corruption, incompetence and greed.
So where's the villain? Doesn't a good story need a villain? Yes it does and this leads to Lisa Margonelli's second point. It's not the people and it's not even the companies. It's the product.
Basically, oil is different than other commodity. There is something about its current indispensability that makes dealing with it at all, on virtually any level, a deal with the devil. To hammer home her point the author focuses on the oil state. She looks at four dreadful examples in particular - Venezuela, Chad, Iran and Nigeria.
Absent oil, none of these countries has ever had a lot going for it economically. Chad, in particular, is and always has been an economic basket case. The discovery of oil, then, should be economic salvation, shouldn't it?
That's the problem. It rarely seems to be. Indeed, it is often the exact opposite. Petroleum has the power to distort governments and economies to such an extent that, instead of creating wealth, oil often ends up creating conflict, corruption, environmental degradation and even more poverty.
As she does with the various players in the oil industry itself, the author's portrayal of the people caught in the web of the oil state is extremely sympathetic. Actually, in fact, I thought she was a little too sympathetic in her portrayal of the Iranians but, in terms of the overall point she is making about the oil state, that's neither here nor there.
It's easy to blame oil companies for every evil relating to oil. However, it is governments who are responsible for the well being of their people, not oil companies. So, if you want scapegoats, by all means blame the oil companies. If you want explanations, though, things turn out to be more complicated.
Basically, when oil is discovered in a poor country no government can refuse to give in to the temptation to exploit the discovery. Neither can oil companies fail to do what it takes to produce oil wherever they find it. After all, they cannot live without new supplies of oil. As for the population, naturally they expect to benefit from the windfall brought by oil. How could they not? So people innocently put up with the depredations necessary to extract the stuff.
Somehow, though, the ending is rarely happy. Local industries cannot compete with the salaries paid by the oil companies. So they die. Governments don't need to tax their populations to raise revenue. Sounds great but this also means that they do not need the cooperation and support of their populations in order to raise tax revenues. The result is usually autocracy - "no representation without taxation," as the saying goes. However, flush with money but lacking the institutions capable of handling their newfound wealth, the spending of oil state governments is often irresponsible and invariably corrupt. The result is tragedy.
So what's the solution to the dilemmas presented by oil? In the author's eyes there is only one solution. The world must wean itself off the stuff. Fair enough. It's not a particularly original conclusion but, given that she has done her homework, Ms. Margonelli can make it with some authority.
She uses alternative fuel developments in China to illustrate the direction she believes we should move in. My own sense is that her choice of location is interesting but a bit problematical. Yet, the direction the author clearly feels we should move in - to transition from an oil to a hydrogen based economy - is very probably (if it is technically possible) our best long term option.
Oil on the Brain was an easy and enjoyable read. Whoever knew that a chapter on gas station operations could be so interesting? Still, it deals with serious problems and draws serious conclusions.
The universal craving for endless quantities of petroleum in a world of limited supply has turned oil into the economic equivalent of an addictive drug. We need to get beyond scapegoating people and industries and start to deal with the reality of our addiction.
The problem is that, however destructive oil may have become, there are no panaceas. So going cold turkey is not really an option. Yet we do need to develop other fuels. This is hardly an original argument but Oil on the Brain does make it a persuasive one.
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