July 26, 2010
An ad appeared in Life Magazine on Feb 2, 1962 with a picture of a large glacier. The headline underneath in bold caps read: “EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER.” (Humble Oil later became part of Exxon/Mobil.)
I don’t think the ad men would recommend this ad for an oil company today. The Sierra Club magazine put a copy of it, without comment, inside the back cover of a recent issue.
I am going to shock some of my green readers (if there still are any) by claiming that, unlike the Sierra Club and despite the BP debacle, I think it is still a pretty good ad. Before you send me to the recycle bin, let me explain.
Oil is without question the single most useful, versatile and valuable substance in the modern world. For high-energy density it has no peers. It is also the basic raw material for a host of other high-priority products. A common view today among commoners and Presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, is that we are “addicted” to this valuable substance. I respectfully object. We get addicted to stuff that harms us, like cigarettes, alcohol, heroin. Oil is the very lifeblood of modern civilized life. When Mae West quipped “too much of a good thing is wonderful” she could have been thinking of oil. Without it we would go back to the Dark Ages, or at a minimum to the days before the Civil War in America.
The Sierra Club and all the rest of us depend on oil to power our cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, tractors, motorcycles, lawn mowers, cranes and bulldozers; to produce our food; to provide tires for our bicycles and other vehicles; to take us on nice vacations via auto, airplane, bus or train (including all the wonderful Sierra Club Outings to the High Sierras, Montana, Alaska, Peru, the Galapagos Islands, the Greek Islands, the Arctic, etc.); to ski, to play tennis, soccer, basketball and swim; to produce our medicines; to make our eyeglasses, contact lenses and hearing aids; to paint our houses and shellac our floors; to manufacture anesthetics that make our operations possible and painless; to make the refrigerant to preserve our food and provide air conditioning in our homes, schools and automobiles; to provide the ink to print our books, newspapers and magazines; to produce the plastics, motherboards and screens for our cell phones, TVs, computers and iPads; to make the strings on our guitars and the “ivories” for our pianos (we used to kill cats and elephants); to help produce many of the chemicals that make windmills, solar panels and long transmission lines possible; to supply the asphalt for our roads; and the chemical raw materials to help make just about all of our modern clothing, appliances and furniture. You name it and it probably has some oil in its manufacture.
All this considered I think it is high time to give a little credit to the folks that provide this essential substance, our oil companies. Yes, I think that BP, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and other companies, large and small, along with their multitude of supplier companies and millions of employees around the world, deserve our thanks rather than our obloquy. Yes, mistakes are made and tragedies result as in the current oil-platform explosion and leak. Which large industry has not made mistakes or caused tragedies?
40,000 or more people are killed in automobile accidents every year in the United States and no one condemns the workers and companies that provided the cars. Many thousands of patients die in our modern hospitals due to mistakes and negligent care? We don’t condemn all hospitals, doctors and nurses. Nor do we begrudge these doctors, nurses and hospitals their just incomes. Yet the people who provide us with the most essential substance of all are often demonized and condemned out of hand as though they were drug dealers to our “addition.” Are we also “addicted” to motorized transportation and to modern health care?
Yes, we could go back to mid-19th century days before Rockefeller and his fellow innovators made oil such a treasured and valuable substance. There would be some advantages it is true. We wouldn’t have to worry about oil spills or global warming. We wouldn’t have to fret about whether our food supply was organic or not. We wouldn’t have to worry so much about health care, unemployment insurance or the national debt. We wouldn’t have to worry about social security funds running low since the average life span was around 40 or so years.
We would have to worry more about creatures like whales and other mammals of the sea being hunted to extinction to provide oil for our lamps and sewing machines. Also for many wild animals of the forests and plains which also might be hunted to extinction to provide needed protein for our overpopulated continent (as did happen with many of our Native-American predecessors in North America). We wouldn’t have to worry about our children getting poisoned by oil-related pollution but we would have to worry about them dying from malaria, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and many other nasty diseases for the most part controlled in the U.S. thanks to oil-derived insecticides, pesticides and water-purification chemicals. Families would be much larger since most children would die of disease, accident or malnutrition before they reached maturity. The U.S. population then was about a tenth of what it is today. That means, of course, that without modern chemicals like oil and other fossil fuels nine out of ten of us would never have been born.
If we went back a few more centuries—before the Industrial Age began that is–we would discover that almost all of our ancestors were slaves, serfs or peasants who lived a short, nasty, brutish life, quite different from the lives of the aristocrats we are familiar with from our history books and historical novels. (The aristocrats, for the most part, also died young.)
Yes, the oil companies make large profits today. And the CEOs of these oil companies rake in millions in salary, bonuses and stock options. So do sports heroes like Bret Favre, Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Lance Armstrong and Lebron James. So do many Hollywood stars and directors. The CEOs of oil companies manage billion-dollar budgets, with hundreds of thousands of workers, operating in some of the most physically, socially and politically difficult and dangerous environments on the globe. The sports stars and entertainers may deserve large incomes because of the entertainment they provide. The CEOs deserve at least as generous an income for their critical contributions to the very existence of our modern world.
And finally, yes, the oil companies profits are sometimes (not always) what some call excessive. These profits also provide a substantial share of the income of most of the pension funds in the western world as well as a substantial share of the funds that research renewable energy possibilities. That’s more than I can say about the large incomes of sports stars and Hollywood celebrities.
Some of you may say, yes, you have a point, but we have to move on, to replace oil with new renewable energy and matter resources. I agree. But. This is going to be a long haul. Renewable energy resources are at present a very very long way from replacing oil and other fossil fuels. What are we going to do for the next thirty or forty years? Kill off 90% of us and then hope to replace the deficit when renewables do arrive in sufficient quantity and quality?
I’m serious. We should be accelerating as fast as humanly possible renewable research and development. And we should be encouraging as much and as fast as possible improvements in efficiency and conservation. But with all the intelligence and all the good will in the world it will not be possible to replace oil and other fossil fuels for at least three or four decades, if not much longer. That is simply the hard truth much as we might like it to not be so.
So in the meantime it would behoove us to muster just a few kind words for oil companies. If oil is an addiction it is an addiction we desperately need to survive. So far as oil goes today “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” Especially when that “too much” comes from the land and waters of the U.S. and Canada. The oil we can get here means that much less we will have to import from countries that are not very friendly to our western values.
Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill
P.S. For more detail on these issues see: Energy and Society, Energy on Earth, Resources, Populations and Climate Change, Capitalism and Democracy and Science and Democracy. (This is also to let you know you can buy many of our programs now on Amazon.com. Key in “Hawkhill” or “Bill Stonebarger.”)