America’s wetlands has accepted sponsorship from various oil companies. ibid.
4Under the approving gaze of Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy their controversial £10 billion deal would open up access to six billion barrels of oil in one of the planet’s last virgin territories. ibid.
Prudhoe Bay [Alaska]: In March 2006 a hole in one of BP’s pipes dumped over 200,000 gallons of crude oil into this Arctic wilderness. The prosecuting attorney said that BP cut corners with disastrous consequences. British Petroleum Alaska plead guilty to a criminal violence of the Clean Water Act and was fined £20 million. But it hasn’t held them back in Alaska. ibid.
BP had not checked the integrity of its pipes for eight years. A US Congressional Committee claimed that a mountain of evidence showed BP’s cost-cutting on maintenance caused the oil spill in Alaska. ibid.
BP is a serial offender. ibid.
This is one of the most polluted places on earth ... A toxic swamp. It survives on the $26 billion a year it earns from oil. Tajikistan is not a democracy ... It is considered one of the world’s most corrupt regimes. ibid.
A major blow-out crippled BP’s Caspian operation. ibid.
The strategic pipeline that carries BP’s oil here was partly financed by British taxpayers. ibid.
So close that at least seventeen senior [Labour government] figures moved between BP, new Labour and the Civil Service. ibid.
Tony Blair ... joined BP as a special adviser. ibid.
At BP’s final frontier it is business as usual. ibid.
BP has a permanent licence to drill – signed and sealed by the British government and MI6. ibid.
Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people. Henry Kissinger
I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. Dick Cheney, CEO Halliburton Corporation 1998
The United States is the world's largest consumer of oil, and past disruptions of the global oil supply have hurt the American economy. Much of the world's oil lies beneath Iraq and its Gulf neighbors, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Some experts argue that, if Iraq had built a nuclear weapon, it would have been much harder to deter Saddam from trying to control the Gulf region and, with it, the world oil market. Council on Foreign Relations online article 2003 ‘Iraq: Oil’
Oil: that was the reason for the first Gulf War in 1991. Oil: that is the reason before all American foreign policy since World War II. Howard Zinn, Liberty Bound, 2004
Is it a coincidence that American military positioning happens to take place in central Asia, the Persian Gulf and other oil-rich regions of the world? Is fighting terrorism the real motive? Or is Washington more interested in grabbing whatever oil reserves are left, fuelling terrorism and war as a result? But massive deployment requires massive manpower. The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror, 2005
The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings. George Monbiot
Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts. Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs
Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East. Christopher Hitchens
America experienced its first oil shock. Within days of the cutoff, oil prices rose from $2.90 to $11.65 a barrel; gasoline prices soared from 20 cents to $1.20 a gallon, an all-time high. Across America fuel shortages forced factories to close early and airlines to cancel flights. Filling stations posted signs: Sorry, No Gas Today. If a station did have gasoline, motorists lined up before sunrise to buy a few gallons; owners limited the amount sold to each customer. Motorists grew impatient. Fistfights broke out, and occasionally, gunfire. President Nixon called for America to end its dependence on foreign oil. ‘Let us set as our national goal ... that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source,’ he said. We have still not met this goal. Albert Marrin
New Rule: America has every right to bitch about gas prices suddenly shooting up. How could we have known? Oh, wait, there was that teensy, tiny thing about being warned constantly over the last forty years but still creating more urban sprawl, failing to build public transport, buying gas-guzzlers, and voting for oil company shills. So, New Rule: Shut the fuck up about gas prices. Bill Maher, ‘The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass’
Unlike my opponent I will not let oil companies write this country’s energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers. Barack Obama
The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world’s oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam. Salman Rushdie
The excrement of the devil. Perez Alfonzo
The world petroleum story is one of the most inhuman known to man: in it, elementary moral and social principles are jeered at. If powerful oil trusts no longer despoil and humiliate our country it is not because these predators have become human, but because we have won a hard-fought battle which has been going on since the beginning of the century. Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, The Shah’s Story p59, 1980
Moses dragged us through the desert for 40 years to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil. Golda Meir
Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. Carl Sagan, ‘Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium’
Whether it is to reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions or to prepare for when the coal and oil run out, we have to continue to seek out new energy sources. Martin Rees
Here in the United States we have between 250 and 300 years of a coal supply. That is more than the amount of recoverable oil contained in the entire world. Tim Holden
The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive than they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the US. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced. Elon Musk
We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we’re so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it’s not going to be around for ever. Margaret Atwood
Too often, governments are quick to use excessive force and even pervert the course of justice to keep oil and gas flowing, forests logged, wild rivers dammed and minerals extracted. As the Global Witness study reveals, citizens are often killed, too – especially if they’re poor and indigenous. David Suzuki
Gas ... the oil companies just burn it off. The Age of Stupid 2009 starring Pete Postlethwaite & Jehangir Wadia & Layefa Malin & Al Duvernay & Fernand Pareau & Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud & Piers Guy & Mark Lynas & Mohamed Nasheed & David King & George Monbiot & Richard Heinberg & Ed Miliband et al, director Franny Armstrong
The oilmen and their obscene profits have had an unhealthy influence on the people running our country. ibid.
Oil became the resource worth fighting for all around the world. ibid.
The Torrey Canyon was the first environmental disaster to unfold in the television era. Birds Britannia III: Seabirds, BBC 2010