The Nigerian elite has become rich even beyond many Westerners’ imagination. Since the 1970s, they have been sucking the profits from the country’s oil resources almost directly from the wells and into their pockets. ibid.
Every day the Nigerian economy loses between 150,000 and 320,000 barrels of oil. Gary K Busch
We most likely peaked in world oil production in 2005. Nafeez Ahmed, The Crisis of Civilization, 2011
For decades the state oil company had been run like a private corporation by the traditional ruling class. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Chavez: Inside the Coup, 2003, Chavez to crowd
The latest threat to humanity … Peak Oil: a theory that the culmination of all oil production in the world is about to peak and will thus go into inevitable irreversible decline in the coming years. The Corbett Report #24, Peak Oil is a Fraud, James Corbett online 2007
‘Peak oil is essentially a fraud, a monstrous propaganda fraud.’ ibid. Webster Tarpley
Tinkering is common in the oil industry. ibid.
Oil: from farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern day lives that is not affected by the petro-chemical industry. Ths story of oil is the story of the modern world. The Corbett Report: How Big Oil Conquered the World, viz Corbett online
The world we live in today is the world created in Devil Bill’s image. It’s a world founded on treachery, deceit and the naivety of a public that had never wised up to the parlour tricks that the Rockefellers and their ilk have been using to shape the world for the past century and a half. This is the story of the Oil-igarchy. ibid.
The Rothschilds and Nobels, the Dutch royal family, the Rockefellers, these early titans of the oil industry and their corporate shells pioneered a new model for amassing and expanding fortunes hitherto unheard of. ibid.
Not just wealth but power over the lives of billions. ibid.
Bustitution: scrapping street cars and tearing up railways to replace them with GM’s own buses, running on Standard Oil’s diesel. ibid.
This social engineering paid off well for Standard Oil and its growing list of petrochemical associates. ibid.
The oil-ligarchs had reached unprecedented levels of control over the economy. ibid.
At the dawn of the twentieth century a new international order was emerging: one founded on oil. And by the end of the twentieth century that order was firmly established. The Corbett Report: Why Big Oil Conquered the World, 2017
The power that came with their near total-monopoly on the world’s most important commodity was enormous … The impact of the oligarchs has been breathtaking. ibid.
John D Rockefeller III: He was on a mission to do something about the problem of over-population. Rockefeller approached that mission as a representative of the Population Council … The Eugenics Society under another name. ibid.
Henry Herbert Goddard: The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. ibid.
It is no longer about oil. It never was. It is about control. ibid.
The technocrats had sketched the outlines of a completely ordered and controlled society, one in which energy is the fundamental measure of value. ibid.
In the summer of 1990 eastern Kuwait was shattered by the expansionist plans of the neighbour Iraq. On August 2nd Saddam Hussein sent 100,000 troops across the border announcing that Kuwait had ceased to exist. Fires of Kuwait, 1992
‘This will not stand this aggression against Kuwait.’ ibid. George H W Bush
The United States led a 32-nation coalition against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. ibid.
Saddam ordered the detonation of almost 700 oil wells. ibid.
5,000,000 barrels a day going up in clouds of poisonous soot. If left alone the fires could burn for 100 years. ibid.
The direction of the wind is the key to the assault on the fires. ibid.
Every fire has its own personality and requires its own approach. ibid.
You’re trusting your life to the men around you. ibid.
If you live in the real world, you can’t do without oil. We use its by-products every day. But the easy oil has long been found and world demand is ever increasing. So now oil companies must scour the ends of the Earth. The Curse of Oil I: Rich and Poor, BBC 2004
All too often it’s a curse. ibid.
The Amazonian Indians – it is they who are paying the price of oil. ibid.
‘Texaco left 627 open-air pits. It is the worst ecological disaster in the hemisphere.’ ibid.
By 2015 a quarter of America’s oil will come from Africa. ibid.
Angola may have some of the richest oil reserves but it remains one of Africa’s poorest countries. ibid.
When asked about this lack of transparency and the missing billions Angola’s government says in effect that it has lost the receipts. ibid.
To meet the world’s growing needs, the oil industry must enter unknown territories seeking oil in places that politically, ethically and environmentally were once off limits. Our dependence on oil may become a curse. The Curse of Oil II: The Pipeline
The Caspian contains some of the largest untouched energy reserves on the planet. ibid.
After the collapse of Soviet power, Azerbaijan’s new oil fields were up for grabs. Hundreds of Western companies and entrepreneurs flocked here. History was repeating itself. ibid.
People out here receive a single payment for the pipeline to pass under their land. He’d seemed quite happy with his $500. ibid.
Georgia: still side by side with the pipeline route. You can almost feel the tension here. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there’s been civil war and three republics have tried to break away. ibid.
The Middle East is a tinderbox. So the West needs oil from elsewhere. Today, Canada and Alaska supply 20% of the oil consumed in the United States. But what seems politically safe is environmentally sensitive. In Alberta, Canada, ancient forest is under threat. The Curse of Oil III: The Wilderness
‘You cannot extract oil without doing some damage.’ ibid.
In recent years a silent revolution has taken place: we thought the age of fossil fuels was coming to an end … The United States firmly back on the map as an oil and gas producing super-power. Thanks to the shale revolution … has opened up a huge reservoir of fossil energy. Shale Cowboys: Fracking Under Trump, VPRO 2017
A few men in Texas are turning the energy supply industry on its head. ibid.
It looks as though fracking heralds a golden future for the American energy market. But there are major differences of opinion about the safety of the technique. It is said to pose several dangers to the environment: to cause earthquakes, and to contaminate the underground fresh-water reserves. ibid.
In 2000 Koch Industries had to pay a $30,000,000 fine for its role in over 300 oil spills. Alex Gibney, Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, 2012
A vast oil platform packed with hazardous equipment. A rig worker whose warnings were ignored. And a pump that should never have been switched on. James Nesbitt: Disasters that Changed Britain III: Piper Alpha, History 2018
The discovery of oil drew some new guests to Scotland. ibid.
They constructed a massive new platform. Christened Piper Alpha, it weighed around 14,000 tonnes and would be able to pump a quarter of a million barrels of oil every day. It soon earned the nickname The Monster. ibid.
An oil industry spreading rapidly across the North Sea. ibid.
1There were 241 men on the platform but unknown to them inside one of the high-pressure gas units the equipment was overheating. At 1 p.m. it exploded; highly flammable gas poured on to the platform and quickly caught fire … The crew of Piper had been lucky. ibid.
Workers who tried to push for union action over safety could find their careers in trouble. ibid.
It was the handover between day and night shifts Occidental had been warned about before. ibid.
The order was given to turn on Pump A. Gas poured out and quickly ignited. The blast tore threw the gas module and wiped out Piper Alpha’s control room. ibid.