Two hundred years ago - and for a thousand years before that - one of the most strategic substances on Earth was salt. It was "strategic" because no army could travel without it - salt was necessary to preserve food in a pre-refrigeration era. Wars were fought over it, and countries that had lots of salt made out well, while landlocked countries with no salt reserves were forced to sell their natural resources in exchange for it.
Oil is the new salt. It is now the planet's number one strategic resource. And, as has been noted by numerous commentators since the first Gulf War in 1990-91, if the primary export of Iraq was broccoli, we wouldn't have given a damn that Saddam Hussein was a tin-pot tyrant.
We use a far greater proportion of the world's oil than we produce, so we have to buy the balance. This dependence represents a massive transfer of wealth from us to oil producing countries. It's a strategic blunder that would have horrified Julius Caesar, who expanded the Roman Empire all the way to central Europe when he ran out of fuel - wood - by deforesting virtually all of Italy , and then paid the price as his empire began to collapse from overexpansion. We transfer billions of our dollars to countries like Saudi Arabia. Oil revenues fund much of the fundamentalist Wahhabi movement within Saudi Arabia, and it's out of this movement that come the most virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric, textbooks, and television and radio programming.
The OPEC nations don't adjust production to meet demand; they maintain it to control prices so they have relatively stable income. Thus, the only way we can change this situation is to reduce the amount of oil we use. Oil is a strategic commodity, and we need to strip it of its strategic value.
Learn more in chapter seven, "Cool Our Fever", of "Rebooting the American Dream".
-Thom
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