The series of essays in this book profile oil producing countries and show how the world of oil fosters corruption, distorts the economy, encourages conflict and alters values. Until oil has less value, the countries that produce it will be subject to forces its wealth creates. A well written and thoughtful discussion. ( )

I put this book on my "politics" shelf because although Maas considers the economics of petroleum, the focus of his argument is that, as Lord Acton wrote "power tends to corrupt", and oil is power in most meanings of that word. ( )

Been there done that. Read most of this info elsewhere. ( )

“The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights.” – J. Paul Getty

With chapters divided by region, [Crude World] examines the effects of the oil industry on oil-producing states. Each section was very interesting in and of itself, but ultimately it felt like a series of newspaper articles that never really coalesced into a common unit. This combined with the fact that most of the information is neither new nor surprising made it a mediocre read. Here’s some sad but interesting quotes:

Equatorial Guinea: “‘Almost everything has to be imported,’ Paces explained… I pointed to the small rocks that had been lined up to denote the shoulders of a dirt road on the site. ‘Those are local rocks, but importing them would be cheaper.’”

Nigeria: “According to official statistics, between 1976 and 2001, there were, on average, more than five spills a week in Nigeria, but according to unofficial estimates, the true figure could be ten times higher.”

Oriente region, Ecuador: “The first offering from Texaco, in exchange for permission from the Indians to look for oil, was a delivery of bread, cheese, spoons, and plates. (The Indians threw out the cheese because it smelled so peculiar.)”

Moscow, Russia: “I dined at a posh restaurant one evening with a banker who needed, midcourse, to make a business call. He faced a problem because he knew his cell phone was bugged and he assumed mine was, too. So he borrowed a phone from another diner, a total stranger.” ( )

I heard this guy speak at the recent ASPO-USA conference. He's good. This book is very much "human interest" journalism -- no need to worry about charts and graphs here, or tortuous explanations of depletion rates. He goes to Africa, central Asia, and all over the world to talk to people affected by oil and the oil industry. He said that writing this book was more difficult even than writing about war, because at least in a war there are people shooting at each other which you can write about. The book was very revealing to me, about how totally corrupt even an oil-rich society can be, and how no one is really "in charge" of figuring out how oil should best be used, either in this country or anywhere else, either. It's just really chaos -- everyone is in there trying to exploit it before it's all gone, which will likely be sooner than we think, we're probably close to or past the point of "peak oil." ( )