Crude, Crisis and Capitalism in Upton Sinclair’s Oil!

Torrents of ink have been spilled trying to explain the significance of fossil fuels and, particularly, oil in human history. In fact, we seem to have reached a point in history where the dependence on or, as George W. Bush more accurately put it, the addiction to oil are posing an existential threat not only to human civilization, but also to large parts of the biosphere. Naturally, the first and foremost question which needs to be asked is what does our current predicament tell us about ourselves as a culture and, perhaps, as a species. While it is not my goal to provide an answer to such existential questions within the limited scope of this paper, I would nevertheless like to outline the intractable problems that oil presents: rapid global warming and climate change that threatens lives and ecosystems; an expanding number of serious, world-altering globalized environmental crises all related to fossil-fuel-fuelled population and economic growth; increasing geopolitical instability, conflict, and terrorism related to control of oil supplies or affecting the extraction/refinement/distribution of oil; and a possibly imminent failure of supply–peak oil–that would wreck the world’s economic and social systems. All of these crises have led to new, widespread awareness of just how completely oil has become essential to all aspects of humans’ way of life, from agriculture to medical facilities, transportation to consumer goods. Oil has become an obsessive point of reference in and clear determinant over the daily lives of many, either victimizing them directly and cruelly as with Shell in Nigeria, or Texaco in Ecuador, or making them increasingly feel vulnerable in the garb of development. In fact, it has become impossible not to feel that oil at least partially determines the production and reproduction of culture on multiple levels. Nowadays, energy is more than a constraint; it remains an essential commodity in the symbolic, material and emblematic aspects of human lives. The reason why the problem seems so intractable is not because there are no solutions but, rather, that our current neoliberal market economy is structured in such a way as to prevent the forceful implementation of the recommendations of the economic, scientific and political community. For this reason, and as this paper will try to demonstrate, the only credible path to effectively and rapidly mitigate catastrophic climate change is to rethink our economic priorities and, perhaps suggest a global economic system that is ecologically just and sustainable.