By Sean Moysey
Oil is toxic to humans, animals and plants. Using it does incredible damage to the environment. To gain control of it, horrific wars have been fought, such as the 1991 Gulf War.
Oil is a major contributor to the contamination of the planet's air. A year's burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) releases 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide, 250 million tons of carbon monoxide, 150 million tons of sulphur dioxide, 50 million tons of nitrogen oxide, 50 million tons of hydrocarbons, and 250 million tons of ash and dust into the atmosphere.
In the world's most polluted cities — Mexico City, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Rome — it is becoming difficult to breathe. In 1991 the Mexico City metropolitan area had 170 days officially recognised as being above the danger level on air pollution indexes. One-tenth of Mexico City's population suffers from respiratory diseases.
Mexico City suffers a bad combination of high pollution and geography which traps the pollution in and around the city. But it is an example of what is happening to every major car-based city.
In Australia one of Sydney's worst smog days occurred on May 6, 1992, when the State Pollution Control Commission's Pollution Index recorded a peak of 218 points. Readings of 50 are considered high.
In addition, the combustion of petrol containing lead is lacing the air with poisonous lead particles. Young children are particularly at risk and may suffer reduced intellectual growth.
Automobiles alone account for 60% of carbon monoxide pollution. Cars and trucks produce the majority of nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons (especially benzene) and lead which pollute air. Nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons react together to form ozone, which is the main component of photochemical smog.
Ozone can cause inflammatory reactions, early ageing symptoms and chronic obstructive disease in human lungs.
Los Angeles suffers the worst photochemical smog in the world. Ozone concentrations there can exceed .2 parts per million and .3 ppm, compared with World Health Organisation standards of .08 ppm. Western Sydney registered LA levels on at least one day in the summer of 1991-1992.
There are more than 400 million motor vehicles in the world; a new car comes into existence every few seconds. Each year, they add more than 500 million tonnes of hot carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, sulphur and a myriad of other chemicals to the atmosphere.
The US is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, releasing close to 5 billion metric tons of CO2 every year, which is 22% of the world's emissions. The three highest producers of CO2 per capita are the US, Canada and Australia.
The United States' 170 million cars consume twice the amount of oxygen produced by the country's plant life. Cars consume one third of the world's oil production.
Internal combustion engines are gulping up oil reserves at an increasing rate. According to Eco Systems, based in the US, only 16 years of recoverable oil is left in US oilfields.
Cities desperately need a sustainable public transport policy which allows people to stop using cars and yet remain very mobile. A 24-hour, accessible, cheap, efficient public transport system, including freight transport, is needed.
Until the end of World War II, Sydney's rail and tram systems were the major form of transport for commuters. In 1946-47, more than 2 million daily trips were undertaken on rail and tram, compared with fewer than 400,000 by private car. With buses included, the proportion of all trips performed by public transport was 87%.
By 1981, the proportion of trips performed by public
transport had fallen to 13%. Cars replaced public transport as the dominant mode of transport. To free our atmosphere from the toxins of oil-based transport this situation has to be reversed.
The ocean is a key purifier of the atmosphere. It absorbs almost half the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, through photosynthetic activity of phytoplankton, and returns fresh oxygen.
The film produced by an oil spill creates a barrier between the atmosphere and the ocean, preventing this exchange process and therefore adding to the already enormous atmospheric problems of the planet.
Oil spills are increasingly threatening our ocean, waterway and coastal ecosystems.
Twenty thousand tonnes of crude oil were spewed into the seas off Western Australia in July 1992, when the tanker Kirki left a slick at least 90 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide. It was the worst oil spill in Australian history.
The Katina-P oil tanker disaster off the coast of Mozambique in April 1992 left at least 9000 tonnes of heavy oil fouling Mozambique's Maputo Bay.
The habitat of Prince William Sound in Alaska was irreversibly changed when the Exxon Valdez ran aground.
The Exxon Valdez was refloated shortly after and sent south to San Diego for overhaul. It spilled more oil off San Diego, creating another slick 29 kilometres long. Rather than decommissioning the ship, the company simply changed its name and kept it in operation.
The oil tanker Braer, carrying 84,000 tonnes of light crude oil (much more than the Exxon Valdez), was sailing from a Norwegian refinery near Stavanger to Québec. When it took a short cut through Shetland waters during a large storm, it lost power and ran aground.
Only 35 kilometres separate Fair Isle from Sumburgh Head in Shetland, yet it is a channel used by 1000
tankers a year.
As a result of the Braer accident, a film of oil settled on thousands of hectares in the south of Shetland. Crops were condemned, livestock poisoned. In the long term, more persistent toxic residues like benzene and its derivatives, which cause cancer, will remain in the soil.
Oil is a mixture of very toxic chemicals, many proven to cause cancer, regardless of whether it is evaporated into the atmosphere or is in the water.
Huge quantities of oil are moved around the world by sea. Even modern technology and high safety standards cannot guarantee against spills.
Accidental spills account for only 10% of total oil spills. Industry discharges oil deliberately on a daily basis. The Braer was carrying almost 500,000 barrels of oil. Yet 50,000 barrels of oil daily are dumped in the seas by ships cleaning out their tanks and bilges.
Even if foolproof means of oil transport existed and oil companies were forced to use them, oil would still be environmentally destructive. The only long-term solution to the world's energy needs is to use sustainable and non-polluting sources of energy.
According to Greenpeace, fumes given off by evaporating oil and inhaled by marine life can result in pulmonary difficulties and death. Oil dispersants used in "clean-ups" make some of the oil sink to the ocean floor, threatening seagrasses and reefs which are a major part of the ecosystem.
For humans, inhalation of oil and fumes can become a worse problem when chemical dispersants are used. There is also evidence of liver disorders, heart disorders, damage to the nervous system and genetic damage as a result of oil exposure.
The use of oil and other fossil fuels could easily be phased out. A Greenpeace report, Energy Without Oil, contains the main results of an 18-month study by the Stockholm Environment Institute and world energy experts.
The conclusions are based on global energy models used by, among others, the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The main problems in implementing the results of the study were not technological or economic, but simply a lack of political will. In other words, powerful people oppose the change.
Over 70% of research and development money is currently committed to fossil fuels and nuclear energy. A mere 12% is spent on renewable energy and energy efficiency.
It's not a matter of if we need to replace oil; it is a question of when we replace it — and how much damage we allow to occur before we do so.
Oil is a non-renewable source, and it is running out. Oil companies are looking for every last drop of oil reserves on the planet and ensuring they get their hands on them.
Oil is profitable because it is non-renewable and non-recyclable. Once an amount of oil is expended as fuel, more is required, which means more sales for oil companies.
Cars consume a third of world use of oil. The increase of petrol-driven cars has been a conscious goal of oil and motor vehicle companies.
Oil companies have a large interest in stopping environmentally sound energy sources like solar power and wind power. It is hard to imagine how a "wind crisis" or a "solar crisis" could occur to raise the price of these energies. Oil crises, however, occur regularly and usually result in a huge windfall for oil companies. Oil's relative scarcity means its price as an energy will always be inflated compared to abundant sources of energy like the sun or wind.
The production of millions of tons of petrol and millions of cars is far more profitable than the production of an efficient, environmentally sound, public transport system.
Since oil became a major commodity, governments of mainly advanced capitalist countries, like the US, Britain and Australia, have done appalling things to secure world oil reserves for their countries' oil companies.
Of the top 100 companies in the world, 15 are oil companies and 18 are motor vehicle companies. Total sales of the top 15 oil companies add up to over $604 billion a year. Seven of these companies are US owned.
The wishes of oil companies have become government policies, both internationally and domestically. The wealth and power of oil companies have determined the development of energy sources.
Western powers, particularly the US, have used bribery and bullying against third world nations to get their way. Oil accounts for 25% of all US profits from the third world.
Libya has been persecuted by the US for a quarter of a century since it took an independent stand against the major oil companies in 1969. Iraq was once a close ally of the US but is now a victim of US hostility because it is perceived as a threat to US oil supplies. Iran's government was overthrown in 1951 with the help of US spy agencies because it nationalised its oil industry. The sovereign rights of East Timorese over their waters were coldly ignored by the Australian government when it signed the Timor Gap oil exploration treaty with Indonesia, which occupies East Timor.
Close to 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and 150,000 civilians died in the Gulf War; 1,800,000 Iraqis fled their homes.
UNICEF estimates 80,000 to 100,000 children may die in Iraq this year as a result of war destruction; 170,000 people have died, directly or indirectly, from the continuing embargo. Malnutrition affects more than one child in five in the south of the country and one in 10 in the country as a whole.
Iraqi hospitals are working at 50% capacity and receipt of medicines is running at 10% of prewar levels.
First and last, the war was about oil. After the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's aim was to rebuild. To do this, it had to sell oil at stable prices.
The day after the cease-fire was signed between Iraq and Iran, Kuwait drastically increased its oil production, lowering the price of oil, costing Iraq $14 billion a year. On top of this, Kuwait stole oil from Iraq's Rumaila oil field by drilling at an angle from its side of the border.
The US was playing these two countries against each other. The US told Iraq that it would not intervene if it invaded Kuwait. Kuwait didn't back down from Iraq's threats after the US told the emir it would intervene if Iraq invaded.
In 1990, six months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, General Norman Schwarzkopf, one of the architects of the war against Iraq, told the US Congress:
"Middle East oil is the West's lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the Free World's proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world has run dry."
Of course, the war hastened the day when the world will run dry. (That's not necessarily a bad thing for the oil companies, since it tends to raise the price of the remaining oil.)
Some 550 oil wells burned in Kuwait, and an unknown number burned in Iraq. Six million barrels of oil, one million tons, went up in smoke daily, creating smog so thick that car headlights had to be used during the day and daytime temperatures dropped by 15° Celsius. The soot fell out as black rain, poisoning water and crops.
Kuwait's fires were the most intense burning source in history: 50,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 100,000 tons of carbon and 800,000 tons of CO2 were spewed into the atmosphere per day.
Somalia also can thank oil for US attentions. Under the guise of a "humanitarian mission" to ensure that food reached starving people, a US-led force of almost 35,000 heavily armed
combat troops invaded Somalia.
A motive for the invasion was outlined in the December 1992 issue of the US magazine, Navy Times. David Winterford, "National Security Affairs instructor" at the Naval Post-Graduate School in California, is quoted as saying that Somalia's "geography is priceless. Whoever controls Somalia could control the southern entrance to the Red Sea and thus the Suez Canal ... And whoever controls Somalia is 200 miles from Yemen and 400 miles from Saudi Arabia, a prime location from which to influence the political stability of the Middle East.
"Middle East stability is dear to the United States and other Western nations whose economies run on low-priced Middle Eastern oil ... The humanitarian mission [in Somalia] is there. But there are lots of instances of starvation around the world that receive little or no official notice from the US government. Here, we can see geostrategic reasons."
The Los Angeles Times revealed that four giant US oil companies stand to make a fortune in Somalia.
The paper's January 18 report said that almost two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips by the pro-US dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, before Barre was overthrown in January 1991.
Conoco, the only major multinational corporation to maintain a functioning office in Mogadishu since 1991, allowed its Mogadishu corporate compound to be transformed into the de facto US embassy before US Marines landed in the capital. The president of the company's subsidiary in Somalia served as the US government's volunteer "facilitator" before and during the intervention.
According to Thomas O'Connor, principal petroleum engineer for the World Bank, who headed a three-year study of the oil prospects in the Gulf of Aden, off Somalia's northern coast, Somalia's oilfields have "high [commercial] potential ... once the Somalis get their act together".
In 1991 a World Bank-coordinated study, geologists put Somalia and Sudan at the top of the list of eight prospective commercial oil producers.
There needs to be an end to interventions by Western powers in oil-producing nations, especially in the Middle East. If these nations were able to control their own resources, then oil prices would at least be more realistic, rather than deflated or inflated at oil companies' behest.
Enabling third world countries to benefit from oil wealth would create the economic basis for eliminating their dependency on oil by developing other industries and improving health care, education and social welfare.
At the same time there needs to be a worldwide redirection to the development and implementation of renewable, environmentally sound energy sources and transport systems.
Companies or governments responsible for environmental accidents should be made to pay for cleaning up and compensating the area — on a long-term basis.
Democratic control over what oil companies do is needed to curb the escalating environmental destruction caused by these companies. Oil companies (and other multinationals for that matter) should be accountable to the population. Decisions being made by these companies affect everyone; we need to control what they do.
The majority of people need to have a say in where the massive resources created by oil profits go. We need to have greater democratic control over companies and governments in order to shift investment away from unsustainable energy sources to environmentally sound and renewable sources.