Rob Nixon
Importing oil costs the United States over $250 billion a year, if one includes federal subsidies and the health and environmental impact of air pollution. America spends $56 billion on the oil itself and another $25 billion on the military defense of oil-exporting Middle Eastern countries. There are additional costs in terms of America’s international reputation and moral credibility: our appetite for foreign fossil fuels has created a long history of unsavory marriages of convenience with petrodespots, generalissimos and fomenters of terrorism.
The United States currently finds itself in a coalition with Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Northern Alliance. Their human rights records range from bad to heinous. This is a conjuncture familiar to oil companies. From the Persian Gulf states to Indonesia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Angola and Nigeria, they have cozied up to dubious, often brutal regimes that allow corporations to operate with few environmental or human rights constraints.
Outside the West, the development of oil resources has repeatedly impeded democracy and social stability. The oil-extraction industry typically concentrates wealth and power and provides many incentives for corruption and iron-fisted rule. In most oil-exporting countries the gap between rich and poor widens over time. From the perspective of local people beneath whose Bedouins in the Middle East, the Huaorani in Ecuador, the partnership between oil transnationals and repressive regimes has been ruinous, destroying subsistence cultures while offering little in return. The Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged in 1995 for leading protests against such destruction, dubbed the process “genocide by environmental means.”