The Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World’s Vanishing Oil Resources By Dilip Hiro
The Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World’s Vanishing Oil Resources By Dilip Hiro, Nation Books, Paperback, 384 pages, $15.95
When W. finally admitted that "America is addicted to foreign oil," he forgot to mention much of that foreign oil belongs to countries whose governments, populations, or both are openly hostile toward the United States. Only a third of the world's remaining oil reserves are in NANI (the U.S. Department of Energy's official acronym for "non-Arab, non-Iranian") states and much of that oil belongs to socialist and anti-American Venezuela. In short, in the very near future, the United States will depend on countries with which it has strained, if not overtly adversarial, relationships. And as the gush of oil dwindles to a drip, a tumultuous geopolitical era will begin.
So says Dilip Hiro's new book, The Blood of the Earth, a well-researched assessment of the world oil situation and the global shake-up that it will precipitate. Hiro predicts that oil production will peak between 2006 and 2017 and then taper into an irreversible fall. Not only will world oil supplies dwindle, they will be concentrated in a small number of developing countries that, using their newfound dominance of the world's chief energy supply, will be increasingly able to push their foreign policy agendas.
Compounding the stress of a dwindling supply, the continuing industrialization of India and China -- which Hiro calls "ravenous meganations in dire search of hydrocarbons" -- will continueto push demand for oil to record levels. Hiro predicts that the increased oil shortages will shift the balance of global power toward oil-exporting countries, leading to a frantic and possibly cataclysmic struggle among oil importers to find the energy to satisfy their military and economic needs.
While the breadth of Hiro's knowledge is impressive, it is frequently deployed to excess, and the book often reads more like a reference volume than a thesis-driven argument. On top of this, a continuous string of diversions cloud his core thesis. While some digressions are quite interesting -- including an analysis of Hugo Chavez's regime in Venezuela and a penetrating look into Iran under the Shah -- the majority of them are tedious. Hiro's propensity to list information is prevalent throughout the book, but is most obvious in excruciating sections on the romances of early oil explorers, the local landmarks of Midland, Texas, and the technical machinations of the original oil drills.
Blood is a noble attempt to add a geopolitical perspective to the chorus of those crying out for a change in energy policy, but the encyclopedic nature of the work cripples its efficacy. Upon completion, one is left with the sensation of having been exposed to a thoughtful, insightful argument, but Hiro's attempt to write an all-encompassing volume on such a broad subject matter is more than he can handle, and his readers pay the price for it. Time, like oil, is a finite resource, and there is only so much of it one is willing to spend sifting through Blood's catalogue of facts to get to the heart of the book buried beneath its core.