Americans have a vast amount of choice when it comes to things like grocery stores, electronics, religion, and cars. However, American's have no choice when it comes to fueling vehicles. At the pump, you get a choice of oil, oil, or oil and the monopoly on oil is hurting us more than we realize.
John D. Rockefeller saw an opportunity and understood that drilling for oil would be risky but refining oil creates a steady flow of money. He started a refining company called Standard Oil and took control over 90% of the U.S. oil industry by 1880. During Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency in 1911, Standard Oil was found guilty by the U.S. Supreme Court of monopolizing the oil industry. The ruling split Standard Oil into 34 oil companies. This split made Rockefeller the richest man in the modern age from his investments in each of the 34 companies.
To this day, oil companies have immense power over our lives. Just about everything we do depends on oil. Oil is in everything. Jeremy Rifkin, the author of "The Third Industrial Revolution" states that, "there is no doubt this will be called the oil age." We are stuck in a cycle of growth and slow down, which is the end game.
There used to be a public electric trolley system that was nation wide, cheap, reliable, and ran on electricity. With this system you could travel from San Diego to New York City just by transferring trolleys. The oil industry saw this as a threat to their profits. Standard Oil, Mack, Firestone, Phillips, and GM collaborated to bring down the electric trolley system. They did this by buying up all the trolleys, pulled up all the tracks, burned the trolleys in public bonfires, and replaced them with motor buses. All five companies were tried and found guilty of mass conspiracy.
OPEC nations control 78% of the world's oil reserves and the oil market is ran by a cartel.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel which triggered the oil embargo. The OPEC nations cut the supply of the oil to the world and caused restrictions on gas purchasing, mass unemployment, and long lines at the gas pump. Demand for fuel was still present and this caused gas stations run out of gas early into the day.
After the oil embargo, the U.S. increased the number of countries it imports oil from. The U.S. built military bases next to almost every oil installation in the middle east to protect its investment. Now the U.S. government spends over $500 Billion to maintain military presence in the middle east each year. This is over ten times what is spent to buy oil from the Persian Gulf. Amory Lovins, Chairman & Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute stated, "Of course we have other interests in the region. It's not all about oil, it is hard to believe that we would have fought a couple of ware there and sent lots of troops there if Kuwait just grew broccoli."
The U.S. has 4.5% of the world population and uses 20% of the world's oil. This number increases rapidly. The U.S. produces 8 million barrels of oil per day but requires 18 million barrels per day in a world that needs 88 million barrels every day. Do not think for one second that the U.S. can sustain itself on domestic oil. The majority of the oil in the United States is shale oil a.k.a "shit oil." With shale oil, you must put more energy into it than you get out of it per unit. Trying to do this would be suicide and we would start to move backwards.
There is a solution though. The only reason the way things are the way they are today is because of greed. We can become independent and free of oil. Brazil has proven they can sustain themselves and be independent of foreign oil. Luiz Inacio "Lula" Da Silva became the 35th President of Brazil from 2002 to 2011. He made sure that the country could produce its own fuel and then increased the presence of FLEX fuel cars. These vehicles can use any mixture of gas and ethanol. The country produces a lot of ethanol from sugar can that is plentiful in the region. This put ethanol as a competitor for oil and gave the citizen choice at the pump. The consumers choose ethanol over gasoline and broke the oil monopoly.
The media will have you believe that biofuels will not solve our problems. This is misleading. The media wants to focus on corn only and say that we cannot produce enough biofuels from corn. However, corn isn't the only thing we can use for biofuels. Biofuels can be created from anything that is or was a plant. The question isn't "which plant produces the most biofuel?" The question is "which plant grows the best where you live?" Our society isn't being held back because of the limitations presented to us by those in control. We are being held back because we are led to believe that the limitations exist.
