“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
The last three years were, by far, the three hottest on record. And for the first time, the three year average has exceeded 1.5 C…the level the experts have said was a threshold that the earth does not want to cross if we want to avoid catastrophic weather patterns…more frequent and massive wildfires, overheating of the oceans causing more intense hurricanes, faster melting of the polar ice caps and permafrost resulting in a greater acceleration of the heating up of the planet…we are triggering a vicious circle that will be very difficult to halt and reverse…but all is not lost…we’ll chat about that sometime soon.
In our previous blog titled Perfect Days in Coextinction, I first took a glance back at some of the films that impacted us the most in 2025, while in the blog titled Good Vibrations on the Dock of the Bay, I talked about the musicians who had passed away last year as well as other notable musical moments that caught our attention. Here, I’d like to talk about literature and one book in particular that I read that has some poignancy for the events of the day, which will lead into a conversation on the observation that where there is oil, there always seems to be conflict, of one sort or another.
All The Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer was a book written in 2003 which I read a little over a year ago to better understand how the Middle East has ended up in such a turbulent situation. It discusses how, in the early 1950’s, Iran was well on its way to developing a secular democratic Muslim republic, striving to end British colonialism and economic exploitation…to regain control over their oil reserves, while remaining sympathetic to western values. It is the true story of a colourful cast of characters, including Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, the executives of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (now BP) and many more who engaged to have the CIA overthrow the Iranian government and put the Shah back in power, who they believed would protect western oil interests. His reign of terror, supported, armed and financed to a significant degree by the United States, resulted in his overthrow in 1979 by Islamic fundamentalists, who imposed a form of religious fascism on the Iranian people and turned their country into a centre for the propagation of terror abroad directed primarily at the United States…the American hostage crisis…leading the US to support Iraq and Saddam Hussein in their fight with Iran…the Islamic revolution played a part in the Russian invasion of Afghanistan where the Americans armed the Mujahedeen…Iran’s revolutionary leaders and their devotion to radical Islam encouraged, supported and financed organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and later the Afghan Mujahidin, giving Osama bin-Laden the base to launch many terror attacks. As Kinzer states, “It is not far-fetched to draw a line from the (CIA overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953) through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York…It is a reasonable argument that but for the (CIA) coup, Iran would be a mature democracy…The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in the Middle East…(the coup) taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.” And here we are, 72 years later, (where it appears that the disdain that Iran feels towards the US is manifesting itself towards Israel, who is seen as America’s proxy in the region), and so continuing to connect the dots to the October 7th Hamas attack and to the devastation, the inhumanity, the death and terror that has been unleashed upon Gaza and much of the Middle East with far reaching implications in other parts of the world.
This month, we again watch as Iranian citizens rise up in protest against the religious fascism only to see a barbaric regime resort to unconscionable attacks against their own citizens in a desperate attempt to hold onto power.
We also have recently witnessed the United States threaten to intervene with the expressed purpose of regime change…not to bring about the very democracy that the United States took offence to back in the 1950’s but to install another Shah-like character who would do America’s bidding, and provide US corporate access to their vast oil reserves.
Earlier this month we saw the inevitable result of the US engaging in a return to 18th-century-style naval behaviour in the Caribbean where they literally boarded oil tankers, leading to the kidnapping of the Venezuelan President, with the true purpose not to return the country to democracy, as they kept insisting, but for the US to gain complete access and control of that country’s oil reserves. The history of the development of the Venezuelan oil industry is one where international oil companies were the pioneers going back to British Petroleum in the early 20th century. By the 1940’s, Venezuela was the third largest oil producing nation and passed a new law that was the first major political step taken toward gaining more government control over its oil industry.
A new legal framework was reached amicably where the government and the oil companies shared the oil wealth approximately 50-50. In the 1950`s when Middle Eastern oil started to flood the market, prices dropped and it was the Venezuelan Oil Minister who proposed the creation of OPEC to stabilize prices. By the 1970`s the Venezuelan government was looking to gain greater control on their oil industry and set about to nationalize it. Oil companies that held concessions to explore, produce, refine and export oil, would forfeit all the assets, plants and equipment belonging to concessionaires within or outside the concession areas and they would revert to the nation without compensation upon the expiration of the concession (which in many cases had been signed by the oil companies in the 1940`s for a period of 40 years). The Venezuelan companies that took over the concessions lacked the expertise to properly manage the industry and over many decades the infrastructure has deteriorated to the point where, even with the largest oil reserves of any country, their production is minimal. When oil reserves were significant, other industries fell by the wayside, but now with oil revenues being low, the overall economy is in tatters. The US has harboured animosity towards Venezuela going back to when they nationalized their oil industry in the 1970’s and took control from foreign companies particularly ExxonMobil and Chevron with limited compensation.
Interestingly, Venezuelan oil minister and OPEC co-founder Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo had presciently warned in 1976: "Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see, oil will bring us ruin... It is the devil's excrement."
For some countries, easy oil wealth appears indeed to be the sure path to failure. Venezuela might be a clear example of that…but not the only one.
As Bill McKibben stated, ``A nation that builds its prosperity on oil makes itself a target...``
Oil and conflict are deeply intertwined…does it not seem that in so many instances, where injustice exists, that oil exploration and exploitation are a root cause? We have witnessed so much human misery connected to the oil industry…from our examples above of Iran and Venezuela to the Osage Reign of Terror in Oklahoma in the 1920’s (see the film Killers of the Flower Moon), Japan’s invasion of Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to seize oil resources and the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 in part in response to the United States imposing an oil embargo on Japan, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait…from civil wars in Africa to pipeline disputes in British Columbia, in many instances, it is the Indigenous Peoples who are pushing back against unfettered access to their land by the oil interests…it is more than just about the land and the water…their fight symbolizes the ongoing colonization and genocide of Indigenous Peoples worldwide. We also see disagreements arising between the Alberta government and the Canadian government over the expansion of Alberta tar sands production and the critical need to keep a cap on the massive pollution that results from it. We are also seeing juvenile threats of independence from minority elements of the Alberta population who feel that any restrictions on their oil industry is somehow undermining their way of life in spite of the fact that the federal government spent $34 Billion in purchasing and expanding the TMX pipeline to the BC coast…or maybe there are other underlying and more sinister aspects to this…it just seems that this group will never be satisfied.
We see conflict happening right now in Eastern Europe with oil as a root cause…the term ‘Petro-Aggression’ is explained as when oil wealth insulates leaders from domestic pressure, enabling more aggressive foreign policy…it’s what we see with Russia financing its attack on Ukraine with its oil revenues.
Geography also has played a major element in where oil reserves are located…whether it is the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela it seems that in many cases, when oil is involved democracy is a victim…but not the only one.
For myself, it always keeps coming back to the urgency that we face with the climate crisis and the need to reduce and ultimately move away from the burning of fossil fuels, but with all the examples of how oil is at the root of so much of the world`s conflicts, that is another fundamental and urgent reason for moving as quickly as possible to a completely electrical energy grid. Fortunately, in many parts of the world, governments are ignoring the knuckle dragging of the United States federal government and are pushing forward with green initiatives that will one day soon, see us abandon the Devil`s Excrement once and for all, bringing us a more peaceful, safer world where justice and humanity prevail.
Next time, we`ll take a look at who is trying to be the major barrier to moving off the burning of fossil fuels and throwing up roadblocks onto the earth`s path onwards towards a clean energy future and more importantly who is driving that future forward.
Please check out our fundraising initiative the Paddle Project which allows us to continue our advocacy for Indigenous climate action: Our Paddles - Canoe Foundation
Oil fires in southern Iraq photo courtesy of flickr user Mateus_27:24 & 25 
