Last week at the 129th Meeting of the Conference of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC member nation ministers decided to reduce crude oil production from the current rate of 24.5 billion barrels per day to 23.5 billion barrels per day, a reduction of 4.08 percent.
In response, the U.S. government, under orders from President George W. Bush, issued a statement to the world:
“It is our hope that the producers do not take actions that undermine the American economy … and American consumers.”
What Bush is failing to see is that if the 2002 worldwide rate of consumption of crude oil continues, decreases in production won’t matter in 38 years because there will simply be no recoverable oil left. The well will have run dry, and our economy will have to find another measure of success.
We are an oil-dependent country. We pour it into our cars, our heating systems, our plastics and our hair gels. We go to the pump, hand over our credit cards and say, “Fill it up.” We have no remorse, no vision for the future.
In 2002, the United States imported more than 1.49 billion barrels of oil from OPEC; that’s more than 4 million barrels of oil every day of the year. And that’s just from OPEC. Total, the United States imports 9.14 million barrels of crude oil per day and produces 5.7 million barrels per day from its own reserves, all of this to feed our hunger for industry.
We consume 2.9 gallons of crude oil per person per day for every man, woman and child living in America. Oil runs through our world like blood through arteries. In our economy, oil seems more important than food.
OPEC currently produces 41 percent of the world’s crude oil and exports 55 percent of crude oil traded internationally. It’s no small thing that of the 11 member nations of OPEC, five — Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya and Saudi Arabia — have been involved in recent military action with the United States.
The current United States involvement in Iraq is not about terror, as the television might have us believe. It’s about oil. To steal a line from folk singer Amy Martin, “It is about rich white men getting richer.”
Bush is right — a drop in oil production does have the potential to disrupt the American lifestyle. If he sends more soldiers to war in order to secure oil, the deaths of our fellow citizens and of the people they would battle will be on our shoulders as the consumers of the oil.
We as a society need to move away from the question of how much oil can we get and toward the idea that soon, within our lifetimes, we will run out of oil.
We need to begin looking at alternatives to oil. We must examine biodiesel, solar and wind power, mass transit and other alternative transportation. We need to look beyond economic projections and prices per gallon. Tomorrow the pump could go dry. We need to start thinking about what happens next.