War and Oil
As dependent on oil as a junkie is on crack, the United States demand for oil has skewed its game in the field of geopolitics, a bias that has resulted in two US incursions into Iraq. The first Gulf War was entirely about oil.
Kuwait, fearing the strength of Iraq in the region as well as President Saddam Hussein's attempts to dominate the market, flooded the market with oil.
The price of crude oil plummeted, which Hussein read 'as tantamount to economic war' and invaded the country. US President George WH Bush responded by dispatching troops into the region in January 1991.
A decade later, supposedly to halt global terror, dethrone a tyrant and deliver democracy to the region, the next George Bush set his troops on Bagdhad with the Britons hurrying to their assistance. Saddam Hussein had purportedly been cooking up weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and was aligned with the al-Qaeda terrorist group.
'My fellow citizens,' said Bush in his speech to Americans in March 2003, 'at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.'
Author Paul Roberts explains that while Hussein was by no means a gentlemanly or humane leader, beneath this thin veneer of American philanthropy lay the true reason for the attack: US oil imperialism needed to be advanced in a market where prices were out of control owing to the tinkering of the puppet master - the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
So misinformed was the US public by now from the constant spin by the White House (and, in many cases, the complicity of a jingoist media) that three-quarters of the American public believed that Hussein was responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in Manhattan.
Not surprisingly, WMDs were not found and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan labelled it an illegal war. Yet the damage has been done and, as these words are written, Iraq is more unstable now than before.
'American oil lust is a mixed blessing,' states Roberts…such heavy dependence on foreign oil makes the United States vulnerable to disruptions in supply and to energy "blackmail" and has, in addition, fostered a long tradition of doing whatever is necessary, covertly or overtly, to ensure that the United States - and US oil companies - have access to world oil supplies.'
The Bush Family
It is no secret that the Bush family roots sink deep into the oil industry. They go back a hundred years to George junior's grandfather, Prescott Bush, who cut his teeth in the international oil business during a two-decade-long term as the director of the arms manufacturer and oil-services company Dresser Industries.
George HW Bush worked for Dresser and ran his own offshore oil-drilling business, Zapata Offshore. George W Bush mostly raised money from investors for failed oil operations. Since the 1980s, the Bush family was well connected with Enron, the giant US energy company.
George HW Bush gave key personnel sufficient clout in Washington to later allow George junior, then on his presidential campaign trail, to head straight to Enron for contributions. This made Enron one of the most powerful corporates in memory.
Dick Cheney resigned as CEO of the oil services company Halliburton to join George W Bush in the White House. He would later be accused of securing lucrative business for Halliburton while serving his term, including facilitating a no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq.
Condoleezza Rice, former national security adviser and US secretary of state, served on the board of directors of the Chevron Corporation - the massive California-based energy company - for a decade before her appointment by Bush.
Rice's connection to the company hit the headlines when Chevron named one of its oil tankers after her in 2001. Writing for the liberal online magazine Salon.com, Damien Cave said 'no administration has ever been more in bed with the energy industry... the Bush administration's ties to oil and gas are as deep as an offshore well.
The US started out as the world's largest producer of oil and other energy. Now it is the largest consumer. One out of every four barrels of oil produced in the world is burned in America, asserts author Paul Roberts, and this 'enormous, apparently limitless appetite exerts a ceaseless pull on the rest of the world's oil players and on the shape of the world political order.
You can see the conflict of interest: what CEO is going to make decisions that will shrink the board's pay package or risk upsetting the shareholders? For the United States to reach the goals set by the climate agreement of Kyoto and perform its crucial part in slowing anthropogenic global warming, the country would need to reduce its emissions by 70 per cent by the end of this century.
This means that not only would the current American population have to cut back radically on their ample lifestyles, but so too would the future population - which is expected to become larger and increasingly wealthy.
White House Ethos
The White House ethos is to deny the complicity of humanity in climate change. It was best expressed by Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who said that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people'.
Pollution and its consequences - which are so intrinsically linked to how people live their lives and hence to their own complicity - also seem to 'strike a raw nerve'. This debate has become a political milieu that took a most sinister turn in 1998 when a group of scientists published a paper in Nature.
The paper argued that of all the factors changing temperature globally during the past 600 years, greenhouse gases were the main driver behind temperature increases in the 20th century.
A political backlash followed early in 2005 when the Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce with the US House of Representatives Joe Barton, an ardent climate change sceptic, requested information on the scientists.
The Washington Post described the action as an intrusive and far-reaching witch hunt, with a possible 'chilling effect on the willingness of people to work in areas that are politically relevant'.
A lack of consensus in the scientific community is further complicating things. While most scientists agree about the general causes and effects of climate change, it's a sufficiently complex science for there to be some disagreement about the finer points. There are also some scientists who question whether the prognosis is as bad as the IPCC says.
The uncertainty is enough for the industrial giant to stall on committing to emission reductions and the economic consequences that will result. The US government has been accused of 'cherry-picking science to suit policy agenda and suppressing science that it did not like'.
Some question whether the climate agreement of Kyoto will even work. Another theory is that the US refuses to sign Kyoto because, if industry, is curtailed in the US, factories will simply move abroad to poor countries where human rights and pollution controls are not as stringent.
This is almost certainly not the case, although the kind of thinking in Lawrence Summer 's memo, which actively encouraged sending pollution to the poorer nations, probably still exists in the upper echelons of US government today.