Oil at 150: an unhappy birthday — VOICES for REASON

As I blogged recently, August 27 was the 150th anniversary of the oil industry.

Given that oil lit up the world in the 19th century and mobilized it in the 20th, and given that to this day oil generates 40% of energy worldwide, August 27, 2009 should have been a day of celebration. Above all, it should have been a day of celebration by the intellectuals who analyze the culture and by the oil industry itself. Instead, it was a day of silence.

Where were the tributes—or even critical retrospectives—in the leading newspaper op-ed pages last week? There were none in the Wall Street Journal, none in the New York Times, none in the Washington Post, none in the Los Angeles Times. I am grateful to Investor’s Business Daily for being the most prominent exception to this trend, and for choosing an op-ed I wrote to commemorate the occasion. The Wall Street Journal finally got around to publishing an oil piece on the following week (though hardly a celebratory one) by historian Daniel Yergin, but the lateness is almost more insulting to the anniversary of oil than not publishing anything.

But if the intellectuals running and contributing to our nation’s editorial pages had nothing much to say about oil’s 150^th birthday, surely the oil industry itself did, no? In fact, the industry was, for all intents and purposes, silent. Yes, there are occasional tributes buried on the depths of corporate websites — but I will not link to them; try to find them yourself, and for every minute you spend, think about how much the industry cares about defending itself. (You can be sure that any initiative to “fight climate change” will be instantaneously apparent on any major oil company’s website.) Even the industry’s lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, has nothing.

Well, if the industry won’t defend itself and celebrate its anniversary, the rest of us still need to. Keep checking out our “Celebrating Oil’s 150^th Birthday” website. Here’s an excerpt from my Investor’s Business Daily op-ed, which recalls a time when people understood the value of petroleum:

The availability of cheap, personalized transport is something oil makes possible, and something we should never take for granted.

As a gasoline marketer told a group of gas station attendants in 1928: “My friends, it is the juice of the fountain of eternal youth that you are selling. It is health. It is comfort. It is success. . . . You must put yourself in the place of the man and woman in whose lives your gasoline has worked miracles.”

flickr: Don Solo