OURS HAS BECOME A "HYDROCARBON SOCIETY"-HISTORY OF OIL

Though the modern history of oil begins in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it is the twentieth century that was completely transformed by the advent of petroleum. In particular, three great themes underlie the story of oil.

• The first is the rise and development of capitalism and modern business.

Oil is the world's biggest and most pervasive business, the greatest of the great industries that arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The expansion of the business in the twentieth century—encompassing everything from wildcat drillers, smooth-talking promoters, and domineering entrepreneurs to great corporate bureaucracies and state-owned companies— embodies the twentieth-century evolution of business, of corporate strategy, of technological change and market development, and indeed of both national and international economies.

Throughout the history of oil, deals have been done and momentous decisions have been made—among men, companies, and nations—sometimes with great calculation and sometimes almost by accident.

No other business so starkly and extremely defines the meaning of risk and reward— and the profound impact of chance and fate.

Until some alternative source of energy is found, oil will still have far-reaching effects on the global economy; major price movements can fuel economic growth or, contrarily, drive inflation and kick off recessions. Today, oil is the only commodity whose doings and controversies are to be found regularly not only on the business page but also on the front page. And, as in the past, it is a massive generator of wealth—for individuals, companies, and entire nations. In the words of one tycoon, "Oil is almost like money."

• The second theme is that of oil as a commodity intimately intertwined with national strategies and global politics and power.

The battlefields of World War I established the importance of petroleum as an element of national power when the internal combustion machine overtook the horse and the coal-powered locomotive. Petroleum was central to the course and outcome of World War II in both the Far East and Europe.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to protect their flank as they grabbed for the petroleum resources of the East Indies. Among Hitler's most important strategic objectives in the invasion of the Soviet Union was the capture of the oil fields in the Caucasus. But America's predominance in oil proved decisive, and by the end of the war German and Japanese fuel tanks were empty.

• A third theme in the history of oil illuminates how ours has become a "Hydrocarbon Society" and we, in the language of anthropologists, "Hydrocarbon Man."

In its first decades, the oil business provided an industrializing world with a product called by the made-up name of "kerosene" and known as the "new light," which pushed back the night and extended the working day. At the end of the nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller had become the richest man in the United States, mostly from the sale of kerosene.

Gasoline was then only an almost useless by-product, which sometimes managed to be sold for as much as two cents a gallon, and, when it could not be sold at all, was run out into rivers at night. But just as the invention of the incandescent light bulb seemed to signal the obsolescence of the oil industry, a new era opened with the development of the internal combustion engine powered by gasoline. The oil industry had a new market, and a new civilization was born.

In the twentieth century, oil, supplemented by natural gas, toppled King Coal from his throne as the power source for the industrial world. Oil also became the basis of the great postwar suburbanization movement that transformed both the contemporary landscape and our modern way of life. Today, we are so dependent on oil, and oil is so embedded in our daily doings, that we hardly stop to comprehend its pervasive significance.

It is oil that makes possible where we live, how we live, how we commute to work, how we travel—even where we conduct our courtships. It is the lifeblood of suburban communities. Oil (and natural gas) are the essential components in the fertilizer on which world agriculture depends; oil makes it possible to transport food to the totally non-self-sufficient megacities of the world. Oil also provides the plastics and chemicals that are the bricks and mortar of contemporary civilization, a civilization that would collapse if the world's oil wells suddenly went dry.

For most of this century, growing reliance on petroleum was almost universally celebrated as a good, a symbol of human progress. But no longer. With the rise of the environmental movement, the basic tenets of industrial society are being challenged; and the oil industry in all its dimensions is at the top of the list to be scrutinized, criticized, and opposed. Efforts are mounting around the world to curtail the combustion of all fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—because of the resultant smog and air pollution, acid rain, and ozone depletion, and because of the specter of climate change.

Oil, which is so central a feature of the world as we know it, is now accused of fueling environmental degradation; and the oil industry, proud of its technological prowess and its contribution to shaping the modern world, finds itself on the defensive, charged with being a threat to present and future generations. Yet Hydrocarbon Man shows little inclination to give up his cars, his suburban home, and what he takes to be not only the conveniences but the essentials of his way of life. The peoples of the developing world give no indication that they want to deny themselves the benefits of an oil-powered economy, whatever the environmental questions.

And any notion of scaling back the world's consumption of oil will be influenced by the extraordinary population growth ahead. The twentieth century rightly deserved the title "the century of oil." Yet for all its conflict and complexity, there has often been a "oneness" to the story of oil, a contemporary feel even to events that happened long ago and, simultaneously, profound echoes of the past in recent events. At one and the same time, this is a story of individual people, of powerful economic forces, of technological change, of political struggles, of international conflict and, indeed, of epic change.

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Orach Paul Francis.