How Big Oil Conquered the World

Terence Newton, Staff

Waking Times

This is how big oil conquered the world.

In the effort to find a cheaper source for kerosene, on Sunday, August 28th, 1859, “Colonel” Edwin Drake struck black gold in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in what was the world’s first oil well, thereby officially beginning the global oil revolution. It is predicted that in 2016 the world will an astounding, “worldwide average demand of nearly 96 million barrels of oil and liquid fuels per day – that works out to more than 35 billion barrels a year.” [1]

“Drake’s well proved that by drilling for it, oil could be found in abundance and produced cheaply. Overnight a whole new industry was born. Before long in millions of homes, farms and factories around the world, lamps would be lit with kerosene refined from West Pennsylvania crude.” [Source]

From that moment, the oil boom began and it was players like John D. Rockefeller who made the first fortunes in turning West Pennsylvania crude into a product that would fuel the world.

Today, there is no doubt that the oil industry is the most powerful economic and development force in the world, and with the recent developments in fracking, the industry is still expanding. There are now over 1.1 million active gas and oil wells in the United States alone, and citizens are beginning to wake up to the reality that oil companies have more rights within the law than ordinary citizens do, and the struggle to stop the oil industry’s advances into our communities is escalating.

Disasters like the Deepwater Horizon and countless other spills, train-wrecks, pipeline explosions and leaks make quick circulation in the news and in disaster struck areas, corporate police prohibit media coverage and even impede public clean up efforts. In the wilds of Canada the Tar Sands oil operations are scorching unfathomable tracts of wilderness. It is as though oil companies literally own the environment and can do as they please without any meaningful repercussions.

Aside from the impact that the oil and gas industry has on our communities and the environment, the world is now geo-strategically organized around the collection and domination of oil resources. The Middle East has been deliberately destabilized in the war on terror and is being taken over by oil companies escorted into no-man’s-lands by private military contractors.

Dictators like the those in the House of Saud are propped up and are free to roam the world with ridiculously lavish riches, entirely above the law. Even the escalating and complicated struggle with ISIS is now entangled in the dramatic and very lucrative oil trade. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently delivered on his promise to provide evidence of how Turkey and other nations are supporting ISIS by knowingly conducting trade with the terrorist organization.

“If you want to rule the world you need to control the oil. All the oil. Anywhere.” -Michel Collon, Monopoly

The oil industry is also well-known for its monopolistic tactics in preventing the proliferation of energy technologies that could offer alternatives to oil, or to make our oil usage much more efficient than it is now.

How was our entire world and culture so thoroughly dominated by the oil industry in just over 150 years?

Recently released, a new documentary film by James Corbett of the Corbett Report brings to light the lesser known and more obscure parts of the quest to bring oil to market and change the course of human history, dubbing it the ‘Rise of the Oiligarchy. It is a new must-see documentary that brings extraordinary perspective to our troubled world.