Crude Oil

In his book, "Crude Oil: The Violent Twilight of Oil", Peter Maass discusses about the world's unremitting pursuit and dependence on oil. He contends that oil dependency has led to conflicts and war between and within countries. Specifically, the oil-producing countries, mostly the developing nations, do not gain from the oil revenue since their governments are marred with corruption and poor governance so that the leaders monopolize the income. Consequently, these countries have remained in poverty with poor economies. Moreover, the powerful western nations like the United States heighten the situation by assisting the corrupt leaders to steal the wealth meant for the citizens. Maass (2010) also highlights that despite the blemishes of oil …show more content…
However, he fails to acknowledge a few practicalities. For instance, he centers his arguments on the evil side of oil and does not appreciate the benefits that come with being an oil-rich country. Some of the advantages include easy accessibility of the scarce natural resource within the country, improved infrastructure to transport the oil, cheaper oil prices for the locals and availability of a wide variety of industries that are linked to oil and its by-products (Ross, 2007). From his book, we can infer that all corruption, war and poverty arise from the greed of oil. Cleary, this is not the case since several wars and poverty cases stem from tribal hatred, inequality, lack of democracy and religious differences (Collier, 2008). All the same, Maass' ideas provide a bigger picture of the challenges that the oil-rich countries face and why they consider oil as a curse rather than a …show more content…
Based on Maass' book, oil dependency leads to wars, corruption and miserable lives. The oil-rich countries continue to face these significant challenges in oil trade since they have remained in poverty over the decades. These nations continue to be poor mainly because of bad governance and corrupt leaders. Moreover, the western governments and multinational companies do little to help the situation. It can also be concluded that oil-rich nations tend to enjoy huge revenues from oil exports which in turn impedes the export of other products. As a result, these countries end up importing most products leading to massive capital flight (Ross, 2007). The extraction of oil also causes environmental degradation such as global warming and massive pollution of water and