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Oil pulses through our daily lives. It is the plastic we touch, the food we eat, and the way we move. Oil politics in the twentieth century was about the management of abundance, state power and market growth. The legacy of this age of plenty includes declining conventional oil reserves, volatile prices, climate change, and enduring poverty in many oil rich countries. The oil sector is now in need of reform. Yet no one seems at the helm, leaving a vital source of energy at the whim of dictators, speculators and corporate operators, and our societies locked into unsustainable growth models.
In this in-depth primer to the world's wealthiest industry, authors Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon take a fresh look at the contemporary geopolitics of oil. Going beyond simple assertions of peak oil and an oil curse, they point to an industry reordered by internationalized state oil companies, Asian consumerism shifting demand, the insecurities and violent assertiveness of declining powers, and the dilemmas of post-oil energy transition. As a new geopolitics of oil emerges, the need for effective global oil governance becomes imperative. Praising the growing influence of civil society and attentive to the institutionalization of producer-consumer cooperation, this book identifies challenges and opportunities to curtail price volatility, curb demand and the growth of dirty oil, de-carbonise energy systems, and improve governance in oil producing countries.
List of Figures, Tables and Text Boxes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Nature of a Political Resource
2 Capturing Oil
3 Marketing Oil
4 Securing Oil
5 Developing from Oil
6 Governing Oil
7 Better and Beyond: the Future of Oil
Notes
Selected Readings
Philippe le Billon is associate professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia. He has worked for environmental and humanitarian organizations in Angola, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and the former Yugoslavia. Gavin Bridge is a reader in economic geography at the University of Manchester. He has published widely on the geography of natural resources.
"You will not find a better guide to the new geopolitics of hydrocarbons."
- Michael Ross, University of California Los Angeles
"No comparable book so effectively covers the core issues as well as Oil and none so effectively provides a road synthesis of key trends and debates with such economy of style and richness of detail."
- Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
"This book is a 'must-read' antidote to current arguments about the scarcity of oil. Not only do Bridge and Le Billon comprehensively demolish those claims, they positively submit a twenty-first century 'beyond oil's prospective' for the future."
- Peter R. Odell, Erasmus University, Rotterdam
