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If we are going to start calling industrial corn sustainable, then we might as well say that petroleum is a renewable resource if you're willing to wait long enough.
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Catherine Friend (Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old Macdonald's Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat)
“
So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
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Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
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Naomi Klein
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Dad's oil dehydrator was a contained electrostatic field, one electrode down the center, the other the container's inner wall. Principal problem was finding a dielectric to separate the two. Refuse oil poured in came out as oil of the highest grade, dry chemicals, and drinking water. Petroleum Rectifying Company successfully prohibited its use.
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John Cage (M: Writings '67–'72)
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Climate disaster has put a spotlight on the need for human society to evolve beyond dependence on petroleum, but our very capacity to decide on that—or anything—remains at risk as long as the industry is still ranging like a ravenous predator on the field of democracy.
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Rachel Maddow (Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth)
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Old foot trails may be neglected, back-country ranger stations left unmanned, and interpretive and protective services inadequately staffed, but the administrators know from long experience that millions for asphalt can always be found; Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere—particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry—they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started.
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Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
“
Yeah, well, time marches on. Getting caught up in causes don’t interest me. Not anymore. Especially when you see the scope of what this is.” He took the Heinz ketchup bottle from the condiment holder. “That’s the thing: Most people don’t understand this. The ingredients, what it goes on, where the energy comes from to create it, the ways the world’s gotta be directed and coaxed and violated and controlled to get this one little fucked bottle. And once you see how ketchup relates to imperial maintenance it’s tough to not get an overwhelmed quality to your thinking. Like one of them Magic Eye thingamajobs—hard the first time, but once you get it, you’ll never unsee it.
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Stephen Markley (The Deluge)
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The Saudis considered the petroleum under their soil a gift from God, but accessing its value laid within man’s capacity. Until the Saudis developed the capabilities themselves, they would simply import the human capital they needed to make that petroleum valuable. This meant importing
Aramco to run the oil industry, IBI and, later, other companies to build modern cities and transportation, and even American financial advisors to create a modern banking system. The trick was to buy what they did not
have from the outside, and then to make it their own.
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Ellen R. Wald (Saudi, Inc.)
“
The 1980s were among the worst periods in the history of the domestic energy industry, amid a glut of oil and slowing demand. An estimated 90 percent of oil and gas companies went out of business and the bulk of the industry’s petroleum engineers left to try their luck in more promising businesses.
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Frackers: The Inside Story of the New Wildcatters and Their Energy Revolution)
“
Until the first petroleum well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, whale oil *was* oil. In Leviathan, a fine history of whaling, Eric Jay Dolin enumerates whale Phil's manifold applications: 'It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution.' In fact, its use as a lubricant impervious to extremes in temperature persisted well into the space age -- NASA lubed its moon landers and other remotely operated vehicles with sperm whale oil until the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986.
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Sarah Vowell
“
Take a simple pocket pen, so cheap that they are given away as advertising. Back of it lie several sorts of chemists, metallurgists, synthetic polymer experts, mechanical engineers, extrusion presses, computer programmers, computers, computer technicians, toolmakers, electrical engineers, a planet-wide petroleum industry, five or more sorts of mines with mining engineers, geologists, miners, railroads, steamships, production engineers, management specialists, merchandizing psychologists—et cetera to a splitting headache. It is impossible even to list the myriad special skills that underlie even the most trivial trade item of our enormously complex and interdependent industrial web.
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Robert A. Heinlein (The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes)
“
The age of centralized, command-and-control, extraction-resource-based energy sources (oil, gas, coal and nuclear) will not end because we run out of petroleum, natural gas, coal, or uranium. It will end because these energy sources, the business models they employ, and the products that sustain them will be disrupted by superior technologies, product architectures, and business models. Compelling new technologies such as solar, wind, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars will disrupt and sweep away the energy industry as we know it.
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Tony Seba (Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030)
“
In airplane crashes and chemical industry accidents, in the infrequent but serious nuclear plant accidents, in the NASA Challenger and Columbia disasters, and in the British Petroleum gulf spill, a common finding is that lower-ranking employees had information that would have prevented or lessened the consequences of the accident, but either it was not passed up to higher levels, or it was ignored, or it was overridden. When I talk to senior managers, they always assure me that they are open, that they want to hear from their subordinates, and that they take the information seriously. However, when I talk to the subordinates in those same organizations, they tell me either they do not feel safe bringing bad news to their bosses or they’ve tried but never got any response or even acknowledgment, so they concluded that their input wasn’t welcome and gave up. Shockingly often, they settled for risky alternatives rather than upset their bosses with potentially bad news. When I look at what goes on in hospitals, in operating rooms, and in the health care system generally, I find the same problems of communication exist and that patients frequently pay the price. Nurses and technicians do not feel safe bringing negative information to doctors or correcting a doctor who is about to make a mistake. Doctors will argue that if the others were “professionals” they would speak up, but in many a hospital the nurses will tell you that doctors feel free to yell at nurses in a punishing way, which creates a climate where nurses will certainly not speak up. Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do.
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Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
“
The Ukraine is still under Russian influence, even if they did give us independence. Ethnic Russians number 22% of our population. The facts remain they will control us economically. We will continue to owe them monetarily for the natural gas, the petroleum and all other industrial tools we need. After they’ve exhausted our scant resources and we have run up large bills, they will just walk right back in and take us over again. Monitor it closely in the years to come, Nicholas, you will see I am right. It could be easy to disregard this movement of mine, if it weren’t for the queer twists and turns history takes from time to time.
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Nicholas Anderson (NOC: Non-Official Cover: British Secret Operations (The NOC Trilogy #1))
“
Manhattan Prep started out as one lone tutor in a Starbucks coffee shop. Less than ten years later, it was a leading national education and publishing business that employed over one hundred people and was acquired by a public company for millions of dollars. How did that happen? We delivered a service that customers liked more than what was otherwise available. They sought us out and rewarded us with their business. We hired more people, grew, and kept improving. This process—a new company filling a need and flourishing as a result—is an example of value creation. It’s the fuel of economic growth, and what our country has been seeking a formula for. It’s the process that leads to new businesses and jobs. Value creation has a polar opposite: rent-seeking. In the 1980s, economists began noticing that countries with ample natural resources experienced lower economic growth rates than others. From 1965 to 1998 in the OPEC (oil-producing) countries, gross domestic product per capita decreased on average by 1.3 percent, while in the rest of the developed world, per capita growth increased by 2.2 percent (for an overall difference of 3.5 percent). This was a surprise—if you had lots of oil in the ground, wouldn’t that give you more wealth to invest and thus spur more rapid growth? Economists cited a number of factors to explain this “resource curse,” including internal and external conflict, corruption, lower monitoring of government, lack of diversification, and being subject to higher price volatility. One other possible explanation on offer was that a country’s smart people will wind up going to work in whatever industry is throwing off money (like the oil industry in Saudi Arabia). Thus fewer talented people are innovating in other industries, dragging down the growth rate over time. This makes sense—it’s a lot easier for a gifted Saudi to plug into the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and extract economic value than to come up with a new business or industry. Does this sort of thing happen in the United States? Yes, you can make money through rent-seeking as opposed to value or wealth creation.
”
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Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
“
Wood was the main source of energy in the world until the eighteen-fifties, and it still could be. Roughly a tenth of the annual growth of all the trees on earth could yield alcohol enough to run everything that now uses coal and petroleum—every airplane, every industry, every automobile.
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John McPhee (Pieces of the Frame)
“
The Soviet system had left many valuable legacies—a huge network of large industrial enterprises (though stranded in the 1960s in terms of technology); a vast military machine; and an extraordinary reservoir of scientific, mathematical, and technical talent, although disconnected from a commercial economy. The highly capable oil industry was burdened with an ageing infrastructure. Below ground lay all the enormous riches in the form of petroleum and other raw materials that Gorbachev had cited in his farewell address
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Daniel Yergin (The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World)
“
In 1970, Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), a limited liability company principally owned by Shell, continued to manage Oman’s oil industry.
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Lois M. Critchfield (Oman Emerges: An American Company in an Ancient Kingdom)
“
The Saudi experience with IBI, though brief, proved instrumental and became a model for how the Saudis went on to conduct business. Saudi Arabia understood that it lacked the resources of more developed nations. These included a large population, an educated populace, capital, credit,
and native businesses. What Saudi Arabia realized it did have was an immense quantity of a very desirable resource: petroleum. Because it lacked so many resources, it could not drill for, extract, refine, transport, or sell that petroleum on its own. It needed outside firms to access the value of the petroleum, at least initially.
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”
Ellen R. Wald (Saudi, Inc.)
“
Carbon atoms are found in most of the millions of naturally occurring molecules that scientists have cataloged. Chief among these are the molecules of life. The physical structures and chemical machinery of all living things on our planet are made of molecules that are largely carbon. Fossil fuels come from living microbes and plants that were buried hundreds of millions of years ago, so coal and petroleum and natural gas, most plastics, and many other industrial chemicals, including solvents and lubricants, are mainly carbon. It’s also thanks to carbon that there are so many smells in the air for us to enjoy.
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Harold McGee (Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells)
“
The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People died so that this mine may profit, that these shoes maybe produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew those toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life.
Once, the trees from which wood came, the springs, river, well, or rain from which drinking water came would have been familiar; every object would appear out of somewhere, from someone or something known to the user, and producers and consumers would be the same people or people who knew one another. Industrialization, urbanization, and transnational markets created a world where water poured out of faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel (in our time if not in Orwell”s with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible. There were undeniable benefits—a more stimulating and various materials and mental life—but they came at a cost.
The places, plants, animals, materials, and objects that had once been as well-known as friends and family had become strangers, as had the people who worked with these materials. Things appeared from beyond the horizon, from beyond knowing, and knowing was an act of volition instead of a part of everyday life.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Orwell's Roses)
“
The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People died so that this mine may profit, that these shoes maybe produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew those toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life.
Once, the trees from which wood came, the springs, river, well, or rain from which drinking water came would have been familiar; every object would appear out of somewhere, from someone or something known to the user, and producers and consumers would be the same people or people who knew one another. Industrialization, urbanization, and transnational markets created a world where water poured out of faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel (in our time if not in Orwell”s with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible. There were undeniable benefits—a more stimulating and various materials and mental life—but they came at a cost.
The places, plants, animals, materials, and objects that had once been as well-known as friends and family has become strangers, does had the people who worked with these materials. Things appeared from beyond the horizon, from beyond knowing, and knowing was an act of volition instead of a part of everyday life.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Orwell's Roses)
“
The evidence of past mistakes was still everywhere in 2000. Koch Industries was still carrying the accumulated litter that was left behind by countless Value Creation Strategies, years of acquisitions, and rapid growth. As Koch reviewed its holdings, one executive described the corporate structure as representing a table piled high at a rummage sale, full of odds and ends that had no apparent rationale for belonging together. Koch began to unload these properties, selling off pipeline holdings like the Chase Transportation Company. It sold a chemical firm called Koch Microelectronic Service Company and closed down a new $30 million chemical plant in Bryan, Texas. Over a period of years, Koch would sell off thousands of miles of pipelines. The corporate odds and ends were discarded. The remaining businesses at Koch were restructured and streamlined. The most important division, Koch Petroleum, was renamed Flint Hills Resources and given new leaders. Other businesses were consolidated under a new, simplified structure that put them under the umbrella of a few new companies like Koch Minerals, Koch Supply & Trading, and Koch Chemical Technology Group.
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
“
But even the biggest Wall Street banks were at a disadvantage when they went up against the traders at Koch Industries, British Petroleum, or Amoco. The Wall Street banks didn’t have access to inside information. Goldman Sachs didn’t own refineries or pipelines and couldn’t get a sneak peek into where markets were headed. The banks had to resort to second-rate information that was publicly available, like government reports on monthly energy supplies. It was a losing proposition. In the mid-1990s, the Wall Street banks came to Koch Industries, asking for help. “We kept getting approached by banks, who say, ‘Hey, Koch. You guys are so good at this physical stuff, we’d like to partner with you,’ ” recalled a former senior Koch executive who was heavily involved in trading operations. The banks came to Koch with the same pitch: the banks would handle “all this financial stuff,” while Koch handled the physical end of trading and shared information from its operations. If Koch executives were flattered by the attention from Wall Street, they didn’t show it for long. “We kind of got curious—or, suspicious is the better term,” the executive recalled. Rather than help the banks out, Koch set up a team to study why the banks were so interested in their business. Koch hired the outside consulting firm McKinsey & Company to study what was happening in commodities markets during the 1990s. McKinsey reported that the world of trading had grown even larger and more profitable than Koch Industries had suspected. As it happened, the futures contracts that Koch was trading had become the “plain vanilla” products in a rapidly booming market. Now there were more exotic, more opaque, and far more profitable financial products on the market. These products were called “derivatives.” That’s where the real money was.
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
“
But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders -- the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded.
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Lee Sandlin (Losing the War)
“
Association of Petroleum Producers—spoke with federal government officials 536 times between 2008 and 2012, while TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, had 279 communications. The Climate Action Network, on the other hand, the country’s broadest coalition devoted to emission reductions, only logged six communications in the same period. In the U.K., the energy industry met with the Department of Energy
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate)
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Many bills proposing a national energy program that made use of America’s vast agricultural resources for fuel production were killed by smear campaigns launched by vested petroleum interests. The oil companies had a monopoly over the automobile industry, and creating a new fuel would be a threat to their power. Due to the threat ethanol fuel posed to major oil companies, production was shut down and the idea of using ethanol as fuel became a thing of the past, another example of how the greed of power and profit has limited our potential.
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Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
“
Bombas Tipo OH1 y OH2” (ANSI/API Std. 610. Eleventh Edition- September 2010. ISO 13709:2009 (Identical). Centrifugal pumps for petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries).
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Iván Mejía (Instalación de Bombas Centrífugas de Eje Horizontal: Manual de Ayuda y Consulta para su Montaje Mecánico (Spanish Edition))
“
It’s not about what they would make,” Charles corrected, “it’s about what they would destroy. Yes, they would make millions, but in doing so they would break down the world’s largest industry worth multi-trillions; the petroleum industry. So now let’s say they continue studying these new sciences in secret. They would then be ahead of everyone else in the outside world and be in a position to break away from our society to advance on their own. Fast forward three or four decades later, this small group, broken away from the mainstream, would end up being a very different society from the rest of the world. Not only would they have very advanced technology and substantial resources, but their world view and geopolitical beliefs would significantly differ from the rest of us. Their technologies may even allow them to interact with the off-world entities before the rest of us; maybe even have the means to travel off-world to have encounters that would revolutionize their own world view, making them far removed from the rest of civilization by orders of magnitudes.” “When you say the off-world entities, you mean,” Mark hesitated, “aliens?
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Vincent Amato (Disclosing the Secret)
“
Former petroleum industry analyst Jan Lundberg puts it this way, “The nation and most of the rest of the world is chasing a technofix instead of adjusting to ecological/economic reality.
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Mark Shepard (Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers)
“
The ADAs say butter is bad? Then food manufacturers give you margarine for decades. But then . . . oops! Margarine contains trans fats, which are now universally recognized as poison. Alright, so they created a whole new line of synthetic "spreads" based on vegetable oils—formerly used as industrial machinery lubricants—extracted by heat and petroleum solvents that have to be deodorized to eat (mouth watering, isn’t it?).
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Richard Nikoley (Free The Animal: Lose Weight & Fat With The Paleo Diet (aka The Caveman Diet) V2 - NEWLY EXPANDED & UPDATED)
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The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
The consumption of petroleum products is expected to grow from the present level of approximately 64 MMT in 1994-95 to around 100 MMT by the turn of this century and to 149 MMT by the year 2010. The objective of the oil industry is to meet this growth in an efficient and effective way
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Anonymous
“
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and other industry representatives, it turned out, had created a “grassroots” group called Energy Citizens that joined Tea Party organizations in packing the town halls with protesters.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
“
When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
It raises a grave question: What role does the petroleum industry play in promoting and approving building materials that are supposed to shelter families from harm?
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John Vaillant (Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World)
“
THEINT WIN HTET Business and Petroleum Trade in Yangon, Myanmar.........SBP Trades in high-speed diesel oil, a product used as a fuel in medium and high compression ignition engines such as those in commercial vehicles, generators, locomotives, boats, and pumps. SBP primarily transacts with private filling stations, marine industry and commercial industrial customers
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Theint Win Htet
“
As Thatcher imposed the policies which earned her the name “The Iron Lady,” unemployment in Britain doubled, rising from 1.5 million when she came into office, to a level of 3 million by the end of her first eighteen months in office. Labor unions were targetted under Thatcher as obstacles to the success of the monetarist “revolution,” a prime cause of the “enemy,” inflation. All the time, with British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell exploiting the astronomical prices of $36 or more per barrel for their North Sea oil, never a word was uttered against big oil or the City of London banks which were amassing huge sums of capital in the situation. Thatcher also moved to accommodate the big City banks by removing exchange controls, so that instead of capital being invested in rebuilding Britain’s rotted industrial base, funds flowed out to speculate in real estate in Hong Kong or lucrative loans to Latin America.
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F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
“
Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere—particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry—they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started.
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Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
“
Oil, they had discovered, could be used as a weapon. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia took on the position Texas itself had once had and became the swing oil producer for the great industrial nations of the world. The biggest transfer of wealth in human history was under way. Hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenues poured into the Saudi Kingdom. The Saudis were drowning in petrodollars.
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Craig Unger (House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties)
“
As early as 1959, at a symposium called “Energy and Man,” organized by the American Petroleum Institute to mark the centenary of the global oil business, the physicist Edward Teller told the industry’s most important executives, “Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth.” The temperature, Teller predicted, would rise, and when it did, “there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise.”3 But these kinds of warnings were easily ignored.
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Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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In 1988, Koch Oil had taken 142,000 barrels of oil without paying for them and cleared pure profit on each of those barrels when it sold them. In 1986 and 1987, the other years that Ballen’s team investigated, Koch was over by 240,680 and 239,206 barrels, respectively. The second-highest overage of any other company in those years was the Phillips Petroleum Company’s overage of 2,181 barrels in 1987, still just 0.009 percent of Koch’s overage that year. The set of numbers was the only clear thing that the Senate team could determine about Koch. As investigators dug further into the company, they discovered an organization that seemed built to obscure its very existence. There was a reason that no one had heard of Koch Oil, even though the company operated huge pipeline networks and two major oil refineries (one in Corpus Christi, Texas, and the other just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota).
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
“
Only such witnessing could have inspired the mildly epiphanic passage in Seeds of Man, in which the clear air of the mountainous borderland all too briefly serves as an antidote to the industrial poisons that had choked the life out of both Okemah and Pampa. As Guthrie recalled it: “The feel and the breath of the air was all different, new, high, clear, clean, and light. None of the smokes and carbons, none of the charcoal smells of the oil fields. None of the sooty oil-field fires, none of the blackening slush-pond blazes, none of those big sheet-iron petroleum refineries, none of those big smoky carbon-black plants. No smells of the wild oil gusher on the breeze. No smells from that wild gas well blowing off twenty million feet into the good air every day.”30
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Will Kaufman (Woody Guthrie's Modern World Blues (American Popular Music Series Book 3))
“
These deals were part of a strategy that Koch had been formulating for over a year. Koch saw something in Eagle Ford. It was something that others also saw, but that Koch was the first to exploit. While production was flat until early 2010, the number of drilling rigs had more than tripled in just over a year, from thirty to 104. This number was a leading indicator. The wells would start pumping, and new oil would start to flow. Koch Industries was poised for the change. The wells being drilled into southern Texas were the face of an energy revolution that would redefine global oil markets and the American economy. They were part of a once-in-a-generation transformation that crept up quietly and then changed everything. In one short decade—from 2005 to 2015—America went from being the largest importer of refined petroleum products to the largest exporter of refined petroleum products. A country that was once the poster child for peak oil discovered that it was home to oil and natural gas deposits that were likely larger than those found in Saudi Arabia. The entire story about fossil fuels was reversed before many people even realized what was happening. These changes were every bit as cataclysmic for oil markets as the OPEC embargo had been in the 1970s. But this time, the changes accrued to America’s benefit. The cost of oil plummeted, OPEC was defanged, and America became essentially self-sufficient as an oil consumer.
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
“
On the other hand, when a company’s value curve lacks focus, its cost structure will tend to be high and its business model complex in implementation and execution. When it lacks divergence, a company’s strategy is a me-too, with no reason to stand apart in the marketplace. When it lacks a compelling tagline that speaks to buyers, it is likely to be internally driven or a classic example of innovation for innovation’s sake with no great commercial potential and no natural take-off capability. A Company Caught in the Red Ocean When a company’s value curve converges with its competitors, it signals that a company is likely caught within the red ocean of bloody competition. A company’s explicit or implicit strategy tends to be trying to outdo its competition on the basis of cost or quality. This signals slow growth unless, by the grace of luck, the company benefits from being in an industry that is growing on its own accord. This growth is not due to a company’s strategy, however, but to luck. Overdelivery without Payback When a company’s value curve on the strategy canvas is shown to deliver high levels across all factors, the question is, Does the company’s market share and profitability reflect these investments? If not, the strategy canvas signals that the company may be oversupplying its customers, offering too much of those elements that add incremental value to buyers. To value-innovate, the company must decide which factors to eliminate and reduce—and not only those to raise and create—to construct a divergent value curve. Strategic Contradictions Are there strategic contradictions? These are areas where a company is offering a high level on one competing factor while ignoring others that support that factor. An example is investing heavily in making a company’s website easy to use but failing to correct the site’s slow speed of operation. Strategic inconsistencies can also be found between the level of your offering and your price. For example, a petroleum station company found that it offered “less for more”: fewer services than the best competitor at a higher price. No wonder it was losing market share fast.
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W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
“
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jony
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There’s probably a special place in hell for the petroleum industry executives. Right next to the people that don’t pick up dog shit in public places.
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L.T. Vargus (Dark Passage (Violet Darger #7))
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About 85 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuels, and about 80 percent of those come from just two sources: coal (46 percent) in its various forms, including anthracite and lignite; and petroleum (33 percent) in its various forms, including oil, gasoline, and propane. Coal and petroleum are used differently. Most petroleum is consumed by individuals and small businesses as they heat their homes and offices and drive their cars. By contrast, coal is mainly burned by heavy industry: coal produces the great majority of the world’s steel and cement and 40 percent of its electricity. The percentages vary from place to place, but the pattern remains. Coal provides about two-thirds of China’s energy, but almost all of it is used by big industries. Coal provides less than a fifth of U.S. energy, but again almost all of it is for industry. In both places petroleum consumption is on a smaller, more individual scale.
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Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
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Sun power’s image as the province of baling-wire hippies was at odds with reality. Today’s multibillion-dollar photovoltaic industry owes its existence mainly to the Pentagon and Big Oil. The first wide-scale use of solar panels had come in the 1960s: powering military satellites, which couldn’t use fossil fuels (too bulky to lift into space) or batteries (impossible to recharge in orbit). By the 1970s photovoltaics were cheaper, but the industry had acquired only one major new user: the petroleum industry. Some 70 percent of the solar modules sold in the United States were bought to run offshore drilling platforms.
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Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
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The most destructive of these was a “duty of twenty cents on each and every gallon” of grain alcohol, collectible at the distillery. The duty increased across the Civil War to a final level in 1864 of some $2 per gallon, or $30 today.14 The alcohol tax was intended to assess beverage alcohol, but it failed to exclude industrial and illuminating alcohol. The high tax, raising the price of those alcohols to about $2.50 per gallon, drove the fuel out of the market just as petroleum-derived kerosene was entering it.
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Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
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Shipbuilding stalled postwar—the Great Depression came early to the shipbuilding industry—but welding advanced, finding a major new application in pipeline construction. In 1925 the Magnolia Petroleum Company of Galveston, Texas, rebuilt a leaky two-hundred-mile bolted natural-gas pipeline with acetylene lap-welded pipe. After five more years of development—other companies followed Magnolia—electric welding replaced acetylene, eliminating overlapping, using less pipe, and cutting welding time in half. Alloy steels were also important to pipeline improvement, as were improved ditching machines and gas compressors. By 1931, pipeline workers were laying the first thousand-mile natural-gas pipeline from the Texas Panhandle to Chicago.
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Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
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Even without its punitive tax, alcohol cost more to produce than gasoline, particularly since it lacked a supply chain from farm to refinery nearly as efficient as the pipelines and railroad cars of the Rockefeller-monopolized petroleum industry. (By 1882, the Standard Oil Trust controlled 85 percent of the world oil market, one reason the US Supreme Court in 1911 ordered it broken up.22) As with wood compared with coal in Elizabethan London, the cost of delivery disadvantaged alcohol compared with gasoline.
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Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
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The idea that coronary artery disease is a result of saturated fats is a lie shamefully perpetuated by an industry and government dependent on corn and petroleum, who place profits before our health and wellbeing. Don’t believe it! The real culprit is sugar, and in the next chapter, I’ll explain
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Valerie J. Burke (Is the Paleo Diet Right for You? Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science)
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in 1959, with the discovery in Manchuria of a giant oil field named Daqing—which means “Great Celebration.” By the 1980s, the domestic petroleum industry was meeting the nation’s needs and also producing a surplus of oil that was exported, principally to Japan.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)