Oil and vinegar
BY Sue McCluskey
Photography by Dickens Street Studio
Its too-obvious title (why didn’t the publisher come right out and call it Dude, Where’s My Oil Well?) seems to suggest that Linda McQuaig’s latest book, It’s the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet (Doubleday, 2004) is aimed at the Fahrenheit 9/11 audience. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but is perhaps somewhat misleading. While Michael Moore’s polemics aim to galvanize short attention spans (and succeed brilliantly at doing so), McQuaig’s book has more in common with the traditional investigative journalism of, in our day, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.
It’s the Crude, Dude exposes, chapter by chapter, the sneaky underside of the long-standing collusion between the petroleum industry and US politicians. It’s not a rant against the war in Iraq. It is an incisive and sometimes frightening look at how our reliance on oil has left industrialized nations vulnerable to a handful of Big Oil interests, whose efforts to bully oil-producing nations into submission reach into the highest level of government.
McQuaig pulls no punches, looking at how automakers contribute to global warming; how US arrogance instigated the 9/11 attacks; how US policy explicitly conflates national security with securing control of other countries’ oil; how, in the event of a worldwide shortage, even Alberta’s resources cannot be kept from the US market (thanks, NAFTA); and how alternative energy sources are kept unreasonably expensive by massive subsidies to fossil-fuel producers.
All this, and the book still manages to be a first-rate page-turner, clearly and engagingly written. There are no eye-glazing accounts of policy or military protocols; rather, the book delivers an ironic, measured and sobering message in a world where the truth is not always true, the news is not always new, and the free market is anything but. Read this book. Better yet, read it, then lend it to someone who drives an SUV.
