by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Of all the world's natural resources, oil is by far the most troublesome. Nations kill for it, cars burn it and people around the globe will pay big money for it because they don't have any choice in the matter. What's more, the world's oil is running out. Oil is not a renewable resource and, according to Toronto-based journalist Linda McQuaig, author of the recently released It's the Crude, Dude, we've used most of the stuff that's easily accessible. If the world economy and environment are to be saved, she writes, we have to find both better ways to use our remaining oil and get serious about exploring alternative technologies.

But the book also addresses Big Oil and its uncomfortably cozy relationship with the current White House administration, with sideswipes at the auto industry and protectionist American tariffs designed to protect the domestic SUV manufacturers. Delving into Big Oil's history of price manipulation and shady political dalliances, the book - with flashes of humour mixed with impressive research and a genuine sense of indignation - is an alternately entertaining and gloomy read.

Mirror: Let's start with last month's election in the States. What does a Bush re-election mean for Big Oil?

Linda McQuaig: Well, oil stocks went up in value, that's one hint. It means Big Oil will continue to get its way. Certainly we won't see any movement on the global warming front, which is extremely serious. Obviously they'll stay the course in Iraq. They'd like to get out of Iraq at some point - they would like to get out of Iraq as soon as possible - but they have strategic interests that they want to accomplish there, one of them being the oil. The other is getting military control of the region.

M: Do you think anything would have been different if Kerry had won?

LM: Not immediately. I think over time there would have been some movement. Certainly Kerry is more willing to acknowledge things like the problems of global warming.

Running on empty

M: What do today's high oil prices suggest about a) Iraq and b) Big Oil's complicity there?

LM: I do think it's related to a problem that we're going to see more of in the future, and that is the dwindling oil reserves of the world. There's only so much of it in the world, and we've been using it up at such a rapid pace that we've used up almost half of what there is in the world. But the problem is that we're using it up ever faster, so at the rate we're going, we're only going to have a few more decades of oil left.

But the problem is even more urgent than that because we've used up most of the easily accessible oil, the stuff that you can skim off the top, as it were, and so increasingly, we're left with this problem of getting at the more inaccessible oil. That's much more expensive, for one thing. It makes what's left of the easily accessible oil more valuable, and I think that's part of what's pushing up the price.

Ironically, another thing that's driven the price of oil upwards is Iraq's oil being off the market. Which is ironic, because I would argue that they went into Iraq partly because of the oil. There was a limited amount of Iraq's oil reaching world markets anyway because of the UN sanctions in the 90s, but there's even less of it reaching world markets now because of the extent of the resistance and sabotage.

In terms of how Big Oil is doing out of all this, well, they're doing extremely well. Their profits, which were always high, are just record-breaking.

Dick's tricks

M: You stressed the meeting, shortly after Bush taking power in 2001, between [Vice-President Dick] Cheney's Energy Task Force and Big Oil, where they carved up Iraq on a map. What did that meeting, which the White House has never really acknowledged, say to you?

LM: The Cheney Task Force was set up right after Bush took office, with great urgency but with great secrecy, and so there's a limited amount that we know about it. One of their focuses was getting control of oil reserves in rogue states like Iraq, and in fact we know that one of the documents they were studying was this detailed oil map of Iraq, where there's nothing on it but oil features and it's all sliced up in little exploration blocks - you can see that's what they're interested in. Another was a detailed list of all the important oil companies around the world that had been negotiating with Saddam in the 1990s, when there were sanctions in place, to develop his oil as soon as sanctions were lifted. The big oil companies from France and Russia and China and all these chief competitors of the American oil companies were lined up to cash in on this one remaining big oil bonanza left on Earth, which is what Iraq is - it's really the only kind of undeveloped source of what's remaining of the easily accessible oil. There was something like a trillion-dollars' worth of oil deals that were potentially in the works, so you can see that this would have been a concern to these companies.

And another thing that's interesting, if you look at the timing on this, was that at the same time the Cheney Task Force was meeting, [the Bush Cabinet was] also discussing toppling Saddam. And don't forget, this is months before 9/11. So you have these two initiatives going on - figuring out how to prevent Saddam from awarding his oil to all the top competitors and you have plans for overthrowing Saddam. And both these initiatives are being orchestrated by Dick Cheney. To me that's suggestive of a connection there.

Death and tax breaks

M: You also have a good chapter about SUVs. How did North Americans get so sucked into buying them?

LM: The thing that's so unbelievable to me when you think about it - you know, they're ugly, they're clunky, awkward-looking and oversized - to me it's all summed up by the fact that the forerunner of the SUV was the Chevy Suburban, going back to the 1930s, which wasn't terribly popular but basically survived that era because it was popular in the funeral business. The size and shape of them made it easy to unload coffins.

M: Which is symbolic in some sort of way.

LM: Yeah, in many ways, I guess. But I think it shows you can market just about anything with enough advertising. It's sold as "the car of independent-minded people, people who go off-road and make their own way." This is ludicrous. I mean, you couldn't drive an SUV on any kind of winding road - it'd be far too dangerous.

Secondly, they've made it very attractive with things like all these incredible tax incentives. At one point they introduced a special tax on luxury cars but they gave an exemption to the SUV - again, that favouritism because the SUV market is the market controlled by the American manufacturers [through government tariffs against foreign SUV imports].

M: Russia ratified Kyoto. The U.S. won't. So where does that put the state of the world, considering that Kyoto is only just baby steps in the right direction?

LM: Well, Kyoto can now come into place, because the requirements are met with having Russia in. That's a huge, huge breakthrough. But Kyoto on its own is not, in any way, enough to hold back the tides of global warming. We've got to go much farther, get much tougher, but what this shows is that it's possible. Global warming, as a problem, has only been understood for the last 15 years. So I think it's phenomenal that in that short a time, the countries around the world have come together really with unprecedented speed to deal with this problem and actually get a treaty in place. That's the good news.

The bad news is, that's not enough. And the U.S. is not a participant. Twenty-five per cent of the world's greenhouse gases are coming from the U.S. The biggest player is not part of Kyoto. That's a very serious problem.

It's The Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet by Linda McQuaig, Doubleday, hc, 346pp, $35.95