Cheap oil in the Persian Gulf led multinational corporations and imperialists, starting with the British in Iran, then in Iraq, to go there in droves. Cheap oil and vast profits are still driving imperialism, war, and global warming.

The British wanted to control Persian Gulf oil resources first of all because they had converted their Navy from coal to oil in World War I. The Navy was essential to Britain maintaining its empire; Britain had plenty of coal, but no oil. It turned out that Persian Gulf oil was not only plentiful; it was cheap.

That oil has extracted a heavy environmental and security price, from global warming to the dead and maimed soldiers who have fought in the Middle Eastern sands for nearly a century - soldiers from India, soldiers from Britain, soldiers from the United States, and soldiers from the region itself. There has been more than one nuclear weapons crisis associated with Middle Eastern oil, including one in 1958 when the western client king of Iraq was overthrown in a coup. Panicking about running out oil is giving a propaganda boost to nuclear power advocates and even advocates of the use of plutonium in nuclear reactors.

In environmental and security terms, oil has not been cheap; it has been very, very costly. But we have found no effective way to constrain its use to reflect those costs. Using up the proven reserves of oil alone, to say nothing of the undiscovered and undeveloped reserves, would increase carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere by nearly 30 percent. That would aggravate the climate change disaster that is already playing out.

We have reached the end of the rope environmentally long before oil can become depleted enough to become costly. In the next commentary, I will discuss what we can do about it.

Listen to this commentary (requires Real Audio)

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Part 3 of "Is oil running out?"