oil-for-food scandal

12 results back to index

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

Skepticism about international law and the fight with the Europeans over Iraq has meant that neoconservatives have had virtually nothing innovative or interesting to say about new possi- The Neoconseiuative Legacy bilities for multilateral organization. They would much rather harp on the United Nation's failings in the Oil for Food scandal than think about how to create an organization of democracies that would build incentives to improve governance and democracy around the world. In the period immediately after World War II, American power was used not just to deter Soviet aggression but also to create a welter of new international organizations and agreements, from the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) to the United Nations, NATO, the U.S.

…

It was the American presence that Osama bin Laden seemed to mind to a much greater extent than support for Israel or other Arab regimes. Iraq and its sympathizers around the Arab world had been Threat, Risk, and Preventive War very successful before the war in arguing that the U.N. sanctions were responsible for killing Iraqi children and had to be lifted for moral reasons. After the war the Oil for Food scandal revealed that Saddam Hussein and his international partners were, in fact, responsible for diverting to themselves money intended to help Iraqi children, but before the war it was impossible to convince anyone of this. It appeared to the administration inevitable that the sanctions regime would fall apart over the coming years and eliminate any remaining barriers to Iraq's WMD programs.

…

See also democratic transitions NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 52, 64, 99, 176; and Iraq war, 174; legitimacy of, 172-74; as security organization, 172; U.S. relationship with, 173-74 natural right, 23 neoclassical economics, 44, 199^6 neoconservatism: as approach to U.S. foreign policy, 7-8, 46-47; attacks on, 13, 183; and communism, 50-51; and the Kristol-Kagan agenda, 40-44; roots of, 14-21; Strauss as influence on, 13, 21-31; and traditional conservatism, 38-39, 44-45; underlying principles of, 4-5, 9, 13-14, 48-49; Wohlstetter as influence on, 31-36 neoconservatives: and Bush administration foreign policy, 3-4, 12-14, 61-65; debate among, regarding foreign policy, 39-40; during the Cold War, 59-60, 62-63; an< ^ international institutions, 49, 64-65; and preventive-war doctrine, 102-3; threat as perceived by, 62 New Left, 18 Nicaragua, 135 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 24 Nitze, Paul, 38, 50 Niyazov, Saparmurat, 130 nonbinding agreements, 165 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), 32 North, Douglass, 122, 129-30 North Atlantic Treaty Organization. SeeNKTO North Korea, 80, 91, 174-75 Norton, Anne, 21 nuclear deterrence, 32-33,68 nuclear proliferation, 32-33; in the Middle East, 34,80-81 Nye, Joseph, 149 Office of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), 150 Oil for Food scandal, 65, 80, 96 Olsen, Mancur, 99-100 Open Society Institute, 137 Orange Revolution, 136 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 142-43 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 175, 176 Osirak reactor, 85, 90 Otpor, 137 overseas development assistance (ODA), 142-43, 147 Pakistan, 91; economic development in, 119; as nuclear power, 80, 88 223 Palestine: as issue in the Arab world, 76-77 Parsons, Talcott, 126 Patriot Act, 1 Perle, Richard, 12, 31, 51 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), 20 Philippines, 132, 135 Pillar, Paul, 68 Pinochet, Augusto, 135 Plato, 25, 30 Podhoretz, Norman, 14, 17 Poland, 29, 136 political development, 125-31, 140, 185; and competition, 129-30; and democratic transitions, 127-28, 140; and economic development, 128-29; ideas as basis for, 130 Pollack, Kenneth, 89 Popper, Karl, 24 Portugal, 133-34 Postel,Jon, 214ml poverty: Moynihan's views on, 20.

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas, Jack Farchy

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, Great Grain Robbery, invisible hand, John Deuss, junk bonds, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

Trafigura pled guilty to a charge of falsely claiming that oil it was selling in the US was compliant with the oil-for-food programme. 15 The American traders faced the harshest penalties. Oscar Wyatt, the owner of Coastal Petroleum, was sentenced to one year in jail, while his friend David Chalmers, the owner of Bayoil, was sentenced to two years. 16 The oil-for-food scandal was emblematic of the commodity industry’s new era of scarcity. For the next decade, low prices would be a distant memory, and commodity traders would fall over one another to secure the precious raw materials necessary to feed China and other emerging markets’ seemingly bottomless appetites for commodities.

…

They went to new oil nations, such as Chad and Sudan, which were exporting crude for the first time, and to established producers about to pump more, such as Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Yemen, Brazil, Equatorial Guinea and Angola. It was a process that drew the traders even closer into the world of oligarchs, despots and dictators, who were getting rich on the commodity boom. They forged alliances, and sometimes joint ventures, with powerful local individuals. Some traders broke the law, as the oil-for-food scandal demonstrated. Others navigated all kinds of dicey situations: wars, coups d’état, corrupt governments and chaotic nations. All in the quest to secure natural resources. ‘The trickier the country, the more upside there is,’ explains Bob Finch, the former Vitol executive who was one of the company’s leading figures during the 2000s. 22 Anyone who had access to commodities was suddenly in a privileged position thanks to the Chinese demand boom.

…

The unexpected capture of Kirkuk’s oil riches gave the Kurds a chance to build an economically autonomous country. A motley array of fixers and consultants soon appeared to help guide them. For oil, they hired a man who knew how to get it into the market: Murtaza Lakhani, the very same fixer who had been Glencore’s man in Iraq a decade earlier and had played a role in the oil-for-food scandal. Now working as an independent consultant, Lakhani helped the Kurds connect with the commodity traders. 9 Among the other fixers who cropped up in Kurdistan was Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump, who would later be jailed for financial fraud. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Manafort’s role was to help organise an independence referendum. 10 But to convert their new oil into money, the Kurds needed to find a way to sell it.

Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite by Carne Ross

Abraham Maslow, barriers to entry, blood diamond, carbon tax, cuban missile crisis, Doha Development Round, energy security, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Global Witness, income inequality, information security, iterative process, meta-analysis, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, stakhanovite, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

I have chosen not to use the term “elected” since it is inaccurate when most of the ten temporary members are not elected in contested elections, but are given seats by rote according to their regional group and place in the alphabet. Only two of the five countries elected every year win their seats through competitive elections of the UN membership, which are themselves often stitched up through backroom deals between countries. 2 You will not find in this chapter a discussion of the Oil-for-Food “scandal” that has erupted in recent years. On this I have nothing to add to the excellent Volcker report (to which I testified at length). 3 This term, now familiar to many, comprises non-conventional weapons including chemical, biological and nuclear ones. In Iraq’s case it also meant ballistic missiles over 150km range (the full details were set out in “the mother of all resolutions”, Security Council resolution 687, which in 1991 set out the precise terms of Iraq’s obligations). 4 I hesitate to confess that the delegates responsible for negotiating a particular issue in the Security Council are called “experts” in the unofficial yet traditional nomenclature of that organ.

…

None of these measures was ever properly or energetically pursued by either the UK or US governments, thus helping to create the situation where sanctions not only failed to force Iraqi compliance but also produced negative humanitarian consequences, a doubly bad policy. 4. War Stories 1 A version of this chapter first appeared in the Financial Times, 29 January 2005. 2 This was the official British inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD headed by Lord Butler, to which I testified in the summer of 2004. 3 The Volcker Inquiry into the oil-for-food scandal found no such evidence. 5. Them and Us 1 Game metaphors have been common in theories of international relations for some time. “Domino Theory”, for example, proposed, erroneously as it turned out, the idea that if one country fell to communism, its neighbours would “tip over” into communism in an unstoppable chain reaction.

The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein

business intelligence, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, John Deuss, offshore financial centre, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Given the enormous size of these companies—in 2011, Glencore was valued at $60 billion, higher than Boeing or Ford Motor Co.—and the global scope of their operations, remarkably little is known about them. In recent years, major oil-trading firms were discovered to have arranged secret deals with pariah states such as Sudan and were implicated in the United Nations oil-for-food scandal during Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq. More recently, Amsterdam-based Trafigura, a trading firm that operates widely in West Africa, was found to have dumped four hundred tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. The company paid a fine of nearly $200 million to settle charges stemming from the case, which resulted in ten deaths and tens of thousands of illnesses.

…

Key brokers who emerged in the post-1973 OPEC world included: Marc Rich, who founded the giant commodities firm Glencore (see Chapter 3); Hany Salaam, a Lebanese middleman who made numerous deals for Occidental Petroleum Corporation during the days of Armand Hammer, its former chairman; and Oscar Wyatt, a Houston oilman and corporate raider who was sentenced to a year in prison in 2007 in connection with the UN oil-for-food scandal. One of the more colorful of that era’s fixers was John Deuss, who once owned his own tanker fleet, and who during the 1980s smuggled vast quantities of oil to South Africa’s apartheid regime, then under an international trade embargo imposed by the United Nations. In 1979, after the overthrow of the shah, Iran stopped exporting oil to South Africa’s apartheid regime, due to the embargo.

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

As an early supporter of the war in Iraq, I like others have taken refuge in counterfactuals: all the bad things that might have happened had we left Saddam Hussein in power. Counterfactuals, if you haven’t noticed, have become a staple of conservative opinion pages. Indeed, the list of what-ifs is long and compelling. Just some examples: Had we not invaded, the sanctions regime against the Iraqi dictator would soon have crumbled, without the oil-for-food scandal being exposed. The French, Russians, and Chinese would have swept in with lucrative deals for Saddam, even as he restarted his weapons program. The arms race between Iraq and Iran would have grown fierce, with many, especially the Iranians, believing Saddam already possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders by Kate Kelly

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alan Greenspan, Bakken shale, bank run, Bear Stearns, business cycle, commodity super cycle, Credit Default Swap, diversification, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, index fund, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, oil-for-food scandal, paper trading, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, the market place

But changes to the London Metal Exchange warehousing rules in the wake of the aluminum flap made Metro far less profitable. There was more. In Europe, Tony “Chocfinger” Ward’s cocoa corner had embarrassed the industry, and Glencore’s IPO had inadvertently invited a period of painful new scrutiny. Just a few years after the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and Trafi’s toxic-waste incident in the Ivory Coast, the physical commodity traders were again seen as mercenaries who left damage in their wake. They could shrug off the tabloid rich lists and accounts of their children partying with celebrities (the subject of an anonymous gossip item in the New York Post involving Ivan Glasenberg’s daughter), but the more substantive allegations resonated.

Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government by Paul Volcker, Christine Harper

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, income per capita, inflation targeting, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, Nixon shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning

The committee could itself investigate: A full report by two senior staff members entitled “Good Intentions Corrupted,” with an introduction by me, tells the full story in all of its complexity. It’s worth reading for insights into the mismanagement of an international organization. Jeffrey A. Meyer and Mark G. Califano, Good Intentions Corrupted: The Oil-for-Food Scandal and the Threat to the U.N. (PublicAffairs, 2006). the “Volcker Effect”: Press Trust of India, “Volcker Effect: Natwar Singh Removed as Foreign Minister,” Times of India, November 7, 2005, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Volcker-effect-Natwar-Singh-removed-as-Foreign-Minister/articleshow/1287392.cms.

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, income per capita, inflation targeting, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil-for-food scandal, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Tragedy of the Commons, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Money flowed into so many companies, he said, because buying these “obligations” from just one company all at once would move the debt markets against him; it was better to split the finances up, and act subtly from many directions. Gaydamak railed against the French investigating magistrate Philippe Courroye who is pursuing him (and leading French investigations into the Iraq oil-for-food scandal). “This Courroye is taking everybody in France by the balls,” Gaydamak said, literally coughing out the judge’s name. Noting the French word courroie, a mechanical belt, he tightened an imaginary belt around his neck and screwed his face up to make the point. “In everyday life, in everyday business, my French problem is always on my back.”

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

When the World Bank unveiled a special panel to investigate the underperforming internal investigation unit created by Wolfensohn, the Department of Institutional Integrity (INT), John was one of six independent experts recruited. The panel was headed by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, who had also probed the UN's oil-for-food scandal. John had made the transition from domestic whistleblower to internationally recognised expert on graft, with a finger on the pulse of the global aid debate. The fight against corruption had mushroomed out of all recognition, going from an issue championed by a few activists to an industry whose meetings filled five-star hotels with per-diem-claiming suits.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

See also under individual countries Neoconservatives and culture of fear, 263 and energy independence rhetoric, 115–121, 288 and Second Iraq War, 115–117, 121 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 120 Netherlands, 80, 250 “A New Direction for Energy Independence, National Security, and Consumer Protection” bill, 253 Nigeria, 31, 58 Nixon, Richard, 1, 10, 32, 67, 152–153, 155, 214 and Arab oil embargo, 93, 95–96 and energy independence rhetoric, 87, 104, 113, 205 and Persian Gulf, militarization of, 96 Nordhaus, William, 261 Norhaus, Ted, 228 North American Electric Reliability Council, 130 North Korea, 60 Norway, 39, 40, 74, 75 Novozymes, 176 Nuclear accidents, 203, 204, 207 Nuclear development program, in Iran, 247, 251 Nuclear power, 11, 126, 203–209, 206 fig. 15 cost of, 203–204, 205 new technology in, 273–275 Nuclear waste storage, 275 Obama, Barack, 4, 16, 20 and coal-to-liquids, 212 387 and ethanol, 157–158, 158 and oil and terror, 52 Occidental Petroleum, 31 O’Driscoll, Gerald, 119 Offshore drilling rights, 280–282 Ogawa, Kiichiro, 272 Oil control of, 26, 108, 288 discovery of, 39–40, 110 and energy density, 283 exploration of, 39–40 infrastructure, militarization of, 33 and infrastructure attacks, 21–22, 28–33 refined vs. crude, 81–82 and terrorism, conflation of, 2, 52–60, 115–121, 233, 266 See also under individual countries; Peak oil Oil addiction, 19, 239–240 Oil and War (Goralski and Freeburg), 32 Oil companies, 39, 40. See also International oil companies; National oil companies; United States, oil companies in Oil exports and energy market, 15–16 net crude, 17 See also Oil, and terrorism, conflation of; OPEC; under individual countries and under individual fuels Oil-for-food scandal, 23 Oil imports, 15 1970–1979, 94 fig. 3 in U.S., 55 See also Energy imports Oil ministry building, and Second Iraq War, 24 388 Index Oil prices, 49, 50 collapse of, 71–76, 76–79 and collapse of 1986, 79 and energy market, 33, 69–71 and import quotas, 91–92 and Texas oil cartel, 90, 91–92 trends in, 16–17 See also Fuel prices Oil reserves, 23, 48, 67, 68, 111 table 2a, 111 table 2b in Persian Gulf, 98 in Saudi Arabia, 23, 49–51 in U.S., 68 Oil revenues and corruption, 75–76 and terrorism, 56–58 Oman, 51, 97 Oman Crude Oil Futures Contract, 244 Oneal, Michael, 177 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 10, 49, 55, 68, 69, 110 and expansion plans, 242 fig. 19 and import quotas, 91–92 and natural gas, 113 and oil control, 108 and oil price collapse, 79 and refining capacity, 81 See also individual OPEC countries Open-source warfare, 59 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 44 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

A Jordanian businessman put it best: “We always profit from wars—so long as it’s our neighbors and not us!” West Amman was built on a mix of Gulf money after the Gulf War as well as successful Palestinians holding real estate assets just in case they would have to flee the West Bank less than sixty miles away. Hundreds of Jordanian and Syrian companies were implicated in the UN oil for food scandal by which kickbacks were paid to arrange the evasion of the sanctions on Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Foreign contractors use Amman as a staging point to service Iraqi reconstruction, utilizing Jordanian subcontractors for everything from transport to medical services. At the same time, much of Iraq’s middle class fled to Jordan to escape their own civil war.

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

It was the largest summit in history at the time, and its purpose was to convince delegates from 178 nations to embark on “a new era of collective security” by replacing military buildups with environmental protections. At the UN, Strong worked as senior adviser to former secretary-general Kofi Annan until 2005, when Strong resigned in the aftermath of the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. One evening in 1978, a gray-bearded shaman appeared at Hanne Strong’s door at Baca Ranch and introduced himself as Glenn Anderson. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “I predicted in the sixties that a foreigner would come here and build an international religious center. What took you so long?”

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

New York: Signet Books, 1974. Meijer, G. I. “Cooling Energy-Hungry Data Centers.” Science 328, no. 5976 (2010). Meissner, Fred. “M. King Hubbert as a Teacher.” Presentation. Geological Society of America Annual Meeting. Seattle. (2003). Meyer, Jeffrey, and Mark Califano. Good Intentions Corrupted: The Oil-for-Food Scandal and the Threat to the U.N. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Meyer, Karl E., and Shareen Blair Brysac. Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Mills, Rodney A. “Iran and the Strait of Hormuz: Saber Rattling or Global Energy Nightmare.”