oil rush

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Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30 by Ben Stewart

3D printing, Desert Island Discs, Edward Snowden, imposter syndrome, mega-rich, new economy, oil rush, Skype, WikiLeaks

Instead of seeing the melting as a grave warning to humanity, they are eyeing the previously inaccessible oil beneath the seabed at the top of the world. They’re exploiting the disappearance of the ice to drill for the very same fuel that caused the melting in the first place. That’s why, in summer 2013, thirty men and women from eighteen countries sailed for a Russian Arctic oil platform, determined to focus global attention on the new Arctic oil rush. They saw how fossil fuels have come to dominate our lives on Earth, how the energy giants bestride our planet unchecked. They knew that at some time and in some place somebody had to say, ‘No more.’ For those activists that time was now and that place was the Arctic. Their ship was seized, they were thrown in jail and faced fifteen years in prison.

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Sometime in the next few weeks Gazprom will try to become the first company in history to pump oil from the icy waters of the Arctic. Until now the thick sea ice has made drilling here almost impossible, but as temperatures rise the oil companies are moving north, and if the Prirazlomnaya succeeds it will spark a new Arctic oil rush. That’s why the Sunrise is here. That’s why, right now, across this ship, thirty men and women are making final preparations to scale that platform and shut it down. Frank leans over the bow and sees his reflection in the water. He breathes deeply and looks up. The last of the sun is sinking below the horizon.

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Activists had confronted BP’s Northstar drilling operations in Alaska; Greenpeace ships had documented climate change impacts off Greenland and Svalbard; and Mads Christensen’s team in Scandinavia had campaigned against the industrial fishing fleets taking their destructive methods to the Arctic. But it was Deepwater Horizon that provided the spark for a new wave of action. With the world’s oil giants moving into the melting waters above the Arctic Circle, Sauven got his way and the Greenpeace ship Esperanza sailed north to confront the new Arctic oil rush. That summer Greenpeace played a cat-and-mouse game with the Danish navy – still the governing power in Greenland. The activists outpaced the Danish special forces RHIBs and occupied the underside of the Cairn platform, forcing a temporary shutdown. The following year Greenpeace returned to Greenland, this time with Frank Hewetson leading the logistics operation.

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, computerized trading, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, John Deuss, Khyber Pass, megastructure, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil rush, Potemkin village, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, trade route, vertical integration

And so “pipeline politics” became a modern-day version of the nineteenth century’s Great Game, in which Britain and Russia had employed cunning and bluff to gain supremacy over the lands of the Caucasus and Central Asia. This book is the story of how, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the game was played once again across the harsh environs of the Caspian Sea. CHRONOLOGY * * * Pre-Soviet period 1823 Zeynalabdin Tagiyev born 1872 Sale of Baku land legalized; oil rush begins 1873 Robert Nobel arrives in Baku 1878 Ludvig Nobel unveils Zoroaster, world’s first oil tanker 1883 Edmond and Alphonse de Rothschild arrive in Batumi 1901 Baku supplies 51 percent of world’s oil 1905 Worker uprising destroys Baku oil fields 1906 Baku-Batumi oil pipeline completed 1914 World War I breaks out 1917 Bolshevik Revolution 1920 Bolsheviks overthrow Azerbaijan government (April 28) Early Soviet period 1920 Standard Oil concludes deal with Nobels (July 30) 1921 Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” invites foreign businesses 1924 Britain recognizes Soviet Union Lenin dies 1933 United States recognizes the Soviet Union Later Soviet period 1968 James Giffen hired by Soviet trader Ara Oztemel 1969 Détente begins; Nixon liberalizes trade with Soviets 1972 Oztemel fires Giffen 1973 John Deuss launches first oil trading venture U.S.

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-USSR Trade Council 1985 Blowout at Tengiz oil field (June 24) 1987 Gorbachev legalizes joint ventures (January 13) Giffen forms American Trade Consortium (May) Heydar Aliyev sacked by Gorbachev from Politburo (May) Chevron in Moscow to look at Soviet oil properties (September) 1989 Steve Remp arrives in Baku (May) Nursultan Nazarbayev becomes Communist Party chief of Kazakhstan (June 22) 1990 Gorbachev signs START II with Bush, and preliminary agreement for Tengiz with Chevron (June 2) Baku’s new oil rush begins with first oil show (October) 1991 Kazakhstan takes over Tengiz talks with Chevron (July 23) Attempted anti-Gorbachev putsch (August 19) Omanis loan Kazakhstan $100 million for grain (November) Ex-Soviet republics form Commonwealth of Independent States (December 21) Gorbachev resigns (December 26) Soviet Union dissolves (December 31) Giffen’s American Trade Consortium ceases to function (December 31) Post-Soviet period 1992 Chevron fires Giffen as adviser (January) Ex-Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze returns to Georgia homeland (March) Nazarbayev and Chevron chairman Ken Derr sign preliminary Tengiz deal at Blair House (May 18) Kazakhs, Omanis form consortium to build export pipeline for Tengiz (June 11) Margaret Thatcher helps seal BP’s offshore Baku deal (September 7) Giffen helps Kazakhstan get uranium pact with United States (October) 1993 Preliminary agreement to develop Kazakhstan’s Kashagan oil field (January 9) Clinton, Yeltsin establish Gore-Chernomyrdin commission (April 3–4) Final Tengiz agreement signed (April 6) Heydar Aliyev announces assumption of power in Azerbaijan (June 18) Russia severs Caspian states’ natural gas exports (November) Russia’s Yuri Shafranik promised 10 percent of Baku offshore deal (November 19–20) 1994 Yeltsin declares Russia ex-Soviet regions’ “guarantor of stability” (February 21) Russia asserts veto rights over Caspian development (April 28) “Contract of the Century” signed for Baku offshore wells (September 20) Giffen put in charge of negotiating Kazakhstan’s major oil deals (December) 1995 Kazakhstan lets Gazprom into Karachaganak natural gas field (February 12) Car wreck kills Qais al-Zawawi, Deuss’s Omani patron (September 12) Clinton phones Heydar Aliyev to urge dual pipeline routes (October 2) Dual Baku pipelines announced (October 9) Unocal signs for trans-Afghan pipeline (October 21) 1996 Deuss forced out of Tengiz pipeline consortium (January) Tengiz pipeline consortium restructuring agreed in Moscow (March 11) Clinton signs Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (August 5) Taliban captures Kabul (September 27) 1997 Collapse of Thai baht triggers financial turmoil (July 2) U.S.

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On the other side of the world, America had yet to develop a commercially exploitable oil industry. But that was about to change, sending shock waves all the way to Russia and, finally, to Baku. In 1859, a tenacious entrepreneur named Edwin Drake struck a gusher after twenty months of toil in the poor western Pennsylvania town of Titusville. With it, he triggered the world’s first oil rush. In the wake of that discovery, a stern and lanky Clevelander named John D. Rockefeller cornered both the U.S. and European markets, earning him history’s first great oil fortune. By the late 1860s, Rockefeller-led advances were revolutionizing the oil business, but production methods at Mr. Jaz’s property were substantially unchanged.

A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher

accounting loophole / creative accounting, barriers to entry, British Empire, colonial rule, Dmitri Mendeleev, energy security, European colonialism, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Blériot, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

However, it was only after Abraham Gesner in Canada, and James Young in Britain, managed to distil effective lamp oils from coal and asphalt in the late 1840s that, in 1853, a Polish pharmacist in Lviv (in present-day western Ukraine), Jan Zeh, and his apprentice Ignacy Łukasiewicz, succeeded in distilling the first commercially viable lamp oil from crude Galician petroleum, for which a local tinsmith designed lamps that could burn the oil effectively, with a reasonably clean, bright flame. This development sparked an oil rush: hundreds more oil wells were now dug and many small refineries were established across the region. It particularly drew in the local Jewish population who had struggled for decades under discriminatory employment restrictions imposed by the Habsburg authorities. By the late 1850s the Lviv General Hospital and some of the larger stations of the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway had turned to kerosene lamps for illumination.139 Whereas in western Galicia some wealthy landowners invested in somewhat larger-scale crude extraction, the very small-scale extraction methods practised in eastern Galicia made it difficult for refiners there to manufacture lamp oil in large quantities.

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Peace without this would be fallacious and temporary … When we have effectually chastized them we may then listen to peace and endeavour to draw further advantages from their fears.60 From Fort Pitt on the Ohio Forks of western Pennsylvania, Colonel Daniel Brodhead led 600 troops of the Continental Army on a tour of plunder and destruction against the Seneca and Delaware villages of the Allegheny Valley. Through Buckaloons and Conewango, across the New York state boundary up to Bucktooth (future Salamanca) and back south across French Creek via Venango, the Indians’ homes and crops were burnt to ashes. Only a very few Seneca ever returned to live here, the future centre of America’s first oil rush.61 A report in the New York Gazette described how Brodhead’s troops advanced on a region of Indian towns with extensive cornfields on both sides of the river, and deserted by the inhabitants on our approach. Eight towns we set in flames … The corn, amounting in the whole to near six hundred acres, was our next object, which in three days we cut down and piled into heaps, without the least interruption from the enemy.

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The gas from below, from a depth of 145 feet was forcing up immense quantities of oil in a fearful manner and attended with a noise that was terrifying at times, in pulse like throes, the gas threw up a stream of oil the full size of the pipe to the height of three feet above its top, and continued a boiling, tossing and surging commotion for a minute throwing out, seemingly, a half barrel of oil at a single toss of the gas … [W]hen the gas subsided for a few seconds, the oil rushed back down the pipe with a hollow, gurgling sound, so much resembling the struggle and suffocating breathings of a dying man, as to make one feel as though the earth were a huge giant seized with the pains of death and in its spasmodic efforts to retain a hold on life was throwing all nature into convulsions.

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

They quietly rolled in the rig and began drilling. It was the spring of 1959. A mile beneath the Libyan desert, Esso hit the jackpot. It was a staggering find. There were 2 billion barrels of oil down there, with several interconnecting reservoirs that promised more. It became known as the Zelten Field and heralded an unseemly Libyan oil rush. * One summer evening in West London I was sitting in a cramped Indian Restaurant with an oilman who holds the secrets to some of North Africa’s most contentious early deals. David Orser is an American who cut his teeth in the Libyan desert, swept up in that first wave of exploration fever. ‘They used to call him “straight-arrow”,’ chuckled his wife across the table.

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A young Libyan army officer had just returned from a British military training school, and had begun organizing a clandestine revolutionary group called the Free Officers Movement, named after his hero Nasser’s original organization. He hadn’t enjoyed England much, with its noisy traffic and rowdy bars, and was pleased to be back home. But he arrived in the middle of the oil rush, and saw where the king’s corruption was leading the country. He couldn’t sit back and watch while Libya’s natural resources were being drained into the pockets of a privileged few, particularly when Colonel Nasser was inciting young Libyan nationalists to rise up and align themselves with the revolutionary Arab states in a display of Pan-Arab unity.

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Walter International had agreed to arrange this and pay his fees, but instead of concentrating on his English lessons in southern California, Teodoro had discovered sports cars and girls, and the company was footing the bill. What amazed Bennett was that the oilman didn’t think the arrangement unusual, just that Teodoro had pushed it a little too far. But then, Walter International was a small company, experienced at punching holes in the earth, inexperienced at doing deals with African dictators. When the oil rush began, the big players, along with a US bank, lawyers and real estate companies, would pay court to Obiang and his family on a scale the oil industry had seldom witnessed. In early 1993 John Bennett was awoken at 2 a.m. in his residence by a phone call. It was a colleague from the embassy. A letter had just been delivered and he wanted Bennett to read it, urgently.

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

The extra processes required to extract and refine tar sand compared with conventional oil add significantly to its cost. Only in recent years has it been economic to commercially exploit the deposits of tar and oil sands, found mainly in Canada and Venezuela. The rise in Canadian petroleum production from oil sands has created an oil rush in the state of Alberta, which has become the Saudi Arabia of unconventional oil, and tar sands provide a new source of supply for American drivers. The US imports more oil from Canada than any other country. Given their political and geographical proximity, this is probably as close as the US may get to energy independence.

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Amalgamated floated in 1889, bought fellow copper producer Anaconda (Schmitz, 1986), and in the same year attempted to corner the copper market by holding back shipments to Europe. This pushed prices higher, which stimulated supplies from other sources. Amalgamated was left holding very large stocks at a time of rapidly plunging prices (Gibson-Jarvie, 1976). The Rothschild bank – which had historically been involved in the gold trade, and which was a financier to the oil rush in the Caspian Sea in the late 19th century, and the diamond trade through its interests in De Beers – was also interested in copper during this period; it was financier to the Secretan scheme at a time when it was a key shareholder in Rio Tinto, and also to Anaconda. This combined interest gave the Rothschilds ‘real power’ in the world copper market in the late 19th century (Ferguson, 1998).24 A second copper producer scheme was set up – the Copper Producers’ Association – which attempted to peg price and limit production when market demand weakened.

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Chance favours the prepared mind, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, land reform, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, precautionary principle, rewilding, seminal paper, social intelligence, trade route

The David Suzuki Foundation, 2010, ‘Protecting species that need it’, http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/wildlife-habitat/science/endangered-species-legislation/left-off-the-list-1/ 7. Environment Canada, viewed 7 February 2013, Species at Risk Act, http://www.ec.gc.ca/alef-ewe/default.asp?lang=en&n=ED2FFC37-1 8. Nathan Vanderklippe, 16 May 2012, ‘Reviving Arctic oil rush, Ottawa to auction rights in massive area’, The Globe and Mail, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/reviving-arctic-oil-rush-ottawa-to-auction-rights-in-massive-area/article4184419/ 1. RAUCOUS SUMMER * This term was coined by Jay Hansford Vest.7 It has been championed by Dr Mark Fisher, whose work has been influential in shaping this book. 1. J. G. Ballard, 2006, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate, London. 2.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Each year every Alaskan gets about $1,400, or $120 a month, paid out of the Alaska Permanent Fund. The father of the fund was a man who governed in prose, not poetry. Jay Hammond, the Republican governor of Alaska from 1974 to 1982, had in his lifetime been a World War II fighter pilot, backcountry guide, and commercial fisherman. In the mid-1970s, during the heady days of the oil rush, Hammond found himself at the helm of a state flush with cash. He decided to propose a novel idea he had come up with years before when he was mayor of Bristol Bay Borough, a region of fishing villages in southwest Alaska with a tiny population. Hammond had noticed that the out-of-state companies that extracted millions of dollars of profit from commercial fishing were investing little to no money in the poor villages that their workers lived in.

Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations by Raymond Fisman, Edward Miguel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, blood diamond, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, crossover SUV, Donald Davies, European colonialism, failed state, feminist movement, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, mass immigration, megacity, oil rush, prediction markets, random walk, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, unemployed young men

Overall, the Angolan economy has taken off since the war’s end, with income per capita rising by more than 20 percent between 2003 and 2005— proving once again that the poorest economies can quickly rebound from war. If the old diamond companies are suffering, the rest of the country isn’t. In the oil rush that has seized much of Africa in recent years, we may be witnessing another disconnect 184 TH E RO A D BA CK F RO M WAR between economic prosperity and business profits. Some Western oil companies, whether inhibited by ethics or constrained by law, have shied away from working with the most unsavory African dictators.

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

Testimony of Stuart Levey, Under Secretary, Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, U.S. Department of the Treasury, before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, July 13, 2005. 9. Testimony of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 5, 2006. 10. Marianne Lavelle, “The Oil Rush,” U.S. News & World Report, April 24, 2006. 11. Daniel Yergin, “Ensuring Energy Security,” Foreign Affairs (March-April 2006). 12. Amory Lovins, Winning the Oil Endgame (Snowmass, Colo.: Rocky Mountain Institute, 2004). 13. David Luhnow and Geraldo Samor, “Bumper Crop,” Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2006. 14.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

In many ways, the disaster in the Gulf was remarkably visible (although a quickly imposed ruling barred anyone from going within sixty-five feet of any response vessels or booms on the water or beaches, under threat of civil penalty of up to forty thousand dollars and a Class D felony punishable by up to fifteen years in jail). It was a media event for the new age: thousands of us sat glued to streaming footage of the oil rushing from its source; we forwarded videos of the burning rig, black smoke choking the sky; Stephen Colbert’s pithy comment—“In honor of oil-soaked birds, ‘tweets’ are now ‘gurgles’ ”—became the most retweeted of the year. But sitting in the boat, I realized just how profoundly the decks were stacked against independent truth tellers—and not only because we were self-financed and especially vulnerable to bullying regulations.

Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit by Loren C. Steffy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shock, peak oil, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh

“You had to remove yourself from conversations, from play acting, from the macho talk. You became very good at avoidance.”4 Nevertheless, Browne pursued his career plans, joining BP full-time after graduating from Cambridge. He was posted to Alaska. Anchorage in the late 1960s was an oil boomtown, not unlike those that had populated Texas in the early days of its oil rush. Browne arrived at his hotel on his first day in town to find that “the noisy smoke-filled bar was crammed with burly, beer-swilling men, with ‘working’ women loitering at the entrance.”5 Like most boomtowns, it was rowdy and crawling with opportunists looking to make a fast buck. Oilfield work was hard in the best of conditions, but in the frozen climes of Alaska, companies had to pay top dollar to get even unskilled labor to the job site.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Now he had done the same for Venezuela.[5] The La Rosa strike confirmed that Venezuela could be a world-class producer. The discovery inaugurated a great oil frenzy. Over a hundred groups, mostly American, but some British, were soon active in the country. They extended from the largest companies down to independent oil men like William F. Buckley, who obtained a concession to build an oil port. The oil rush provided enormous opportunity for General Gomez to enrich himself. His family and cronies, the Gomecistas, would, infallibly, obtain choice concessions from the government and then resell them, at considerable profit, to the various foreign companies, passing on kickbacks to the general himself.

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He was indeed in the line of the great buccaneer- creators of oil: Rockefeller, Samuel and Deterding, Gulbenkian, Getty and Mattei. He was also an anachronism, a privateer from the past, in spirit a "merchant from Odessa" circling the globe in his corporate jet in search of the next great deal. But it was a deal in Libya that had made possible his global tycoonery.[6] The mad Libyan oil rush was already well along when, in 1965, Occidental won concessions there in the second round of bidding. Oxy's thick bid stood out midst the 119 others because it had been done up, under Hammer's personal supervision, on sheepskin manuscripts and was wrapped in red, black, and green ribbons—the colors of the Libyan flag.

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Toward the end of 1970, British Petroleum announced the discovery of oil in the Forties field, on the British side, one hundred miles northwest of Ekofisk. It was a huge reservoir. A series of major strikes followed in 1971, including Shell and Exxon's discovery of the huge Brent field. The North Sea oil rush was on. The 1973 oil crisis turned the rush into a roar. Fortunately, a new generation of technology was either available or under development that would allow production to proceed in the North Sea, a province of the sort that the industry had never before attempted. The whole venture was risky and dangerous—physically and economically.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Now the ships were almost worthless. It was fitting that this industry, which had been captured in countless fictional forms—most notably Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—would maintain its romance with a bit of theater even in its hour of sunset. Unlike the Gold Rush, which had started from a single momentous discovery, the oil rush was the product of dozens of experiments. The final series of trials centered in one region of western Pennsylvania, where oil was so rich that it practically seeped out of the ground or from streambeds. Where it was present, it was largely viewed as an unavoidable, foul-smelling nuisance. Notably, it had obstructed one entrepreneur, Samuel Kier, who had started a venture to drill for salt water to make salt, only to have his efforts yield more of this useless oil.

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Even with wholesale prices for crude oil hovering around 50 cents per gallon, ventures such as Kier’s barely yielded two to ten barrels per day—enough to market as expensive bottled potions, but not plentiful or cheap enough to light homes across America. But Bissell’s Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company kept at it and, after a bit of difficulty, reorganized as the Seneca Oil Company. It then hired the man universally credited with the starting the oil rush. The company dispatched Edwin Drake to the small Pennsylvania town of Titusville, nearly forty miles from the nearest tracks of the Erie Railroad. After months spent organizing and procuring equipment, including a small steam engine, Drake started drilling into the ground in May 1859, laying iron pipe as the drill made progress.

Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Now the ships were almost worthless. It was fitting that this industry, which had been captured in countless fictional forms—most notably Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—would maintain its romance with a bit of theater even in its hour of sunset. Unlike the Gold Rush, which had started from a single momentous discovery, the oil rush was the product of dozens of experiments. The final series of trials centered in one region of western Pennsylvania, where oil was so rich that it practically seeped out of the ground or from streambeds. Where it was present, it was largely viewed as an unavoidable, foul-smelling nuisance. Notably, it had obstructed one entrepreneur, Samuel Kier, who had started a venture to drill for salt water to make salt, only to have his efforts yield more of this useless oil.

…

Even with wholesale prices for crude oil hovering around 50 cents per gallon, ventures such as Kier’s barely yielded two to ten barrels per day—enough to market as expensive bottled potions, but not plentiful or cheap enough to light homes across America. But Bissell’s Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company kept at it and, after a bit of difficulty, reorganized as the Seneca Oil Company. It then hired the man universally credited with the starting the oil rush. The company dispatched Edwin Drake to the small Pennsylvania town of Titusville, nearly forty miles from the nearest tracks of the Erie Railroad. After months spent organizing and procuring equipment, including a small steam engine, Drake started drilling into the ground in May 1859, laying iron pipe as the drill made progress.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Even in Texas, it would not be hard to protect aquifers while respecting ranch and farm owners’ views. How can that be? Look to oil and gas. Black Gold One hundred and fifty years ago, the oil industry was booming…in Pennsylvania. Ever wonder about the product name, Quaker State Oil? The first oil rush occurred in Titusville, Pennsylvania, back in 1859. Wildcatters raced in, trying to get as much crude out of the ground as fast as possible. Photos from the period show a forest of wells crowding each other. Drillers overpumped oil in Pennsylvania for the same reasons they overdraft groundwater in California: the rule of capture.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell

Anthropocene, carbon footprint, clean water, Google Earth, gravity well, liberation theology, nuclear paranoia, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the scientific method, young professional

But a hurricane blew the sign down, and it has not been replaced. To people driving past, Spindletop is a void space, a low mile of trees by the highway that goes unremarked, even in the area whose prosperity it once sparked. But however invisible, the wedge of land between Sulphur Drive and West Port Arthur Road holds a secret. And the secret is this: the oil rush on Spindletop is not over. Not quite. Steven Radley is the last man standing. More than a hundred years and 150 million barrels of oil after Patillo Higgins’s hunch first came good—and a half century after the major producers left this land for dead—he is doing his damndest to squeeze every last cup of petroleum out of its stubborn soil.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices by Robert McNally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, collective bargaining, credit crunch, energy security, energy transition, geopolitical risk, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, index fund, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, joint-stock company, market clearing, market fundamentalism, megaproject, moral hazard, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transfer pricing, vertical integration

Doan, Lynn, and Dan Murtaugh. “Shale as World’s Swing Producer Signals ‘Jagged’ Oil Future.” Bloomberg News, April 19, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-20/shale-as-world-s-swing-producer-signals-jagged-future-for-oil. Dolson, Hildegarde. The Great Oildorado: The Gaudy and Turbulent Years of the First Oil Rush: Pennsylvania 1859–1880. New York: Random House, 1959. Domanski, Dietrich, Jonathan Kearns, Marco Jacopo Lombardi, and Hyun Song Shin. “Oil and Debt.” Bank for International Settlements. March 18, 2015. http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1503f.htm. Dombey, Daniel, and Javier Blas. “Naimi Tightlipped on Bush Oil Appeal.”

Cable Cowboy by Mark Robichaux

AOL-Time Warner, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Bear Stearns, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, corporate raider, cotton gin, estate planning, fear of failure, financial engineering, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, oil rush, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, vertical integration

Something about the Western city came to define the spirit of these pole climbers, in an era when individual men, not conglomerates, reigned sovereign over an industry. So in 1965, TCI moved to Denver to play with the big boys. By the mid-1960s, Bob Magness had realized the potential of community antenna to fill a vast need; he likened cable to the oil rush days in his native Oklahoma and Texas. Though he was building his own wealth, building TCI had given Magness a thrill not unlike betting big in a poker game. He continued borrowing money and buying up systems. He had good reason to believe he held a strong hand. Few cable systems had ever failed up to this point, largely because the values of the systems that were trading hands kept rising.

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

., Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2009). 8 Clay Shirky, “The Political Power of Social Media,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 1 (2011), pp. 28–41. 9 Marcus Noland and Howard Pack, The Arab Economies in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute, 2007), pp. 99–111. 10 David Hobbs and Daniel Yergin, “Fiscal Fitness: How Taxes at Home Help Determine Competitiveness Abroad,” IHS CERA, August 2010; interview with Lucian Pugliaresi. 11 Bhushan Bahree, “Fields of Dreams: The Great Iraqi Oil Rush: Its Potential, Challenges, and Limits” IHS CERA, March 2010. 12 Middle East Economic Survey, October 11, 2010, October 18, 2010. 13 Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 271 (“stupidity”). 14 Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 267, 286. 15 Karim Sadjadpour, Reading Khamenei: The World View of Iran’s Most Powerful Leader (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009), pp. vi, 15; interview with Archie Dunham. 16 Interview. 17 New York Times, March 10, 1995 (Christopher). 18 Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, pp. 272, 282 (executive order); interview with Archie Dunham. 19 Axworthy, A History of Iran, p. 277 (“constitutional government”); Robin Wright, The Iran Primer: Power, Politics, and U.S.

…

Averill, Bruce, and Eric A. M. Luijf. “Canvassing the Cyber Security Landscape: Why Energy Companies Need to Pay Attention.” Journal of Energy Security, May 2010. Axworthy, Michael. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Bahree, Bhushan. “Fields of Dreams: The Great Iraqi Oil Rush: Its Potential, Challenges, and Limits.” IHS CERA. March 2010. Baker, John. “The Successful Privatization of Britain’s Electricity Industry.” In Leonard S. Hyman, The Privatization of Public Utilities. Vienna, Va.: Public Utilities Reports, 1995. Baker, Peter, and Susan Glasser. Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution.

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 5 Lifting the Resource Curse At the turn of the twentieth century, czarist-ruled Azerbaijan was the world’s biggest exporter of oil, and its largest city, Baku, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, was like the Wild West. People flooded in from all parts of Russia, intent on making money in the oil rush. Jews, Turkomans, Kazakhs, and assorted Europeans joined the fray. Real estate prices soared as the new arrivals competed for space. Oil rigs and refineries dotted the city. Alfred Nobel worked here for a while, and the park he built still remains. In the course of the century, Azerbaijan’s oil made many people rich, yet much of the nation remained very poor.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

air freight, carbon credits, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, oil rush, operational security, South China Sea

"Burn it. We both know what is happening here. Give the farang something to claim against their insurance companies. Let them know that their activity is not free." Jaidee grins. "Burn it all. Every last crate." And for the second time that night, as shipping crates crackle with fire and WeatherAll oils rush and ignite and kick sparks into the air like prayers going up to heaven, Jaidee has the satisfaction of seeing Kanya smile again. * * * It is nearly morning by the time Jaidee returns home. The ji ji ji of jingjok lizards punctuates the creak of cicadas and the high whine of mosquitoes. He slips off his shoes and climbs the steps, teak creaking under his feet as he steals into his stilt-house, feeling the smooth wood under his soles, soft and polished against his skin.

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, man camp, margin call, Maui Hawaii, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, reshoring, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Timothy McVeigh, urban decay

Some locals believed it was named after a Native American expression. It’s more likely that it was a tribute to Bill Krohn, a popular and outgoing reporter for the Daily Ardmoreite in the city of Ardmore. Krohn had been an indefatigable journalist who traveled to oil fields to visit workers, breaking news on new oil discoveries and chronicling the 1920s oil rush. When he saw a roughneck, he’d call out the traditional Jewish greeting of “shalom aleichem,” or “peace be unto you.” Krohn became a well-liked figure, and his greeting caught on. He even popularized the traditional Jewish response to this greeting: “aleichem shalom,” or “unto you, peace.” When a newcomer heard the odd phrase and gave Krohn a look of confusion, the reporter would buy the fellow a raspberry soda at a nearby confectionery store and explain it all to him.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

‘Here in some of the finest fishing grounds in the Arctic, here is where they were sonic blasting, testing for oil, here is where those idiots want to place the rigs.’ ~ On 15 June 1971 production began in the offshore oilfield known as Ekofisk, sited to the south-west of the Norwegian continental shelf. At that point the extent of the Norwegian oil-holdings was still unknown, but the rapid success of Ekofisk began a speculative oil-rush along the west and north-west coasts of Norway. The Norwegian government responded quickly, creating Statoil in 1972 and establishing the principle of substantial state participation in each production licence issued for these wealthy waters. Oil is Norway’s life-blood. Its system – political, infrastructural – is thickly oiled, through and through.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

But China’s currency liberalization will make preventing Chinese money from flowing out of the country harder, and the Chinese passport now gets red-carpet treatment: Red is the new green. OIL AND WATER ACROSS THE WORLD’S LONGEST BORDER For centuries, natural resource supplies have lured waves of economic migrants seeking work and fortune. Today, Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, is one of those towns to which migrants have flocked in search of North America’s new “oil rush” riches. Canada only seriously tapped its oil sands (a patch larger than England) after the OPEC embargo of 1973. Suddenly Fort McMurray found itself properly incorporated as a city for the first time, and its population more than tripled to thirty thousand by 1980. In just the past ten years, the population has shot up again to eighty thousand.

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

., Pennsylvania, with special reference to Its Use for Illumination and Other Purposes.” Three years later Edwin Drake began drilling for oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, applying techniques used in salt wells. Though the Civil War briefly put a halt to the drilling, as soon as the war was over America witnessed an “oil rush” reminiscent of the California gold rush, and northwestern Pennsylvania was soon littered with makeshift oil wells and crude refineries where men refined oil much as they distilled whiskey, boiling the liquid and smelling it to see if it could be used for kerosene. Though the mountainous terrain of the Pennsylvania oil fields made transportation difficult, the construction of an oil pipeline in 1865 removed the bottleneck: oil flowed from Pennsylvania to railroad tanker cars and tanker ships and thence to giant refineries.

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

“From west to east,” Walker concludes, “and from north to south, the mechanical principle, the philosophy of the nineteenth century, will spread and extend itself. The world has received a new impulse.”71 It had, and the transformation would be profound. But the human world still largely lingered in the dark for half the earth’s each turning. There were remedies for that condition as well: oils, rushes, tallow, the fat of pigs, coal gas, whales. All would serve in their time. * * * I. Two centuries later, the greatest physicists of the early twentieth century—Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr—would similarly dismiss the possibility of splitting the atom to release nuclear energy as “moonshine.”

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

The danger is that if people think it is the end of the road, they will invest elsewhere. It is still a strong and diverse economy, and we must start paying more attention to the traditional side of things.’ Such men argued that Aberdeen had been inaccurately characterized as a former one-horse town that had enjoyed a few mad oil-rush years, and was about to revert to its primitive, dozy previous existence. In the early days of the boom, Americans would ask before they arrived whether the streets were paved, and some newcomers had been amazed to find a solid city, rather than a picturesque outpost of scattered crofts. ‘We weren’t going around in bare feet and kilts,’ said one businessman.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Dexter Filkins, “The Shadow Commander,” New Yorker, September 30, 2013; Ali Alfoneh, “Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani: A Biography,” AEI, no. 1 (January 2011); Ali Soufan, “Qassem Soleimani and Iran’s Unique Regional Strategy,” CTC Sentinel 11, no. 10 (November 2018). 4. Filkins, “The Shadow Commander.” 5. “Iraq Oil Rush,” New York Times, June 22, 2008 (“suspicions”); “Iraq—Systematic Country Diagnostic,” World Bank, February 2017. 6. Interview with Dr. Ashti Hawrami; IHS Markit, “KRG and Iraq Could Reach Oil Export and Revenue Deal in December, According to Turkey,” December 4, 2013. 7. Renad Mansour and Faleh A.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

The money that poured into Silicon Valley start-ups in the late 1990s was also a good investment binge, since it left behind productive companies like Google, but its unraveling led in the short term to the 2001 recession. Now, as oil prices collapse, U.S. energy investments are plummeting, drilling rigs have been silenced from Texas to North Dakota, shale jobs are drying up, and shale boomtowns are turning into ghost towns. Though this oil rush leaves behind a productive new industry, a plus in the long run as it will likely keep a lid on U.S. energy prices, it poses a near-term risk because energy investment was such an important driver of U.S. growth in recent years, and that boost is now largely gone. The United States has also lost its advantage on the currency rule, which says that cheap is good.

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

Like Don Benito Wilson before him, Doheny hoped that the tarry stuff, which most still thought a useless nuisance, signaled the presence of oil, and with $400 that Canfield borrowed, leased the oozing parcel of land. Within months, they’d drilled the first successful oil well in L.A., and with the money it produced plus backing from banker Isaias Hellman, among others, began leasing every promising property they could find. An unprecedented oil rush followed. It had taken thirty-five years, but Wilson’s dream of a west coast oil boom had finally come true. As railroads switched from coal to oil power and the internal combustion engine set loose the automobile, oil became one of the Southland’s leading industries. In the years that followed, Canfield and Doheny expanded their empires, together and separately, leasing land and drilling wells all over the region.

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

After 1848 a wider railway network was built; export businesses increased, especially of timber, paper, sugar and tobacco; and several mechanized industries were launched. Oil, however, supplied the only resource to promise industrial development of more than provincial importance. Discovered in the 1850s in the district of Borysław-Drohobycz, it grew explosively into a wild oil-rush area of near-unregulated drilling and exploration. Foreign investment, mainly French and German, poured in. Borysław and nearby Tustanowice saw hundreds of oil shafts spring up in the muddy fields alongside the district’s only paved road, and 100 trains a day left the state refinery at Drohobycz.

Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

After 1848 a wider railway network was built; export businesses increased, especially of timber, paper, sugar and tobacco; and several mechanized industries were launched. Oil, however, supplied the only resource to promise industrial development of more than provincial importance. Discovered in the 1850s in the district of Borysław-Drohobycz, it grew explosively into a wild oil-rush area of near-unregulated drilling and exploration. Foreign investment, mainly French and German, poured in. Borysław and nearby Tustanowice saw hundreds of oil shafts spring up in the muddy fields alongside the district’s only paved road, and 100 trains a day left the state refinery at Drohobycz.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963. ———. Roger Sherman and the Independent Oil Men. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967. Diggins, John Patrick. Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Dolson, Hildegarde. The Great Oildorado: The Gaudy and Turbulent Years of the First Oil Rush: Pennsylvania, 1859–1880. New York: Random House, 1959. Dreiser, Theodore. The Financier. Reprint. New York: Penguin, 1981 [1912]. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: International Publishers, 1968.

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by J. Kenji López-Alt

coastline paradox / Richardson effect, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, oil rush, place-making, the scientific method

Instead of staying light and crisp, an onion ring with too much batter will retain too much internal moisture, and as soon as it comes out of the oil, the batter starts getting soggy. • The “split shell.” This occurs when everything appears to be going fine until all of a sudden, through some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism, the batter crust spontaneously splits in half. Oil rushes into the gap, rendering the onion leathery and burnt. • The dreaded worm. This is the most heinous of onion ring crimes. It occurs when the onions aren’t cooked thoroughly, so that rather than breaking off cleanly with each bite, you’re left with a long worm of onion in your mouth and the hollow shell left behind in your hand.