Od's Blog!

Snap Quiz


Question: What proportion of the US’s oil imports come from the Middle East?

Answer: 20%. That’s 20% of imports, not 20% of needs—the US remains the US’s largest supplier, followed by Canada and Mexico.

The Middle Eastern oil fields are not strategic to the US itself—the US could get along without them, and barely notice. Remember that next time someone says the war in Iraq is “all about oil.”

Of course, if they were strategic, and the US were of an imperialist mind, it would be trivial for them, logistically, to walk in and take the oil fields of sparsely populated Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait. They would not need to trouble with more populous Iraq.


Question: what proportion of the world’s ten biggest oil companies are US owned?

Answer: 0%. ExxonMobil, the biggest American player, is number 14. The biggest oil company, worldwide, is Saudi Aramco, owned by the Saudi government.

The largest producer in the US? British Petroleum.


Quesion: How much has the price of gasoline gone up in the past 20 years?

It's gone down. Adjusted for inflation, the price of gas is currently lower than it was in 1981.



People want to believe that oil is some kind of conspiracy, and that the Americans--or the Saudis--are behind it.