Crude world

by Peter Maass

Oil is the substance that allows our world to work. Over the course of a century it has taken on such a variety of functions that even a small decrease in oil output would cause economic chaos and nightmarish shortages. We know, of course, that this reliance is a disaster but what we are perhaps less clear about is the terrible damage done by oil to those countries that produce it: the people who on the face of it should most benefit from money gushing from their land.Crude World is a passionate, gripping, angry tour of some of the most awful places in the world – the violent, polluted, dictatorial regions from which the oil is extracted. Peter Maass follows the journey of oil and shows how it is a substance that sullies everything it touches, poisoning land and rivers, promoting political violence and creating corruption on a staggering scale. Oil is a strangely invisible substance – from oil well to tanker to refinery to petrol station to car almost nobody sees it. It requires very f