Many of the modern world's natural resources are extracted by strong-man regimes which effectively steal them from their citizens. When we buy stuff made from them, we become complicit in tyranny, but doing without them isn't an option. What should we do?
Most books on this subject either shoot for ridiculously impractical utopian absolutes, or declare the modern world a total ethical disaster and wallow in self-pity that leaves no path for improvement. Wenar focuses on how far we've come in the past two centuries in countering "might makes right" politics, and shows how we can extend that progress to solve the resource ethics problem.
In seeing both the good and bad of the modern world, and rejecting both the complacent status quo and utopian idealism, he may anger people who read only half his argument, but that's on them. His proposed solution is both a shockingly extreme response and an "art of the possible" half-measure, which points out how far from a moral system of trade we are today.
His proposal is refreshingly realistic about the limitations of global politics. He sees that no problem can be solved by demanding unanimity among world powers, so we must do what we can as individual nations. But as I do think he underestimates just how sneaky global resource trade can be: he does his best to plug the leaks, but there are still some holes remaining. But a leaky boat is better than an imaginary one.
Puts the resource (mainly oil) problem in modern context. I enjoyed learning about Africa's and Arabia's relation to the West through oil. Although I was aware that the West was not innocent, it becomes harder to ignore when you learn details.
The second half gets more into political and philosophical prescription to remedy the issues.
Wenar is optimistic even though it's hard to envision a world where we get resources without doing harm. I especially enjoyed learning that the British fought the slave trade for about 60 years during the 1800s at great cost. Back then no one believed it was realistic that plantations would shut down. Yet people did make it happen. Patience is the key. Eventually the time for positive change arrives.
The author attempts to place morality at the core of global trade in natural resources, showing how the majority of petroleum producing countries are ruthlessly authoritarian that steal the resource revenues from their own citizens. With historical and philosophical dimensions, the book shows how the global trade in natural resources with the 鈥渕ight is right鈥� regimes comes (ALWAYS) at a human cost. Therefore, the last two chapters offers a proposal to end the Western exploitation of natural resources from corrupt regimes through adopting a 鈥淐lean Trade Act.鈥� The author is not explicitly advocating an imposition of western-style democracy, yet his idea of "Clean Trade Act" as the West buys resources from places where people have given their assent (but how can "the West" knows that?) is somehow confusing. While his proposal to boycott dictatorships might seem far-fetched, it worths considering a new morality in global commerce and adding to the new growing body of work about the subject of "the resource curse."
I received this as an arc from net galley in exchange for an honest review. Throughout the world, resource - rich countries are plagued by tyranny, violence, and corruption with precious few exceptions, the political elites in such nations control natural resources, which are often the primary - and sometimes the only -' source of wealthy generation. This wasn't what I thought it would be. Although I have read the whole book it was slow and I nearly gave up. But I kept going. This will only get a 3*.
"At your best, you are conditionally trusting, and unconditionally trustworthy. Hard-headed and soft-hearted, a pessimist of intelligence and an optimist of will. You reach confidently across boundaries to join energies with others so that together you are stronger and free. You are powerful and counter-powerful. You are connective. You should rule the world."
This book is a great philosophical and moral look at at resource exploitation. It goes into great detail on how it affects the peoples of nations which are being exploited as well as the rest of the world.
The other gives many great solutions to fix this problem which is actually far ore profound than one would at first imagine.
Excellent listening, although somehow difficult at times. It definitely taught me a lot on the relationship between power and resources. I feel this book should be a compulsory read in schools, it could show the young generations how to change this world.
Ramps up the usual analysis by economists of natural resource curse and puts it on steroids. Very timely given the current rise of populist nationalism and protectionism; as countries rethink their trade arrangements, clean trade can be part of the new mix. Cites Rousseau's arguments that enlightenment driven capitalism has a built in contradiction: People are promised the moon, but see things they can't afford to buy, places they can't afford to visit. This leads to frustrations and self delusions. The populists take this argument and focus on loss of jobs from trade, omitting that consumers benefit from low prices. Wenar focuses on the contradiction between our values of human rights, and the reality that our trade practices benefit the worst dictators and militia leaders, and finance beheadings and child soldiers.
The resource curse is like addiction to alcohol or drugs. A few can handle it -- Churchill and Kennedy could handle drinks and drugs for instance. Norway and Botswana can handle oil/gas and diamonds due to strong cultural and political features that were there when they started mining their resources. But most countries don't do well; the resources are taken by strong man, protected by combination of violence and clientalism, and by the complicity of countries that import the resources. The richest resource based states also give back some in public goods, but the poorer ones give back little, sometimes as a matter of policy not to strengthen a public that could rise up, which derives from Rousseau's advice to kings two centuries ago.
But there is hope: just as Slavery, colonialism and apartheid were wiped out, so can theft of resources. Starts with awareness that buying stuff from autocrats is buying property they have effectively stolen from citizens. This is supported by international consensus based on Westphalia treaty that might makes right, and the one that has effective control over resources has the property rights, but contradicts our practices to oppose slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and is against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights calling for the popular authorization of natural resource use. Just as we have sanctions on trade for various reasons with some count, we could sanction resource trades with autocrats and rebel militias by adopting a Clean Trade Act and other related measures to promote popular resource sovereignty. Hard to to do with everything, since supply chains are not always obvious. huge potential benefits in potentially reducing Us and NAto military spending as nasty regimes and militias get less funding. There will also be costs, but Britain paid 2 percent of national income for 60 years to end slavery, and did it because it is right. Drawing on the history of brave antislavery proponents and others, lots could be done to reign in oil fueled tyrants.
Leif Wenar's Blood Oil is a thought-provoking and well-researched exploration of oil, politics, and morality. The author demonstrates an impressive depth of knowledge on these topics, and I found many of his arguments and perspectives compelling. For readers who want to dive deeply into the ethical and political dimensions of the oil industry, this book offers plenty of insight.
That said, the author鈥檚 personality does affect the reading experience. Wenar鈥檚 optimism sometimes veers into naivety, and his perspective is so distinctly American that it may irritate readers from outside the U.S. Despite this, his philosophical musings about oil and its impact on the world remain engaging and are worth exploring.
Overall, Blood Oil is a solid read for anyone interested in the intersection of oil, ethics, and global politics. While there are a few personal elements that detract from the book for me, I would still highly recommend it.
"At your best, you are conditionally trusting, and unconditionally trustworthy. Hard-headed and soft-hearted, a pessimist of intelligence and an optimist of will. You reach confidently across boundaries to join your energies with others so that together you are stronger and free. You are powerful and counter-powerful. You are connective. You should rule the world."
Great insight into corruption within the global supply chain but then diverges his arguments into claims relying heavily on Prothos and not enough evidence. For example he would talk about, "9/11 Alaska cries" and dives into a more philosophical idea for global social justice.
Very informative and helpful to understand how our simple purchases each day affect people across the world..both positively and negatively. The book is somewhat repetitive, but he does explain how to create positive change.
Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World by Leif Wenar is a realistic look at what goes into the items of our daily lives. Wenar holds the Chair of Philosophy & Law at King鈥檚 College London. After earning his Bachelor鈥檚 degree from Stanford, he went to Harvard to study with John Rawls, and wrote his doctoral thesis on property rights with Robert Nozick and T.M. Scanlon. He is a Fellow of the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at The Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
We all know that oil runs the economy but even deeper it runs our lives. From the plastic we use to the fuel used to transport food to our stores, to the petroleum based fertilizers that help grow our food we are swimming in an ocean of oil. We also know that oil is found in countries who we would not do business with if they did not have oil. We rationalize our relations with tyrants because we need the oil. It鈥檚 not just oil either. The raw materials that make our personal and industrial electronics work also come from countries with repressive governments. The relationships become more complex when we look at the larger picture. In the 1980s, Cuban troops guarded American oil interests in Angola. Angola used the money from oil purchases to buy arms to fight America's allies. American money was being used to fund America鈥檚 enemies.
America looks to ensure Middle East security, to promote world stability rather than our imports. The majority of American oil imports come from Canada with only 15% or so from Saudi Arabia. It is still the Middle East that is in the news rather than the sizable imports from Africa and Latin America. Very few oil producing countries are democratic as well as few that are not corrupt. Wenar looks at what happens to oil producing countries. Many countries experience skyrocketing GDPs which creates the illusion that standard of living would increase. Wealth, however, tends to stay with the county鈥檚 leadership and elite. Most money does not trickle down to the people or the infra structure. Wenar explains that countries鈥� economies that produce raw materials are like an electrical grid. A good well-designed grid can handle a sudden influx in power and expand. A badly designed grid will overload, short, and destroy itself under similar situations. Countries like Norway easily handle the new oil wealth, diversify and prosper. Countries like Nigeria and Sierra Leone fall into corruption.
Two countries, centuries before, also ran into new wealth and how they used that wealth determined their future. Spain gained huge colonial possessions and pulled the natural resources and then stagnated. England, on the other hand, took in raw materials, like cotton, and created finished good and exported them -- adding value to the raw materials. Spain faded and England grew. Countries like Canada and Norway have a diverse economy that will continue to function once the oil is gone. Angola, Nigeria, and others will drop into even more poverty. Even a country that is developed like Saudi Arabia will have large problems. The unemployment rate among the young is skyrocketing. Two-thirds of the Saudi population are under thirty. There are not enough, jobs even with the government creating superfluous civil servant positions. Saudi leadership needs high oil prices to fund its social services that help keep the population docile. An angry, unemployed, youth is not something that they are ready to handle.
In the opening of the book, Wenar helps to remind even the most socially conscious of how we promote the system of corruption, tyranny, and poverty. We might think we are doing to right thing buying organic oranges -- No petroleum pesticides or fertilizers. But a closer look shows just how tainted the fruit is. Somewhere in Africa blood diamonds are being mined. 60% of all diamonds are used for industrial purposes. In China, these diamonds are used to make drill bits by underpaid workers living in a totalitarian society. The drill bits are exported to Mexico (or an, even more, corrupt oil producing country) and used to drill for oil, that is refined, sold as diesel, burned by a truck hauling organic oranges to your grocery store. In the big picture, your organic oranges are not petroleum free but also tainted by blood diamonds. The problem is, that today, there are so many steps taken to get something as simple as an orange that nothing you buy is guilt free.
Not all is doom and gloom. Wenar presents the case of how the slave trade was ended, simply on moral grounds and a few other successes against tyranny in modern times. The final section of the book covers solutions to some of the problems of we are experiencing. They are not perfect solutions but do offer a starting point and a place to begin discussing solutions. A very important and timely read.
A lot of hard work went into this book and it is a worthy subject. I applaud the sentiment even if I don't share the love for communist thinkers.
One idea that hasn't occurred to the authors is that people might not be as good as they think they are and this is the founding block for their suggested solution to the problem. They will be disappointed.
They will also be disappointed with economics because in their clever plan the nation paying the money into that clean fund will not be China but the consumers in the US. So basically you are still buying tainted goods but now you also pay into a fund for the country selling the tainted goods. The incentive here is for the country to just keep selling the tainted goods to keep growing the fund before caching out and collecting on the sale of the goods they have already received money from a second time. Cut out the elaborate setup and just blatantly offer money to the country on the condition of them introducing reforms because that is in effect what you are proposing - see if the public likes the idea then, when it's not obfuscated.
They keep using the example of UK fighting slavery against its best interests without mentioning that this was during a time when there was no real democracy. Fact is there are no examples where people as a whole adopted behaviours detrimental to themselves for the sake of morality (except when due to religious adherence and that is going down).
A very interesting book to learn the basis of how the world works today. It was the first non-fiction book I麓ve read in years, and even if at the beginning was a little tough, as the chapters and the information about the world trade, the social differences and the autocracy governments goes on, it becomes more and more interesting. The sensation after reading Blood Oil is sad, because of what麓s going on, but the message is optimistic, because if humans have reached many achieves lately in topics such as human rights...why couldn麓t we reach even more in the years to come? I enjoyed a lot of the way the author explains the situation in countries as Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Angola, Sierra Leona, Iran, Iraq and Arabia Saudi, because he offers a chronological history of how these countries have become what they麓re today. Also, this book has given me the eagerness to learn more about geography and world麓s economic today. I highly recommend it!
I learned a lot from this book in terms of how the resource curse really works and how policies in importing countries could improve the situation. Some parts of this book were super interesting. However, I think I could have learned about the same amount if the content had been condensed a bit. The book was a bit repetitive at times, and there was too much time spent venturing off into abstract philosophy that just didn't do much for me or was perhaps over my head. I listened to the audio version of the book which perhaps contributed to making some parts harder for me to follow. But I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about this topic, there's lots of good stuff in there. But don't be afraid to skip over parts that are starting to get boring as he will probably make the same point again later anyway!
An interesting and well-written treatise on the political economy and moral philosophy of oil and other natural resources, as they relate to the various authoritarian regimes and warlord factions that profit from them. There is a lot of good research and powerfully arguments here about the nature of oil regimes, and the history of how humans have viewed issues of state sovereignty and who has the rights to resources. It gets a little repetitive at times, however, possibly because the intent was that this book doesn't need to be read linearly, and so repeats arguments and observations in later chapters that were already fleshed out earlier. And the "solutions" chapters feel a little thin. But overall a pretty interesting read.
Well it easy to imagine that this book is about oil and the evil associated with it. But the more intriguing and enlightening angle of this book is the discussion on the legal apparatus by which blood oil is made available for legitimate use for the rest of the world. The history of oil extracting countries and the economics and politics associated with it were well described with context. Counter intuitively, most of the oil countries that have been "blessed" with this natural resource have regressed in development. Oil is the modern day drug on which almost all of human progress is based which is why it is essential to read this book.
A thought-provoking account of the moral and causal responsibility Western consumers bear for the perpetuation of authoritarianism in resource-rich, developing countries. Although a philosophical text, it is easily accessible to the average reader thanks to Wenar鈥檚 smooth prose style. If this book makes you uncomfortable, then it has achieved its purpose!
I only read some pages of this book, The book started well, but the author reached a point where he mentioned that the West will mead the world to a better future, while critisizing all of the Oil states and putting them on the same basket without mentionning that one of the reasons of deterioration of those same states is the west itself, This vision of the author made me stop reading the book.
This is an interesting book, covering some very important topics. The negative is that it goes over the same ground several times to make its point, which becomes rather tedious, and is a shame as it distracts from the message.
An excellent book, that is clearly well researched and does well to bring together various complex and difficult themes, with well-thought out conclusions.
I wanted a history/political science book, but this book was more of a policy treatise with a bit of history on the side. So there were a lot of informative bits, but not really my jam. (I also think it could have been edited a bit to be shorter.)
But I did learn what "popular resource sovereignty" is, so there's that. And there analysis of the relationship between resources and dictatorship was really helpful. Basically: I loved the first 1/3 of the book, but I didn't quite need the rest of it.
Even those who keep their ears firmly closed to news and current affairs can surely not have failed to discover that people fight over oil. Fighting is everywhere, whether it is at nation state-level or further down the food chain, with terrorists stealing and smuggling oil to finance their activities.
This fascinating, engaging book looks at how democracy and development is being impeded in oil producing and exporting countries. This impacts the world, as many strive to lead an ethically focussed life whilst struggling with the fact that so much of our modern-day society uses oil and oil-based products. You can鈥檛 normally fill your tank with petrol from a 鈥済ood country鈥� whilst ignoring a 鈥渂ad country鈥�. You absolutely cannot expect to determine where the oil came from that was transformed into derivative components that, in turn, were turned into products you use daily. If you had to boycott everything manufactured with an oil-derived product, you鈥檇 have a very restricted daily routine.
The author believes that the problem can be improved upon, even if it cannot yet be totally eradicated, and he has developed some 鈥渄emocracy-enhancing clean trade policies鈥� that can help, even if it only sidesteps the dictators and warlords who rely on natural resource sales to perpetuate their rule. Cut off demand for their supply and you may cut them out of the picture in due course.
This is no casual read, even though even the most general of readers could stand to gain a lot by reading it. This book is something you invest time in, allowing the author鈥檚 insightful commentary, research and thoughts to sink in. It probably is not the sort of light reading you would take on holiday. For those with a deeper professional or academic interest, it can be a definitive work, a resource goldmine; albeit a mine whose resources you are actively encouraged to plunder 鈥� no violence is necessary.
The book naturally touches on other elements that are affected by the same sort of problems, such as aluminium. Some of the figures highlighted are amazing and hard to believe. Every second, 3500 pounds of aluminium are used as well as 50 tons of iron. Scale that up: every year a billion cubic meters of wool are used 鈥� can you even imagine that? The sheer scale and reach of this book is amazing. Even if you seek to disagree with some of the author鈥檚 findings, there is a lot of other information that will wash over you art the same time on related subjects, both historical and current. There is a wealth of references, notes and a detailed index you can backtrack on the author鈥檚 research and see for yourself if you are in any doubt.
This was a depressing book to read because of its core message, yet the author has done an excellent, formidable job in managing to make some sense of the situation and presents it in a calm, logical, focussed manner. It can be essential reading for many and should be recommended reading for the rest of us.
Blood Oil, written by Leif Wenar and published by Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190262921. YYYYY