{"id":5498,"date":"2013-11-06T10:43:27","date_gmt":"2013-11-06T16:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5498"},"modified":"2013-11-06T10:43:27","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T16:43:27","slug":"what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5498","title":{"rendered":"What If We Never Run Out of Oil?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2013\/05\/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil\/309294\/?single_page=true\">Charles Mann:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill\u2019s world. Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill\u2019s outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated.<\/p>\n<p>Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. With characteristic vigor and verve, he set about modernizing the Royal Navy, jewel of the empire. The revamped fleet, he proclaimed, should be fueled with oil, rather than coal\u2014a decision that continues to reverberate in the present. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. Because of this greater energy density, oil could push ships faster and farther than coal could.<\/p>\n<p>Churchill\u2019s proposal led to emphatic dispute. The United Kingdom had lots of coal but next to no oil. At the time, the United States produced almost two-thirds of the world\u2019s petroleum; Russia produced another fifth. Both were allies of Great Britain. Nonetheless, Whitehall was uneasy about the prospect of the Navy\u2019s falling under the thumb of foreign entities, even if friendly. The solution, Churchill told Parliament in 1913, was for Britons to become \u201cthe owners, or at any rate, the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the supply of natural oil which we require.\u201d Spurred by the Admiralty, the U.K. soon bought 51 percent of what is now British Petroleum, which had rights to oil \u201cat the source\u201d: Iran (then known as Persia). The concessions\u2019 terms were so unpopular in Iran that they helped spark a revolution. London worked to suppress it. Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Mann: As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill\u2019s world. Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5498"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}