What is the true nature of oil dependency? [CNN]

The answer is not simply to the ends of the earth; the mad pursuit has also taken us to the bottom of the ocean. Deepwater exploration is the latest holy grail of Big Oil. On August 2, 2007, a Russian submarine with two parliamentarians on board planted a titanium flag two miles beneath the North Pole. At stake were lucrative new oil and gas fields -- by some estimates ten billion tons of oil -- on the Arctic sea floor. Two weeks later, it was announced that the fabled Northwest Passage was navigable for the first time in recorded history, facilitating the new oil frontier. The ecological preconditions for this unprecedented event were, of course, global warming -- another product of Big Oil.

Nigerian anti-corruption czar Nuhu Ribadu says that 70 percent of the country's oil wealth has been stolen or wasted. From 1965 to 2004 Nigeria's per-capita income actually fell from $250 to $212, while income distribution deteriorated markedly. Between 1970 and 2000, the percentage of people subsisting on less than one dollar a day in Nigeria grew from 36 percent to more than 70 percent, from 19 million to a staggering 90 million.

During the last decade of Croesian oil riches, GDP per capita and life expectancy in Nigeria have, according to World Bank estimates, both fallen. To conclude, as the International Monetary Fund has, Nigeria's $600 billion in oil revenue has actually contributed to a decline in the country's standard of living. No wonder former Venezuelan oil minister and OPEC cofounder Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo dubbed oil "the devil's excrement."

NVDL: It is re3asonable to anticipate, whatever the Climate Change realities that befall us, we will pursue our addiction to our current lifestyle by substituting from oil energy to coal energy. We will continue not to care about global warming to our great cost. Will there be a war between the poor and the fraction that is the rich? Between those who care about the planet (environmentalists essentially) and The Rich? I would argue that there has to be.

clipped from edition.cnn.com In late 2006, a consortium discovered oil at a staggering depth in the Gulf of Mexico. The test well, Jack-2, delved through 7,000 feet of water and 20,000 feet of sea floor to tap oil trapped in tertiary rock laid down 60 million years ago. The drill ships and production platforms required to undertake such deep drilling are massive floating structures,much larger than the largest aircraft carriers and costing well over a half billion dollars (and close to a million dollars a day to rent). In 2007, the vast new Tupi field in Brazilian coastal waters was discovered in 200 meters of water below a massive layer of salt in hugely inhospitable geological conditions. One test well cost more than $250 million to drill. But the addict, says Burroughs, knows no limits to satiate his craving. The deadly logic of addiction -- the drive to acquire oil at all costs -- is experienced with particular ferocity in the oil-producing states of the equatorial region and global south.