One Year Later in a Hot, Flat, Crowded World:
5 – The New Millennium Is Still the 1970s 1

The vast majority of American citizens who remember the 1970s have been waiting ever since then for our country’s leaders to make the difficult political, business, and scientific funding decisions that will wean the United States from dependence on foreign oil.

Why are we still waiting? Probably for the some of the same reasons we are still waiting for a solution to the problem of unaffordable health care: number one being that too much money is at stake and big stakeholders are calling the shots.

Interestingly enough, too much money and big stakeholders are also problems for citizens of those foreign oil producing states. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman repeats the thesis of his 2006 Foreign Policy article The First Law of Petropolitics: as the price of oil goes up, oil producing nations’ governments become more authoritarian and repressive.

Friedman says the 9/11 attacks showed that our dependence on foreign oil is changing the international financial system for the worse, and funding an intolerant, anti-Western, repressive strain of Islam.

He goes on to describe in detail this maddening situation and other ways petrodictatorships are bad for the world and bad for the United States. Even for those of us who remember the 1970s, it is worth reading and reviewing.