Petroleum Power is more brute force than Science!

Petroleum power is the combination of limited sources of supply with the artificially expanded demand developed totally in the 20th century. Napoleon couldn’t imagine any practical use for steam power. A few years after his time steam power was universally recognized as the force that reshaped the world economy. Internal combustion engines were just the next step in steam engine technology.

How steam engines worked and what was the relationship between steam and motive force baffled science throughout the 19th century. Many made their scientific reputation claiming to explain thermodynamics, but their work is all illogical nonsense. The complex pressure dynamics between hot steam and condensed water droplets was totally beyond their understanding. Steam engines powered machinery and was designed by mechanics. The rest was all claptrap nonsense.

Entropy steam tables, temperature differential equations, all of thermodynamics developed on the assumption that steam power and piston engines must be the way God constructed the world. Hero of Alexandria in ancient times built a turbine engine, but no modern knew how to harness its rotating motion. The concept of having it spins a wheel somehow eluded science for a long time.

Steam engines evolved not into turbines (circular motion was too hard for modern science) but into ever more explosive piston pressures. Roger Bacon had envisioned modern technology where piston engines would power fast cars, transport vehicles, ships independent of wind, airplanes and submarines. He couldn’t build a pressure tight piston, and his experiments led to the discovery of gunpowder and guns instead.

That was the 13th century, then came the trauma of the Black Death and after that it took until World War I to make Roger Bacon’s insights reality. As pressure piston engineering developed better fuel than gun powder was needed. It exploded, but it was hard to get into a piston and left terrible smoke residue.

In the 19th century, crude petroleum was only useful as kerosene for lighting lamps. It became the great American export, a source of instant wealth and global trade. Good kerosene burned without exploding. The explosive fraction called gasoline was a terrible impurity in kerosene sales. The lighter fractions exploded and killed folks. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was named that as he worked hard to keep the standard composition with no gasoline in it.

Petroleum power was developed by engine designers looking for more powerful, internal combustion piston engine to outperform the steam engine. Diesel saw the fire boxes of African tribes and used the idea for his simple evolution of the steam engine to an internal combustion engine which would burn lots of fuels, using the piston compression for ignition.

Others sought to explore the explosive power of light petroleum fractions in piston engines. By the last decades of the 19th century gasoline engines were being produced and used to power autos. The power and efficiency of these evolved steam engines made them the choice for new and better designs in battleships, airplanes, fast cars and trucks.

The invention by Edison of the electric light destroyed the kerosene business. The decision was made to never let technology interfere with petroleum power and sales. This was a fateful decision as it locked the world into being stuck with fossil fuel piston engines as the only means easily available to have engine technology.

Then there was World War I which became the dividing line between horse power and petroleum power. Gasoline engines were established and their use universal.German military planners assumed that only coal powered railroads could be used by the French army when they invaded. The French President intervened, hired the gasoline powered taxi cabs of Paris to transport his army to meet the Germans and stop them before they could capture Paris.

The resulting trench warfare front used all the technological development of the world to create vast destruction that moved the front very little distance. The war raged until the parties were exhausted without any true decision being reached. After World War I the French and British sought to carve up the collapsed Turkish Empire between them.

The British knew their navy was now to run on petroleum power and there was none available in Britain. They believed there were petroleum deposits in Mesopotamia, so they created the nation of Iraq out of warring tribes which would all want lots of British arms to fight each other and thus would allow development of their petroleum reserves to pay for them.

British desperation during the Great War caused the promise to both the Arabs and the Jews that they each could have a homeland with a capitol in Jerusalem. After the war, the British sought to prevent both although they ultimately sought to divide Palestine into a Jewish western part with no petroleum and the trans-Jordan eastern part with petroleum reserves. The idea was to use the Jewish state to prevent Arab nationalism from finding a center at Jerusalem.

The 20th century began the time of petroleum power in all possible ways. The physics of thermodynamics was expanded to make a scientific claim that everything civilized depended upon the greatest possible expression of energy. Petroleum powered offered the opportunity to burn concentrated, energy dense fossil fuel at high temperatures which was defined as the epitome of civilization and development.

Indigenous peoples relied upon sunshine and lived in peaceful harmony with the land. This was clearly primitive and civilization wanted to absolutely go the other way. Fossil fuel consumption became a hallmark of civilization. The more energy used the more advanced your culture. A brutally primitive ideology, but with the military force to conquer the world, opposition was silenced.

Petroleum power was expanded since crude petroleum produced many fractions, not just the two simple hydrocarbons used in gasoline. An entire petrochemical industry formed to make as much of the products in daily use, from plastics to pharmaceuticals out of petroleum. The post-World War II world became a civilization of petroleum power and petroleum products used for everything.

Petroleum power made the world go round, all of science and technology was turned to the greater exploitation of petroleum. The sources of petroleum became essential war goals in World War II and that petroleum power expanded in the next 50 years. The free market was manipulated to increase petroleum power. Supplies were closely balanced to demand which was connected to economic growth and basic survival.

Instability became a source of profit as it would drive up market prices. Guaranteeing instability became an international game of intrigue and insider fun. The U.S. C.I.A. was established by the Banker Alan Dulles to be the centralized government control of international information useful to profitable market moves in international bonds.

To the information gathering was added a covert arm modeled after the secret bankers’ agents who went into the world to improve the profitability of their securities holdings. If everyone knows the government of country X is not going to pay the interest on their bonds so they can improve the lives of their people, those bonds are cheap in market trading.

If your bank buys up a large portion of those bonds at rock bottom salvage prices as worthless paper you have a sizeable investment in a new government that will ignore its people and pay fully the interest on the bonds. A simple change in government by any means results in a huge bond profit which makes it all worthwhile.

Free market capitalism has many features, but it evolves always and in all ways toward whatever offers the highest profit returns. War, drugs, government corruption and general disorder offer the greatest profit opportunities. It is simple natural selection what must follow in a truly free market system.

Petroleum power is a natural fit into global capitalist profiteering. Fossil fuel intoxication is only a few centuries old. It cannot survive even one more century, perhaps not two more decades. Petroleum power did not exist until the late 19th century. It is a purely 20th century notion that began as improved naval engines before World War I and expanded into global geopolitics with the spoils of that war.

Petroleum power can't be around in 2150 for myriad obvious reasons. The quantities of available petroleum reserves may be near or at there peak production with only declining supplies available soon. No one knows for sure as this is very secret information. Losing petroleum power means disaster for the oil producing states. Maintaining oil production means disaster for the Planet from Global warming and other pollutions.

This is the end game of petroleum power. War in the oil fields of the Middle East is the ultimate expression of 20th century modern thinking in this postmodern new millennium. The ultimate choice is clear and the decisions will be forced upon us quickly. All rapid change is disruptive and violent. Violent change has been highly profitable since the time of Napoleon.

Now, the time has passed and a new time is developing. Petroleum power is obsolete and deadly. Starting with the premise that fossil fuel use and thermodynamics are on their way out is all the guidance required to start new and better understanding. Once you know the goal and the secret trail the rest follows simply as you work on your own personal solutions.

Living in harmony with the celestial mechanics of sunshine and the local topography of Planet Earth is the only way to survive through the centuries and millennia. All indigenous peoples share this simple understanding. Modern society made a mutually exclusive choice of perspectives—the traditional ways or the new petroleum power ways.

No one today, especially not petroleum companies, believes they can keep on the same path they used in the 20th century. They strive to maintain their power and relevance as long as they can. But now it is clearly the end game for all this petroleum power perspective. Survival of this current century depends upon rejecting fossil fuels and embracing sunshine and Planet Earth topography. Q.E.D.

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