Читать книгу Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Amanda Little - Страница 16

An even more transformative event was looming on the near horizon. World War I would have a profound effect on the growth and influence of the young oil industry. The war presented America’s oil executives with an opportunity to gain protection, stability, and security by expanding their influence into politics.

This was the first major war of the Industrial Age—a “war that was fought between men and machines,” as Yergin put it. Close to 13 million people lost their lives. Never before had petroleum-powered battleships and tanks been on the front lines of battlefields. They replaced the horses, trains, and slower ships that had moved troops in wars past. The defining decision for this mechanized war—a decision often credited with the Allies’ victory—was in fact made in 1911, the same year as the trust bust, before the war began. Winston Churchill, serving in the admiralty, made the difficult choice to transform his entire naval fleet from coal-powered engines to oil, a new and riskier fuel but one that promised the great strategic benefits of faster ships and more efficient use of manpower. This momentous decision—he termed it the “fateful plunge”—ultimately helped clinch the Allies’ victory, as their ships outmaneuvered the coal-fired fleet of the German Reich.

Oil also won big victories on land. Yergin told me the story of the “Paris taxi armada”: Germans were amassing troops in the hills to the north of Paris in 1914, far outnumbering the Allied soldiers who were dispersed to the south. There was no train system to transport the Allies northward, and traveling on foot would never get them to the front in time to repel the assault on Paris. French general Joseph Gallieni had an idea: in a matter of hours he rounded up six hundred Parisian taxicabs and commissioned them to shuttle six thousand French reserve infantry troops to the battlefield—paying each driver his standard meter fare after a swift victory.

Military successes such as these amounted to dollar signs in the eyes of American oil executives, whose fields and refineries were at the time supplying the vast majority of the Allies’ oil. In 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson was making plans to join England and France in the war, he summoned to a strategy meeting the chief executives of America’s top oil companies, asking what they would need from the government to ensure that a cheap and abundant supply of oil flowed from U.S. oil wells to European battlefields. This represented a U-turn in government-industry relations: not five years after the dissolution of Standard Oil’s trust, its new chief executives were in Washington deciding how they could cooperate—amongst themselves, and with their federal disciplinarians.

Wilson created a Petroleum War Service Committee and tapped A. C. Bedford, president of Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon), to lead it. Bedford, a cutthroat executive who had worked at Standard Oil for more than thirty-five years, saw an opportunity that would extend well into the postwar future. “He and his committee of fellow oil company presidents proposed that supplies be pooled and efforts coordinated to produce all possible oil,” wrote historian Carl Solberg. “Overnight, the industry, with President Wilson’s support, was doing what the Sherman Antitrust Act forbade.”

It didn’t stop there. Industry leaders made a plea for a substantial tax break wrapped in the battle flag of patriotism. Bedford made the case that “if America were to have enough oil to win the war, Congress must create greater inducements to produce the stuff,” Solberg wrote. A so-called depletion allowance was established, eventually granting a 27 percent tax deduction for any investment made by U.S. petroleum companies to discover new oil.

As the war came to an end in late 1918, oil industry leaders formed the American Petroleum Institute, and installed Bedford as president. This was the nation’s first organization designed to protect the industry’s interests and guide its influence in public policy making. At the top of the Institute’s agenda: extending the wartime tax breaks and opening western public lands to prospectors.

In the postwar years, U.S. oil companies advanced steadily into overseas markets. Already the industry had established itself as America’s first multinational enterprise—remember Rockefeller’s initial mission to bring “new light” to the world’s darkest corners—but World War I accelerated that trend. Thanks to the celebrated success of trucks, automobiles, and oil-powered ships during the war, the Age of Mechanization shifted into high gear. The mass production of gas-powered vehicles for the war (more than 160,000 were constructed for Allied troops) dramatically reduced the cost of these conveniences for mainstream consumers in Europe and at home.

The Standard spin-offs quickly expanded their operations throughout Western Europe, Russia, and Asia. Soon they had more foreign customers than domestic. The United States was, in today’s terms, the Saudi Arabia of the world, a country whose vast plains, deserts, and ranch lands supplied the majority of the world’s oil—and would continue to do so for several decades.

“After the Great War,” Yergin told me, “there was a surge of consumption as automobiles began to crowd city streets and a new lifestyle based on cheap oil took hold. That’s when Americans began to perceive low-cost travel, cheap electricity, and affordable heating almost as a right conferred by our democracy.” In 1923, when English writers Davenport and Cooke visited the United States during its postwar oil heyday, they reported:

Travel but a little in the country and you will gain the impression that the modernism of the United States flowed from its oil wells…The oil-tank car is as ubiquitous on his railroads as the coal-truck on ours. The oil-tin litters his waste places. His wayside is dotted with the petrol pump and at night illuminated oil “filling stations” make his streets more beautiful. A network of oil pipe-lines underlies his country, more extensive than the network of railways overlying ours…Does not the American partly live in oil? Certainly he cannot move without it. Every tenth man owns an automobile, and the rest are saving up to buy one.

The cozy relationship that had been established between Washington and Big Oil during World War I grew more complicated in its aftermath when questionable public-private ties were exposed. As early as 1910, Congress gave the president authority to set aside strategic oil fields in California and Wyoming for emergency use in the event that military oil supplies ran low. This provision would lead to one of the more notorious moments in American political history—the Teapot Dome scandal.

In 1921, Albert Fall, President Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior, who oversaw millions of acres of public land, was caught taking bribe money from oilmen. Fall, who had worked as a chuck wagon cook, a hard-rock miner, a rancher, and a lawyer before he won political leadership, had secretly leased more than 100,000 acres of land located inside of the military oil reserves in eastern Wyoming (named Teapot Dome after a boulder in the shape of a teapot that overlooked the oil field) to prominent eastern oil prospectors. He had done so in exchange for personal gifts and loans totaling more than $5 million in today’s dollars.

When Fall was investigated, Congress was hard pressed to find a lawyer to represent him who didn’t have a conflict of interest with the oil industry. “Just think; America has 110 million population, 90 percent of them lawyers,” remarked the popular humorist Will Rogers, “yet we can’t find two of them who have not worked at some time or another for an oil company. There has been at least one lawyer for each barrel that ever came out of the ground.”

In response to the scandal, rumblings arose about the oil industry’s influence inside Congress itself: “[I can] name a dozen senators spotted with this flood of oil,” said Senator George Moses, a New Hampshire Republican. “Those yet unnamed are greater in number.”