Peter Maass on What Oil Does Around the World
After years as a foreign correspondent reporting from war-torn countries, Peter Maass began to notice they all had something in common. “Oil,” he told the audience at the Skirball Cultural Center. “It was everywhere I had been. When I was in Bosnia, people would say, ‘If only we had oil the Americans would save us.’ In the Middle East, people would say, ‘If only we didn’t have oil, we wouldn’t get invaded so much.’” Maass began work on what would become Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, initially …
