Has anyone ever studied the true cost of a barrel of Mid-East oil?
If you add in all of the foreign aid given to gain favor with middle eastern countries, the military costs of the Persian Gulf war and the coming Iraq war, and even the cost of 9/11 and the war or terror (because they wouldn’t hate us if we were not interfering in their region) the cost has got to be much more than $30.
Also add in the production created from that barrel - lets be fair and take the positives as well as the negitives.
I would wag that when you factor in the productivity gains a barrel of oil gains us instead of costs us.
It’s a bit simplistic to attribute the full cost of our involvement in the Middle East to oil. The two largest recipients of American aid in the region, Egypt and Israel, have no oil. We’ve spent billions fighting in places like Korea and Vietnam that also have no oil. I think we’d be involved in the region regardless.
Even if we do count these costs, however, they represent “fixed costs” associated with keeping supply lines in the region open. It would be misleading to divide these costs among the barrels imported to the United States. The variable cost of a barrel of middle Eastern oil is exactly what we pay in the marketplace.
There’s at least two more general sets of considerations to add to the mix: the traditionally unaccounted-for costs to the global environment (i.e., pollution, toxic waste, global warming), and the costs to the OPEC states vis-a-vis wasted opportunities for a more democratic, liberal, modern, and diversified path of socio-economic development.
With respect to the latter, take Saudi Arabia, for example. This nation, established on paper in the aftermath of WWI by the Great Powers, has been a primary supplier of oil to the west for several decades, and what do they have to show for it? Practically zilch. Their population is currently 22 million, with a per capita income of around $16,000 and a national debt in excess of $200 billion. The average Saud or “guest worker” living there fares incomparably worse than the oil-soaked leisure-class royals (approx. 7,000 Royal Family members), who enjoy the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth. The Saudi economy remains largely undiversified, although they’re willing to spend billions of dollars supporting Islamic-fundie Wahabbism (through mosques, madrassas, charities, etc.) and God knows what else.
I’m not assigning all or even primary blame for this on the west, let alone the USA. Ultimately those choices are the responsibility of those states and their populaces. But it doesn’t reflect well on us, either, that we’ve been so eager to buy oil from (and sell arms to) these backwards and thoroughly repressive regimes.
As for the USA, don’t forget the tremendous costs of maintaining the national network of roads and highways, which amounts to a massive (if largely self-justified) government subsidy of, and commitment to, an automotive-based system of transport. Equalize or question those subsidies, as is done in certain (admittedly, much smaller and more densely populated) European countries, and you get more alternatives – extensive train networks, and even those funky community-car and public bike programs developed in The Netherlands. And since we’re only paying about a third as much for gasoline as the Europeans and Japanese are, we drive and live in more energy-consumptive ways than they do, and our research in renewable energy technologies suffers accordingly, because from a crudely economic standpoint, “solar cells (& etc.) simply don’t pay for themselves (yet)”.
Argh.
I don’t see anything here that is a General Question that hasn’t been answered.