Goal: Profits
McGovem, James
Goal: Profits AN INSIDER'S LOOK AT AMERICA'S RICHEST INDUSTRY: THE OIL GAME by James McGovern The Viking Press. 239 pp. $12.95. The adage "Don't judge a book by its cover" applies only too...
...McGovern does not remind us, as the Economic Development Bureau in New Haven does, that "of the more than 3.2 million oil wells drilled in the world, 2.4 million or 75 per cent are in the continental United States...
...The Oil Game is but one of a library of books that examine oil and energy, and the politics surrounding them...
...Its subject is the American oil business...
...McGovern's most severe criticism of the companies and their chief executives is no better than this: "It would be comforting to believe that the first priority of the men who run the oil business is to ensure adequate supplies of reasonably priced petroleum products during the transition period [to other forms of energy], but it is more realistic to assume that their first priority is to make money by providing consumers with certain goods that they want to buy...
...Never are we told that those figures are in dispute...
...Just so...
...This McGovern does not seem to be able to do...
...profit is the flywheel of corporate life...
...Profits reaped from public resources are for him a necessary part of any solution...
...Maarten de Kadt (Maarten de Kadt teaches economics and business at Empire State College in New York City...
...The Third World is not mentioned as a likely location for future oil finds...
...the industry's collusive suppression of new energy technologies until Big Oil is sure it's got the most it can out of petroleum resources...
...McGovern has based his book on a certainty that petroleum will soon run out...
...We are, however, promised by its author that "this is not still another book about...
...We cannot afford to have our thinking trapped by the profit-oriented limitations of the oil companies' game...
...Reports which came out in the spring of 1981 even suggest that the CIA doubts its own earlier projections...
...A much more comprehensive appreciation of the control of energy by large corporations is to be found in work of longtime observers of energy company activities...
...The focus of The Oil Game is on the senior executives who play the game...
...Biologist and political activist Barry Commoner's The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis is a treatment of the interrelation of oil, technology, and economics...
...The contradiction inherent in private ownership of public resources never comes under serious assault...
...The emphasis is on the stars...
...McGovern, a former speech writer for Texaco executives, can claim to be an insider, yet most of his information is not uniquely in the province of insiders...
...manipulation of the international flow of oil during embargoes...
...As a number of studies show, petroleum use will decline greatly, as against other energy sources, in the next thirty years, whether or not oil runs out...
...In fact, the book is mis-titled...
...Government, and more...
...Their stories and the accompanying accounts of their dealings with one another and the operations of their companies—culled from newspapers and speeches—read as though they were all commissioned by the companies themselves...
...Increasingly efficient energy use and the development of new sources of energy are ignored as part of the oil game...
...They are simply left out here...
...the companies' close working relationship with agencies of the U.S...
...In predicting the coming decline of Soviet oil production the author relies on CIA reports claiming that the Soviets will soon reach their maximum output ability...
...This he supports with a lengthy discussion of the oft-told story that not much more oil will be found...
...McGovern offers no independent viewpoint...
...We get biographical accounts of Leon Hess (Amerada Hess), Armand Hammer (Occidental Petroleum), John Patrick Gallagher (Dome Petroleum), John Elred Swearingen (Standard Oil of Indiana), Robert O. Anderson (Atlantic Richfield), William P. Tavoulareas (Mobil), John K. McKinely (Texaco), and others...
...Political scientist Robert Engler's The Brotherhood of Oil: Energy Policy and the Public Interest is a thorough report on the politics of oil companies...
...Thus the only solution McGovern can offer lies within the narrow confines of conserving given finite resources...
...To begin to see diverse energy futures, thinking independent of oil companies, or Department of Energy or CIA prognostica-tors, will be necessary...
...Oh, there may be some in offshore waters, but it will be expensive to bring it to the surface, so do not count on ocean wells as a solution...
...Michael Tanzer's The Energy Crisis: World Struggle for Power and Wealth is a good introduction...
...Worldwide energy problems demand the attention of more than just a small group of energy executives...
...For authoritative writing on energy futures the recent work of Marc H. Ross and Robert H. Williams, Our Energy: Regaining Control, is as good a place as any to start...
...Alas, none of this is in James McGovern's book...
...When asked to review the book I was excited, for the title suggested an inventory of oil company outrages: pricing dodges...
...Energy availability and delivery are serious business...
...Nor are future supplies of natural gas in the United States adequately considered...
...Suggestions of major social structural change seem beyond McGovern's thinking...
...the energy crisis...
...But McGovern fails to consider the consequences and larger implications...
...This public utility solution would not rechannel the flow of profits taken by private corporations from the production and sale of what is the public's...
...McGovern's book is a listing of events arranged to retail the rags-to-riches lives of these modern-day robber barons...
...The adage "Don't judge a book by its cover" applies only too well to The Oil Game...
...But even his bow to conservation is not imaginative...
...Also outside of his conceptual framework are the contributions of the men and women who comprise the labor force producing profits for the petroleum companies...
...he argues that "the only realistic alternative, short of gasoline rationing, is for Americans to drive less in smaller cars that burn less gasoline...
...Perhaps," we are told matter-of-factly, "the time has finally come to make a serious effort to regulate investor-owned oil companies in the public interest, just as investor-owned public utilities are regulated...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
