Taki's Mag

Untitled (The Cow Jumps Over the Moon), 1937–38 by Willem de Kooning

The de Kooning show just closed at MoMA, and I just finished reading The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin.

We are as obsessed with oil as de Kooning was with oil paints. Trying to follow US energy policy is as pendulous as following de Kooning’s swings from abstract to representational and as grotesque as some of his figures.

From Pennsylvania to the Strait of Hormuz, The Quest has great locations, is packed with breathless story lines, and we meet lots of fascinating people: Edison, Ford, Einstein, and Haagen-Smit, the “father of smog.”

But everything is a battle for Yergin. “The world abruptly changed….The seemingly immutable structure of global confrontation had suddenly buckled,” he writes, referring first to the 1973 oil embargo, then to the opening of new countries to foreign investment in the 1990s.

Good thing it isn’t the Earth itself that’s so wildly oscillating, only “the Modern World,”  i.e., the energy industry. Because that’s what the book is about—an industry trying to find markets for its products and succeeding beyond its wildest dreams.

De Kooning said flesh was the reason oil paints were invented, but he used them to power everything: cloth, muscle, teacups, tables, faces, and even space. With oil paint, you can go through things without consuming them and touch things without polluting them.

As for petroleum, it was first used for illumination. Just when it was about to lose that market to electricity the automobile came along, and then an even bigger motor to fuel: The Global Economy.

In 1906 grain prices were low and farmers unhappy, so Teddy Roosevelt lifted the alcohol tax and ethanol developed as a fuel. Later it was banned along with other alcohols during Prohibition. In 1971 Nixon established price controls; in 1981 Reagan repealed them. In 1979 Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof; in 1986 they were dismantled—along with the R&D programs they symbolized.

“There are many parts to the quest, but fundamental to it, and underpinning everything else, is the search for knowledge, which advances technology and promotes innovation,” writes Yergin, making Texas oil men, Kazak dictators, and Omani sheiks the equivalent of mystics or Enlightenment thinkers.

In his painting Excavation, de Kooning draws on the rich deposit of art history and through applied thought and studied technique gives each line, black as pitch or bright as the sun, its own motive force.

Yergin writes:

There is one key energy source that most people do not think of as an energy source. Sometimes it is called conservation; sometimes efficiency. It is hard to conceptualize and hard to mobilize yet it can make the biggest contribution of all to the energy balance in the years immediately ahead.

But savings are not a source, just like a revenue shortfall is not a loss. A loss is something that existed then disappeared, like fossil fuels or forests when they are burned; a revenue shortfall is something that could have happened but didn’t. Fond as he is of the conditional, Yergin should know the difference.

It might not have happened had Saddam not gone to war.…The result is something that would have been unimaginable without the circumstances created by the price crash.

Yergin uses the conditional to talk of economic history but never questions the conditions. The idea that energy is something that must be bought and will come to you through a grid is a given. De Kooning takes conditions and bends them to his will. Under his brush’s mechanical movements the grid becomes a web, shapes are made boundless, surges are stilled, and energy can be stored forever in a simple canvas.

The financial markets and the rising tide of investor money were having increasing impact on the oil price. This is often described as speculation. But speculation is only part of the picture, for oil was no longer only a physical commodity; it was also becoming a financial instrument, a financial asset. Some called this process the “financialization” of oil. Whatever the name, it was a process that had been building up over time.

Speculation or financialization, loss or shortfall, abstract or non-representational, potato or potahto! But the terms are important; it matters whether you call things by their name or use a euphemism.

When they say “energy security” what they really mean is unimpeded access to cheap energy sources, presented as part of a seemingly immutable world order.

But “being anti-traditional,” de Kooning reminds us, “is just as corny as being traditional.”

In the US, ethanol—a non-traditional and renewable energy source—is made mostly from corn. It is not proven however that it pollutes less, and if we consider its entire production process, it may in fact increase both food prices and pollution.

Besides, it’s still the same old reaction, combustion, the first one we happened to get a handle on, but there are others, chemical or mechanical. In combustion, something will be consumed and something released. But for what? Rather than the source, let us look at the term.