The Wall Street Journal runs a weekly column in which an author lists the five best books on a particular subject. The Journal invited me to write the column this week. My five best books on oil are (drum roll…) Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company, Anthony Sampson’s The Seven Sisters, Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, Abdeldrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day. The story is posted on the Journal’s site and on mine.

My latest story, in New York magazine, focuses on the controversy over the so-called ground zero mosque. The piece draws on lessons of iconoclasm in the modern era, from the destruction of the World Trade Center to the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station and the theft in 1911 of the Mona Lisa (more people lined up to see the empty spot where the stolen masterpiece had hung than visited the museum to see the actual artifact).  As the story says, “In a city with more than its share of famous buildings, one that doesn’t even exist has already become iconic. It is a modern alchemy of symbols in which the act of destruction doubles as an act of creation. The thing is, the opponents of the community center appear to have failed to understand the double-edged consequences of the preemptive iconoclasm they are trying to achieve.”

NPR’s always-excellent literary program, Fresh Air, features an interview with me today. Click here for audio and transcript.

That’s the nifty headline Foreign Policy uses for my latest story about the connection between oil, war and American military spending. A key question the story asks is this one—“To what extent is oil linked to the wars we fight and the more than half-trillion dollars we spend on our military every year?” The quick answer is, it’s strongly linked, and it costs a lot. For more, click here or here.

A last-second and little-noted victory for transparency—the financial regulation bill approved by Congress includes an amendment requiring extractive companies (oil, gas, gold, coal, etc) that are registered with the SEC to disclose all payments to foreign governments. Great news for the international transparency movement.

Vintage, which is publishing the paperback of Crude World on August 10, has done a wonderful job on the cover design, methinks.

Stepping into the void left by mainstream media reducing their foreign coverage, the VII Photo agency has teamed up with Medecins sans Frontiers to produce a multi-part multi-media series on world hunger. Showcases the work of Antonin Kratochvil, who’s always amazing, and Ron Haviv, among others. Here’s the link to the website; one of the essays is below.

“The truth is that we care mightily when BP wreaks havoc in the Gulf of Mexico, but we pay scant attention when Shell harms Nigeria, when Chevron pollutes Ecuador, when PDVSA stains Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, when Suncor extracts oil from tar sands in Canada. It’s understandable that as we watch the live webfeed of the gusher, we want to know what BP officials knew and when they knew it, and we want to know why the Obama administration didn’t react sooner. But if we don’t broaden the horizons of our questions, we run the risk of reinforcing a fairy tale that says we can have our oil and our environment, too. The worst outcome of the mess in the Gulf would be the perpetuation of the conceit that error and greed can be regulated out of the worldwide oil industry.”—To BP Or Not To BP, By Peter Maass

This is for the readers of my blog who speak German (a population estimated at 1-2). German radio has posted what appears to be (if Google Translate can be relied upon) an interesting discussion about the German version of my book. Austrian radio has chimed in, too. Cicero excerpted a chapter in its April issue.

An oil pit and gas flare in the Oriente region of Ecuador. Chevron faces a multi-billion dollar lawsuit for pollution in the region during the 1970s and 1980s. (Time/Ivan Kashinsky)

A dragonfly tries to clean itself as it is stuck to marsh grass covered in oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in Garden Island Bay on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. (AP/Gerald Herbert)

The amount of oil that is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at BP’s broken well. The video shows one of the two main rupture points.
Update: Scientists who have seen the video say the leak is much more than 5,000 barrels a day.

In an interview on the marvelous “The World” radio program, I describe the ways in which the spill in the Gulf of Mexico has brought home to America, quite literally, the environmental costs of oil extraction that countries like Nigeria have had to endure for decades. If America is to awaken, it needs to understand that drilling less in its own waters is not the remedy; the solution is drilling less everywhere.

I’m trying to find the photographer who is on the tank in the pictures below (which are stills from a video). This was one of the first Marine tanks into Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003. If you know who the photographer is, please email me via peter at petermaass dot com. Thanks!
Update: I found him.

My French publisher, Autrement, has just come out with their version of Crude World. The French title is Pétrole Brut. The cover is fantastic, I think. For Autrement’s webpage about Pétrole Brut, click here. The Dutch edition—the title is Ruwe Wereld—has just been published, too; for more info on that, click here.

After being postponed due to a snowstorm in February, my talk with photographer Ed Kashi takes place on Thursday at 5:30 pm at Harvard Law School (to be precise, in Griswold Hall, Room 110). We’ll discuss the problems of oil and the ways we’ve chosen, with pens and cameras, to document them. Should be interesting, and refreshments (of some sort) will be served. For more info, click here.

My short contribution to an online debate in the New York Times about Obama’s decision to expand offshore drilling:

I consider myself an environmentalist and have written at length about the problems of oil extraction, but I have a hard time getting upset about the decision to expand offshore drilling.

As a matter of global justice, why should America exclude its coastlines while coastlines all over the world are drilled for oil that goes into American gas tanks? Banning oil companies from operating in our waters while encouraging them to do so in other people’s waters — there’s a whiff of hypocrisy to that, a sort of outsourcing of oil pollution. Perhaps if we suffer more of the inconvenience of extraction we will reconsider the merit of continuing down the road of a fossil-fuel based economy.

But don’t get me wrong — drilling to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce gas prices is a charade. President Obama seems well aware of that, in a sense calling the other side’s bluff. With 2 percent of the world reserves, there is no way to extract our way to lower prices or energy independence; the impact will be between “not at all” and “hardly at all.”

The new policy, rather than being a vindication of the “drill, baby, drill” argument, will show its shallowness and hopefully allow us to have a more constructive debate about our energy future. Paradoxically, drilling a bit more in the short term may help the effort to drill a lot less in the future.

A genius video about the problems (there are lots) with bottled water.

If my book could talk it would say “Hello Denmark.” In a few weeks, Gyldendal, the oldest publishing house in Denmark, is bringing out a Danish version of Crude World.

If you ever thought war reportage could use more intellectual depth—wouldn’t it be interesting for a philosopher to wander the fields of battle?—I have two wonderful words for you: Carolin Emcke. Other than her last book, “Echoes of Violence,” little of Emcke’s work has been translated into English from German. But Emcke, who has a doctorate in philosophy and is a war correspondent for Die Zeit, has begun posting translations of her articles, including a great one she wrote not long ago for Die Zeit about Iraq. Read her work, remember it (you will) and pass it around.