The World's Tumult and the Price of a Barrel of Oil - 13 October 2000

It was a very odd feeling one morning last week to wake up and think of our coming presidential election as a minor event, a sort of local wrestling match in a world suddenly resounding with rebellions, wars, the making and unmaking of nations.

On a single morning it required no more than a few inches of my paper's news summary to report that Poland's president had been re-elected with 54% of the vote, that Lech Walesa got 1%, and consequently the former Communists mean to crush Walesa's Solidarity party.

Also that Sri Lankans were bracing for violence as they went to the polls while the civil war with Tamil separatists raged in the North.

That President Kostunica was trying to assert his new authority over a parliament containing two thirds of Mr Milosevic's party.

That in Granada, Spain, a famous Spanish prosecutor was murdered in his home by Basque separatists.

And that in response to the pleas of the UN's secretary general and President Clinton, Israel had extended the ultimatum that threatened war against the rioting Palestinians.

The rest of the column was a dribble of notes about two minor dictators in trouble and the Ivory Coast's junta leader trying to ban his five opponents from the ballot in the coming presidential election - a trick that neither Vice-President Gore nor Governor Bush had thought of.

And what in this country, what violent conflict can we offer to add to the world's tumult?

Well Mr Gore says that to relieve America's fatal dependence on Arab oil by drilling in the wildlife area of Alaska would damage or kill off rare birds. Governor Bush says that in that vast snow land lots of drilling can be done, and should be done soon, with never a spotted owl in sight.

I suggest that of all these upheavals there are really only two that concern most of the listeners to this talk - they're the rioting in Jerusalem and the revolution in Belgrade.

And Belgrade took pride of place in the headlines and the hearts of Americans. For it was a scene they wish on every country struggling under a dictatorship like a huge canvas by Delacroix: a broken purple sky billowing with smoke, two great tidal waves of people surging towards each other looking up to a single figure thrusting a torch - the perfect romantic picture of what in Africa they call "uhuru" - the day of liberation.

How many times since 1945 have Americans written cheering editorials at the violent birth, the liberation of yet another new nation, a nation Americans always assume to be destined for a democracy like their own?

I say "Americans" advisedly because in the early years, after the Second World War, the British and the French and the Dutch tended not to join in the storm of cheers and wholesale congratulations when an old colony, a ward of Empire, gained its independence.

Your point sir? My point is that 55 years ago, 51 nations signed the charter of the United Nations. Soon there could be four times that many member nations, so many have, they say, acquired their freedom.

Well they shook off or managed or fought for their independence that a fact rarely remembered is that of the 60 or more new nations that were formerly under foreign rule, and which enjoyed the same rhapsody of joy on the day of liberation, no more than a dozen dare pretend to be democracies - the rest have yielded to dictatorship.

Sometime in the 1960s when the number of new nations was increasing briskly I once asked the Secretary General of the United Nations - the courtly, greatly underrated, U Thant of Burma - I asked him where all these nations were going to go since very few of them could be self-sustaining.

He said: "In the breakdown of the empires there is a natural craze to be free, to be separate. There will be scores more lands, islands, former colonies who want to be sovereign.

"One day they will discover they don't have one big item to live on or to trade with - a crop, a metal, a fishery, whatever - they will have to go to war for it or federate again in blocks. This may take 50 years."

When he spoke there were, say, 67 member nations. Today there are 181.

If there is one domestic concern that offers no solution at the moment - concern for which more than once America has gone to war - it is the problem of home heating oil for the millions of Americans who live anywhere cross the North Eastern seaboard, across the pastures and then the prairie, all the way through the Rockies in Wyoming and Montana.

Now, I discover that this - as a problem not of comfort but of staying alive in health - is something that tends to puzzle people who live in temperate climates where an outdoor temperature just below freezing is considered bitter if not Arctic.

We're talking about a stretch of country - say, 500 miles down from the northern border of New York, thence about 2,500 miles due West, taking in the homes of, I figure, 70-odd millions who from December on through March and April have regular daily low temperatures of, say, 12 degrees, that's 20 below freezing.

When my daughter in Vermont calls to say that at breakfast time it was 15 below she means below zero or 47 below freezing. A little gas or electric heater isn't much help.

So a sharp European wrote, after the recent talk I did on the oil problem. He asks me what happened to the colonials in the 17th and 18th Century in this part of the world and adds the sassy query: Were they tougher types perhaps?

Not at all. In the very earliest days small houses had huge fireplaces and outside the door, forests of wood.

By the 18th Century the colonial house, built of wood - as almost all American houses still are - had developed a central heating system.

The basement furnace stoked with wood, the heat went up through a flue and filtered into the living room and the bedrooms through small rectangular iron grilles in the floor.

In most, if not all, of the 18th Century houses you see in New England towns, the system still serves as well as any other. But up through the grilles comes heat from the oil in the furnace.

Last time we saw, I hope, why Americans might merely grumble about the price of petrol for their cars, well they're up in arms about the sudden revelation that the fuel reserve that is kept back for winter heating oil is lower than it's ever been.

Why? That is the unanswered question - or rather it's a question that everybody finds embarrassing to answer since everybody knows the answer. It's the price of a barrel of oil that the Arabs, the Opec nations, choose to ask.

But since this is an election year both parties are looking for a scapegoat. And needless to say they find it in each other.

The rest of us tap the expertise of practically any expert on anything remotely connected with oil, with petrol.

This week I tapped two extremes: one a top executive, the CEO of a big oil company that sells millions of barrels of oil a day, at the other extreme a philosopher who describes himself rather as a professor of biology and population studies.

Professor Paul Ehrlich is the name. He says there is no such thing as a fixed human nature, that each of us is a mixture of our genes and the environment we live in. So each of our natures is unique.

So how does this explain why the Arabs have all of us, if you'll excuse the expression, over the barrel?

The oil tycoon disposed of the question easily. He was a victim, as aren't we all, of the Opec price. All he can do, he said, in pricing the barrels he sells was to follow the "volatility of the market" - great word, volatility, it's being used every day on this mournful week to explain the steady plunge in hi-tech stocks.

Now Professor Ehrlich - at the end of an interview that wove its way through a spaghetti tangle of philosophic, biologic, genetic talk, he eventually said that global warming was a real problem and most of us weren't doing anything about it.

Then, what could we do? Well, he said, try to get Americans out of their automobiles and sports utility vehicles and then convince them that petrol prices are not too high but too low.

The deep idea is, I suppose, to stop us using our motorcars altogether so we'll stop piercing the ozone layer and fouling up the atmosphere.

As a practical solution I think this compares favourably with that of a doctor I knew, a medico of great distinction and sharp intellect, who yet told a Senate committee that if only people stopped spending money on alcohol and tobacco every home in America could have an indoor toilet.

I am, of course, flattered to see that Professor Ehrlich's culprit for the oil mess was the same as mine - namely the American people themselves, who shrank the heating oil reserve by gobbling up unprecedented rivers of gasoline along every highway in the land during the golden prosperous summer of 1999.

But finding the culprit doesn't solve the problem. What Professor Ehrlich is asking - and my distinguished father-in-law proposed to the Senate - was to ask human beings to change their nature, no matter how many natures they happen to have.

Well, changing one's character provided the usual happy ending to Hollywood movies in the 1930s but I don't recall its ever happening in life. Certainly not to a whole nation. Oh dear!

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.