Clever Geek Handbook
19 December 2025

The Best Things in Life

Recommendation

Professor of philosophy Thomas Hurka ponders what makes a good life. He writes simply, explaining philosophical concepts with understandable examples: Chocolate and sex, for instance, are good. Hurka layers his concepts, one upon another, weaving a modern and interesting – if not necessarily compelling to the reader who is not philosophically minded – report on what comprises a good life. More practical readers might prefer tips or parameters, but this isn’t a self-help guide. It’s more of a discussion, with points to consider and directions for reaching your own conclusions. Hurka’s ability to cite Kant, Socrates and other philosophical giants without getting bogged down helps readers consider theories they might find otherwise inaccessible. BooksInShort suggests this book to managers, executives, entrepreneurs and armchair philosophers seeking gentle guidance toward a more rewarding life.

Take-Aways

  • Reflecting on essential good and evil aids decision making.
  • Pleasure, one of the key “goods” in life, comes in many forms and intensities.
  • Reaching for happiness directly probably won’t bring results; try a roundabout approach.
  • Seek what brings you joy, regardless of what anyone else owns or does. One clue: The goal of your quest probably isn’t money.
  • Pursue enjoyable activities and seek “flow,” an immersion that brings good feelings.
  • Knowledge is one of life’s goods; some kinds of knowledge outshine others.
  • Achievement – involving action, intention and work – generates a good life, with more advanced achievements earning more acclaim.
  • Goodness, or virtue, contributes to a worthy life because it compounds other goods.
  • Love and friendship evoke more than good feelings; they provide a space for knowledge, achievement and opportunities to be virtuous.
  • Ultimately, a good life derives from a unique, individual balance of all these goods.

Summary

Building a Good Life

Life’s most important decisions require tough choices. Some decisions combine practical and philosophical concerns, such as deciding whether to work after college or volunteer abroad, or whether to stay married for the kids’ sake or to get divorced for your happiness. To choose the right course, you must weigh all factors and determine what would make your life good or bad. Philosophers disagree on what encompasses a good life. Thomas Hobbes believed the best life comes from getting the most of what you want. Epicurus and others from his school of thinking prioritized pleasure; Socrates and his comrades chose knowledge, while diverse philosophers rank “moral virtue,” creativity or religious dedication as most important. All these varied priorities concern what is intrinsically good. Two related ideas prevail: Fundamental good exists, as do different paths to a good life. Still, some lives will have more worth than others, based on what has ultimate value.

Measures of Pleasure

Pleasure – also known as contentment, enjoyment and happiness – comes with a variety of commingling sensations. Pleasure does not exist in a pure form, despite the saying “pure pleasure.” As with sound, you can measure more or less pleasure. And although they evoke similar feelings, pleasures vary in kind and in goodness.

“While it’s good to know your inner states, it’s no tragedy if you don’t, and if being wrong about them helps you achieve other important goods, that’s probably on balance a blessing.”

You can divide pleasure into two categories, each with two subtypes. The first category separates simple, self-contained pleasures, such as taste and other bodily sensations, from more complex pleasures, stemming from events that make “you pleased that something is the case,” such as your favorite team winning a title. The second category involves the degree and breadth of your feeling. You can experience slight pain or pleasure, as with a stubbed toe or back massage, all while maintaining other thoughts and feelings. Or you can feel pain or pleasure that affects your sense of well-being, as with depression or contentment. These aren’t experienced in a body part or in parallel with other feelings. Rather, they color your entire outlook.

“Good feelings don’t often come in the front door because you asked them to enter; they prefer to slip in the back door when and because you’re absorbed in something else.”

All pleasures are equally good, separated in worth simply by their “degree of pleasantness.” Figuring out how much pleasure you feel at any moment requires identifying your many good feelings, measuring their intensities and adding them up. Two people could arrive at the same amount by widely differing routes. Consider a party-loving ladies’ man filled with self-doubt or a frugal priest contented with his lot in life. Despite different types of sensations, their total pleasure may rate similar values, and, thus, their lives would rate similar degrees of goodness.

Pursuit of Happiness

Types of pleasure can work together, reinforcing each other and spreading one into the other. That means happiness of one type encourages pleasure of other kinds. Similarly, sadness of one kind can lead to more sadness. An overall good mood is the most powerful pleasure, paving the way for simple delight and general satisfaction with life. Achieving that happiness is vital, but it leads to a pivotal question: How do you find happiness?

“If achieving a goal makes the right kind of change in the world, it has intrinsic worth.”

Seeking happiness head-on, with that as your firm goal, won’t bring nearly as much pleasure as an indirect route. Sidling up to happiness – while pursuing activities that you do well – seems to bring the most pleasure. You can try raising your pleasure quotient with physical joys like sweets, sunning or sex. You’ll feel good, but those feelings won’t last. You can try increasing your income. But as you earn more, you’re likely to spend more. A bigger paycheck soon becomes another normal aspect of your life, and its effect on your happiness level will fade. Improving your mood helps make you open to happiness, although individual temperament seems to align to a certain consistent lifelong mood.

“To fully enjoy an activity you have to be absorbed in it; if you’re only half attending, you’ll get only half the pleasure.”

However, you can increase your happiness. Avoid physical pain, and fix the things to which – according to studies – you will never grow accustomed, such as a long commute or noisy working conditions. Go after things you want simply because they’ll bring you joy, regardless of what other people get. That means more vacation rather than more money, according to a study of Harvard students.

“To get the most pleasure, you shouldn’t consciously seek it or even think of it as good; if pleasure is not to be out of sight, it must be out of mind.”

Pursue enjoyment in a form that works for you, from playing golf to solving puzzles. Seek “flow,” that total state of focus wherein you lose sense of time and awareness of nearly everything around you as you merge and become one with whatever you’re doing. Actions become automatic, and you probably won’t fully recognize the pleasure you’re getting from the activity until later. This brings longer-lasting pleasure than physical pleasure, and mood changes affect it less. Find an activity and let it take you away. Good feelings will naturally follow.

Pleasure or Pain?

Pleasure – meaning all good feelings – isn’t that important. Compared to pain – meaning all bad feelings – pleasure comes in second.

“The root of flow is the successful exercise of a developed skill, which requires the right balance between challenge and ability.”

For example, consider a person who is suffering pain at the most intense level possible. Then imagine someone else enjoying pleasure as much as possible. You might first think that lessening the suffering person’s pain and increasing the other’s pleasure are equally good. But that isn’t true. You should favor reducing pain, because pain holds higher value. Living a better life requires caring most about those who suffer most. A so-called “time bias” also limits pleasure. You care more about pleasure now than several years away. A similar bias means pleasure and pain raise less feeling when they’re in the past. Aiming for future accomplishments or goodness might produce less immediate but more permanent enjoyment.

Types of Knowledge

Societies send children to school – to acquire skills and to learn the laws of nature, history, and culture – simply for the value of knowing. But all knowledge is not equal. Understanding nature’s laws serves you well, unlike knowing something trivial, such as how many blades of grass fill your yard. In determining the worth of different types of knowledge, it helps to separate them into three areas:

  • Outside knowledge, which exists apart from you.
  • Relational knowledge, which concerns your place in the world
  • Internal knowledge, which includes your thoughts as well as your personal qualities.
“Achievements have to be challenging, and the more challenging the better.”

When you weigh these three kinds of knowledge, relational knowledge has an edge, because it connects internal and outside knowledge. A fourth type of knowledge, moral knowledge, requires knowing what’s right, or good, and what’s wrong, or bad.

The Value of Achievement

Knowledge and achievement connect you to reality. Fitting your mind to the world is knowledge, such as learning the cycles of the moon. Fitting the world to your mind is an achievement, such as setting a goal and reaching it. Not every action is such an achievement. For example, breathing demands action, but not the intention and willful effort that define achievement.

“The best friends, unlike the best judges or scientists, are moved more by simple feeling than by evaluative judgment.”

Achievements vary in worth. The most valuable ones affect many people or last for a long time, such as the work of political leaders who improve their constituents’ lives or poets who contribute to literature. Similarly, valuable achievements include those that require meeting lesser goals on the way to the larger goal. Valuable achievements involve work, must be challenging, and require learned abilities and effort. For example, mastering the skills, preparation and equipment to climb Mount Everest demands structuring your goals step by step, which increases the value of your achievement. Precision also adds value. For instance, in golf, poetry and woodworking, those with the most advanced skills command the most admiration.

Virtue

Being a good person holds value, but it isn’t the only measure of a good life. Virtue contributes to a good life, just as vices detract. Aligning your viewpoint with the good compounds your goodness, such as when you feel good because you brought pleasure to someone else. Similarly, a negative point of view about evil feelings is also good. However, connecting a bad feeling, such as envy, with a positive object lessens its virtue. Aristotle held that enjoying good activities is good. Pursuing or considering a good is also good. Better still is experiencing the good yourself.

“It can hurt and it can harm, but for most of us, love’s glories are worth the gamble.”

Ideally, you will pursue goodness and shun badness for two reasons: because you realize it is morally good (or bad) and because you value it (or not). For example, consider how you feel about lying. You avoid it because you believe it to be wrong and you don’t like it. You bring harmony to your life when these two “moralized” and “simply emotional” thoughts align. Kant placed superior value on moral beliefs, but that doesn’t hold up in all situations. Ought a friend visit you in the hospital because it’s her duty or because she cares about you? The former brings you little comfort; the latter, much.

“Compare one life devoted to learning about the history of the 20th century and another spent running a medium-sized business. Can we say that either is clearly better? I don’t see how.”

When you compare virtue with other kinds of good, however, it can come up short. Since virtue involves having the proper attitude toward something else – be it good or bad – it is less valuable than the item it is evaluating. For example, a teacher educates children with a genuine desire that they learn. Outsiders value the instruction more than they value the teacher’s attitude, so they are bestowing higher worth on the act itself than on the teacher's motivation.

What’s Love Worth?

Love and friendship are essentially the same good with different degrees of intensity and a similar core: enjoying someone’s company and wishing that person good things. Love’s first value comes from the positive feelings it creates in you. But love also provides a place for other good things to flourish, such as your knowledge of the other person, achievement together and virtuous opportunities. You want your friends and lovers to be happy. You enjoy their pleasure and suffer through their pain. Conflicts accompany love but do not lessen its goodness.

“Pleasure is a limited value: Though good, it’s not as good as its opposite, pain, is evil. Even among feelings, it sits in second place.”

The problems associated with love are rarely sufficient to make you avoid the risks. For example, you might wish a friend happiness while recognizing that he is about to make a bad choice. Rejection and jealousy complicate love, and explaining love is never easy. Partly, you love a person for traits that others could appreciate, like a smile or sense of humor. But you also love someone for “historical qualities,” the history you’ve created together that no one else can share. Love changes as your history grows, as you learn new things about each other or as you change together. Love also can wither as one person’s moral values or sense of fun might change. If your contented past becomes today’s fights and arguments, your history has changed and so might your love.

Building a Good Life

Two other factors also contribute to a good life. The first is proper balance – for example, determining the ideal quantities of pleasure and knowledge. Too much focus on any single area can detract from others, just as too little focus undermines useful knowledge. Seek a comfortable place as either more of a specialist or more of a well-rounded person. Being purely one or the other won’t lead you to your best life. Let your values and abilities guide you to an ideal division of goods. Most people should focus – but not too hard – on a few goods or a single good.

“Being good at a game is good.”

The second factor is your life’s general form. For example, is an even keel better than a life of highs and lows? Is a longer life better than a shorter one? Is excelling in a single good better than a well-rounded balance of goods? This issue involves your life through time. Do you want it to improve in quality as you age? Does living longer add or subtract to the quality of life? Philosophy cannot answer these questions with authority. Only living can.

The Ultimate Question

And what about death? An accidental death at a young age deprives you of years of good things, but if you’re sick and in pain and you die today, then you’re spared more suffering. Thus death prevents evil rather than depriving you of good things. Enjoying the good things in life and living well, then, is a reasonable response to inevitable death.

About the Author

Thomas Hurka teaches ethics and philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he holds a chair in Philosophical Studies. His other books include Perfectionism; Virtue, Vice, and Value; and Principles: Short Essays on Ethics.

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The Best Things in Life

Book The Best Things in Life

A Guide to What Really Matters

Oxford UP,
 


19 December 2025

The Oil Kings

Recommendation

If you think the US’s alternative energy policy is forging ahead, think again. It has been stalled for decades, largely because of US reliance on oil from Iran and Saudi Arabia. Andrew Scott Cooper, a historian and NGO activist, offers a dense presentation about the geopolitics of oil from 1969 to 1977. He focuses on the politicians and diplomats of the time, covering their relationships and limitations. Cooper discusses the flawed decision making that shaped American foreign policy and the US’s dependence on foreign oil. He tells a powerful story, much of it revealed for the first time, since he culled research from newly declassified documents. While the book occasionally gets bogged down in minutiae that distract from the more interesting main narrative, BooksInShort recommends it to anyone intrigued by the convoluted mechanics of oil geopolitics.

Take-Aways

  • In 1969, Persian Gulf nations delivered one-third of the developed world’s oil.
  • To secure oil supplies through the volatile Gulf region, President Richard Nixon’s administration promoted the “Nixon Doctrine.”
  • The Nixon Doctrine’s aim was to supply pro-US regimes, especially Iran, with arms.
  • The Shah of Iran, a staunch anticommunist, spent much of his country’s oil wealth on military purchases.
  • Nixon secretly allowed Iran to raise oil prices so the Shah could buy US weapons.
  • This decision started a huge wealth transfer from the West to Middle Eastern oil nations.
  • In 1972, Nixon covertly promised to supply Iran with nuclear technology.
  • The US cultivated its relations with Saudi Arabia to counterbalance Iran’s growing power and help break the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
  • When Saudi Arabia broke OPEC’s ranks by opposing price increases, Iran’s economy nose-dived.
  • By 1977, rebellion exploded in Iran, leading to the Shah’s overthrow and the nation’s subsequent turmoil. In 1980, Iran’s Emperor died in Egypt, a stateless exile.

Summary

A Pivotal Time

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a pivotal time in strategic world relationships, particularly in the Middle East. At the time, Persian Gulf oil fields produced one-third of the developed world’s oil. Almost all of Japan’s petroleum imports came through the Gulf, as did 55% of the oil “NATO Europe” used. These trade connections made the region’s security crucial, particularly Iran’s, since much of the world’s oil moved by ship through its Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, potentially vulnerable marine passageway. Yet Great Britain recalled its military from the Persian Gulf, and the US, preoccupied with the Vietnam War, had only “a seaplane tender and two destroyers” in the region. Seeing the need to safeguard the flow of oil through the volatile Gulf region, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, fostered the idea that the US should develop and arm regional surrogate nations to protect American national interests. This policy became known as the “Nixon Doctrine.”

“Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was a hard man to say no to in the spring of 1969.”

In the Persian Gulf, the US turned to its old ally, the Shah of Iran. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a staunch anticommunist, became his country’s leader after the CIA and British intelligence sponsored a coup in 1953 that overthrew his predecessor, the popular, pro-Soviet prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The taint of foreign intervention in Iran’s domestic affairs stained the Shah’s rule as absolute monarch. Yet the Shah remained independent from US influence in some areas, specifically oil production, much to the chagrin of the CIA and successive US presidential administrations.

Clandestine Dealings with the Shah

By the late 1960s, US officials began worrying that the Shah’s military expenditures – which always ranged from one-quarter to one-third of Iran’s spending during the Shah’s reign – were cutting into the funding of important civilian programs that could support Iran’s domestic progress. As resentment against the Shah built inside Iran, US officials thought a revolution was imminent, but as long as oil prices and production grew, Iran enjoyed political stability.

“Oil was the Shah’s greatest source of strength and also his Achilles’ heel.”

While the Shah pursued independent policies in domestic areas, he also worked closely with the CIA, allowing it to set up spy facilities in Iran, mainly directed against the Soviet Union. To repay the Shah, maintain him as an ally in the region and help him buy more US arms, President Nixon made an extraordinary offer: In a secret meeting on May 14, 1970, he gave the Shah’s emissary permission to raise oil prices. Nixon knowingly allowed this transfer of wealth from the West to the Middle Eastern oil kingdoms. But Iran’s spending soon exceeded its oil revenues. As Washington debated Iran’s future, Nixon decided to cultivate Saudi Arabia as a US ally, alongside Iran, in his “Twin Pillars” policy.

Saudi Arabia’s Ascent

Unlike the Shah, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, King Faisal, believed that oil prices should increase gradually, so as not to disrupt national economies. US imports from Saudi Arabia grew from $13.5 million in 1970 to more than $79 million by early 1972, but Nixon failed to develop a cohesive energy policy because his administration was focused on the ’72 re-election campaign. Instead, 64 federal agencies worked independently of one another on fuel issues, with no direction from Nixon’s cabinet.

“A greater share of oil revenues allowed pro-US oil potentates to develop their economies while buying the weapons they needed to defend themselves and the free world’s oil supplies.”

Nixon appointed former Texas governor John Connally, an important fund-raiser for the president’s re-election bid, to negotiate with the Saudis about their push to control more of Aramco, the joint US-Saudi oil producer in Saudi Arabia. King Faisal won a huge concession, paid for by Western oil consumers: The Saudis gained a 25% participation deal and an eventual 51% controlling interest in Aramco. Years later, transcripts revealed that Kissinger had encouraged the Saudis to negotiate hard against the US oil companies; Kissinger, uncomfortable with economic issues, considered the oil companies greedy and wanted the Saudis as vital allies.

“The Nixon-Pahlavi relationship was based on a shared interest in grand strategy and geopolitics and a mutual fascination with power and its many uses.”

Envying the Saudis’ victory, the Shah issued an ultimatum to his Western partners in the National Iranian Oil Company to relinquish control of the corporation to Iran. The consortium agreed, setting the tone for a new shift in oil power. In September 1973, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya expropriated 51% of foreign oil firms’ assets in his nation, raised oil prices 30% and stopped accepting US dollars as payment for oil exports. Saudi Arabia and Egypt then reduced their oil production. In October 1973, eight Arab armies invaded Israel in the fourth Arab-Israeli war. When the US rearmed Israel, the Arab oil-producing nations objected. They increased oil prices and imposed a complete oil embargo against the US – the first time nations used oil as an economic weapon.

“When it came to Iran, Washington’s dividing lines between power, money and access were often blurred.”

To break the embargo, Kissinger and Nixon approached the Saudis about forging a bilateral relationship. This meant the US would provide economic assistance and buttress King Faisal’s regime against internal and external political and military threats. In exchange, the Saudis would raise oil production and refuse to grant their OPEC partners a requested price increase. US and Saudi officials finalized their new petro-military-political alliance at a party for 1,400 guests at Saudi Arabia’s US Embassy in June 1974.

Post-Nixon Pandemonium in Iran

When Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency on August 8, 1974, following the Watergate scandal, the Shah lost an important ally. Moreover, despite the support the Shah received from Nixon, he had feared the president as the only American who could thwart his ambitions. But the Shah dismissed Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, as weak – an impression Kissinger planted. Recognizing his own strong position, the Shah promoted Iran as the center of a new regional political bloc composed of Ethiopia, Israel, Australia, India, Indonesia, South Africa and New Zealand. He set out to collect on Nixon’s 1972 promise to sell Iran nuclear power plants and fuel.

“In foreign affairs as in domestic politics, the Shah’s brinksmanship was driven by a self-perpetuating money chase.”

Iran’s flamboyant military purchases, complicated by its weakening economy, alarmed experts in the Department of Defense and the CIA, who feared the Shah would become more nationalistic and more closely aligned with anti-US Arab nations. But these agencies, as well as Kissinger, thought the Shah was vulnerable to a leftist coup. They dismissed the possibility that the Ayatollah Khomeini, a right-wing Shiite cleric then exiled in Iraq, posed any threat to Iran.

“‘This Qaddafi is a real nut,’ the Shah warned Kissinger. ‘He is making trouble.’”

In autumn 1974, Kissinger visited Iran and accepted the Shah’s offer of surplus Iranian oil at a discounted price. This would skirt OPEC pricing, give dollars to Iran and help build the new US strategic oil reserve. But the deal had serious legal and political issues, so Kissinger had to sell it to Ford. If the arrangement failed, Iran threatened to raise oil prices to aid its domestic economy.

“Kissinger let the Shah increase oil prices because he believed oil revenues would cushion the pro-American monarchies of the Persian Gulf from internal revolt and external invasion.”

To deal with the Shah during this sensitive period, Kissinger hired former Nixon treasury secretary George Shultz, who by the fall of 1974 had become president of Bechtel, an international engineering firm. This meant that Shultz was acting in both a diplomatic and a corporate sales capacity in Iran. The Ford administration had calculated that if the Shah purchased nuclear facilities from US firms, it would generate $6.4 billion in revenues for the US. Kissinger favored this purchase as a way to bring Iranian petrodollars back into the American economy. After 18 months of bilateral negotiations, the parties reached an impasse. But when Kissinger met the Shah in 1975, he reached a possible agreement, bringing home a plan for Iran to buy $12.5 billion in US nuclear reactors, while selling oil to the US below the OPEC price. The deal met continuing opposition.

The Politics of Oil

In March 1975, the assassination of King Faisal shook the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s massacre of Kurds in Iraq delivered another shock. Iran and the CIA had earlier supported the Kurds, but the Shah abandoned them as part of a deal with Hussein. The Shah’s duplicity greatly concerned Israel, which relied on Iran for its oil.

“Henry Kissinger had personalized relations with the Shah, hoarded information, and sidelined the Shah’s critics in the White House.”

While visiting President Ford in May 1975, the Shah said he was developing a plan with Egypt to invade Saudi Arabia. He also said Iran would boost oil prices by 30% to 35%, a move that could destabilize world economies. At the time, the US’s military and commercial presence in Iran was booming: Some 40,000 Americans lived and worked there, often creating culture clashes as their casual dress and inappropriate behavior raised the ire of the conservative Islamic population. When the US Embassy in Tehran reported the deteriorating security situation inside Iran, including an increase in the killings of Americans by leftist groups, Kissinger dismissed it.

“There is no indication that Kissinger briefed his successors on the byzantine deals he had negotiated.”

By the summer of 1975, a global economic contraction led to a drop in oil production, which hit Iran hard: Decreased oil revenues spawned a financial crisis and social unrest. In June, students in Qum rioted, advocating the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Since the Shah had outlawed opposition parties, he crushed the uprising. But in Washington, more officials questioned the Shah’s judgment in using oil as leverage in political blackmail. This view eroded Kissinger’s influence and pitted him against the growing number of anti-Shah officials in the White House.

“Television viewers in Iran and elsewhere watched the astonishing spectacle of their king being tear-gassed on the American president’s front lawn.”

In 1976, rising oil prices strained Western economies. European communist parties were attaining power in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Syria invaded Lebanon to contain a civil war between Lebanese Christians and Muslims. When gunmen assassinated the US ambassador to the Lebanon, Ford ordered 1,400 Americans to leave the nation; the Saudis provided security for the evacuees. Grateful for the support and for the Saudis’ promise to hold the line on oil price increases, Ford agreed to sell them more weapons: $6 billion in military hardware over a two-year period. Only Iran had purchased more.

The Collapse of the Shah

In November 1976, Jimmy Carter won the presidential election. As Ford’s term drew to an end, it grew increasingly clear that the Iran policies he, Kissinger and Nixon promulgated had failed to produce a pro-US ally. Kissinger, given his own questionable actions, decided not to turn over key documents detailing his agreements and discussions with the Shah to the incoming Carter administration. Today, the location of these papers – as well as their content – remains a mystery.

“Perhaps it was appropriate, given everything that had happened the past nine years, that the fuse of revolution had been lit on the White House lawn.”

With many world economies staggering under the load of increasing oil prices, all eyes turned to the OPEC meeting in December 1976. When every member except Saudi Arabia voted to increase prices in two stages, the Saudis balked, announcing they would raise prices by only 5%, while also increasing their oil output. This was bad news for Iran, which desperately needed more oil revenue. It also altered the US’s strategic Mideast relationships, as the Saudis asserted themselves as the new oil power brokers.

“Pride comes before a fall, although in [Kissinger’s] case it’s more conceit than pride.” (The Shah)

By January 1977, Iran was broke. The Shah accused the Saudis of betraying OPEC. One Iranian court minister noted that his country had “squandered every cent we had only to find ourselves checkmated by a single move from Saudi Arabia.” Since Kissinger had failed to brief the Carter team on his convoluted arms-oil-CIA deals with the Shah, the new administration lacked critical information about the history governing the delicate Iran-US relationship. And Carter’s fresh diplomatic team at Tehran’s US Embassy had never served in an Islamic nation.

“The industrialized world will have to realize that the era of their terrific progress and even more terrific income and wealth based on cheap oil is finished.” (The Shah)

By the summer of 1977, Iran was suffering from political paralysis, a depressed economy, rolling electrical blackouts and water shortages. Unemployment surged as workers flocked to Tehran from the countryside looking for work. South Tehran became a slum, and wealthy Iranians sensed it was time to leave. To save the regime, the Shah fired key ministers who had been entrusted with building low-cost housing and making other civic improvements. The changes were too little and too late. During the Shah’s 12th and final visit to Washington, D.C., in November 1977, Iranian student demonstrators rioted simultaneously outside the White House and in downtown Tehran. The tide had turned and would wash the Shah away. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran’s Emperor and King of Kings, died three years later, a stateless exile in Egypt.

About the Author

Andrew Scott Cooper is a PhD candidate in American history. He has worked with the United Nations and Human Rights Watch.

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The Oil Kings

Book The Oil Kings

How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East

Simon & Schuster,
 


19 December 2025

Blowout in the Gulf

Recommendation

Authors William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling are college teachers, and if you have a chance to take their classes, enroll right away. Professors of environmental studies and sociology, respectively, they are very informative, and they base their conclusions on well-reported facts. Their book links US energy policy to oil politics, corporate performance, risk management, and the technological and geological problems that led to the US’s largest peacetime offshore oil spill. The professors cover the oil industry’s history and the energy debate in a single, tightly packed volume, including significant accidents, their causes and the paltry penalties companies – especially British Petroleum – paid. The book contends that oil companies wield too much power over prices, policy and the environment. BooksInShort considers this vivid story about these tremendously powerful, hugely profitable companies to be essential reading.

Take-Aways

  • In April 2010, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 men and injuring 17.
  • The blast released 200 million gallons of oil – history’s largest peacetime offshore spill.
  • Human negligence, poor safety and misplaced cost cutting led to the disaster.
  • The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) called BP a “Renegade Refiner.”
  • The oil industry’s political dominance and environmental wastefulness go back to 1882, when the Standard Oil Trust became the US’s first national monopoly.
  • International oil firms created the world’s first oil cartel in 1927 followed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1960.
  • By 2000, the US held only 2% of world oil reserves, but it remained the biggest oil user.
  • The oil and gas industry spent $340 million on lobbyists from 2008 to 2010. They fought repeal of six oil and gas tax programs that could save the US $30 billion in a decade.
  • To avoid future disasters, policy makers should exclude “bad actor” companies.
  • They should name independent regulators and let OSHA inspect drilling platforms.

Summary

Destroying Oil

Contemporary oil drilling began in the United States in 1859 and the nation provided more than half of the world’s oil supply until 1953 when legislation first permitted ocean drilling.. Over time, finding and retrieving oil became increasingly challenging. Offshore platforms must drill for oil very precisely, sometimes going miles below the ocean’s surface before penetrating the seabed itself. Oil companies go to extraordinary lengths to meet the insatiable demand for oil. But by the 21st century, the US – which holds only 2% of proven oil reserves – was consuming oil faster than any other nation, though it has only 5% of the globe’s population. Oil companies perpetuated the myth that they could find more crude oil and kept exploring increasingly remote, inhospitable places, including building the Alaska oil pipeline and expanding offshore exploration into deeper waters. Across the globe, engineers are pushing the boundaries of safety and technology to seek more oil.

“The logical place to start...is by asking why the crew of the Deepwater Horizon would have been working in such a dangerous spot in the first place.”

Politicians in the US continue to call mistakenly for “energy independence,” an impossible goal. Even though the US must rely on oil reserves from other nations, every president since Richard Nixon in 1974 has repeated the drumbeat for more domestic drilling. But as these leaders knew when they spoke, the US has no more readily accessible domestic crude, which is why it spends $1 billion a day on imported oil. The quest for oil also explains why British Petroleum (BP) built the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. To get to oil, its crew had to maneuver piping through a mile of water and then 2.5 miles into the seabed. The huge platform had a deck as big as two football fields, and it housed 130 people.

“BP and its partners made a series of fateful decisions, each of which increased risk, and almost all of which appear to have been designed to save time and money.”

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 men and injuring 17. Onlookers 35 miles away could see the flames. After the fire raged for 36 hours, the platform collapsed and sank. As oil spread in the Gulf and thousands of fish, birds and sea animals died, President Barack Obama and other leaders called it America’s “worst environmental disaster.” However, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward said the environmental damage was “very, very modest.” By June, the US Geological Survey estimated that 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil (42 gallons per barrel) were leaking daily from the uncapped well; BP estimated the spill at just 2% of that tally. Experts later said the well leaked 200 million gallons of crude – history’s largest offshore peacetime oil spill.

“Energy policy experts in the United States have spent decades in continuing to do the same thing, and we, the people, have done next to nothing to reverse the pattern.”

Investigators traced the final cause of the explosion to human error involving BP, its contractors and partners, and US regulators. The mechanical linchpin was the failure of the mechanism that was in place to make such a disaster impossible: the supposedly “fail-safe” blowout preventer, a valve designed to shut off oil flows automatically in an emergency. More surprisingly, the drilling platform had passed a safety inspection a few days before the accident.

“What we have been doing...has been to find the fossil deposits left behind during the eras of the dinosaurs and to burn them up as fast as we could.”

While the Deepwater Horizon collapse teaches many lessons, the hardest may be that the US lacks the technology to repair the damage that technology creates. Injured parties across the Gulf Coast filed thousands of lawsuits against BP and its contractors, but the litigation will unfold for years. Some victims of 1989’s Exxon Valdez spill waited 20 years for their settlement checks. In fact, 20% of those granted compensation died before they received funds. The Exxon Valdez disaster resulted from “the atrophy of vigilance,” a slackness that sets in over time as people become less diligent and safety conscious. In 2005, a Texas BP oil refinery exploded, killing 15 and injuring 170. In 2006, a “corroded” BP oil pipeline ruptured in Alaska, spilling 200,000 gallons of oil. In another incident, BP burned 500,000 pounds of poisonous chemicals, releasing 17,000 pounds of carcinogenic benzene, but BP didn’t inform nearby residents until a week later. BP had a long record of safety shortcuts, from bypassed valves to numerous regulatory violations.

“Despite the habit of referring to oil ‘production’, the reality is that the 20th century was an unprecedented exercise in oil ‘destruction’.”

Between mid-2007 and early 2010, BP accounted for about half of all US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) safety violations in the entire refining industry. In fact, OSHA has called BP a “Renegade Refiner.” The firm’s actions have included “corner-cutting patterns” in relation to many safety procedures, including sloppy maintenance and negligent accident-prevention processes, from failing to maintain and deploy cut-off valves, like the blow-out preventer, to displacing and sealing wells with the wrong materials. Other drilling contractors, including Halliburton and Transocean – which leased the Deepwater Horizon to BP – also had safety violations. The industry’s enforcement “system is flawed.” Regulators go in and out of an industry-job revolving door, and oversight agencies use biased oil company accounts about their own safety checks (i.e., the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) relied on BP’s reports).

“The world now uses up about a 1,000 barrels of its finite oil reserves every second.”

When Tony Hayward became BP’s CEO, he dropped 7,500 jobs and cut $4 billion in expenses, which may have endangered his employees and increased their accident risk. Yet, after the Gulf calamity, when BP transferred him internally (offering him a position in Russia), Hayward received $1.5 million in salary, plus a pension worth more than $17 million.

The First Cartel

Prospectors drilled the first contemporary-type oil well in Asia in 1848, near Baku [in modern-day Azerbaijan], and the US oil boom began in 1857 with the drilling of “several crude oil seeps” in Pennsylvania. Industrialist John D. Rockefeller launched his oil kingdom with a refinery in Cleveland, Ohio, just after the US Civil War. Having immediately gained 4% of US refining capacity, he gobbled up 22 competitors to control 50% of world capacity within a few years.

“The United States gets a lower share of the income from our nation’s offshore oil than almost any other jurisdiction in the world.”

By 1880, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and its affiliates controlled 90% of US oil refining capacity. In 1882, Rockefeller set up the Standard Oil Trust, the first US national monopoly. In 1888, he created an international firm, Anglo-American Petroleum. After the US’s first gusher sent oil 100 feet into the air in Beaumont, Texas, in 1901, oil prices boomed and crashed in the early 1900s. Since then, the oil industry has sought to manipulate refining, pricing and transport.

“Even a frenzied pace of drilling in the US would [not affect] petroleum prices, for a very simple reason: The US now produces less than 7% of the world’s oil, and most US deposits have already been exploited.”

Local opposition thwarted an effort to drill off California’s coast in 1898. That was not the case in Louisana, where local authorities allowed the oil industry to install large wells close to Caddo Lake in 1905 and granted leases for drilling under the lake starting in 1910. This operation piped underwater oil with such intense gas pressure that engineers developed an early form of the blowout preventer that played a crucial role in the Deepwater Horizon debacle. Drillers soon discovered oil in Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo, where they introduced the moveable, steam-powered drilling barge. Local wood-eating worms forced them to replace wood platforms and pilings with concrete pilings and steel decking, which the industry used later in the North Sea and the Atlantic.

Oil in the Middle East

Commercial oil explorations in the Middle East began in 1901, when British entrepreneur William Knox D’Arcy signed a 60-year exclusive agreement with the Shah of Persia to explore in present-day Iran. He struck oil in 1908 and two years later founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the first seed of BP. Explorers discovered oil in Iraq in 1927, in Bahrain in 1931, and soon thereafter in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. By the mid-1920s, Anglo (now Anglo-Dutch Shell Oil Company) was the world’s largest oil producer, outpacing Rockefeller’s empire. By the end of that decade, oil prices fell due to overproduction and intense competition. To stabilize prices, executives from the biggest oil companies met at a castle in Scotland in 1927 and created the first international oil cartel. They set production quotas, allocated markets to the nearest oil companies and based prices on the cost of Texas oil. The Federal Trade Commission discovered this cartel in 1952, but it stayed in effect until the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and 1974.

“It’s high time we expected our political leaders to be more realistic.”

During World War II, the US produced eight million of the nine million barrels of oil the Allies used. Postwar, non-US suppliers increased production. By the mid-1950s, the US was no longer the world’s leading oil producer, but in 1956 it remained the largest consumer, largely due to higher car sales and the development of suburbia. General Motors (GM) lobbied various cities to remove their trolley, streetcar, and train systems, and replace them with GM buses. In 1955, a US commission headed by GM board member Lucius Clay recommended constructing a national highway system, theoretically to evacuate cities in the event of a Soviet missile attack. In 1956, Congress authorized the system, with the federal government paying 90% of the building costs.

Running on Empty

In 1960, in an effort to control prices as more oil supplies became available, representatives from oil companies in Iraq, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar formed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). When Colonel Moammar Gadhafi came to power in Libya in 1969 and began to nationalize the country’s foreign oil companies, he forced them to renegotiate more favorable prices for Libyan oil. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, OPEC penalized the US and the Netherlands for supporting Israel by instituting an oil embargo from October 1973 to March 1974, doubling the cost of US gasoline in a year. By this time, most US land-based oil reserves had already been discovered and tapped. This left Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and California’s coastal waters as the last promising sites for US oil exploration.

“Energy use in the United States has gone well past the point where more enthusiastic oil drilling can provide a solution.”

The process of awarding oil exploration leases changed under President Ronald Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt, one of the most “intensely controversial and blatantly anti-environmental political appointees” in US history. Watt consolidated administration of offshore drilling leases at the MMS. Instead of maintaining policies that held leaseholders to three-square-mile plots, he awarded leases for huge “area-wide” parcels at “bargain basement prices,” earning dramatically less revenue for the nation than under old policies. Under Watt, bid rates fell and ownership concentrated; in time, only 20 companies owned more than half of all federal offshore leases. These policies depleted US oil reserves and diverted capital from alternative-energy development.

“Conservation and improved efficiencies have actually provided more ‘new’ energy than the entire domestic oil industry.”

President George H.W. Bush inherited the oil lease question. He ordered a study and imposed an offshore drilling moratorium that lasted 18 years before President George W. Bush repealed it. In 1994, a Republican Congress passed the Outer Continental Shelf Deep Water Royalty Relief Act, encouraging deep-water drilling and exempting oil companies from paying federal royalties for five years. Given this favorable treatment, 2,840 fossil fuel companies signed leases from 1996 to 1998. While this was good for oil companies, the Government Accountability Office found that US offshore drilling lease receipts were among the world’s lowest.

Getting Favorable Treatment

Since the government issues drilling leases, the oil technically belongs to the American people. In fact, US taxpayers receive only 40% of the revenue, while citizens in Norway, Vietnam and Tunisia receive about 75% of the revenues from their nations’ deep-water leases. A 2005 Congressional Budget Office study found that the effective US tax rate for oil and natural gas deals was 9.2%, “well below” other industries’ average effective marginal tax rate of 26.3%. To maintain its favorable status and preserve its tax benefits until the 2020s, the oil and gas industry spent $340 million on lobbyists between 2008 and 2010. In the first year of the Obama administration, the Treasury Department’s chief economist estimated retracting just six preferential oil and gas industry tax programs would save $30 billion over 10 years.

Causes of the Disaster

The causes of the Deepwater Horizon platform disaster include management lapses and the mistakes of rig personnel, who skipped safety policies to get work done faster. These human errors outweighed the technological failure of the blowout preventer. To prevent further catastrophes, the oil industry and its regulators could follow three approaches: .1. “Exclusion” – This policy would exclude “bad actors,” that is, firms with poor safety records, such as BP, from controlling drilling operations. .2. “Regulation” – Regulatory authorities would include independent citizen oversight groups, including parties with an interest in preventing oil spills, such as those in fishing and tourism businesses, as well as indigenous groups and local communities. .3. “Refocusing” – OSHA should have the authority to inspect offshore drilling platforms, currently classified as “vessels” under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard, which works with MMS to inspect them. OSHA is better equipped to inspect and enforce the law since it has ongoing refinery regulatory policies it could apply to drilling platforms.

About the Authors

William R. Freudenburg is an environmental studies professor at the University of California. Robert Gramling is a sociology professor at the University of Louisiana.

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Blowout in the Gulf

Book Blowout in the Gulf

The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America

MIT Press,
 



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