Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

immobilize the U.S. Pacific fleet so it could not cut off Japanese forces when they moved south on the East Indies. Japanese planes launched the first bomb at 7:55 a.m. One eyewitness, U.S. Navy Commander Hubert Gano, would later recall, “Ships were sunk and burning everywhere. [Battleships] had tried to escape but ran aground at the entrance to the harbor. Entire squadrons of our airplanes were destroyed on the ground. I saw aircraft engines in puddles of molten aluminum.” A dozen battleships were sunk and hundreds of U.S. planes went down. Within hours, 2,335 American soldiers and 68 civilians had been killed.

      Rather than disable the United States, the attack only quickened its resolve to lead the Allies to victory—and to starve the Axis nations of essential fuel. As the Allies systematically destroyed German and Japanese tankers and trains delivering oil, and sabotaged their fuel supply routes, the Axis powers were eventually forced to design programs and battle tactics around gas shortages. Hitler’s blitzkrieg (lightning war) attack style was a case in point: the idea was to strike quickly and forcefully before fuel supply problems could arise. The Japanese, meanwhile, were driven to pursue a desperate “pine root campaign” that brandished the slogan “Two hundred pine roots will keep a plane in the air for an hour.” Civilians were frantically exhorted to dig up pine roots in the hope that the vegetation could be fermented to produce an alternative to oil. Though pine root fuel production reached 70,000 barrels per month, the entire operation was ultimately a bust—the refining process was riddled with problems, and Japanese planes could barely get off the ground with the botched alternative fuel.

      “Ravenous for oil, Japan was facing defeat,” Painter told me. “It was a nation running on empty.” In part because of petroleum shortages, Japan resorted to its tragic strategy of kamikaze attacks, whereby suicide pilots crashed their planes into the decks of Allied ships. Such an attack was portrayed as an act of glory—a sacrifice for the good of the Japanese nation—but it also served a horribly practical purpose for a country lacking oil: if the pilots were going only one way, they would need just half the fuel.

      German general Erwin Rommel summed up the desperate challenge of fueling war in a letter to his wife written as the tide of battle turned against his forces in North Africa: “Shortage of petrol!” the stoic general wrote. “It’s enough to make one weep.”

      In a sense, General Zilmer’s appeal for relief from fossil fuels is reminiscent of Rommel’s lament. While the challenges the two generals faced were technically different—Zilmer was hamstrung by a flawed fuel-delivery system and Rommel by a supply shortage—both felt the tactical vulnerability that comes with relying on oil. Just as Germany and Japan relied on their foes Russia and America for fuel before World War II, now America relies on volatile nations—most notably in the Middle East—to fuel our daily demands and to sustain our military presence in this oil-rich region. It is a dependence that had its origins in those final years of World War II.

      THE KINGDOM

      As I tried to gain a clearer understanding of the relationship between oil and war—specifically, of the military tactics David Painter had described—one book I turned to was Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, among the first books on military strategy and still, twenty-five hundred years after it was written, one of the most influential. Judging by the due dates stamped in the margins of the various weathered versions housed at my neighborhood library, it remains a popular book even in the unlikely locale of Nashville, Tennessee, circa 2008. One sentence struck me as particularly resonant, probably because I didn’t expect to find anything like it in a book that’s ostensibly a how-to of combat: “In peace prepare for war; in war prepare for peace.”

      That phrase could be said to sum up the relationship dynamics between the United States and Saudi Arabia, I realized as I thought through my conversation with Painter. For decades America has been carefully nurturing its friendship with the Saudis while simultaneously girding for conflict with Saudi-funded groups.

      The origins of the stormy U.S.-Saudi friendship can be traced back to February 14, 1945. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had spent years shepherding the United States through the bloodiest conflict in world history. In his preparations for peace toward the end of World War II, Roosevelt made the desert kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula a top priority.

      Immediately after the Yalta Conference of February 4–11, 1945, at which the Allies established guidelines for their now-certain victory in Europe, Roosevelt set sail aboard USS Quincy for a destination on the Suez Canal where he’d arranged to meet Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, king of Saudi Arabia. This was to be one of the most fascinating and pivotal meetings of the twentieth century.

      Roosevelt wanted to establish a collaborative relationship with the king. As early as 1943 he had proclaimed in a letter to his secretary of state that the “defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.”

      That same year, the American geologist Everette Lee DeGolyer had visited Saudi Arabia to assess the region’s oil reserves: He concluded that “the center of gravity of the world’s oil production is moving from the Gulf of Mexico–Caribbean area, to the Middle East…and will continue to shift until it’s firmly established in that area.” He estimated Middle Eastern reserves to be as much as 300 billion barrels of oil (they have since proven to be more than twice that). “Those numbers made clear,” said Painter, “that the Middle East would be a region of tremendous geopolitical importance.”

      Ibn Saud set off on the two-day journey to the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal from his home in Jiddah on February 12. Having never before left his country, the king did so at great risk: in his tribal culture, his throne could be easily usurped if he wasn’t there to defend it. But the opportunity this meeting represented was too good to pass up. It was the first time a leader of the West would meet with a leader of the nation known simply as “the kingdom.”

      As recently as a few years earlier, the high priority granted this meeting would have been unimaginable. For all but the last decade of its history, the Arabian Peninsula had been one of the world’s poorest regions. Its past had been marred by conflict: desert tribes warred with one another throughout the Middle Ages, and then faced the onslaught of the Ottoman Empire when it laid claim to the peninsula in 1514. From the eighteenth century on, a fierce tribal resistance tied to a conservative Islamic movement known as Wahhabiya grew in opposition to foreign rule.

      King Ibn Saud was a descendant of one of the first Wahhabis. He was born in the Arabian desert, but as a boy he was exiled with his family to Kuwait by a rival group known as the Rashidis. In 1901, then only in his twenties, Ibn Saud led a bold and ultimately successful assault on the Rashidis. A tall, stately man, known as a magnetic leader, Ibn Saud came to be revered for his successes in battle. By 1925, after nearly continuous fighting, he had laid claim to much of the peninsula, including the religious sites of Mecca and Medina. By 1932, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was born, with Ibn Saud as its leader.

      Ibn Saud had high hopes for his new nation, despite its barren soil and forbidding climate. Around the time Saudi Arabia was formed, a vast oil field had been discovered in neighboring Bahrain, which had a strikingly similar geological composition. Saud’s years of exile in Kuwait had given him a clear eye for geopolitics: at the time, Turkey, Britain, Russia, and Germany had various interests in and negotiations with Kuwait over trade routes, warm-water ports, and railroads. But Saud was wary of opening his country up to oil prospecting. American representatives of Socal (the Standard Oil Company of California, a spin-off of Rockefeller’s empire) met with the king’s representatives—who were “hardheaded, smart, patient, tenacious, wary…bargainers worthy of anyone’s steel,” as author Wallace Stegner later described them. A deal was reached in 1933, after extensive negotiations, granting Socal exclusive oil rights.

      But early wildcatting turned up nothing. After years of sinking exploratory well after exploratory well in vain, Socal finally hit pay dirt in 1938. Following the discovery, other U.S. companies—Texaco, Mobil, and Exxon—poured into the region to join Socal, and collectively became known as the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). The first oil tanker left Saudi shores in 1939, within months of the war’s outbreak. By 1945, the nation was producing 21 million barrels per year, and there was abundant proof that the