Sublime

Yet in the twenty-first century only puny profits can be made that way. Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war. An organization such as the Islamic State may still flourish by looting cities and oil we

The synthetic revolution that began in the 1940s had rewritten the rules of geopolitics. Secure access to raw materials—one of the chief benefits of colonization—no longer mattered that much. One could procure the necessary goods through trade, and if, as in the thirties and forties, the markets closed down, well, that wasn’t the end of the world.

Henry Kissinger is known for the rather menacing aphorism, “who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control continents; who controls money can control the world.”

You may be thinking that the oil industry is too big to fall so quickly, but bear in mind that the reserves-to-production ratio of oil is around ten years. This means that if a company doesn’t invest billions in searching for oil and bringing it into production each year, it would run out of oil in around ten years. Not only do these costs continue

tracked—and then revised or adapted as circumstances dictate.

crude oil was so cheap that there were no incentives to use it efficiently: American houses in regions with a cold climate, increasingly heated by oil furnaces, were built with single-glazed windows and without adequate wall insulation; the average efficiency of American cars actually declined between 1933 and 1973; and…

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