By the gas pump's red glare

Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank

By Lisa Margonelli

Published by Broadway, 2008

Available at Asia Books, Bt495

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

 The Nation

I might have been willing to bet that Lisa Margonelli was a member of that large club of authors who live in a funk over the way their books are marketed. With best-seller status and great reviews, she can't really complain, but the cover blurb, the subtitle and many of the reviewers' snippets festooning "Oil on the Brain" do her a grave disservice by touting it as some sort of laugh-a-minute romp around the gas stations of the world, a fuel-conscious On the Road with Charles Kuralt (if not Kerouac).

 It is not. It's a serious, at times harrowing account of a greater global threat than climate change - and one of that problem's causes besides. Except for a few shots of whimsy, it's not funny at all.

Margonelli spent four years hopping from one oil-industry nexus to another, starting with a California gas station and ending up in Shanghai, looking for the roots of Americans' addiction, the reasons they're willing to pay more and more to feed it, and a possible cure.

Around the world her focus remains American, and why not? In those four years the price of gas at US pumps doubled, yet her compatriots curtailed their use by only 4 per cent. They want "safe"

SUVs and homes in the suburbs, so they need more gas. It's an "energy straitjacket",

even as they accept the evidence for global warming.

"Ironically," Margonelli writes, "we've ended up with a government more comfortable getting involved in the politics of oil-producing countries than tangling with the politics of encouraging Detroit to make more efficient vehicles at home."

But surely there's no irony in this when the US is at the same time pocketing billions in weapons sales, and she herself makes the point that most overseas oil producers who make deals with Washington are rewarded with arms shipments.

It's a gap in her logic, but the White House has a hard time staying white in this greasy saga, right from Franklin

Roosevelt's days. Margonelli refers to "a terror war that exists as much in imagined

catastrophes as real ones" and acknowledges how George W Bush jettisoned nature conservation at the oil industry's behest.

She is, nevertheless, cautiously optimistic to the end. "The next big gushers are in our brains, waiting to be found," writes this self-admitted moth-to-an-oil-lamp. Readers, however, may have a hard time seeing anything rosy in the fading glow of American neon.

In all other respects, "Oil on the Brain" cannot be faulted. It is highly readable, staying free of the clotting statistical quicksand thanks to the helping hand provided by the very real people Margonelli meets on her odyssey. At times she portrays them in vivid hues against the vast black backdrop of crude oil.

The most real of her characters appear when she hangs around a Texas oil well, where her host, CD Roper, is so gloomy about the industry's prospects that he says, "Roper's Law is that Murphy

was a drunk optimist."

"I open my car door to a stunning wall of 100-degree heat and throbbing noise - cachunk cachunk," Margonelli writes. "By the time I stand up this sound has segued into pounding vibrations beyond my hearing. I feel sick. When I look down my feet appear foggy ... Leaning over to get a better look, I discover a flat mass of brown insects hopping in unison three inches off the ground. This is all a little more Alice in Wonderland than I expected."

From there she heads to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Louisiana, recently in the news when Congress called Bush crazy for buying more oil overseas to keep it full, even as the price skyrockets. Then she goes to the NYMEX, where the slightest nuance drives brokers bonkers.

The situation in Venezuela seems promising, but Margonelli is ultimately ambiguous about Hugo Chavez and the wisdom of having a state oil company

whose profits are twice the national budget. It underlines her theme: There are no easy

answers in the petrol game.

Chad, one of the world's poorest nations, is the world's newest exporter thanks to a huge Exxon-World Bank investment that tossed it 28 per cent of the revenue from its own oil - compared to the

98 per cent that Nigeria commands. Chad is an appalling, throw-up-your-hands fiasco.

Unlike Venezuela, there is no hope there at all.

Is there any purely good news? Yes, in China, Margonelli believes. She takes a ride into the quite-likely future in an electric car called the Aspire, listening to urban planning for the year 2100 that's factual, not speculative. America, she admits, has a lot of catching up to do.