Blood of the Earth: The Global Battle for Vanishing Oil Resources - Softcover

'It's all about the oil. What is? Pretty much everything, in Hiro's encyclopaedic yet racily readable account of the economy, science and geopolitics of oil over the past century ... The text is spiced with flavoursome tableaux of first-hand reporting, from Azerbaijan to New York City. It will annoy some readers, and refresh others, that Hiro doesn't make any artificial attempt at "balance". He robustly defends Hugo Chavez, who has irritated the US no end in recent years, and gleefully writes subheadings such as "Rice's Astonishing Ignorance" to recount how Condi, a former director of Chevron, claimed in 2006 to be amazed at how the politics of energy was "warping diplomacy around the world". In the face of global warming, he argues finally, we have no choice but to embrace all alternative energy sources at once.' Steven Poole, Guardian, 3 May 2008.

China is now the world's second largest energy consumer, trailing only behind America. And India has moved up into the fourth place behind Russia, after overtaking Japan in 2001. Dramatically changing the geopolitics of oil in the new century, China and India are rapidly expanding their navies as they become increasingly dependent on lines of oil tankers from the Middle East, posing the beginning of an eventual challenge to American hegemony in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. But while competition for oil sharpens - the world is approaching the projected peak oil output in 2012 - the number of countries able to export the commodity is shrinking. Those countries will be largely Muslim, or like Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, hostile to Western interests. The potential shortage of oil sets the stage for the coming oil wars of the 21st century.