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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ than six years bird-dogging Standard Oil, gaining the trust of its executives, plumbing its accounting books, and for the first time publicly exposing its inner workings. Her articles were published in a series of cover features in McClure’s Magazine from 1902 to 1904 and were then compiled into a tell-all bestseller, The History of the Standard Oil Company.

      What is most noteworthy about Tarbell’s writings, beyond their shrewd analysis and detailed evidence of business corruption, are the more intimate passages in which the author paints a portrait of Rockefeller himself—a man she described as “the victim of a money-passion which blinds him to every other consideration in life”:

      To know every detail of the oil trade, to be able to reach at any moment its remotest point, to control even its weakest factor—this was John D. Rockefeller’s ideal of doing business. It seemed to be an intellectual necessity for him to be able to direct the course of any particular gallon of oil from the moment it gushed from the earth until it went into the lamp of a housewife. There must be nothing—nothing in his great machine he did not know to be working right.

      Tarbell saw Rockefeller—his greed, obsession with order, and chokehold on the competition—as the embodiment of all that was wrong with America, whereas independent wildcatters (like her father) embodied all that was right. “Life ran swift and ruddy and joyous in these men,” she wrote adoringly. “There was nothing too good for them, nothing they did not hope and dare.” It was a blatantly biased judgment, but nevertheless it voiced the opinion of many Americans: while Rockefeller represented caution and distrust, the wildcatter represented boldness and hope.

      Yet Rockefeller and the wildcatters also shared strong commonalities. Above all, they shared the insatiable lust for more—the feeling that the industry must stop at nothing to find ever more distant, deeper, greater pockets of reserves. William Mellon, the Gulf Oil executive who invested in Spindletop, explained the common thread this way: “For a great many…the oil business was more like an epic card game, in which the excitement was worth more than great stacks of chips. None of us was disposed to stop, take his money out of the wells, and go home. Each well, whether successful or unsuccessful, provided stimulus to drill another.”

      BUSTED

      The wildcatters and Standard Oil were on a collision course, and the battle between them would be fought in the halls of Congress and the Supreme Court. This struggle would transform the diverse, chaotic oil business into the modern contours we know today as Chevron, Exxon, and other industry leaders. Howls of protest from independent oil companies against Standard Oil grew louder as the behemoth grew in might. The independents argued that Standard was blocking competition and controlling prices with cutthroat tactics that forced them to sell out. President Theodore Roosevelt allied himself with these independent companies, publicly denouncing Rockefeller and his colleagues as morally corrupt: “The methods by which the Standard Oil people…have achieved great fortunes,” he argued, “can only be justified by the advocacy of a system of morality which can also justify every form of…violence, corruption and fraud, from murder to bribery and ballot-box stuffing in politics.”

      Roosevelt’s administration launched an investigation into Standard Oil’s business practices on the grounds that it was violating the Sherman Antitrust Act—a federal statute outlawing corporate monopolies or trusts. A trust is a megacompany that aggregates an array of smaller companies, controlling them under a single leadership. The law, still in force today, forbids such conglomerates on the grounds that they can stifle competition, innovation, and economic progress, hurting small businesses and disadvantaging consumers.

      This conflict between Capitol Hill and Standard Oil trust escalated into a public spectacle that was equal parts Watergate and The Magnificent Seven, and the public lined up for ringside seats. “[It] became a kind of morality play for any individual who felt threatened by the new industrial order; a kind of commercial equivalent to the Western, as the last glimpse of a heroic age,” wrote historian Anthony Sampson. “The trust-busters saw themselves as defending the very core of democracy.”

      Rockefeller was characteristically unfazed by the investigation, and cast the charges against his company as a challenge to the nation’s economic structure as a whole: “It must in good time be perceived by all that the centralized corporation is a necessity of progress. There has been substantial basis for popular suspicion…but it is poor logic to find against the whole idea of corporations because of these few failures.”

      The Justice Department sued Standard Oil for antitrust violations in 1909 and, after 444 witnesses gave testimony, the company was found guilty; Rockefeller and his executives were slapped with the maximum penalty. The gray eminence himself was playing golf when news of the decision reached him. He read the messengered letter, slid it into his pocket, and said stonily, “Well, gentlemen, shall we proceed?” When his colleagues pressed him, he disclosed the damage: a $29 million fine ($638 million in today’s dollars). Standard appealed the decision, and the case went to the Supreme Court. On a sunny day in May 1911, the Supreme Court upheld the earlier verdict and ordered the monopoly to splinter into more than a dozen independent companies.

      “This was an extraordinary task,” Yergin explained to me. “Here you had a company that spanned every state in the Union, operated in multiple countries, refined more than three-quarters of America’s oil, exported four-fifths of its kerosene, sold the railroads nearly all of their lubricating oil, and had a massive transportation business. How are you going to divide that up?” Standard’s executives decided to split up regionally. The largest of its subsidiaries was Standard Oil of New Jersey, which acquired Spindletop-born Humble Oil and later became Exxon. Standard Oil of California later became Chevron, subsequently merging with Buckskin Joe’s Texaco. Standard Oil of New York later became Mobil. Standard Oil of Ohio later became part of BP. Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco. These subsidiaries eventually comprised six of the legendary “Seven Sisters” that dominated global oil production throughout the twentieth century.

      As these spin-off companies competed to produce oil products better, faster, more cheaply, and more efficiently, they pushed each other to innovate. Mobil, for instance, developed a breakthrough method for refining oil into gasoline, which increased by 45 percent the amount of product it could get for every barrel of crude. By 1917, the profits of the spin-off companies had collectively shot up to double, then triple the profits of Standard Oil before the dissolution. Rockefeller, in turn, had nearly quadrupled his wealth and become the richest man in the world.

      FATEFUL PLUNGE

      An even more transformative event was looming on the near horizon. World War I would have a profound effect on the growth and influence of the young oil industry. The war presented America’s oil executives with an opportunity to gain protection, stability, and security by expanding their influence into politics.

      This was the first major war of the Industrial Age—a “war that was fought between men and machines,” as Yergin put it. Close to 13 million people lost their lives. Never before had petroleum-powered battleships and tanks been on the front lines of battlefields. They replaced the horses, trains, and slower ships that had moved troops in wars past. The defining decision for this mechanized war—a decision often credited with the Allies’ victory—was in fact made in 1911, the same year as the trust bust, before the war began. Winston Churchill, serving in the admiralty, made the difficult choice to transform his entire naval fleet from coal-powered engines to oil, a new and riskier fuel but one that promised the great strategic benefits of faster ships and more efficient use of manpower. This momentous decision—he termed it the “fateful plunge”—ultimately helped clinch the Allies’ victory, as their ships outmaneuvered the coal-fired fleet of the German Reich.

      Oil also won big victories on land. Yergin told me the story of the “Paris taxi armada”: Germans were amassing СКАЧАТЬ