12 April 2011
Noam Chomsky: Clark University, Worcester, MA, Q&A Partial Transcript
57:10 - 1:00:35
Questioner: In your opinion, if the United States was able to switch entirely to domestically produced renewable energy resources, and we no longer needed to rely on any oil from the Arab world, what sort of impact would this have on US-Arab relations?
Chomsky: Approximately zero in my opinion. There's a lot of mythology about this. The US doesn't get most of its oil from the Middle East. In fact if you look at US energy policy, so for example, the year 2000, the last Clinton year, they came out with a big study of energy and the conclusion was: the US of course has to control the Middle East -- that goes way back, that's a matter of world control -- but the US itself, it said, should rely on more secure Atlantic Basin supplies, meaning western hemisphere and west Africa. So, the rest of the world can rely on insecure supplies, but we've got to make sure we rely on secure ones.
In fact if you look back at the history, it really is surreal. Back in the 1950s for example, the US was the main producer and in fact the main exporter. The Eisenhower administration made a decision to essentially eliminate US domestic resources, to take US oil only from Texas, which was much more expensive than from Saudi Arabia, but this was for the benefit of Texas oil producers.
So there was a decision to exhaust US domestic resources -- of course they couldn't exhaust it -- but to deplete US domestic resources for the benefit of Texas oil producers and a couple of corrupt cabinet members, who pretty soon were big-shots in the Texas oil system. So, Americans paid a lot more for oil. That's what they were doing and that went on for I think 14 years, right through the Democratic administrations of the 60s.
What they were essentially doing was depleting US oil resources, leaving big holes in the ground, which we now call the strategic petroleum reserve, and we fill it up from imported oil from Saudi Arabia. These systems are run in order to make money for the right kind of people, not for reasons of security. And today, to get back to your question, if the US were running 100% on solar power, we'd have exactly the same policies towards the Middle East.
You go back to the global planning at the end of the Second World War, it was recognized pretty clearly, in fact said -- I'll quote one of the leading advisers, one of Roosevelt and Truman's leading advisers -- that "if we can control Middle East oil, we will have substantial control of the world." Because it's such a powerful instrument of control. And that remained true right through the 50s when the US wasn't using, practically not using the oil at all. And it would continue today.
These are instruments of world control.