Reflections About

Oil

ONCE upon a time coal was king.

Then came a time when cotton became king. Now we have crowned oil as monarch. Much has already been written about the hydro-carbon hidden away in the bowels of the earth, the search and struggle for possession, brought to the surface to become the life blood of mechanical energy. Here let us discuss another kind of oil, vital energy of man.

Edwin E. Slosson, in his book, “Crea tive Chemistry”, says: “All life, and all that life accomplishes, depend upon the supply of solar energy stored in the form of food The chief sources of this vital energy are the fats and the sugars. The former contain two and a quarter times the potential energy of the latter. Both, when completely purified, consist of nothing but carbon, hydrogen and oxy gen; elements that are to be found freely everywhere in air and water. So when the sunny southland exports fats and oils, starches and sugar, it is then send ing away nothing material but what comes back to it on the next wind. What it is sending to the regions of more slanting sunshine is merely some of the surplus of the radiant energy it has received so abundantly, compacted for convenience into a portable and edible form.”

Unlike cotton, there is no evidence of over-production of vegetable and animal fats; true, there may have been a glut when the huge shipments of whale oil arrived after the season’s slaughter.

When Leviathan was exterminated from the northern seas, the hunt went re morselessly on to his last refuge in the Antarctic, as Herman Melville says. The moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters.

There is an intimate relation between the over-production of cotton (or, rather, under-consumption), and the paltry price paid for the tropical oil seeds. The palmy days, when cotton was king, and coconuts the “consols of the East”, when the produce of land and sea was bought and sold on competitive world markets, are but a blessed memory.

Would it be straining the imagination to suggest that this monster combine, Unilever, was a contributing factor in precipitating the great depression, by depressing the price of copra, that restricted the purchasing capacity of the cotton-wearing peoples of the tropical belt of the world, and by unbalancing the financial stability of the cotton growing and spinning industry with its consequent unemployment?

Let us look at another interesting item, glycerine, the sweet element of fats and oils. It is a by-product in the manu facture of soap, and is extensively used in the preparation of nitro-glycerine and explosives.

Like soap and margarine, its price has soared out of all proportion to the primary product.

Here then are all the factors that supply the energy to prosecute the war against Hitlerism. The hydro-carbons supply mechanical energy, fats for human energy, and glycerine a vital ele ment in chemical energy.

If the war aims of the Allies are to crush this hideous thing called Hitlerism in Germany, only to prolong and better the condition of the greedy munition, ar mament, and oligarchy interests (called

democracy in England) then our young manhood on the battle front will again have died In vain and our wretched civilisation will slide to destruction, greased by the greed and rapacity of soulless combines that restrict the free exchange of food and commodities between the nations of the world. uwccii buc a, A London correspondent (“PIM”, 19/7/34) struck a warning note. Newspaper quotations of copra values were a farce The newspapers merely told the world what the combines had to say.

The corporations were getting stronger every day, in the copra industry, as in everything else; and, unless there is some world-wide movement to check the strength of these merciless capitalists, serious consequences must follow. The masses will rebel against the stranglehold of the combines, just as all through history they have rebelled against other

forms of tyranny.-

R.S.