The Politics of Oil Revisited

History can add much needed perspective to current debates over energy. Unfortunately, professional historians have neglected this vital issue, at least since the last wave of interest in energy history crested in the early 1980s. Amid the current concern about energy security and climate change, we are, however, witnessing the rebirth of interest in "energy/environmental history." Paul Sabin's Crude Politics is an excellent building block in this emerging literature. It is a model of systematic, data-rich analysis with much to say to both historians and policy makers.

Although the subtitle, The California Oil Market, 1900–1940, seems to describe a regional study, the book is much more. Because California is a major oil producing state and the time period covered witnessed the birth of attitudes and laws that shaped the oil industry from World War I until the oil crises of the 1970s, Sabin's work offers far-reaching insights into the political economy of oil in the twentieth century. The analytical framework constructed by Sabin from legal, political, and economic history should prove flexible enough to apply to events both earlier and later in history, as well as events in other parts of the world.

The book begins with a strong statement of the author's fundamental point: "the free market, supposedly independent of government interference, is a mythical concept" (p. xv). Sabin analyzes government actions that structured markets, creating the legal and regulatory framework within which competition occurred. Parts I and II of his book demonstrate how conflicts over property rights, at both the national and state levels, defined the basic terms of access of oil companies to public and private lands. Part III examines the regulation of pollution and overproduction to illustrate how political and legal processes shaped the government's response to the societal impacts of oil production. Part IV offers an interesting analysis of how taxes on gasoline and automobile registration encouraged highway building, contributing to the steady growth of demand for gasoline. Throughout these sections, the book returns to its central task, the discussion of how politics, broadly defined to include legal and regulatory forces, shaped the market for this important product in this important state.

One of the book's great strengths is its detailed analysis of political lobbying. The chapter on the ten-year political battle over the federal government's 1920 Mineral Leasing Act, which created the legal framework for access to oil on public lands, gives convincing descriptions of the strings being pulled as well as the motivations of those doing the pulling. Sabin's analysis of the writing of this important law shows the strengths that have made oil industry lobbyists so successful in the United States: a long-term perspective, access to good data, excellent lawyers, control of jobs, money. Again and again, oil industry interests turned to politics to try to capture competitive advantage. They understood the opportunities designed into the market because their lobbyists had been present at the creation of such opportunities; they understood the changing structure of the market because their lawyers had guided many of these changes through the legal process.

A later chapter on the controversy raised by oil pollution in the 1920s broadens Sabin's analysis of lobbying by showing how deep divisions within the oil industry shaped the choice of public policies on oil production along the southern California coast. Political tensions between the oil companies and groups outside the industry also grew during these often heated debates over the societal costs and benefits of coastal drilling. Divisions within the industry became even more pronounced in later debates over potential government actions to address problems caused by the chronic overproduction of oil in the 1930s. The competing self-interests of domestic and international producers on the divisive issue of imports could not be easily balanced through politics.

Good sources and an eye for complexity allow Sabin to give the reader a convincing view of the messy process of...