Word: petroleum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Isaacs proposed towing giant, flat-topped icebergs from Antarctica (those from the Arctic would not be big enough) to the California coast; as they melted, fresh water could be siphoned out of the lakes that would form on top of them. The idea has impressed at least one country: petroleum-rich, water-poor Saudi Arabia. A French engineering firm hired by the Saudis is studying whether or not the plan is practical. Towed by six tugs, the French believe, an iceberg could make the 5,000-mile journey from the bottom of the world to the Red Sea port...
...blame for the world's soaring petroleum prices? The vast majority of consumers and experts alike would readily answer: OPEC. During the past four years, the eleven-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has more than quintupled oil prices, raising the present tag to about $13 a barrel...
...impressively documented book titled The Control of Oil, just published by Pantheon Books, Dr. John M. Blair argues that the real culprits are the major international oil companies, known familiarly as the Seven Sisters (Exxon, Mobil, Standard Oil Co. of California, Texaco, Gulf, Royal Dutch Shell, and British Petroleum). In Blair's view, the companies actually aided and abetted the OPEC increase, while pleading helplessness to their price-gouged public. "A form of bilateral symbiotic oligopoly" is the author's complicated if caustic term to describe the relationship between the oil "majors" and OPEC...
...free market, which he felt had been curtailed by the economic power of a handful of huge corporations. From 1957 until 1970, Blair was chief economist of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, and helped expose price fixing and questionable interlocking relationships in the drug and petroleum industries...
Blair proposes a tough remedy. At present, the big companies control each stage of the petroleum process: pumping, transport, refining, marketing. Blair would break them up into companies specializing in only one phase of the petroleum process. Ideally, each company would then haggle over price each time the oil changed hands and would thus unleash free-market forces that would push prices down...