Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940

摘要

In this book Paul Sabin aims to 'explore the political dimensions of environmental change' (p. 8), and uses California as a case history of the role of politics and economics in shaping the supply and demand for petroleum. This well written and researched book, follows the complex shifting of alliances in the Californian oil economy in the first half of the twentieth century. Sabin explores in eight chapters the four key elements in the competitive struggle by oil producers to exploit the rich oil reserves that lay beneath federal public lands in the San Joaquin Valley and in the Los Angeles basin. These were property rights, federalism, regulatory rules and tax policies and investment. As he remarks, 'the book examines how the Californian oil market changed over time in response to the interplay of political, legal and economic developments. Sometimes corruption and greed drove the policy process. But in other instances, particularly during the Great Depression, differing conceptions of the public good, fairness and equity also underlay political struggles and institutional innovations' (p. 4).