preview

The Role Of Opec In The Future Of Energy. Throughout History,

Good Essays

The Role of OPEC in the Future of Energy
Throughout history, the lifestyles within every culture was molded by the ability of its people to perform work or labor on the earth. Furthermore, cultural lifestyles were also shaped by the availability of resources and the types of resources available. The lifestyle that exists within Western civilization today was made possible by the extraction and usefulness of one particular resource: oil. Along with the rapid emergence of the fossil fuel industry in the United States, so came the drastic changes in lifestyle that its citizens became accustomed to. Petroleum products constitutes the vast majority of services and goods provided in Western culture; transportation and infrastructure, massive …show more content…

Not only were trees being felled to be used for heating and homes and tools, trees were cut down to make room for crops to feed the increasing populations of both people and livestock. The need for new, more efficient (energy dense) resources was increasing. With each new resource discovered, it provided the ability to do more work, feed more mouths, and shelter more people. But it wasn’t until the discovery of fossil fuels that the way of life changed to drastically and the world entered a new level of human growth and development.
With the coming of the industrial revolution, so came massive changes in culture, lifestyle and population. The utilization of fossil fuels built a society that runs entirely on petroleum products. People are being born into a society that saw little regard for the environment and whose main goal was to continue a trend of rapid growth and therefore, further utilization of fossil fuels. This bred habits in Western culture that still exist today. The attitude cultivated by the increasing use of petroleum products also helped develop a crippling dependency on the resource, which, sooner or later, would come back to haunt the Western world.
Once fossil fuels had solidified its status not only as a valuable commodity but also the substance that lubricates the gears of capitalism, several key petroleum exporting countries (Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) unified to

Get Access