Iran war: Brent oil briefly hits $119 as talks stall

July 15, 1854

The news of the day speaks of a war in Persia, of a strait blockaded, and of oil priced at one hundred and nineteen dollars. They have put a number to the cost of this conflict: twenty-five thousand millions. A sum so vast it becomes an abstraction, a noise in the ledger of nations. I walked to the pond this morning and considered the cost of my own existence. My house cost me twenty-eight dollars and twelve-and-a-half cents. My bean-field, for which I traded the sweat of my brow and the strength of my arms, yields a harvest I can measure in bushels. I know its true cost. But what is the cost of twenty-five thousand millions? It is the life of every man who must labor to produce that sum, it is the forests felled for its ships, the fields scorched by its passage. It is paid not in treasury notes, but in years and peace and quiet mornings.

They fight over a strait, a narrow passage for tankers, while the wider passage of the sun across the sky goes unremarked. The price of Brent crude soars, and men will speak of markets and supply. I look at the oil in my lamp, bought with the labor of a half-day’s work, and I know its precise value: so many hours of my one life exchanged for this many evenings of light by which to read or write. Their war is a monstrous engine of complication, demanding this fuel, requiring that price, justifying this blockade. Simplify, simplify. The essential fact is this: men are trading their lives - their only, irreplaceable lives - for the privilege of contention over a channel of salt water. The pond this evening is still. It asks for nothing, and reflects everything.

The price of oil rises. The strait is blocked. The fleet is deployed. The cost is tallied. These are the signs, but they are not the cause. The cause is the shift in power, the ambition of one, the fear of the other. The strait is merely the place where the conflict finds its expression. The blockade is the pretext, but the reason is the structure of fear and ambition that has made this war not only possible, but inevitable. The strong impose their will; the weak resist where they can. The price of oil is the measure of the world’s suffering, but the suffering itself is the work of men who act from necessity, not malice. They speak of rights, of security, of honor - but these are the words that adorn the actions that power demands. I record the price, the blockade, the cost. Let others draw the moral. The facts are grave enough.

September 12, 1895

This morning, I read of oil prices rising like floodwaters, of wars measured in billions like sacks of grain counted at market. Men in distant capitals speak of “blockades” and “straits” as if these were chess moves, not currents that will drown fishermen, starve families, silence children. The Pentagon - what a curious word, this temple of war - calculates the cost at twenty-five billion. But who has reckoned the cost in the trembling hands of a sailor who does not wish to die for a quarrel he did not choose?

The ships choke the strait, iron beasts bellowing smoke, their bellies swollen with oil that will be burned, spilled, traded, while somewhere a farmer sows his field, unaware that the price of his lamp’s fuel is now written in ledgers alongside the price of bullets. The generals and the merchants speak of necessity, of strategy, of markets. But necessity is the child of their own making - a monster fed by fear and greed, wearing the mask of reason.

I think of the young men who will be sent to die for this. Not for their homes, not for their loved ones, but for the right of one set of rich men to sell what another set of rich men wish to control. And when the war is done, the oil will still flow, the accounts will be balanced, and the dead will be buried in unmarked graves.

Is this not madness? To kill for the right to set a price?