The \u201ccurse\u201d of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been\u00a0repeatedly hailed\u00a0as the planet\u2019s twenty-first-century \u201cnew Saudi Arabia\u201d for\u00a0\u201ctough energy\u201d\u00a0\u2014\u00a0deep-sea oil, Canadian\u00a0tar sands\u00a0and fracked oil and natural gas. But here\u2019s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?<\/p>\n
Once upon a time, the giant US oil companies\u2014Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco\u2014got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the United States the planet\u2019s dominant energy producer. But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.<\/p>\n
Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America\u2014the Third World\u2014where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.<\/p>\n
Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.<\/p>\n