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Oil anxieties usually stem from fears about running out of oil, but the true oil scourge of the past is overabundance. Oilmen conceal their oil in order to maintain profits and manipulate their monopoly on oil so that they may wield political power. To keep the price of oil high enough to sustain the industry, oil authorities have developed methods of producing scarcity. The results of making oil scarce have been harmful to society economically, politically, and socioculturally. Since current forms of alternative energy are naturally scarce, this article evaluates whether the effects of the oil curse arise from scarcity itself or from the production of scarcity. The destructive experiences with produced oil scarcity inform prospects for a future with alternative energy, including how these energy forms can be developed in ways that avoid the associated effects of the "oil curse."
Produced Scarcity
The oil industry's primary challenge for the majority of the twentieth century was the "organization of scarcity and the prevention of abundance."1 Experiences of perceived scarcity - especially in the 1970s - and the current looming threat of peak oil derive not from geological limits but rather from strategic methods of producing scarcity. The factors dictating oil scarcity lie "above-ground" - resource availability is often determined by the ways in which societies and economies are internally organized.2 In the case of oil, scarcity arises from within the organization of the industry itself.3 Academic analysis of the petroleum industry has revealed that geologically limited peak oil is not a real imminent threat, evident from the lack of consensus among oil corporations about whether peak oil is a threat at all. Some corporations add the peak oil theory to their repertoire of "strategic imaginaries" used for producing scarcity and controlling prices.4
MECHANISMS OF SCARCITY PRODUCTION
The methods by which scarcity is produced may shed light on whether the resulting problems derive from the methods themselves rather than being inherent to oil. The peak oil claim can be used to "naturalize a situation whose origins are political and economic," transmitting the source of the perceived scarcity into the natural realm and thereby obscuring Big Oil's position of culpability.5 Theories of resource scarcity include unequal resource distribution as one of three factors in producing environmental scarcity,...