Professor Leif Wenar, chair of philosophy and law at King’s College in London, and author of the book Blood Oil: Tyranny, Resources, and the Rules that Run the World argues that drilling for oil, “mining and profiting from diamonds or copper or coltan or any other resource,”1 without the express consent of the people who live on that land, is theft. He also believes that enabling authoritarians and armed groups to seize and profit from those resources is unethical and unnecessary, as well.
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These are hard but important truths that we should wrestle with every time we fill up, buy a diamond…according to Wenar, each and every time we buy anything.
“Many of the 20th century’s conflicts, and politics, were drenched in oil. We fought wars, made unsavory alliances, and spent many billions of dollars protecting our access to foreign oil. We needed it for our cars, our flights, our heating, our plastics. Others around the world saw this modern American way of life, and started to copy it — and then, they needed lots of oil, too. That made countries with oil very powerful. If you’re of a certain age, you may remember the long lines at the pumps in the ‘70s, because OPEC was putting the squeeze on supply.
But that was then. Now, in the 21st century, we have more choices. We have more oil and gas of our own, within North America, and we’re actually beginning to use less of it. But we still get a lot of our oil — and the metals in our mobile phones, and other resources — from places where authoritarians and/or armed groups are profiting, and ordinary people are suffering.”2
According to Wenar, the average American household sends about $275 a year to people like that just by filling up at the pump. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.
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Now, if we are all being honest, I’m sure this all sounds too hard. We already make thousands of choices a day and to add one more, especially one this monumental, can be overwhelming. However, Wenar wants to make it easy on us to do the right thing; visit cleantrade.org, and he’ll show you how you can use your dollars most responsibly.
To read the entire interview or listen to the PRI interview, click here.
