The world as we know it would not exist without oil. It powers our economy, turbocharged the industrial revolution, and allowed us to travel across the world in a matter of hours, not months or years. It made the world smaller and the possibilities bigger. It changed our relationship with the Earth and irreparably changed the climate and altered delicate ecosystems. And it has formed an intricate web of power relations and geopolitics, from all-out wars to strategic alliances, that work in the public eye and behind the scenes to shape our countries and our lives. “In the modern era, no other commodity has played such a pivotal role in driving political and economic turmoil, and there is every reason to expect this to continue,” read a Brookings Institution study . Arguably, no other region has been as thoroughly transformed by oil as the Middle East, a region whose […]