This government as well as other governments, the liberal press and liberal media, in conjunction with liberal minded people, has spent an inordinate amount of time and effort castigating and criticizing big oil with seldom a true recognition of the value of oil, in and of itself. While some of the criticisms of big oil are sensible, in the sense that big oil, is very, very big, in fact, on a worldwide scale, companies that specialize in oil and gas, are four out of the six biggest corporations in the world by revenue, indicating that petroleum is a commodity of significant worth, significant power, and significance, that speaks more to the value of oil as a necessity commodity for material economic success and advancement as opposed to anything else.
The sheer size of big oil is definitely an issue, and whether companies such as Exxon and Mobil oil should have been allowed to merge is highly questionable, as well as the merger of Gulf, Standard Oil of California, and Texaco into Chevron. These mergers fly in the face of the Sherman Antitrust Act which split Standard Oil into 34 companies, only for the reemergence of the strongest of these separate oil companies to consolidate and to thereby become larger and more fearsome corporations which we currently have at the present day.
The size of these oil companies, speaks to the influence and necessity of petroleum products in modern day life, to which, while most everyone knows that oil is the lifeblood of transportation in all of its many forms, many more people, are somewhat ignorant, of the value oil has as a commodity for things other than transportation, such as: plastic, general toiletries, medications, fertilizers, asphalt, and lubricants.
So too, oil is the reason that backward Middle Eastern countries, have been able to become rich, or at least rich for the ruling class, simply because they are fortunate enough to have land which has an abundance of this natural resource, which means that countries such as Saudi Arabia, as estimated by salon.com, are in the position in which "petroleum accounts for 90 percent of the country's economy." This would indicate that it is petroleum that brought modernity and power to these nations.
What those that champion alternative sources of energy such as wind and solar, do not seem to comprehend is that while both wind and the sun are freely abundant in the sense that they exist for all, to harness these natural means of energy, costs money, time, equipment, capital investment, logistics, governmental interplay, and so forth. In addition, for those that spend inordinate amounts of time castigating the evils of big oil, or oil in general, because oil is dirty and non-renewable, don't seem to realize that wind and solar, are also dirty and technically un-renewable, because you cannot use either as a power source without constructing something, often an eyesore, that needs land, maintenance, materials, and disruption to the natural order of things in order for these alternative energy sources to scale up and work.
Not only that, but the most important point of it all, is that the amount of oil that is used for our daily needs is staggering, and to replace that oil with something of equivalent worth, would necessitate the need for the very same thing that we see today from oil and gas companies, which is capital, size, power, consolidation, and strength, so that while the players in the energy game would change, the new boss would be exactly the same as the old boss. It is delusional to believe that wind and solar would bring to this country somehow a smaller and more beautiful footprint, fair and equal to all, with the bucolic sights and sounds of an earthly paradise. In fact, a large scale integration of wind and solar into America would be dirty, ugly, less reliable, wholly corrupt, and prohibitively expensive to the common man, all in the end, benefiting the exact same types of privileged people that big oil benefits currently.