We’re two weeks into the largest oil shock in history. The system that led us here was described 100 years ago, then stress-tested in 1973. And here we are again, still neck deep, addicted as ever.
The prices at the pump are only the most immediate numbers, and while they may sting, it’s the tip of a petroleum iceberg bearing down on the titanic global economy.
In recognition of this remarkable and troubling moment, Ink & Time revisits the original petro-fiction novel by Upton Sinclair, too seldom referenced, titled quite simply Oil!
On February 27, Brent crude was lingering at $67 a barrel. By March 9, it breached $119, a 78% spike. Every day, 20 million barrels transit through a 21 mile passage called the Strait of Hormuz, which is now effectively closed to commercial shipping.
The International Energy Agency has called this "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” It authorized its largest-ever emergency release of 400 million barrels.
One wonders if it will be sufficient.
QatarEnergy declared force majeure on LNG shipments and European natural gas prices surged 52% in a single session. Urea fertilizer prices at the New Orleans hub jumped from $475 to $680 per metric ton within days. One-third of global fertilizer trade passes through Hormuz: 27% of the world's ammonia, 22% of phosphates, 45% of sulfur.
The pinch of the world’s oil is threatening food security, manufacturing and livelihoods.
Last week Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid put it plainly: "with each passing day it gets harder to argue that the disruption will only prove temporary.”
Analysts are actively talking about stagflation.
Upton Sinclair: Biographer of the Political-Energy System
Neither the dependencies, nor the chokepoint, nor the cascading economic carnage would have surprised Upton Sinclair.
In 1927, he published Oil!, a forensic parable of how petroleum money buys governments, captures media, silences institutions, and makes itself structurally irreplaceable.
The novel is based on the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s, in which US Interior Secretary Albert Fall accepted bribes from oil companies in exchange for access to naval petroleum reserves. The sale of public resources by the men entrusted to protect them was called the “greatest scandal in American politics” to date. It was fictionalized as the story of J. Arnold Ross and his son Bunny. Here was the father who understands exactly what the system costs and goes ahead and pays it anyway.
It’s also about the son whose conscience cannot accommodate it.
Vernon Roscoe, the novel's oil baron, spends millions to install a "round-faced man" as president. Newspapers bury corporate scandals for payoffs. Universities fire instructors for teaching "unapproved history."
Workers die in oil fires and are mourned only as a financial loss. The prose is blunt:
"Money ain't power till it's used, and the reason I can buy power is because men know I can use it, or else, they wouldn't sell it to me."
Sinclair was a “muckraker” who ran for governor of California and wrote nearly a hundred books. The Jungle (1906) remains his most famous work as it changed American food safety law.
Oil! is now recognized as his second most important novel, revived in the popular imagination by Paul Thomas Anderson's film There Will Be Blood (2007).
The book was banned in Boston in 1927, more for its sexual content, not its politics. The politics, apparently, were tolerable.
1973: The Oil Economy’s First Stress Test
If you need convincing that the machine Sinclair described is structural rather than incidental, consider what happened fifty-three years ago. In October 1973, Arab members of OPEC imposed an oil embargo against Western nations in response to US support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War.
The embargo removed roughly 7% of global oil supply from world markets.
Crude prices quadrupled in three months, from $2.90 to $11.65 per barrel. Gas stations imposed rationing. Nixon introduced emergency consumption curbs. Japan declared a national emergency. The US economy shrank by 2.5%. An estimated 500,000 Americans lost their jobs.
A decade of stagflation followed: simultaneous rising prices and stagnant growth.
It was then that the IEA was created, with the specific intent to prevent a future sequel. Strategic petroleum reserves were built across member nations, and energy diversification was encoded into policy. Fuel efficiency standards were introduced.
The world appeared to have learned a lesson. Or did it?
The political architecture described has survived intact: concentrated control over a commodity that buys state power, with costs externalized onto those least able to bear them.
The current US administration have made a habit of calling climate change a hoax.
If one were to do a carbon accounting of the war, or even of just the military mobilization, it de facto negates a large part of private sector carbon reduction efforts of recent years.
It is politically expedient to put climate change on the proverbial back-burner.
It is not tangential to the story. It is the story of the rest of our lives.
Yet, the institutions built after 1973 were designed to make the next shock survivable. Sadly, they were not designed to make it unnecessary.
In 1973 oil was weaponized in response to US support for Israel.
In 2026 oil is again being used as an economic weapon. Ironically, again it is triggered by US-Israel strikes on another regional power.
A Hundred Years of Same Same Oil Politics
Sinclair captured three things about oil that remain as structurally true in 2026 as in 1927. Each has survived a century of supposed progress.
Oil Purchases the State
In Oil!, Vernon Roscoe buys the presidency to secure access to naval petroleum reserves: the scandal was the literal sale of public oil to private operators through bribery.
Post 1973, the petrodollar system priced all global oil in US dollars, entrenching American financial hegemony for fifty years and ensuring that every oil-importing nation on earth is forced to hold and spend dollars.
The 2026, the United States is simultaneously the world's largest oil producer, the military instigator of the conflict that triggered the oil shock, and through the petrodollar trade, it’s economy is a structural beneficiary of high oil prices, to say nothing of the windfall to the military-industrial complex.
American consumers, meanwhile, watch as gasoline prices climb. The system enriches the state while punishing its citizens. Sinclair is surely turning in his grave.
Chokepoint Power: Distributed Consequences, Concentrated Gains
In Sinclair’s day, California oil fields were contested territory: whoever controlled the land controlled the wealth. Today the Strait of Hormuz carries not only 20% of global petroleum but 85% of polyethylene feedstocks, and one-third of the world's fertilizer trade.
A single military decision and global food security is at risk, European factories face input shortages, and Asian manufacturers scramble for alternative supply.
Our interconnected vulnerability is the structural consequence of concentrated control of a commodity with no short-term substitute. In 2026, the chokehold is at the level of global maritime geography.
One of the most uncomfortable insights in the novel was about who pays:
"Your Thanksgiving dinner was spoiled, because one poor laborer had slid down into a well which you happened to own; but dozens and perhaps hundreds of men had been hurt in other wells all over the country, and that didn't trouble you a bit."
So, who pays in 2026? The victims of the war.
The gulf states who got rich off the system, and are now caught in the cross-fire.
But, Fitch Solutions has rated South Asia as the region that will "bear the brunt" of the shock. (see infographic below).
Thailand's net oil imports run at 4.7% of GDP, the highest in Asia. The Philippines sources 96% of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Sub-Saharan African economies face what economists describe as a "triple blow": higher energy costs, more expensive dollar-denominated debt repayments as the dollar strengthens, and collapsing fiscal space to maintain public services.
The costs of the oil system are never borne by those who control it.
The Broader Diagnosis and the Embedded Irony of Oil!
Oil's share of global energy demand fell below 30% for the first time in 2024.
Electric vehicles now account for roughly 25% of new car sales worldwide. In China it is above 50%.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimates that every 1 GW of solar capacity installed avoids $3 billion in LNG import costs over 25 years. The transition is real, and necessary.
And yet, petrochemicals are the fastest-rising source of global oil demand, projected by the IEA to overtake transport as the leading driver of oil consumption. Naphtha and ethane, both crude oil derivatives, feed the production of plastics, synthetic fibers, industrial solvents, packaging, and components inside wind turbines, EV batteries, and solar panels.
This is the stuff of modern life, and our hope for a green energy transition.
Yet, the combined share of oil, gas, and coal in the global energy mix remains approx. 80%. The green economy is being built on a petrochemical supply chain.
"...an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor."
Far more than oil, he was describing a system of governance that has now survived the Teapot Dome scandal, two world wars, the 1973 embargo, the creation of the IEA, the climate movement, and the renewables revolution…
And has just produced the largest oil supply disruption in recorded history.
None of us are watching this from the outside. Much of our food supply transits Hormuz. Interest rates are being repriced. The components inside our "clean energy" investments are manufactured on petrochemical feedstocks.
Bunny Ross couldn't escape his father's oil money even when he desperately wanted to. It is not a personal failure as much as the structural reality of a system that persists, and has never been dismantled. Only managed.
Oil! entered the public domain in January 2023. You can read it for free on Project Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks. It's 527 pages and reads like a thriller, at least until the final third, when Sinclair can't resist lecturing.
Read it anyway. The lectures are about our world, still to this day.
The Iron Heel by Jack London (1908) is the original speculative dystopia describing the political machinery fed by oil money.
Ink & Time is dedicated to surfacing long lost or forgotten books that provide texture to our moment. Reading won’t stop the war. Or will it?
If you believe in reading as a tool for understanding the forces shaping life today, share this with someone who would benefit from a wider perspective.
