Fuel for thought Crude World: the Violent Twilight of Oil Peter Maass Allen Lane, 288pp, Pounds 20 The use of refined petroleum as fuel, which began in the 1850s, freed hundreds of millions of people from the toil of centuries, gave hundreds of millions more a life of ease and plenty, and, by allowing great cities to feed themselves from every corner of the world, multiplied the population of the earth fivefold. Oil also gave the world a new and terrible kind of warfare, rendered great tracts of land uninhabitable to man and beast, and transferred to the atmosphere enough fossilised carbon to threaten the very survival of humanity.

There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its longrun average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20 th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation. For the US magazine journalist Peter Maass, we are in a sort of petroleum twilight in which the search for and extraction of crude oil is becoming daily more difficult, dangerous, corrupt, violent and messy. It is in the nature of international trade to obscure the distant consequences of our actions. Few Californian drivers recognise that their commute begins in the squalor and desecration of Ecuador's Oriente Province and ends in the loss of 4, 000 American lives in Iraq. In this short and vivid book, Maass seeks to show them how these things are linked.

Starting off in Firdos Square, Baghdad, where the statue of Saddam Hussein is being torn down, Maass assembles grim evidence of the curse of oil on its producers: in Nigeria, a journey upriver in the Niger Delta, past hideously polluted swamps and Shell's Potemkin villages; in Azerbaijan, the Intourist hotel in Baku in the 1990s; the D aura refinery in Baghdad; a Lukoil board meeting in Moscow; an oil-company town in Saudi Arabia; and in Venezuela the fortress of El Country Club, Caracas.

Oil is of no use to the local poor, because it uses capital, not labour. In one marvellous scene, Maass visits Marathon Oil Corporation's gasliquefaction plant on the island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea, where even the paint is imported. "Those are local rocks," says the Texan manager, pointing to the kerbstones, "but importing them would be cheaper."

Maass shows how oil exports cause the local currency to appreciate, sucking in luxury goods that displace domestic industry and agriculture, causing unemployment to rise, and widening the gulf between rich and poor.