The increase in barrel prices strongly contributed to inflation, which then triggered an escalation in interest rates, an increase that caused the explosion of the subprime bubble.

Global crude oil reserves are like a huge, melting glacier that shrinks, floods, and fertilizes side valleys hitherto deserted, out of reach.

An indispensable good transported to the far corners of the world, black gold had become the very vector of the industrial vascular network, the blood of human technology.