Seven Oaks Magazine.

After launching her new book in Vancouver last week, McQuaig sat down with Seven Oaks to talk about the war, the SUV and the modern-day Luddites, Cheney and Chavez, and the other villains and heroes of It’s the Crude, Dude.

1. Most of your books have focused on Canadian politics. What caused you to shift your focus to foreign policy, and specifically to the war in Iraq?

I guess, quite frankly, I got fascinated by what was going on around Iraq. I write a weekly column in the Toronto Star, and I found myself, increasingly, writing about this phenomenal war. It was just a fascinating political story. They were obviously keen to go to war. They kept saying they were worried about weapons of mass destruction. It didn’t matter that the weapons inspectors could see that there were no weapons.

It just fascinated me. It became clear to me that this had to do with our whole obsession with oil, and that connected with global warming, and it seemed like a pretty interesting story.

2. On global warming, you make an interesting analogy between oil executives and the so-called Luddites of the past. Could you explain the comparison?

Of course, they would go wild at the comparison to the Luddites, they like to think of themselves as forward thinkers. Actually, the Luddites, they had kind of a good idea about some things. But the relevance is that, you know, Exxon and some of the other big oil companies are simply resistant to change, whereas the rest of the world has become aware of the seriousness of the problem of global warming.

Apart from the whole problem of using up the world’s oil resources so that there won’t be any eventually in the future, the more compelling problem – that we’re actually making the planet unsustainable – is something that the world has come to realize has to be addressed. And yet there’s this small group of enormously powerful companies resisting it, that are essentially trying to hold back the clock, trying to prevent the world from going forward in a way that everybody sort of recognizes has to be done. And I don’t know how you describe that as anything other than Luddite.

3. One of the people holding back this sort of change is Lee R. Raymond, the CEO of ExxonMobil. He’s a character in your book. One of the things that I think makes your books so readable is your extensive use of character vignettes – usually of some real villains. Is this a deliberate choice of style, to unfold the story this way?

Well, I’m not making these villains up. I guess one wants to make the story interesting, but the facts in themselves are interesting. I mean, Lee Raymond, Dick Cheney, could you come up with a character more questionable, more greedy, more self-interested? Just the levels of the conflict of interest, just to tell the story, just to describe the facts, is to describe this larger than life kind of villain. But he’s for real.

4. On the flip side, you do have a couple of characters that might be cast as heroes. One of these characters is Hugo Chavez. Could you explain the role that Chavez played in oil politics over the past few years?

Chavez is an interesting character. I had a long interview with him. The reason I went down to see him – I didn’t really know much about Venezuela – was that I was interviewing an oil analyst on Wall Street and he was talking about OPEC, how OPEC had declined in the 1990s and virtually disappeared. And then he said it had revived, incredibly, in 2000 and after that. I just asked him what happened, and he said, ‘Hugo Chavez.’ So that made me fascinated about the role of Chavez.

The problem with OPEC is that they want to see oil prices maintained at a fairly high level, but there’s enormous competition among them to maximize their production, to maximize the money they earn. But if they all maximize their production, then they’ll flood the market with oil. So there’s traditionally this difficulty to keep OPEC together, to have them stick them to their quotas. So that had broken down in the 90s, to a certain extent due to U.S. interference trying to break it down. The U.S. has always been trying to weaken OPEC.

Hugo Chavez figured out how important it was to keep that together. And he, through incredible personal diplomacy, going country to country to deal one-on-one with the leaders of all the OPEC nations, to get them to come to this big summit in Caracas, to sort of get them back working together. And he did it very successfully, so that’s partly what’s intriguing about Chavez. Also, Chavez really has championed the common person, the poor person, actually. I mean, the poor make up a huge percentage of Venezuela’s people.

5. And Chavez was -- of the world leaders –one of the most vocal in condemning the U.S. war in Iraq. A study released this week estimates that 100 000 Iraqis have now died as a result of the war and occupation. I thought, actually, that the title of your book is a little different from the urgent message it contains.

My thinking was, let’s grab people’s attention. At one point, there was some talk of calling the book ‘Plunder,’ which is a lot of what it’s about, but to me that sounded too much like a slogan. ‘It’s the Crude, Dude’ was my idea, and to me it was catchy, and what you needed was something to catch attention.

6. Noam Chomsky has described your book as ‘an urgent wake-up call.’ Are there any alternatives that you see globally to the imperial machinations that you describe, anything that makes you optimistic?

There is reason for optimism, sure, in the sense that there are alternatives, we don’t need to go down this road. This would be a truly depressing situation if oil was kind of the only source of energy, and we either had to go back to a different way of life, or proceed ahead. But oil is not the only energy source. And, also, we don’t need to use so much of it to maintain the same, or essentially the same, lifestyle. I mean, not that there’s anything so impressive or important about our lifestyle. I think we over-consume in general on every front. But the simple truth is that you can drastically reduce energy consumption and without even significantly changing your lifestyle. For example, you can make cars more fuel-efficient. So maybe you don’t drive around in your great big SUV.

Actually, the Union of Concerned Scientists has designed their own SUV which looks very much like the other SUVs – big, ugly, imposing – but has a few differences, like it’s made of lighter weight steel and things like that. It produces way less greenhouse gas, something like 30% less greenhouse gas. So you can even have an SUV! It’s a question of using technology to create greater efficiency, but we don’t do that.

Right now -- I’m sure another book project will be forthcoming – I’m not working on one. Right now, I’m just kind of working on this one.