Oil for Life: The Bureau of Mines and the Biopolitics of the Petroleum Market

We are often told that oil is essential to life. Of course, this notion does not refer to crude oil itself, which is only a progenitor of a multiplicity of petroleum products that emerge from the refining process. Of all these products, motor fuel stands out for its centrality to ideas of “the American way of life” and the specific geographies made possible through privatized automobility and low-density suburban residential settlement. But oil’s net over our lives is cast much wider than gasoline. In 2011, a New York Times article, “Oil Oozes through Your Life” (Clifford 2011), emphasized the saturation