haircuts in mauritius are currently free. the barbers and salon owners donate the cut hair to soak up the oil on mauritian beaches from all of the tanker accidents that happen offshore.

a fully loaded oil tanker traveling at normal speed requires at least 20 minutes to stop. this means that if it suddenly spots a reef as far as 3 miles away, it will probably still crash into it.

bermuda has the highest per-capita income of any non-oil-producing nation.

senators who voted against an amendment that stated human beings are in large part a cause of climate change collected an average of us$467,000 from oil and coal industry groups.

a computer study of more than 39 million words on the denial side of human-caused climate change found that the bulk of it was funded by exxonmobil and the koch foundation or front organizations funded by those groups.

gasoline evaporates and oxidizes, which means that all of the mad max movies are a lie. in the dystopian future, unless the oil companies persist, gasoline-powered vehicles will be useless.

the u.s. armed iraq to combat iran, which was our mutual enemy at the time. there is even a photograph of donald rumsfeld - who ran the pentagon under george w. bush - shaking qaddafi's hand. when we invaded iraq to secure the world's second largest oil field, we fought troops that we had trained, who were using weapons that the u.s. government supplied to them.

the united states armed afghanistan warlords to combat that country's takeover by russia - our enemy at the time. when the russian's pulled out after 10 years of war, we moved in (originally to build an oil pipeline for enron), only to find that we had created the taliban.

1 gallon of gasoline has 31 million calories.

if you work in oil or gas production, your chances of dying at work are 6 times higher than average. if you work in oil or gas production in north dakota, your chances are 18 times higher.

number of barrels of oil we have in reserve: 13 trillion. that's right - trillion. so why do we need a pipeline?

the crime rate worldwide has been steadily dropping ever since lead was banned from gasoline - a change that the oil companies fought.

lead exposure causes headaches, inhibits iq, and can lead to aggressive or dysfunctional behavior. long term, lead can be absorbed into bones, teeth and blood. it causes kidney damage, inhibits body growth, causes abdominal pain, anaemia and can damage the nervous system,

the united states comprises just 1/28th of the world's population but uses almost half of the world's gasoline.

despite the name 'black gold', when oil first comes out of the ground, it is usually dark green, a result of its origins (long-dead plants, marine animals, and dinosaurs).

as part of their settlement with a fracking company that they said poisoned their water, the hallowich family is forbidden from talking about fracking for the rest of their lives... and so are their children. if they do, the drilling company has promised to sue them.

alfred wegener developed the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics. the american society of petroleum geologists considered his ideas a threat to their jobs, and mounted a massive smear campaign against him and all research that supported his conclusions.

hey.... this sounds familiar. are you sure that we haven't talked about oil guys denying established science before?

anyway, by doing everything that they could to discredit wegener and his work, it was 36 years before it became accepted, and the basis for how we predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc., today.

in 1953, the cia, british petroleum (bp), and britain's mi6 spy agency ousted iran's democratically elected president and put exiled king shah pahlavi in power, under the condition that he allow foreign oil companies - such as bp - to continue to operate in iran.

as a result of this deal, the shah became incredibly wealthy, and ordered his breakfast flown in from france every morning while his people lived in poverty.

years later, iran's religious leaders helped lead a revolution against the shah. they privatized all of iran's oil operations and the shah escaped to egypt.

iran has hated great britain and the united states ever since.

most major u.s. cities had electric streetcars (even my little burg, port huron). that ended when gm, standard oil, phillips pretroleum, and firestone bought controlling interest in national city lines, which owned all the tracks, and shut them down so that everyone would have to buy cars.

remember the first gulf war? ever wonder why iraq attacked kuwait? kuwait was drilling wells near the border diagonally to steal iraq's oil.

ever wonder why we got involved? well, other than the fact that iraq was selling oil to france and russia rather than to us, a kuwaiti nurse testified before congress that iraqi soldiers stormed the hospital where she worked, took babies out of incubators, and killed them. except that never happened.

the nurse wasn't a nurse. she was the daughter of the kuwaiti ambassador. she was coached on what to say by a pr firm called hill & knowlton, who were hired by the government of kuwait for about us$11 million.

the largest embassy in the world is the u.s. embassy in iraq. it cost us$750 million to build, has 16,000 employees, and costs us$6 billion per year to run. iraq produces 3,5 million barrels of oil per day, and is the 2nd largest oil reserve on earth.