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ShareThere are so many things wrong with “Over a Barrel: The Truth About Oil” that I hardly know where to begin, but let’s start with this one: It doesn’t contain a single word about onions.
This silly, conspiratorial documentary (airing as an episode of “20/20”) hosted by ABC anchor Charles Gibson spends a considerable chunk of its 42 minutes of air time trying to prove that we had to pay $4 a gallon for gasoline last year because sinister Wall Street speculators deliberately ran up oil prices. The obvious answer, according to “Over a Barrel,” is to put tough new restrictions on the trading of futures trading in oil.
Except that’s not obvious at all if you know your onions. Onions are the only commodity for which the United States government has banned all futures trading. The result: Onion prices jumped 400 percent in 2006, plummeted 96 percent early in 2008, then jumped again 300 percent later in the year.
All kinds of things — supply and demand, inflation, volatility in the stock market — influence the prices of commodities, including oil. But explaining the laws of economics is a lot more complicated, and not nearly as sexy as blaming everything on the greedy machinations of Big Onion, er, Big Oil. And given a choice, “Over a Barrel” goes for the negligee every time.
From the show’s dubious and one-sided substance to its irritating verbal tics (the constant reference to American “addiction” to oil, as if it’s simply the source of a mindless high rather than the foundation of U.S. productivity), “Over a Barrel” is a mindless compendium of conspiracy theory and neo-hippy sloganeering.
Is our supply of gasoline low? Never mind that environmentalists and NIMBY naysayers have prevented the construction of a single American refinery in the past 30 years: The real culprits are the oil companies. “They make more money keeping the market tight,” as one of the endless parade of industry critics interviewed in “Over a Barrel” darkly insists. Not to mention Big Oil’s fomenting of endless warfare in the Middle East: It seems oil explains the whole of American foreign policy. Sept. 11, 1,400 years of violent cultural friction between Islam and Christianity, and the longstanding U.S. alliance with Israel don’t influence it a bit.
Actually, “Over a Barrel’s” supposed plucky consumerism is just a guise for a pre-Calvinist suspicion of profit. If not, Gibson and his crew would have had some much tougher questions for oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, presented as a critic of his former industry. Pickens, Gibson casually mentions, “has invested most of his considerable fortune” in alternative energy sources like wind and natural gas.
Actually, Pickens wants to invest “your” fortune in it: For a couple of years now, he’s been lobbying for a $1 trillion government plan for wind farms that would be accompanied by massive federal seizure of other people’s land. You’d pay for it; Pickens would reap the profits through his investment in wind and natural gas companies. Not a word about that part in “Over a Barrel,” though. The truth about oil, it seems, is rather selective.
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OVER A BARREL: THE TRUTH ABOUT OIL
10 p.m. EDT Friday
ABC
