Italiano 
English 
Português It accelerated the pace of our lives, having triggered a transport revolution that began with motor vehicles and reached its peak with jets.
The age of oil, like that of coal before it, freed humanity from the drudgery of manual labor; it led to an increase in global income and a lengthening of life expectancy. Products and energy derived from oil helped mitigate infant mortality rates and combat malnutrition. And in doing so, they populated the planet with billions of souls, more than animals, plants, and soil are able to sustain.
In short, it is difficult to imagine a world without oil as a fuel and source of chemical substances. But while it has accelerated our way of life, oil has also contributed to greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn have led to climate change.
In Berg's time nothing of this was known. Just as coke had avoided an ecological catastrophe—by putting an end to the exploitation of forests to fuel the first blast furnaces—at first oil seemed like a solution, not a problem. By providing lamp oil of higher quality than the fat obtained from sperm whales, it saved them from likely extinction. Motor vehicles replaced horse-drawn carts just as newspaper commentators were expressing fears that cities would soon be buried under manure. That is how the material world works.
Things changed in the mid-nineteenth century, when chemists managed to distill a flammable liquid from bitumen. Kerosene, whose name derives from the Greek word for "wax," promised wonders: its flame was six times brighter than that produced by spermaceti extracted from the skulls of sperm whales. And just when settlers were convinced that all whales would soon be killed, a new hope was lit.
We are obviously talking about a period before the advent of electricity, when the main objective was to light up the night sky, extend the working day, and improve families' living conditions. Other sources from which to obtain kerosene were therefore sought, starting with the fields of Baku, in Azerbaijan, and then pursued with greater vigor in the United States.
Salt, solid and at the same time plastic and malleable, was the perfect material to act as a seal for underground oil reserves: where there was salt, there were often oil and gas as well. The Chinese had known this for thousands of years and burned the natural gas that sometimes escaped from salt mines to facilitate the evaporation of brine. Everyone therefore rushed to drill any salt diapir in the United States and around the world.
Salt was found in abundance in the Persian Gulf: oil was discovered in Iran in 1908, in Iraq in 1927, then in Kuwait and Bahrain in the 1930s.
