When I was young Esso used to urge us to “put a tiger in your tank” when filling up with petrol. These days some are trying hard not to consider what we are putting in our tanks at all. Is it Libyan?  Saudi? Kuwaiti? From which particular oppression does it flow?

This Friday, 11 March, Saudi opposition groups have called for a “day of rage”. The kingdom has responded with what local sources describe as the biggest deployment of armed force seen since the foundation of Saudi state. Eyewitnesses describe truckloads of soldiers moving through key centres of population. The government has banned all demonstrations. The troops have orders to fire on anyone who attempts to gather in a public place.

This amount we know from the locally staffed news agencies in Saudi. But very few western journalists are present in the kingdom, fewer still are ever allowed to travel to the towns which are populated by the country’s Shiia minority.

The ingredients are set for a good deal of blood to find its way into the Saudi oil supply. These days, we journalists in the outside world are dependent for our information upon ex-patriot doctors, nurses, construction and oil workers. Inevitably they tend to be centred in the cities of Jedah and Riyadh. It is they who have told us of the clamp down on Satellite phones, the occasional shut downs of assorted internet services, and interference with t he mobile phone systems.

Read more – Oil shock: unrest in Saudi Arabia ‘worst case scenario’

This is the eerie overture to something which could prove , after Friday Prayers this week, everything or nothing. We oil consumers, we who have depended upon this and other repressive Arab regimes to prop up our systems are holding our breath.

But as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have warned, Saudi is not alone. There are many other regimes battling to contain civil rebellion.

The demonstrations in Oman have continued now for several weeks. The numbers are not large. Some four hundred in the port city of Sohar; a couple of hundred in the capital Muscat, and what observers regard as most surprising, an uprising in the Southern city of Salaleh. The army has been deployed and so far seven people are known to have been killed, dozens injured and or arrested. How, without journalists present, do I know? Oman is awash with ex-pats – not least in the armed forces. The Omani army is commanded by a British Major General – ‘on loan’ from the UK – he has a number (one sources tells me ninety) of UK army personnel with him. If Oman blows, the British will be very intimately involved.

Most of us filling our petrol tanks fret about the price of the stuff, perhaps we should be a little more concerned about what colour it is.

What might otherwise be regarded as an incredible feat of engineering has been achieved a mile under the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.

As of this moment, it LOOKS as if BP has finally managed to lower and secure a completely sealed cap on to the three month old gush of oil.

The more we learn about ‘deep sea, off shore’ drilling, the more miraculous the entire saga becomes.

Miraculous that man, without line of sight and with the vicissitudes of currents and ocean swirls, can so direct remote robotic actions that a seventy ton cap can be dropped upon so active a volcano of oil, secured and sealed to a flexible outflow to conduct the gush in a controlled flush to boats anchored on the surface. 

Yet it is today’s ‘miraculous’ engineering capacity that got BP into trouble in the first place – a conviction that they had a fail-safe mechanism to explore and retrieve oil from depths never plumbed before.

As America struggles to break its previously unquenchable dependence upon countries with questionable regimes in the Middle East, let’s make no mistake, BP represented to the archangel of hope.

‘Drill baby drill!’, was Sarah Palin’s cry which I heard for myself at the last Republican Convention.

Barack Obama’s unease about coastal drilling bowed in the face of the post Iraq War need to slash those Arab oil imports.

But what we never knew was that all this drilling depended upon one ‘fail-safe’ piece of technology which had ‘never previously failed’.

Had we known then that we were one valve, one washer, one O ring from disaster would we have drilled baby?

When Channel 4 News was reporting from Brazil at the end of last year, we devoted much attention to the new and potentially life changing finds of oil off Rio.

They are two thousand feet DEEPER than the reserves off Louisiana.

At what point will the world conclude that seven thousand feet, five thousand feet, any thousand feet below the sea’s surface is too deep?

That in effect those stocks are non-stocks and that the need to find an alternative right now, is with us?

Presumably only when demand outstrips supply, will our drugged dependence on oil ever be broken, by science coming up with a more sustainable alternative.

The question now is whether that moment could be artificially fixed by a globally agreed moratorium that draws the line on deep sea drilling.

Is Union Carbide’s horrific environmental disaster of 1984 America’s ‘BP’? Yesterday’s minimal sentences passed down on eight former Carbide employees, did not include the then Chief Executive Warren Anderson. No one has ever acted upon the arrest warrant that was issued for his arrest. No one until yesterday was ever brought to book. America and her then multi-national, in effect, took little or no action to remedy the disaster.

When I visited Bhopal in 2002 – 15 years after it had happened, the stench still hung over the site. The wreckage stood untouched since the devastating explosion that left 50 tonnes of the toxin – methyl isocyanate – hanging in a cloud over the City’s slums.

At least 3,000 people died immediately, some 15,000 are estimated to have died since as a result of ingesting the fumes. Many birth deformities have occurred and many cancers diagnosed amongst survivors. It is alleged that the ground water remains dangerously polluted.

Beyond the 11 people killed aboard the exploding oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico no one has yet died from the consequent oil spill. Yet an American president is now at war with a British multi-national and all political guns are blazing.

Had President Ronald Reagan expended against Union Carbide a tenth of Mr Obama’s energy and rhetoric today focused on BP, would life and death for the people of Bhopal might have turned out very differently?

Perhaps what Union Carbide and BP tell us is that even in a globalised world, holding great multi nationals to account is technically extremely difficult.

The eight carbide employees sentenced yesterday for their role in the Bhopal disaster have got two years in jail and a little more than £1,000 each in fines. No one expects anyone from BP, Haliburton, or Trans Ocean, to go to prison, let alone to have to pay personal fines.

Perhaps the fact that BP is voluntarily paying for both the battle to contain the oil and to clean it up is real progress.

But if BP’s disaster had happened off Nigeria or Uganda’s Lake Victoria oil field, could we have been so sure?

Is this still a globalising world with one outcome for the rich and another for the poor?