Rachel Maddow is on NBC's Today right now! [View all]

[SunSeeker]

It's interesting that even Saudi Arabia sees oil as a bad thing. Rachel says that the founding energy minister of Saudi Arabia said he wishes they discovered water instead of oil, and the founder of OPEC said he thinks of oil as "the excrement of the devil."

She notes that in countries with oil and gas-dominated economies, governance "sucks." It tends to dry up the rest of the economy, Russia being a prime example. Russia has no economy outside of its oil and gas insdustry, its all they've got, which Rachel notes resulted in Russia using oil as a weapon.

Oil really is a cancer.