Plunder, Rot, Fear, Greed and Desire. Laconic chapter headings tell the story. This brilliant, dismaying book by a reporter who delivers fact, analysis and eloquent anger with equal aplomb is designed to make you shudder the next time you drive on to a garage forecourt. Where did my last 20 litres come from? How many sickened and died in Africa or South America to keep the pumps I depend on full? And what will happen to me when, more swiftly than I can possibly realise, those pumps run dry?

Peter Maass travels far, wide and indefatigably, notebook in hand, visiting places where the world averts its eyes. Welcome to Equatorial Guinea, Africa's third largest exporter of oil and gas; population, 600,000. If you average out oil revenues across its citizens, it would be richer per capita than Saudi Arabia. In fact, it is dirt, diseased poor.

The managers at its mighty new natural gas plant arrive from America and Europe; the workers they control are flown in from India and the Philippines. Nothing – not food, not goods, not the well-being of trade – comes from the mean streets of Malabo. Nothing – not health or education – goes the other way. Wealth here begins and ends with Teodoro Obiang, the great but tactfully obscure dictator, his sons, his wives, the brutal regime that Mark Thatcher didn't quite manage to overthrow a few years back.

You can read about Obiang – and the $300m to $500m in his Washington bank "investment accounts" – in a US Senate report on "Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption". We know in dismal detail what he stands for, but don't expect anything to change. We can rail at Mugabe, because Zimbabwe has no oil. But President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea remained an honoured guest on the White House circuit long after his cover was blown.

Welcome, too, to the Niger Delta, eighth-largest oil-exporting region on the planet. Nigeria has earned more than $400bn from oil, yet, as Maass grimly notes, nine out of 10 Nigerians live on less than $2 a day and one in five children dies before its fifth birthday. Some 80% of Nigeria's oil wealth goes to 1% of its population (on World Bank figures). It is, frankly, stolen as it trickles through the system, from ministers to bureaucrats to policemen scratching their palms. And, because this is Nigeria, not some tiny, fly-blown state, because the land teems with young men without schooling or jobs, all this leads to big troubles and, sometimes, big headlines.

The Delta that Maass visits is the eighth circle of Hell: filth, choking fumes, venality, desolation. Rebels kidnap oil workers, organise resistance armies, often live openly in their towns or villages until Nigerian troops arrive, but they are not the villains of this piece, merely fighters for a better life for the people who live here yet see not a smidgen of hope through their pain. The country may be near collapse, corroded from within, unable to govern amid ungovernable decay (this is the chapter called Rot), but savage injustice fuels constant resistance. There are no winners, just more and more losers.

Oil has brought Nigeria little but misery and violence, and, as you voyage onwards, the story repeats itself with malignant force. Ecuador? A contaminated land. Kazakhstan? Russia? The strong men take command. Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia? We can all begin to write the script there. Put Norway, Canada (and perhaps Aberdeen) to one side and it's hard to find anywhere that takes the gush of oil without an accompanying stench of corruption and a slick of environmental destruction oozing in its wake.

But Maass plays much more than a mere polemicist. In a way, it's the things that don't fit his thesis that make it most compelling. We're not just talking voracious capitalism, are we? When Teodoro Obiang heads some military parade, the roads he drives along are laid by Chinese workers. Nor are we talking simple populist idealism. When Hugo Chávez of Venezuela wins an election, he looks first and hardest at the price of oil because that's the key to his popularity. When Rumsfeld and Bush pour armies into Iraq, it's easy to say that war is all about oil – but why then leave Baghdad's biggest, most precious refinery to its fate? A master plan or a masterpiece of incompetence?

Conspiracy theories don't always fit. We can make the supreme villains here the giants of American and European capitalism, the Exxons, the Shells, the BPs, but, increasingly, from Quito to Caracas to Moscow, it's the state oil and gas companies – owned by the people, for the people, but strangely not doing much good for the people – which do the continuing damage. Must we blame rough men from Texas or smooth men from Pall Mall for offering gifts to the rulers who greet them on the runway, hands outstretched, money bags open? How much, at root, do we pump-fillers care as long as we get our fix?

The strength of Crude World, filled with vivid reporting, is that it leaves you no option but to care. Its weakness is that it also offers no very convincing alternative. What happens when the oil runs out? Maass believes that day is much closer than oil industry estimates of reserves would have us believe. Why let realism damage your share price? He thinks that the fabled "peak" of production may be already past, that Saudi Arabia is beginning to be a busted flush, that recovery from this recession will stutter and stall because there isn't enough oil to fuel it.

He is, in short, a practical environmentalist, a pragmatic climate changer. We'll change because we must do. Global warming and global shaming are two peas in the same putrid pod. And yet, as his journey ends at a wind farm in the San Gorgonio Pass, Southern California, another kind of despair creeps in. Windmills, more accounting transparency, railways, technologies waiting just round the corner for an inventor? Somehow the answer seems so much punier than the questions he's posed.

He asked about the rot that transfigures our humanity. He asked about greed and shrugging indifference. Why suppose that a few whirling blades or freedom-of-information requests can begin to cure that?