In The Petroleum Papers, investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki tells the story of how the American oil companies that founded the tar sands in Alberta, Canada--home to the third-biggest oil reserves on the planet--ignored warnings about climate devastation as early as 1959. Instead of alerting the world to act on this impending global disaster, Exxon, Koch Industries, Shell and others created ad campaigns saying climate change isn't real and that alternatives to oil are an economic disaster. These companies built a global right-wing echo chamber to ensure tar sands could keep flowing into the U.S., which helped elect Donald Trump and now leaves the Joe Biden administration with a sprawling climate mess. But Dembicki also tells the high-stakes stories of people fighting back: the Seattle lawyer who brought Big Tobacco to its knees and is now going after Big Oil, a young Filipino activist who saw her family drown in a …
In The Petroleum Papers, investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki tells the story of how the American oil companies that founded the tar sands in Alberta, Canada--home to the third-biggest oil reserves on the planet--ignored warnings about climate devastation as early as 1959. Instead of alerting the world to act on this impending global disaster, Exxon, Koch Industries, Shell and others created ad campaigns saying climate change isn't real and that alternatives to oil are an economic disaster. These companies built a global right-wing echo chamber to ensure tar sands could keep flowing into the U.S., which helped elect Donald Trump and now leaves the Joe Biden administration with a sprawling climate mess. But Dembicki also tells the high-stakes stories of people fighting back: the Seattle lawyer who brought Big Tobacco to its knees and is now going after Big Oil, a young Filipino activist who saw her family drown in a climate disaster, and a former engineer at Exxon who was pushed out for asking too many hard questions. With experts now warning we have less than a decade to get global emissions under control, The Petroleum Papers provides a step-by-step account of how we got to this precipice and the politicians and companies who deserve our blame.
A tough read, if I'm honest. Covers the, by now well-known, story of how the oil companies knew about the effects of burning fossil fuels for decades, going back at least to a speech by, of all people, Edward Teller in 1957. This book takes a slightly different spin as it focuses on the Albertan oil sands, and the activities of Imperial Oil (a subsidiary of Exxon) and Suncor (among others) in developing them, despite knowing that they were even more destructive than regular oil supplies.
