Rachel Maddow’s new book Blowout isn’t so long (at a mere 367 hardcover pages sans notes and index) that it looks daunting to the interested reader. But then again, it’s Rachel Maddow. That means it’s dense and scholarly in the good doctor’s inimitable way, including long histories, seemingly divergent facts and associations, and a parade of villains a majority of people never heard of. It takes us on a grand, in-depth tour of the American oil and gas industry from its beginnings in the mid-1800s all the way to today, where interesting and insidious international wheeling and dealing by a more familiar cast of characters helps to explain the current state of world tensions as well as why it’s so much harder than it should be to confront head-on the worsening climate change situation that threatens all of us well into the future.
For fans of Maddow’s reporting style on MSNBC, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained about things we may never have been interested in knowing before. Confession here: I spent my teen years in Oklahoma, when a gallon of gasoline for my Volkswagen bug cost all of 19.9¢, and still have family ties to the state. Thus unlike most readers, I already knew quite a lot about that state’s contributions to the industry. Its bad actors, its ‘colorful’ characters, the political corruption it has long engendered, and the ugly black messes it so gleefully makes and leaves in its wake wherever it travels. Go ahead and stick it out when the going gets dense, it’s worth it in the end when Rachel weaves it all together into a rope sturdy enough to suspend an entire planet (if not all the life on it). Her scholarship is impeccable as always, her sources authoritative, and her conclusions… horrifying to democracy-loving people.
From John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the early days through the biggest, richest corporation on the planet (ExxonMobil) and Rex Tillerson, to the cripplingly corrupt and regionally destabilizing oil/gas endeavors of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, we get the ultimately banal explanation for what’s been bothering us all for so very long — why, oh why can’t we convince our political overlords to go ahead and really support our collective changeover to clean, renewable energy sources, even as the need to do so asap becomes ever more obvious?
As expected, the answer is “All the money and all the power in the world.” Yet even if we already know that, it’s good to get the details and be able to line them up toward construction of winning arguments we political activists can use effectively in our quest to invent a better, far less violent and polluted world for ourselves and our grandchildren.
And speaking of those, I’ve been telling my children and grandchildren for many years when they get depressed by the state of the world and their own lack of a foreseeable future, every generation has its dragons to slay. It’s just part of the karmic sojourn on Earth, like it or not. Dragons are very nasty critters — they come in all sizes, are extremely hard to kill, and they all breathe fire. But if we wish to construct a decent world from the ashes of this indecent one, some of us are going to have to make it a lifelong mission. The remaining question is, as always, ‘How?’
Rachel apparently has far more faith in small-d democracy and government action than I do. Then again, I’ve seen the corruptions of Big Energy in action for more than half a century. And unlike her I did not become a serious scholar of government (I was too busy battling dragons that boast well-organized government protection rackets). But her conclusion about the sordid tale she tells in this book is heartening if you do keep on hoping these particular monsters can somehow be vanquished…
Containment is the small-c conservative answer to the problem at hand — democratically supported, government-enforced active and aggressive containment. It’s the only way to fight against the industry’s reliance on corruption and capture. The question isn’t whether it’s doable; it is. It’s just whether we’ll have the focus and the persistence to actually do it. Powerful enemies make for big, difficult fights. But you can’t win if you don’t play, and in this fight it’s the stakes that should motivate us: Democracy either wins this one or disappears. It oughtta be a blowout.
