Blowout
Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
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Description de l’éditeur
**THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
A ground-breaking investigation into the oil and gas industry, international corruption and world politics.
Oil.
Corrupt? Yes.
Unimaginably lucrative? Of course.
But, the enemy of democracy?
Blowout is the oil and gas industry as we've never seen it before, as told by America's most incisive political journalist, Rachel Maddow. A blackly comic journey from Washington to Siberia, to deep within the earth's crust and the icy Arctic seas, it reveals not just the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas but why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election.
This is our final wake-up call: to stop subsidizing oil and gas, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry before it destroys our democracy
'Each page in Blowout is a revelation into the depth of corruption and greed that is infused into the international economy' David Lammy, MP
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Petroleum-industry profits inexorably subvert good governance, argues this scattershot indictment of the oil and natural gas industries. Maddow (Drift), host of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, surveys Big Oil's recent misdeeds, including Western oil companies' support for Equatorial Guinea's Obiang dictatorship, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and blocking rules to regulate fracking practices that cause earthquake swarms and pollution in Oklahoma (while the same companies demand tax breaks). Anchoring the book is Russian president Vladimir Putin's cutthroat petropolitics. Maddow contends he turned Russia's oil and gas sectors into cesspools of corruption and inefficiency, seized well-managed private oil companies and arrested their CEOs, and made energy a foreign policy weapon while getting investments and technology from ExxonMobil. Maddow tells these stories in colorful, sardonic prose she pillories Putin's campaign "to piss in the punch bowl of free elections all over the civilized world" but the resulting hodgepodge doesn't always support her portrayal of oil and gas as a "singularly destructive industry" that "effectively owns" governments; her absorbing account of Putin's skullduggery is really about a vampiric government victimizing the oil industry (and includes an unconvincing link to Trump-Russia collusion theories). Maddow's absorbing but inconsistent expos demonizes more than it analyzes.)
