On Oil
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A journalist, and former roughneck, considers our long, complex, tortured relationship with oil.
Oil has dominated our lives for the last century. It has given us warmth, progress, and life-threatening pollution. It has been a gift and is now a threat. It has started wars, ended wars, and infiltrated governments—in some cases, effectively become the government. And now oil's enduring mythology is facing a messy, complicated twilight.
In On Oil, Don Gillmor, who worked as a roughneck on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta, looks at how the industry has changed over the decades and illustrates the ways our dependence on oil has led to regulatory capture, in Canada and elsewhere, and contributed to armed conflict and war across the world. Gillmor documents the myriad ways that oil companies have misdirected environmental action and misinformed the public about climate concerns and illuminates where we went wrong—and how we might yet change course.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and novelist Gillmor (Canada) offers a stinging critique of the oil industry. Focusing on the U.S. and Canada, particularly Alberta, where he held several summer jobs on oil rigs and later covered the oil sands as a reporter, Gillmor balances his own recollections with a broader history of the industry's entanglement with national and international politics. He goes in a few unexpected directions, including exploring ways in which petroleum has dovetailed with Christian conservatives, beginning with John Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil, who extensively funded evangelicals like Billy Graham. Gillmor also touches on how oil led to corruption and inequality in Equatorial Guinea, how countries outside of North America are making a faster transition to renewables, and how lobbying and a revolving door between oil and politics hamper regulation efforts in the U.S. and Canada. The book's many allusions to religion give it an apocalyptic feel ("You would think that oil would be more closely aligned with the devil; it's... black as night, bringing obscene wealth... debauchery, corruption, and ruin"), while Gillmor's damning language rings like that of an unheeded prophet ("Oil will remain a part of us. Evidence of its comforting, violent reign will be spread across the world for generations"). Punchy and powerful, this is a knockout.
