The richest, the most corrupt, the most destructive industry on Earth is oil and gas, even without talking about Global Warming. Coal tries, but they don't play in the same league of international disasters.
National Treasure Rachel Maddow's new book is Blowout: Corrupted democracy, rogue state Russia, and the richest, most destructive industry on Earth. Says it all right there, really. But you want to know who, how, when, how much, and what to do about it, don't you? Well, there is far more here than I can tell you about, so I will focus mainly on emissions and renewables.
We have a rich and varied cast of characters.
- Wildcat oil drillers
- Monopolists
- Technical innovators
- Corrupt politicians
- Science deniers
- Seismologists
- Activists, including Lucy Lawless on a drilling ship
- Russian oligarchs and mob bosses and Putin
- A White Supremacist conference at a Holiday Inn in Russia
- Ukraine
- Equatorial Guinea
- Hapless Soviet deep-cover spies
- Guccifer
- The Internet Research Agency
We also have the infamous Resource Curse, first described by Adam Smith in the case of the Spanish Empire.
All in all, I wish we had discovered water.
Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani
And, of course, the climate. And swarms of earthquakes.
Rachel wants you to understand the facts clearly and dispassionately. And then she wants you to be outraged,
OUTRAGED,
do you hear me?
In a focused outrage, with a sense of humor, where we understand who is doing what to whom, and we discuss ways and means, and we then all go and execute the plan to toss out all of the rascals from government at all levels and fix things. So many things. But there are plenty of us to take on each of the pieces. Do what you are best at, or are best-placed to do. And give thanks that we are all in this together, and we all have each others' backs.
Global Warming Quotations
Now, Rachel does not focus the narrative on Global Warming or renewable energy, and does not mention electric vehicles or tree planting, or any of our other usual topics. But the climate catastrophe is there behind all of the others, such as the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, or the even bigger one on the sea floor in the Caribbean that you most likely never heard about, or the 20 others every year. Bigger than any of those is the descent of various countries into autocracy and monstrous corruption and even worse poverty than they had before oil was discovered.
We've endured eight years of an administration that buys into an alarmist mentality that the world is coming to an end, and that it's due to man-made gases.
Sen. James Inhofe
Worried that burning hundreds of billions of newfound barrels of oil over the next fifty years might not be altogether sanguine for the general health of the planet? [Oil fracker] Harold Hamm wasn't.
I don't believe the scientific evidence of global warming is settled. There are multiple conflicting studies on this subject.
There are not, actually.
He could not see why the Obama administration was handing out big fat cheap loans and tax incentives to wind and solar and the other green energy sectors.
Green whatever is not creating a lot of jobs.
And he could not see why, year after year, Team Obama kept threatening to construct federal environmental regulations for fracking or to water down the array of federal tax breaks the oil and gas industry had enjoyed for more than a century.
George Kaiser of the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company became a bogeyman: the George Soros of the Sooner State, a Pinko who just wanted to grow the government into a monster. He was invested in solar energy, for gawd-sakes!
Cracking the [Russian] Arctic would of course also bring the world one step closer to the brink of irrevocable catastrophe. Here sit more than one-fifth of the world's oil reserves, and if you were looking for a do-or-die climate question, the most apt might be whether the Arctic would keep its huge store of fossil fuels, or have it extracted and burned.
The oil and gas business isn't hell-bent on bad government for some ideological reason; it's just practical business sense. Democratically responsive government…[might decide] to take the expanding costs of global warming out of the hide of the industry that brought it down upon us.
The end-times battle that we're engaged in now is to figure out how to get along without oil and gas—and we're plugging away but still a long way off from that—and in the meantime commit to a whole new level of constraint and regulatory protection against this singularly destructive industry to minimize its potential harms.
After reeling off a laundry list of other disasters, Rachel continues
And that's not even to consider the Big One: they are the chief drivers of the global climate catastrophe. While fueling that catastrophe—literally—they have also funded a decades-long campaign of denial that ensures the climate problem will get worse and that any solutions to it are seen as politically and economically impossible.
Here at the end of the world, with the climate crisis bearing down like Godzilla over downtown Tokyo, U.S. taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas drilling are now almost literally insane.
With the accelerating pace of sea-level rise and global warming, the worst silver lining in the history of silver linings is that new jobs and new industries may derive from the need to clean up the messes of the industry thus far, to sandbag us against the worst damage it has already done.
She has some thoughts on how to counter it and the entire corrupt industry. And the lying right-wing media.
Further Reading
Rachel has excellent notes on her main sources for the various parts of this tale at the back of here book. This is the most important, the modern definition of the Resource Curse.
The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States, by Terry Karl
As I mentioned, Adam Smith discussed this paradox in Wealth of Nations.
In consequence of those popular notions, all the different nations of Europe have studied, though to little purpose, every possible means of accumulating gold and silver in their respective countries. Spain and Portugal, the proprietors of the principal mines which supply Europe with those metals, have either prohibited their exportation under the severest penalties, or subjected it to a considerable duty.
The continual importations from Peru and Brazil exceed the effectual demand of those countries, and sink the price of those metals there below that in the neighbouring countries.
The cheapness of gold and silver, or, what is the same thing, the dearness of all commodities, which is the necessary effect of this redundancy of the precious metals, discourages both the agriculture and manufactures of Spain and Portugal, and enables foreign nations to supply them with many sorts of rude, and with almost all sorts of manufactured produce, for a smaller quantity of gold and silver than what they themselves can either raise or make them for at home. The tax and prohibition operate in two different ways. They not only lower very much the value of the precious metals in Spain and Portugal, but by detaining there a certain quantity of those metals which would otherwise flow over other countries, they keep up their value in those other countries somewhat above what it otherwise would be, and thereby give those countries a double advantage in their commerce with Spain and Portugal.
Agriculture and manufacturing were so far discouraged in Spain that it has never recovered. The corruption at Spanish courts since the conquests in America, and in the Spanish Catholic church, are legendary.
Rachel Live
Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow really enjoy each other's company, and each other's work.
Likewise Lawrence and Rachel.
This is more about respect rather than having fun together.
Rachel told Meghan McCain her Dad was right when he came back from Ukraine in 2014.
Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.
Stephen and Rachel had a segment of fun, not shown in this clip, and then got down to a serious book interview.
There are two solutions to the Oil and Gas Resource Curse.
- The one Rachel emphasizes is democracy, an excellent choice to start with.
- The other one that readers here know about is leaving fossil fuels entirely in the ground. Except for petrochemicals and steel-making.
Other News
There is more going on than I can keep up with in once-a-week Diaries. I am talking to other groups about splitting off EV Tuesdays from Renewable Fridays. I may need to split up the other tech Diaries and the political ones, too. Volunteers welcome.
Here are two more major announcements that I will cover here soon if I am not overwhelmed by yet more news.
IPCC TLDR: Oceans and the cryosphere
Yes, they are getting much worse.
PreCOP25 to Raise Climate Ambition Through Sharing Best Practices
With a focus on raising the ambition required to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and adapting to the worst impacts of climate change, Costa Rica opened three days of exchanging best practices for climate action and discussions at PreCOP25.
The conference has gathered delegates from 100 countries and more than 1,500 participants and is taking place prior to the 25th Conference of the Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to be held in Santiago de Chile in December.
More than at the preparatory meetings of previous years, this PreCOP is focused on the exchange of experiences on possible solutions to accelerate the decarbonization and resilience of the world's economies.
Costa Rica is focusing PreCOP25 on climate science and the need to increase climate ambition. Global emissions need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050 to limit global average temperature rise to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the central goal of the Paris Climate Change Agreement.
Environmental ambition is profitable.
