Book Review/Ken Winkes

Still Addicted to Oil

I never thought it would happen, but Donald Trump inspired me to read a book. nnI’d had “The Petroleum Papers” around for months. Just one more book about how corporations lie and twist facts to protect their profit stream, I thought. I already knew all that. After all, over 10 years ago I’d read “Merchants of Doubt,” which brilliantly documents the methods corporations employed to manipulate public opinion on the harmful effects of smoking, on Ronald Reagan’s ill-conceived “Star Wars” defense initiative and yes, on climate change. Why read another book on something I already knew?

Then came Trump with yet another grift. Give me one billion dollars, he said in a meeting with oil executives last April, and I will eliminate tax breaks for electric vehicles, regulatory impediments that stand in the way of your profit, protect the billions in tax subsidies you already have, and reverse the pause in natural gas exports imposed by the Biden administration. What a deal. For only $1 billion, Trump would sell more of America’s and the world’s future.

No surprise, really. Trump was already a signatory to the Devil’s Bargain fossil fuel corporations made more than 50 years before. Warned by their own scientists about the inevitable effects on the earth’s climate of spewing loads of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, they ignored the warnings and instead spent millions to contradict and promote uncertainty about what they knew to be true.

While covering the familiar story of Big Oil’s decades-long deception, Canadian author Geoff Dembecki devotes a large portion of his engaging book to the people and corporations that opened the Alberta tar sands to exploration and bitumen extraction. Much of that story was new to me.

Sun Oil, which under the name of Suncor became the largest bitumen producer, was the first big company to invest in tar sands development. Profit was, of course, the primary driver, but as it was for other oil company owners, religion and politics also influenced their approach to business. Sun Oil’s Pew family was staunchly anti-FDR Republican, firmly anti-communist and committed to a brand of Christianity that believed unfettered capitalism was God’s plan.

A more familiar name with similar right-wing politics also reaped riches from the Canadian tar sands bonanza. The Koch brothers’ Minnesota refinery equipped to process bitumen into fuel was conveniently located. In the 1960s and ’70s, it became Koch Industries’ “cash cow,” providing the profit that fueled Koch Industries’ rapid expansion and financed its growing political influence. Big Oil and right-wing politics have long gone together.

“The Petroleum Papers” also showcases the men and organizations who created the fossil fuel industry’s climate-change-denying machine and shows how the industry’s lobbyists have successfully delayed government response to the increasingly obvious climate crisis. In 2024, even as a succession of climate disasters are front page news, we still subsidize oil companies, we still don’t have a federal carbon dioxide cap-and-trade policy, and Justin Trudeau’s promised taxes on the tar sands operation have more gaps than teeth.

Dembicki weaves a series of often touching stories of individuals directly affected by climate change into his lively history. A survivor of a typhoon in the Philippines. An Alaskan native village being inundated by rising seas. A Colorado community sickened by the pollution from a nearby refinery. A truth-telling Exxon scientist evaluated out of his job. And that of the lawyer who successfully sued the tobacco companies for lying and is attempting to hold the fossil fuel giants to similar account.

So far, legal action at the federal and state levels has unfortunately yielded little concrete result. Although oil companies now admit the reality of anthropogenic climate change, they have so far escaped financial responsibility for the immense devastation they cause.

In 2023, the hottest year so far on record, the three largest American oil companies made nearly $22 billion dollars. In early August 2024, 100 homes were flooded in Juneau, Alaska, when an ice dam broke away from the Mendenhall Glacier.

We’re still addicted to oil. Our heads are still buried in the oil sands.

“The Petroleum Papers” by Geoff Dembicki, 283 pages, Greystone Books, Ltd. (2022).

Ken Winkes is a retired teacher and high school principal in Conway, Wash.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2024

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