Blowout by Rachel Maddow **** (of 4)

Since its earliest commercial success in Drakes Well, Pennsylvania, just 30 miles from where I live, the oil and gas industry has created enormous wealth and in its wake, environmental havoc and maldistribution of power. The "Oil Curse," well known to economists, is the process by which the export of oil and gas is traded for the import of petro-dollars which nearly always end up in corruption rather than development.

Blowout begins with a blatant case of big money going bad. Equatorial Guinea, for example, has exported such vast quantities of oil that its megalomaniacal autocratic leaders have enriched themselves beyond anyone's wildest ability to fathom. And yet, over the course of several decades of profligacy by the royal family, every measure of human development in Equatorial Guinea has fallen. Education, literacy rates, individual income, availability of drinking water, and health care have all declined. Oil spills and contaminated ecosystems abound.

Case number two is Russia which has banked its entire economy and international prestige on extraction of oil and gas with sales to Europe and the United States. The result has been the same. Vladimir Putin may now be the wealthiest man on the planet. His oligarch friends have prospered alongside him. Putin's personal enemies have been jailed or killed. His desire for additional fossil fuels have led him to take Crimea and Donetsk from Ukraine. Concurrent with declining diminishing human rights, the rule of law, and environmental standards, the life expectancy for young men in Russia is now lower than it is in Haiti. 

By implication, the United States is not immune. Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips have extracted oil and gas from deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, from fracked shale deposits across the continental United States, and in the Arctic. They have caused oil spills, earthquakes, and contaminated waste water. They have done so while facing only minimal regulatory oversight, because, and you can argue over whether this is corruption or not, they can pay an inexhaustible supply of corporate lobbyists and make unlimited donations to political candidates of their choosing. 

Campaign contributions by oil and gas companies to Republicans (red) and Democrats (blue) (Huffington Post.)

Russia helped sway the United States elections in 2016 to assist an oil-friendly, Russia-friendly candidate into office who named the CEO of ExxonMobil to be Secretary of State (Rex Tillerson, whose company had enormous stakes in Russian drilling operations.) Since taking office Trump has worked to remove regulations on fossil fuel companies with perhaps more focus than he has toward any other issue.

What is so damming about Blowout is the suggestion that the United States suffers from a diversion of wealth to a select few corporations on par with the depredations of Equatorial Guinea and the wholly undemocratic Russia. Oil and gas companies emerge as willing participants in the destruction of countries and regional environments. Human induced climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels (obfuscated and denied by fossil fuel companies), perhaps the ultimate crime against the planet, barely receives mention in this book. If it were included (see Jane Mayer's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right), you would wonder why anyone would permit such concentration of power to happen. Blowout at least shines a light into the darkness.