The Petroleum Papers

Starred review from July 18, 2022
The petroleum industry is guilty of a Big Tobacco–style public cover-up, according to this vivid exposé from journalist Dembicki (Are We Screwed?). Petroleum executives have known since as early as the 1960s that they were contributing to climate change, Dembicki writes. Among the evidence he cites is a 1977 briefing for Exxon executives by a company scientist in which they were informed that if the rates of burning fossil fuel “didn’t slow down... the dangers to humankind could be immense,” and that the company needed to consider “changes in energy strategies”—the scientist’s warnings were ignored. By the 1990s, as the public’s awareness of climate change increased, the Shell Oil–backed Global Climate Coalition “was regularly getting academics who questioned the scientific consensus on climate change quoted in major media outlets” despite knowing they weren’t using “credible science.” The industry has no shortage of political allies, Dembicki writes, and criticizes, among others, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau, who campaigned on an environmentally friendly platform, but later supported the Keystone XL pipeline: “When it came to the crude produced in Canada’s oil sands, the Trudeau government actually saw Trump becoming president as a good thing,” Dembicki writes. This damning account is a worthy contribution to the literature on climate change.

July 15, 2022
Big oil knew about greenhouse gas-related climate change more than half a century ago--and did nothing but lie about it. In November 1959, writes investigative climate change reporter Dembicki, a prominent oil executive named Robert Dunlop "received a credible warning that his industry could cause death and suffering for large numbers of the planet's inhabitants." That warning came from physicist Edward Teller, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb and "no back-to-nature romantic," who prophesied that his invention was a toy next to the consequences of fossil fuel-caused climate change. Moreover, added Teller, when the climate warmed, the ice caps would melt, the oceans would rise, and large swaths of the world would become uninhabitable. Even at the time, the facts were not hidden: So bad was the smog in Los Angeles in 1943 that "many assumed that it was a chemical warfare attack by the Japanese army." Still, Dunlop and others in the petroleum business covered up those inconvenient truths, and decades later, players such as Koch Industries remain heavily invested in the fossil fuel economy, backed by media outlets such as Fox News, whose minions have steadfastly insisted that climate change is a natural phenomenon. The situation, though, is different in the courts, and renewable-energy warriors are waging combat against big oil that draws on many of the same tactics as the fight against big tobacco in the 1990s. One recent case, for instance, contests the extraction of Canadian oil sands, while another links typhoon damage in the Philippines to the international energy industry. Yet, even as one Exxon oil scientist warned 40 years ago that climate change would be catastrophic for people around the world, the Philippines included, the company still is "trying to convince people the emergency wasn't real." A damning, necessary expos� of corporate malfeasance with lethal consequences.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.