The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change
(Libby/OverDrive eAudiobook)

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Kalorama , 2022.
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Available from Libby/OverDrive

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A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR"An essential read."—The Washington Post"Essential… This book belongs on the shelf next to Merchants of Doubt, Dark Money, and Kochland." —Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene"The petroleum industry is guilty of a Big Tobacco–style public cover-up, according to this vivid exposé."Publishers Weekly STARRED ReviewBurning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world—the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. As investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki reveals in this explosive book, the decades-long conspiracy to keep the oil sands flowing into the U.S. would turn out to be one of the biggest reasons for the world’s failure to stop the climate crisis.In The Petroleum Papers, Dembicki draws from confidential oil industry documents to uncover for the first time how companies like Exxon, Koch Industries, and Shell built a global right-wing echo chamber to protect oil sands profits—a misinformation campaign that continues to this day. He also tells the high-stakes stories of people fighting back: a Seattle lawyer who brought down Big Tobacco and is now going after Big Oil, a Filipina activist whose family drowned in a climate disaster, and a former Exxon engineer pushed out for asking hard questions.With experts now warning we have less than a decade to get global emissions under control, The Petroleum Papers provides a step-by-step account of how we got to this precipice—and the politicians and companies who deserve our blame.Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute

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Format
eAudiobook
Edition
Unabridged
Street Date
09/20/2022
Language
English
ISBN
9781696609760

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Published Reviews

Choice Review

Just as the Keeling Curve tracks fluctuations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, this book charts the vicissitudes of American responses to global warming. In chronologically arranged chapters spanning 1959 to 2022, Dembicki, an investigative climate change reporter, begins with James Hansen's public warning about the deleterious effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, independently verified by the roughly coeval, but only internally published, research conclusions of companies such as Exxon. The book then explains how, as public interest grew in addressing the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, firms involved in oil and natural gas production--concerned with profits and investments--knowingly suppressed their research findings, as the internal documents cited ably attest. This was coupled with their attack on the science of global warming, carefully constructed public relations campaigns designed to misinform and scare the public, and their backing of bogus grassroots organizations meant to sow distrust of governmental carbon mitigation programs like cap and trade. Although initially successful at sowing doubt about global warming in the 1980s and 1990s, Big Oil now faces rising lawsuits and public cognizance of its role in both encouraging inaction and attacking solutions like lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. --Robert T. Ingoglia, St.Thomas Aquinas College

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Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Sept.)

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Kirkus Book Review

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 exposé of corporate malfeasance with lethal consequences. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Publishers Weekly Reviews

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. (Sept.)

Copyright 2022 Publishers Weekly.

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Citations

APA Citation, 7th Edition (style guide)

Dembicki, G., & Menasche, S. (2022). The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change (Unabridged). Kalorama.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)

Dembicki, Geoff and Steve Menasche. 2022. The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change. Kalorama.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)

Dembicki, Geoff and Steve Menasche. The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change Kalorama, 2022.

Harvard Citation (style guide)

Dembicki, G. and Menasche, S. (2022). The petroleum papers: inside the far-right conspiracy to cover up climate change. Unabridged Kalorama.

MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide)

Dembicki, Geoff, and Steve Menasche. The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change Unabridged, Kalorama, 2022.

Note! Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy. Citation formats are based on standards as of August 2021.

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