In tracing the industry and its impact on our lives, Maddow begins at the beginning, in 1859, with the discovery of “rock oil” and, a few years later, John D. But wait, there’s more! Fossil fuels are the world’s cheap high, an international addiction, Maddow argues, creating “such large, up-front, sweat-free gains for connected elites that no one wants to do anything else but chase the oil jackpot.” Maddow’s tale ties together fracking in Oklahoma, Russian “sleeper” spies, the debauched son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, “earthquake swarms,” poisoned pets, the hacker Guccifer, Moammar Gaddafi’s death and a secessionist movement in Texas. “Blowout” reads like Maddow’s MSNBC monologues, piling outrage on top of outrage, peppered with breathless asides warning of Armageddon.
The book’s title is a technical term for that horrifying moment when, if pressure in an oil or gas well builds and control systems fail, the fuel races back up to the rig and explodes in a fireball. The industry is so rich, so “ginormous,” so intertwined with every aspect of our lives and the lives of everyone on Earth that, if you follow the dots, it explains how almost everything in the world works - ultimately, she warns, it will “fatally injure the whole freaking planet.” It’s the “key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we’re now living through,” she says. In her view, almost everything comes back, in the end, to the industry.
Maddow states her thesis at the outset: The oil and gas industry “is the most consequential, the most lucrative, the most powerful, and the least-well-governed major industry in the history of mankind.”Īt its heart, this book is a tale of two countries, the United States and Russia, and how, as Maddow sees it, they have been warped by a rapacious fossil fuel industry. Her new book, “Blowout,” takes on the fossil fuel industry or, as one person she cites puts it, the “excrement of the devil.” What sets her apart from other serial fulminators is that she does it with facts - and sardonic wit.
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