The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change

by Geoff Dembicki

Overview

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 Review

Burning 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781778401794
Publisher:	Greystone Books
Publication date:	05/21/2024
Series:	Washington Post Best Book of the Year
Sales rank:	327,166
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Geoff Dembicki is an investigative climate change reporter from Alberta, Canada, home of the largest tar sand deposits in the world. His book Are We Screwed? won the 2018 Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. He is a regular contributor to the Tyee and VICE. He lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

I The First Warnings (1959-2013)

"Just another storm" 9

"Men on a hunt" 14

"A gift from God" 19

"We were all so desperate" 26

A "hellish cloud" 28

"Operation Oilsands" 34

"A million pieces" 41

II The Early Construction of Denial (1968-1988)

"He seemed embarrassed" 47

"Ahead of the game" 52

"Very strong interests at stake" 59

"Pitted against our very survival" 66

III Solutions Known and Sabotaged (1988-2002)

"Threaten the existence" 75

"I feel embarrassed" 81

"We have to get this right" 89

"Americans can't hear the whistle" 89

"The dumbest-assed thing" 97

IV A Public Awakening (1997-2008)

"Victory will be achieved" 105

"They lied about everything" 107

"Saudi Arabia of the western world" 115

"What Makes Weather?" 119

"Global energy powerhouse" 124

V Blame Canada (2006-2010)

"Back off dudes!" 133

"A full-on barney" 137

"Public embarrassment" 141

"They're struggling forward" 146

"Global warming!" 152

VI The Climate Goes to Court (2008-2014)

"The island is sad that it's going away" 161

"A way to justify exploitation" 166

"I remember being angry every day" 171

VII Well-Oiled Allies (2016-2019)

"Stacked with friends" 177

"Friends in unexpected places" 180

"It just kept going and going" 188

"This is an avalanche" 193

"We are the beating heart" 198

"They surrounded me" 206

VIII The Right to Live (2020-2022)

"Robbed of their options" 215

"Why wouldn't I choose the right thing to do?" 222

"Is there risk?" 232

Epilogue 239

Acknowledgments 243

Notes 247

Index 273

Editorial Reviews

"[A] brisk, masterful crime story"
—Toronto Star

"In a classical Greek tragedy, the world is brought to ruin by a character's moral flaw. The moral flaw that has brought the planet to the brink of climate chaos, according to [The Petroleum Papers], is unbridled greed compounded by hubris—a bloated sense of corporate entitlement...[F]or those who want a no-frills account of how we ended up on the climate precipice, this is an essential read."
—Richard Schiffman, The Washington Post

"The petroleum industry is guilty of a Big Tobacco–style public cover-up, according to this vivid exposé.”
—Publishers Weekly STARRED Review

"A truly needed compendium of Big Oil's endless lies—Geoff Dembicki has done the world a tremendous favor. Hopefully we'll act on it; if not, it will be a great resource for any future historians wondering why and how we let the petroleum-industrial complex do such damage."
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Falter and cofounder of 350.org

"A terrific and engaging book with great new investigative material. The Petroleum Papers reveals how the Koch brothers, Exxon and other key players in the Canadian tar sands led a decades-long campaign to misinform the public about climate change. Dembicki has provided us with a compelling narrative of the efforts fossil fuel companies took to profit from planet destroying fuels despite extensive knowledge of the dangers.”
—Robert Brulle, Visiting Professor of Environment and Society, Brown University

“Dembicki's painstaking journalism and research help reveal a global kleptocracy as cold-blooded as they are deluded; this book belongs on the shelf next to Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, and Christopher Leonard’s Kochland. An essential chapter in the tragic story of our collective failure to stop catastrophic climate change.”
—Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene

“Dembicki documents how oil industry executives willfully ignored the findings of their own scientists, then spent nearly thirty years sowing confusion in order to paralyze public debate... Read this book on the power of lies and scream.”
—Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Tar Sands

"An exposé that reads like a novel... The Petroleum Papers is gripping even as it enrages."
—Seth Klein, author of A Good War

From the Publisher

★ 07/18/2022

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2022-06-17
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.

Kirkus Reviews