Anchoring the book is Russian president Vladimir Putin's cutthroat petropolitics. Maddow (Drift), host of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, surveys Big Oil's recent misdeeds, including Western oil companies' support for Equatorial Guinea's Obiang dictatorship, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and blocking rules to regulate fracking practices that cause earthquake swarms and pollution in Oklahoma (while the same companies demand tax breaks). Petroleum-industry profits inexorably subvert good governance, argues this scattershot indictment of the oil and natural gas industries. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.” It’s in her nature.”īlowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson.

She deftly shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Vladimir Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West’s most important alliances, and the United States. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry. And in 2014, revolutionaries in Ukraine raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia-including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove-was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. “A rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting, and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today.”- The New York Times Book Review Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy-Winner Take All.

Rachel maddow book blowout