Blowout

Rachel Maddow offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil and gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea, exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia's rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia's rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the United States, and the West's most important alliances. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. This book is a clarion call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest industry on Earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of predatory oil executives and their enablers. The stakes have never been higher.