Oil be damned
December 18, 2009 11:17 AM   Subscribe

Peter Maass is a journalist who writes about the oil business. Are petro-execs intrinsically more corrupt than other businessmen?
and Scenes from the violent twilight of oil.
He now has a new book: Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. In september Harpers asked him Six Questions.
posted by adamvasco (11 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
(I built his old site! in coldfusion, thank god he updated)
posted by mathowie at 11:20 AM on December 18, 2009


(Clarification - The book is called "Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil". The review from The Nation is titled "Lessons of Darkness")
posted by adamvasco at 11:38 AM on December 18, 2009


Scenes from the violent twilight of oil.

Showtime, 9PM: The Violent Twilight of Oil (2012). Pouty, hardworking teenage vampire CEOs slowly destroy the earth in the service of their petrochemical corporations. (PG)
posted by gurple at 11:58 AM on December 18, 2009 [4 favorites]


Lessons of Darkness
posted by acro at 12:05 PM on December 18, 2009


I recently re-read Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization. Mumford was a communist which he does not admit until about page 450 although it is obvious early on. One thing that jumped out of Mumford's book is his contention that resource extraction industry--he mostly means mining of tin and copper and gold and silver for his earliest examples--has always been, since before written history, been performed by slaves, prisoners, and other societal dregs. In the United States and Britain we have a nice sugar coat of gloss upon this fact. And it is certainly not absolutely true. (For example Martin Luther's father was sort of a gentleman miner.)

If you go to a place like Nigeria Mumford's idea will be right in your face twenty-four hours per day seven days per week.
posted by bukvich at 1:05 PM on December 18, 2009 [4 favorites]


Maass previously gained attention when he confirmed the identity of "Where is Raed"'s Salam Pax, who had worked for him as a translator. Maass didn't know of Pax's secret identity at the time.

Also: Maass, previously on MeFi.
posted by zarq at 3:08 PM on December 18, 2009


Are petro-execs intrinsically more corrupt than other businessmen?

Yes.
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:42 PM on December 18, 2009


"Just as the railroad companies did not lead the way into automotive production, I wouldn’t expect and wouldn’t want oil companies to control the next generation of energy technologies." - Harpers, Six Questions

This worries me too. Quoted this so I can come back to check this statement 5-10 years from now.
posted by peppito at 4:59 PM on December 18, 2009 [1 favorite]


Hmm, this tangentially reminds me, I was chatting to a PhD student working on an oil related engineering project recently; he told me their team made a mistake which cost 1 1/2 million dollars and it didn't matter.
posted by yoHighness at 5:57 PM on December 18, 2009


This worries me too. Quoted this so I can come back to check this statement 5-10 years from now.

I've been posting this every chance I get of late, so here again is Hermann Scheer on "the structural transformation of the energy sector" just getting underway with the dawn of industrial-scale renewable energy - which Scheer argues basically guarantees that no one fully invested in the current energy regime will ever be truly committed to its eclipse. (Which, when you think about it, is dead obvious, and yet rarely stated. Which is just one reason why I think Hermann Scheer is pretty much the most important progressive politician alive today.)
posted by gompa at 12:29 AM on December 19, 2009


Mod note: fixed title of book in fpp
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:30 AM on December 19, 2009


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