Editorial Content for Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

Imagining Rachel Maddow tracking down facts on a news story reminds me of an analogy I once heard about TV’s “60 Minutes”: “The worst day of your life is about to begin when you see the ‘60 Minutes’ camera crew at your door.” Well, wake up big oil and gas industry: you are about to learn what it feels like when the Lioness of television cable news and bestselling author stalks you across the world for over a century and a half to ring your collective bells.

BLOWOUT is an information-packed, often witty and absorbing account of how America --- and eventually most of the planet --- became addicted to this elemental and ultimately destructive substance lurking in the bowels of the earth. Maddow likens the discovery of “rock oil” on a farm in western Pennsylvania on August 28, 1859 to the big bang that would evolve over the next 150 years into what she describes as “the industry’s prevailing culture: the tools of its trade, its financing, its administration, its ethic, and its reach.” And its politics.

"BLOWOUT is an information-packed, often witty and absorbing account of how America --- and eventually most of the planet --- became addicted to this elemental and ultimately destructive substance lurking in the bowels of the earth."

Early in the book, we learn of the genie that would be loose from its bottle in a forested area in the Grand Valley near Grand Junction, Colorado. In 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission announced “a preliminary pre-detonation briefing” for the 36 families who lived within a five-mile radius to “evacuate temporarily” for Project Rulison. Neil Armstrong would soon take his “One small step for man…” and we were camping near the home of old school friends in that very place. Say what? A detonation of a what? We already had packed up so we could watch the moon landing unfold live on TV. Thus we missed the briefing that would inform attendees of this upcoming event.

A 1,250-pound, 43-kiloton nuclear weapon --- nearly three times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima --- would be detonated after being lowered to “8,426 feet beneath the earth’s surface, where it vaporized enough rock to open a 300-foot-high, 152-foot-wide cavern. The ‘fracture zone’ radiated out 433 feet.” It would register a 5.5 on the Richter scale. Maddow had me at “Grand Junction, Colorado.” Once she linked the date relative to the moon landing, I could not stop turning the pages.

The test equipment designed to collect data on krypton and tritium contamination failed, as did future attempts, until 1973 after larger and more clustered A-bombs were “detonated simultaneously, at three separate depths within 851 feet of one another.” In the same area. Since it resulted in only 317 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and radiation was increasing, the cost-benefit ratio didn’t pay off. Thus ended the nation’s first experiment in nuclear fracking.

This is just a tasty bite of what awaits you in this extraordinary saga of the extensive, horrendously costly and corrupt venture to satisfy the ever-growing global appetite for gas and oil. Do you recall the catastrophic incident in 2010 when British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon explosion coated the Gulf of Mexico with nearly 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel, resulting in dead sea life, not to mention human lives being lost and millions of dollars of business losses? Exxon Mobile, headed by Rex Tillerson (who later would become President Trump’s first Secretary of State) was busy making tens of billions of dollars in Nigeria and elsewhere, so he dodged a bullet. It was only days after the Deepwater Horizon event that his aging pipeline ruptured, leaking nearly a million gallons of oil near a series of coastal villages in Nigeria. Who was reporting anything that happened in Nigeria anyway?

Other interesting themes here include the Oklahoma fracking earthquake scandal and the story of the beleaguered geologist who landed the job of charting those incidents. Did you watch the TV series “The Americans” about the Russian couple living as Americans in a Maryland suburb, passing along intel to Moscow? While the show was not purported to be based on an actual incident, it easily could have been. Russia was training spies to do this very thing, but America and most other nations are taking advantage of our “useful idiots.”

The publication of BLOWOUT takes us almost, but not quite, up to breaking news (who can keep up with that?). Ukraine oil vis-à-vis Russia comes up late in the book.

Maddow muses: “But ask yourself this: What is the point of outrage at oil and gas producers? What good can possibly come of it? It’s like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s who she is; it’s in her nature."

“You just can’t make this stuff up,” as Maddow is fond of saying on her MSNBC program. You can’t blame the Lioness for what she reports. It’s in her nature.