“Blowout” is a historical account of the current state of Big Oil & Gas and their long-standing onslaught on democracy in Western civilization in the US and EU. She takes the reader from the early days of the discovery of black gold and Standard Oil’s monopoly of the industry under the grip of John D. Rockefeller to the more recent days of the current industry as Vladimir Putin and Russia threatens Europe with the specter to turn off its supply of oil and gas.

Maddow also dives into the ways that natural gas was heralded as the savior to America from its dirty coal addiction has lead to a steady stream of earthquakes due to fracking at extreme distances deep in the earth in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Ohio and many other states situated on largest deposits of natural gas trapped under difficult to penetrate shale layers in the earth’s crust.

The ongoing theme in Maddow’s book is the way that industrial capitalists continually exploit the earth’s natural resources for profit and low prices with detrimental environmental impact, while continuously trying to downplay the effect of drilling or oil spills dumping hundreds of thousands of drums into the sea or man-made earthquakes or poisoning communities from fracking fluid, all collateral damage to Big Oil & Gas’ bottom-line and drive to higher revenues and bigger profits to private companies and their powerful CEOs. It is the constant clamoring by scientists and concerned citizens that our burning of fossil fuels for more than 100 years that is ever increasing has caused both a hole in our ozone layer, protection from the blazing sun beating down on the earth that governs the seasons and the increasingly erratic weather disasters that regularly threaten our communities and way of life.

Not only are these companies destroying the planet and negatively impacting everything around it, but it consistently threatens to “turn off the faucet” of the oil and gas powering the world today. They use this threat to get local, state and federal governments to bend to their every whim.

The most difficult part is that we have built our economy and infrastructure around our need for oil and gas giving the supplying companies all of the power and control. Until we ween ourselves off of fossil fuels and onto more renewable energy sources, we remain dependent on them. One thing that has actually made Big Oil & Gas change is when voters stand up and tell their elected officials, “No! We won’t keep enduring this. If something doesn’t change, we will vote you out of office.”

This book was an eye-opening look into current events and the geopolitical dynamics at play around the world due to the increasing demands for oil and gas.

Get a copy of it on Amazon here.