Oil, together with other fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, has been a part of human history for millennia- from serving in its tarry bituminous form as mortar between the bricks of Babylon and waterproofing Indigenous canoes in pre-conquest North America, to fueling the world’s catastrophic automobile age to driving a process of climate change that may signal the end of the human experiment on the planet. Don Gillmor, a Toronto based (and award winning) journalist and novelist who worked in the Alberta oil fields as a young man, has provided in this elegant little book, On Oil, a set of reflections on what oil means for modern life and the uncertain but increasingly dire way it is shaping our future.
Using a Voltaire quote in defense of “pocket pamphlets” as his epigraph, Gillmor clearly means for his little book to help make a revolution against the age of oil, and to stand in contrast to the “twenty-volume folios” of environmental analysis and polemic that precede (and, to be fair, inform) it. It will not be popular reading in the comfortable board rooms where petro executives and their political minions meet to plan our future. Spoiler alert, what these villains have in mind may well destabilize the planet’s climate and make human civilization crash and burn, as Gillmor so eloquently argues, deploying the crisp prose and extensive research that reflects his background in journalism and his choice of moving human interest details that reflect his skills as a novelist.
As this review is published, the latest federal election is receding into the rear-view mirror of history and Canada will be governed not by a Conservative regime that would have been unabashedly in thrall to Big Oil but by a Liberal regime that is, in the last analysis, also in thrall but more hypocritical about its servitude. Neither “option” offered much hope for meaningful change on this crucial front, and Alberta’s petro premier Danielle Smith is already making noises about disrupting Canadian unity in favor of more support for the oil lords she serves.
In the meantime, even if Kafka was right when he mused that there was hope, just none for us, this book is a valuable contribution to our shared public conversations about oil, climate change and the unwholesome interpenetration of the fossil fuel industries and our political masters.
And this interpenetration has been enormously profitable for Big Oil, if disastrous for the planet. Much of the petro-profit represents wealth transfers from working taxpayers via immense subsidies that mask just how inefficient and wasteful the industry is. The International Monetary Fund says that Canadian taxpayers subsidized the petroleum industry to the tune of $81 billion in 2020. (This figure includes “externalities”- costs inflicted on the environment and citizens outside the industry -as well as direct cash and tax subsidies. The equivalent global figure for subsidies around the world was $7 trillion in 2022.)
A more cautious estimate of Canadian petro subsidies that Gillmor uses, not including externalities, pegs these annual giveaways at $14 billion, which he contrasts with only $1 billion in annual Canadian support for renewable energy sources!
So, the often-cited argument that the world must choose between a strong economy and environmental sanity is a deceptive one. In fact, under the current status quo, we get world-scalding climate change and a “Robin Hood in Reverse” transfer of wealth from workers to the industries creating the damage. It gets worse. In the petro states like Alberta where the industry has effectively captured the government, in addition to underwriting obscene petro-profits, government actively discourages the growth of competing and renewable power sources like solar and wind to prop up oil profits. Under Danielle Smith, Alberta’s current premier and former oil industry lobbyist, the government imposed a moratorium on renewable energy projects and followed up on the end of the moratorium with new restrictions on where such projects could be built, closing off, as earlier reported in rabble by Kiah Lucero nearly 40 per cent of the province’s surface area from renewable development.
In addition to its disastrous environmental impacts, Big Oil comes with a long history of entanglement with toxic ideologies such as right-wing Evangelical Christianity and domineering patriarchy. Gillmor sketches in some of these connections over the past century and a half, although he could have usefully elaborated on both these points. It is instructive to know how these mind toxins have been blended into 20th and 21st century oil production just as surely as the chemicals used in fracking, but further analysis of how these elements interact and strengthen each other would have been welcome.
But this is a small criticism. All in all, Gillmor has given us an important book full of crucial facts and moving human portraits, all serving to remind us of the crisis we face and the ways that the crisis flows from our oil fields. Whether we will listen and act soon enough to stave off total disaster remains to be seen. But Gillmor has done his part. Now we should do ours.
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