Blog

The Best Books on Oil

2010-08-21T13:49:15Z

The Wall Street Journal runs a weekly column in which an author lists the five best books on a particular subject. The Journal invited me to write the column this week. My five best books on oil are (drum roll…) Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company, Anthony Sampson’s The Seven Sisters, Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, Abdeldrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day. The story is posted on the Journal’s site and on mine.

Iconoclasm and the “Ground Zero Mosque”

2010-08-14T13:11:43Z

My latest story, in New York magazine, focuses on the controversy over the so-called ground zero mosque. The piece draws on lessons of iconoclasm in the modern era, from the destruction of the World Trade Center to the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station and the theft in 1911 of the Mona Lisa (more people lined up to see the empty spot where the stolen masterpiece had hung than visited the museum to see the actual artifact). As the story says, “In a city with more than its share of famous buildings, one that doesn’t even exist has already become iconic. It is a modern alchemy of symbols in which the act of destruction doubles as an act of creation. The thing is, the opponents of the community center appear to have failed to understand the double-edged consequences of the preemptive iconoclasm they are trying to achieve.”

Fresh Air Does Crude World

2010-08-12T17:17:13Z

NPR’s always-excellent literary program, Fresh Air, features an interview with me today. Click here for audio and transcript.

The Ministry of Oil Defense

2010-08-05T17:36:42Z

That’s the nifty headline Foreign Policy uses for my latest story about the connection between oil, war and American military spending. A key question the story asks is this one—“To what extent is oil linked to the wars we fight and the more than half-trillion dollars we spend on our military every year?” The quick answer is, it’s strongly linked, and it costs a lot. For more, click here or here.

A Big Win For Transparency

2010-07-16T14:56:36Z

A last-second and little-noted victory for transparency—the financial regulation bill approved by Congress includes an amendment requiring extractive companies (oil, gas, gold, coal, etc) that are registered with the SEC to disclose all payments to foreign governments. Great news for the international transparency movement.

What’s In A Cover?

2010-07-06T16:43:22Z

Vintage, which is publishing the paperback of Crude World on August 10, has done a wonderful job on the cover design, methinks.

The New Publishers

2010-06-22T06:29:35Z

Stepping into the void left by mainstream media reducing their foreign coverage, the VII Photo agency has teamed up with Medecins sans Frontiers to produce a multi-part multi-media series on world hunger. Showcases the work of Antonin Kratochvil, who’s always amazing, and Ron Haviv, among others. Here’s the link to the website; one of the essays is below.

To BP Or Not To BP?

2010-06-08T13:08:56Z

“The truth is that we care mightily when BP wreaks havoc in the Gulf of Mexico, but we pay scant attention when Shell harms Nigeria, when Chevron pollutes Ecuador, when PDVSA stains Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, when Suncor extracts oil from tar sands in Canada. It’s understandable that as we watch the live webfeed of the gusher, we want to know what BP officials knew and when they knew it, and we want to know why the Obama administration didn’t react sooner. But if we don’t broaden the horizons of our questions, we run the risk of reinforcing a fairy tale that says we can have our oil and our environment, too. The worst outcome of the mess in the Gulf would be the perpetuation of the conceit that error and greed can be regulated out of the worldwide oil industry.”—To BP Or Not To BP, By Peter Maass

Öl - Das Blutige Geschäft

2010-06-01T14:23:38Z

This is for the readers of my blog who speak German (a population estimated at 1-2). German radio has posted what appears to be (if Google Translate can be relied upon) an interesting discussion about the German version of my book. Austrian radio has chimed in, too. Cicero excerpted a chapter in its April issue.

Oil in Ecuador…

2010-05-25T16:57:16Z

An oil pit and gas flare in the Oriente region of Ecuador. Chevron faces a multi-billion dollar lawsuit for pollution in the region during the 1970s and 1980s. (Time/Ivan Kashinsky)

...and in Louisiana

2010-05-25T16:52:44Z

A dragonfly tries to clean itself as it is stuck to marsh grass covered in oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in Garden Island Bay on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. (AP/Gerald Herbert)

5,000 Barrels a Day

2010-05-13T02:09:18Z

The amount of oil that is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at BP’s broken well. The video shows one of the two main rupture points.
Update: Scientists who have seen the video say the leak is much more than 5,000 barrels a day.

We Are All Nigerians Now

2010-05-04T21:19:46Z

In an interview on the marvelous “The World” radio program, I describe the ways in which the spill in the Gulf of Mexico has brought home to America, quite literally, the environmental costs of oil extraction that countries like Nigeria have had to endure for decades. If America is to awaken, it needs to understand that drilling less in its own waters is not the remedy; the solution is drilling less everywhere.

Who Is This Photographer?

2010-04-28T22:20:44Z

I’m trying to find the photographer who is on the tank in the pictures below (which are stills from a video). This was one of the first Marine tanks into Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003. If you know who the photographer is, please email me via peter at petermaass dot com. Thanks!
Update: I found him.

Vive la France!

2010-04-25T15:59:09Z

My French publisher, Autrement, has just come out with their version of Crude World. The French title is Pétrole Brut. The cover is fantastic, I think. For Autrement’s webpage about Pétrole Brut, click here. The Dutch edition—the title is Ruwe Wereld—has just been published, too; for more info on that, click here.