Private Empire


Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Main Points:

  •  Exxon and Mobil were both descendants of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller's oil monopoly. Following anti-trust laws in 1911, the two companies became private companies placed in an existential crisis: replace 1.5 billion barrels of oil/year. 
  • In March 23, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker crashes into the reef of Prince William Sound near Alaska. This results in a destructive oil spill and a tightening up of risk management at the company. 
  •  Following 2000, when Exxon and Mobil joined- Exxon inherited 5 separatist insurgencies in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Chad,  Venezuela and Aceh, Indonesia.

Adam Hochschild of the New York Times reviewed the book in a 2012 articled titled "A Well-Oiled Machine".

Foreign Policy's David Biello also reviewed the book in the Oil and Glory section of the online newsource.

For a great in-depth analysis of the book, one can watch an interview of author Steve Coll by the New America Foundation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Consider a Spherical Cow

Image
Consider a Spherical Cow: A Course in Environmental Problem Solving by John Harte Main Points: What is the "spherical cow" joke ? The phrase comes from a joke about theoreticians I first heard as a graduate student. Milk production at a dairy farm was low so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the farmer received the write-up and opened it to read on the first line: "Consider a spherical cow..." The Approach : The spherical cow approach to problem solving involves the stripping away of unnecessary detail, so that only the essentials remain. Of course, approaching the complex world from the spherical cow perspective
Read more

Should We Risk It?

Image
Should We Risk It? by Daniel M. Kammen & David M. Hassenzahl Main Points: " I began by trying to quantify technical risks, thinking that if they were 'put into perspective' through comparison with familiar risks we could better judge their social acceptability. I am ashamed now of my naivety, although I have the excuse that this was more than 20 years ago, while some people are still doing it today. "- Harry Otway (1992) Background: Daniel Kammen teaches a course at UC Berkeley called "Environmental Classics" where they rotate through key papers/books like Amory Lovins' paper "A Road Not Taken", the Wedges paper. They read the original items- the critiques that came at the time and the critiques that come after. Only Silent Spring  becomes a fixture in the course year after year.  Take a look at Kammen's lab RAEL and BREG  for sustainability tools and what tools we need to alter the dialogue around clean energy or sus
Read more

Read one Book a Week

I once participated in an energy club in grad school. The club was composed mainly of grad students from several departments and disciplines - engineering, business, and law. Our mission was to foster a diverse energy community and enable interdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge exchange, and professional development. Over the course of two years, the club grew in size from 20 to over 100 students, creating its first alumni mentoring program, taking tours of several energy companies, hosting its first energy case competition, installing the largest solar panel array in the local neighborhood, building a vertical axis wind turbine, and collaborating with several organizations around the nation. I loved it. Mainly because of all the great friends who made my time in the club truly memorable. Much of what we were trying to do was to understand the energy environment from those who worked, taught, and preached about it daily. While talks and small group dinners got us interested, I fe
Read more