41 pages • 1-hour read
Blowout
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Chapters 28-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary: “Constituency Trumps Everything”
Maddow opens the chapter by detailing Aubrey McClendon’s death, just one day after he was criminally indicted for charges related to his financial dealings. McClendon got into his SUV and drove into a concrete wall, in an apparent act of suicide. The excesses of his life as the Chesapeake Energy CEO would turn out to be a cautionary tale for how Big Oil and Gas can corrupt. As public school teachers in Oklahoma were paying for classroom supplies out of their own pockets, the oilmen of Oklahoma had built their fortunes off the tax breaks passed by the state legislature. Maddow writes:
“The real genius of the oil and gas industry is the magic trick it does—again and again—in which it uses the hugely remunerative prospect of oil and gas profits to hypnotize otherwise sentient landowners and lawmakers and even whole countries into plighting their troth to the drillers” (347).
As Maddow transitions into the final chapter, she argues that the only way to hold an industry as powerful and formidable as oil and gas accountable is to do it ourselves.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Containment”
In the final chapter Maddow reviews some of the book’s central figures, such as Rex Tillerson, Harold Hamm, and Teodorin Obiang. She also establishes the Trump presidency as a time of great promise—for Big Oil. As Maddow was finishing the manuscript for the book, the Mueller Report was released, a document that contained countless mentions of American and Russian meetings, tying some of the same role players, such as Paul Manafort, to the US presidential election and Russian interests. The exact language of the report reads:
“The investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the [Trump] Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts” (360).
This interference by the Russians and compromise by the Trump campaign tie the Russian and US oil and gas industries together, just as Rosneft and ExxonMobil partnered years earlier. The answer to the problems Maddow exposes in this book is simple: Democracy is the only hope against an industry that has already left so much wreckage in its wake.
Chapters 28-29 Analysis
Maddow uses her voice most clearly in the final two chapters. Extensively researched and meticulously tied together, Blowout becomes more personal in these final chapters, as Maddow clarifies the state of affairs today as they relate to Big Oil and Gas. When she alludes to the Mueller Report, the connection between Russian and US interests is made painstakingly clear. Russia needed a president who would ensure that its economic interests, which depend oil and gas, would be served. And Putin was willing to do whatever it took to ensure this happened. In Maddow’s final rallying cry for democracy to win this battle for regulation and accountability, she also cautions that Big Oil and Gas may actually have the power to destroy democracy altogether.
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