Blowout

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.