EvC BONUS: Upton Sinclair's Oil! - Climate Book Reviews Podcast with Michael Tondre

Ed Whittingham & Roger Thompson discuss Upton Sinclair's classic novel - Oil!

We're sharing another episode of Ed's occasional podcast, Climate Book Reviews, this time discussing the book that was the inspiration for the critically acclaimed 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

Ed and co-host Dr. Roger Thompson (Associate Dean and Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University in New York) chat with Michael Tondry, editor of a critical edition reissue by Penguin Books.

Michael talks about the history of the book, the events that gave birth to it, and the book’s depiction of both the hope and horrors of oil exploration and extraction. 

About Your Hosts:

Roger Thompson is a professor and writer at Stony Brook University. He began his career working with environmental literature and nature writing and established with Ed Whittingham an environmental internship program in Banff, Alberta for students at a VMI, a military college. His most recent environmental book, No Word for Wilderness: Italy’s Grizzlies and the Race to Save the Rarest Bears on Earth (Ashland Creek), documents the attempts by grassroots activists and university faculty to preserve the Marsican bears of Abruzzo, and it reveals for the first time the mafia’s attempts to use National Parks to fleece EU subsidies.

Ed Whittingham is a clean energy policy/finance professional specializing in renewable electricity generation and transmission, carbon capture, carbon removal and low carbon transportation. He is a Public Policy Forum fellow and formerly the executive director of the Pembina Institute, a national clean energy think tank.

Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ed Whittingham: Hey there, it's Ed. I'm sharing another episode of my occasional pod called Climate Book Reviews that I co-host with my old friend, Dr. Roger Thompson, an associate Dean and professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University in New York. Our goal through the pod is to curate some climate and energy related books worth knowing about.

The episode is from February when Roger and I discussed Upton Sinclair's Classic Novel Oil with Michael Tondry, editor of a critical edition reissue by Penguin Books. The novel was the Loose inspiration for the critically acclaimed 2007 movie. There will be Blood for which Daniel Day Lewis won the Best Actor Oscar.

Michael talks about the history of the book, the events that gave birth to it, both the hope and horrors of oil exploration. And extraction. For more info, check out climate book reviews.com. Now over to Roger. 

[00:00:57] Roger Thompson: Welcome everyone to climate book reviews. We're back again, and this time we're delving again into the world of fiction.

Last time we dealt with some contemporary fiction. This time we're, uh, dealing with Upton Sinclair and, uh, really bright mind that helped oversee the republication of this kind of seminal book around. Oil and the petroleum economy. Um, I wanted to introduce Michael Tore, um, he's here to talk about that book as well as his book on Oil by Bloomsbury, and of course, introduce my co-host, ed Whittingham.

[00:01:27] Ed Whittingham: Thanks, Roger. Um, I think this is the first time we've had someone who isn't an author of a book, but someone talking about someone else's work, but I can't imagine someone more qualified to talk about. This book and frankly, the catalyst for my introduction to Upton Sinclair's whole body of work on a fascinating topic.

So I'm, I'm super excited for, uh, for our discussion today. 

[00:01:48] Roger Thompson: Yeah. Ed, did you know the book, the Jungle, or? No, that was, uh, that's one i, I had read years ago, so I was aware of this book, so I was 

[00:01:55] Ed Whittingham: aware of, uh, the Jungle and King Cole, but shamefully, I'd not read any Upton Sinclair, uh, like. Perhaps half of the English speaking world.

I, I saw there will be blood, but I know it's only loosely based on oil. I don't know if we'll, we'll get into the differences, but yeah. The, the, the book is, is a fantastic read. And Michael, your, your introduction to the book is, is also fantastic. 

[00:02:22] Michael Tondry: Thank you so much and thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here and to be talking about Sinclair and Oil and how it fits into our current moment and so, and I'd be really exciting to delve into all that stuff.

[00:02:33] Roger Thompson: That's great. Well, why don't we start there then, and we're curious a little bit about your background and you have any connection to the oil or petroleum industries other than kind of being in, uh. A person in the United States and, and how did you come to know this book and get so interested that you would, uh, get so invested in going through a critical edition of it, which is a lot of work.

A lot of work. I. 

[00:02:53] Michael Tondry: I started as a 19th century British scholar and found myself increasingly interested in questions of energy and work, uh, particularly in the context of 19th century thermodynamics, the science of energy. And the final chapter of my first monograph talked about the formation of thermodynamics in the context of, uh, Victorian fiction and some of the common culture of letters, uh, by which, uh, ID is about.

Energy circulated. And so I think that chapter brought to mind further questions about the material specificity of coal oil, natural gas that I wanted to explore in greater detail. And so that led me to, uh, a project about oil, and I began to develop that over the first part of 2020. Uh, when I think like many of my academic friends in March, April.

Of that year, I found myself, uh, wrestling with, uh, changed demands for work and labor, uh, in the classroom and beyond. And so, uh, I thought instead that I might develop a set of public facing, uh, contributions. And so when I looked, looked into Sinclair's Novel Oil and saw that it had not yet been produced as a scholarly edition, uh, it just went outta copyright in 2023 and.

Uh, I got to work on that and, um, uh, found a number of really interesting things about its publication history and, um, some of the biographical details surrounding the text. 

[00:04:19] Roger Thompson: I. Were there particular ones that really caught your attention? I mean, obvi for the, uh, for listeners who haven't read, and let us encourage you and let us encourage you to pick up this new edition, which reads beautifully and the introduction's just great, but there are, uh, significant, it's, it's loosely modeled after, uh, kind of oil bearing of the early 20th century and, and, uh, dramatizes what can become known as a teapot dome scandal.

[00:04:43] Michael Tondry: Yeah, the teapot teapot dome scandal of 20. Uh, 1921 to 23 when a series of public officials were caught in, uh, a set of bribery actions, um, by which three different landlords were parceled out to private oil corporations. And so, uh, kind of uncannily anticipating some of the exes of our current moment.

Yeah. In terms of that question about the changes and, um, sort of genetic processes by which. Sinclair wrote the novel. Um, interestingly, the exclamation that marks its title came belatedly after the fact. Um, Sinclair wrote it and found out just as he was beginning to put it into press that there was another novel called Oil, um, that was published just beforehand.

And so that iconic. Exclamation, which looks like an oil gusher bursting out of the ground came as a last minute gimmick to skirt. Copyright restriction. There's a longer story here, I think, and perhaps more interesting one as well about Sinclair's biographical ties to the oil industry. Um, Sinclair had moved to Southern California in 1916 and, uh, had, uh, been privy to a massive oil scramble that kicked off in 1921.

Just at the same time as the Teapot Dome scandal, uh, right in his backyard. And so, uh, the Shell Oil cartel discovered oil in, uh, massive quantities in Signal Hill and beyond, uh, in Southern California. And, uh, Sinclair's partner bought two different land lots in the, uh, uh, with the idea of selling it to oil interests and the Sinclair's witness to kind of.

Communal discussion about how to sell the land disintegrate into sort of big, uh, configuration. And this event gave Sinclair the idea, uh, for a larger novel about how oil corrodes democratic norms and principles. You know, that's, uh, I think an interesting sort of anecdotal part of the, the narrative.

There's a sort of a turn of the screw here, which is that, uh, Sinclair. Like his partner benefited from the oil boom. They both found ways to, uh, profit from the very system of extraction and accumulation that, uh, Sinclair set out to critique. Uh, Sinclair typed the end, uh, of his novel just as his partner cashed in on her land.

Is that right? Right at that moment, exactly. We the same. Um, there's a, there's a kind of cautionary tale and a kind of, uh, sort of meta story about how oil is so totalizing as to be a sort of, um, you know, uh, pan social substrate. It, uh, it's something we can't help be, uh, a part of immersed in. So the question perhaps isn't, uh, how to get.

Swim some sense of objective traction on oil, but how to find ways of critiquing its systemic norms by building certain collaborations and modes of critique that might, uh, build 

[00:07:36] Ed Whittingham: towards structural change. You know, there are so many parallels in the book to today. This is a fascinating thing for me as I was reading it set more than a hundred years ago, published.

A little less than a hundred years ago, but I think by, by a couple years. And you know, the whole discussion of oil and, uh, oil and gas independence versus the super majors, oil and gas producing jurisdictions. I live in one oil boom times. What that does to communities with social rights of, of workers, labor rights, we parallel to climate justice, all sorts of things.

And going back to what you said, Michael, about the exclamation mark. Upton Sinclair Liberally uses the exclamation mark throughout the text, and I found that actually, I found that captivating because it's like it's capturing the optimism of j Arnold Ross, the dad, capturing the optimism of Bunny as the son, and just that whole era where communities are being transformed by Derricks.

In a matter of months. And it's almost like he was anticipating our modern age when we deliberately use exclamation marks and pretty much every text message and emails, email message these days, actually, 

[00:08:46] Michael Tondry: ab absolutely, it's, it's almost a kind of, uh, graphic emoji, you know, it's, it stands in for the big emphatic.

Structures of feeling that oil incites the, uh, big emotional reactions that it sets off. And, um, I think, um, you know, by the standard of modern, like writing workshops, he's a bad writer. He pulls us rather than shows us. Uh, but that's, I think precisely why, uh, this novel is so fascinating. Uh, it tries to capture, to map the panoramic conditions of oil and to hold together both faces of the oil industry, you know, both its beneficiaries.

And, um, those who are most subjugated up and down the commodity chains. So, uh, absolutely. Yeah. 

[00:09:29] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, it's such an ambitious text and I would say it only sort of works like it's a great story, but it is hugely ambitious in all the threads he's trying to interweave. But yes, so many, so many parallels to what's happening today.

I should also say war as well, in the way that war has this effect of dampening, you know, any kind of social justice or perhaps in our case, a climate justice movement. 

[00:09:50] Roger Thompson: Or discussion of those things. Right. Entirely. Um, and I would, I would add in there also in our, our current moment in the way I think this book resonates and is worthy of people spending some time going through.

And, and I, I do think it's, there's, there's moments where there's great yarns. I mean, it reads is a very modern text, I think. But this connection to, uh, the evangelical, or at least fundamentalist kinda religious movements and the way these things become interwoven. With capitalism's reliance on oil industry.

Um, you know, I, I, I think these things all kind of speak. I want to, I want give you a chance here. Say a little bit more. I noticed, and when you're talking about shell, you use the, the word, and for our listeners, I'm curious what you say, use the word cartel. So I'm curious about, uh, your, your language towards there.

[00:10:34] Michael Tondry: Yeah, I think that, um, you know, I would say that's an accurate description of the historical use of paramilitary force, forms of sanctioned violence and, uh, modes of coaptation and, uh, territorial dispossession, uh, that have historically defined both the shell cartel. And other oil syndicates, um, headquartered in Northern Europe and the us and so would use that as a sort of descriptor for a set of modes of energy accumulation and value production that continues through this moment.

[00:11:06] Roger Thompson: Uh, well, I mean, uh, and along these lines and, and kind of, I, um. I appreciate, you know, the carefulness of that. The, one of the things that's helpful to me on this is the degree to which I, the book also for me, uh, provided at least seems for education, right? Um, my lack of awareness about US involvement in, say, Siberia, in as in Bolshevik.

This is, um, I'm, I shamefully admit that I. Utterly unaware of this, right? Until this, and then I went on a little, I went on a reading binge, right? Just trying to understand, 'cause you know, it's a piece of fiction, but it's relying on historical contingencies and exigencies and I wanted to learn more. And this was utterly illuminating to me.

And in, in some ways, regardless of anyone's particular politics, to have a text open that up for me was really, really helpful and really illuminating and just, I really appreciated it. So, um, really great. 

[00:11:58] Michael Tondry: Yeah. Uh, and you know, Sinclair was writing at a moment of great optimism about the Russian and, uh, this was before the atrocities that followed.

And so, uh, right, uh, around the time of 1917 and its, its aftermath and, uh, the sort of ran possibilities for structural recon, reconfiguration that he saw for workers. And, um, just to go back to that, you know, that point about the. Cartel. There's a similar moment of optimism leading up to, uh, uh, to the, this, this, uh, set of decades.

I think that, um, in 19 10, 19 11, the standard oil cartel had been forcibly, uh, partitioned into a set of, into a set of 27 regional units. Uh, it was declared monopoly forced to be broken down by the federal government. Part because, uh, muckraker, like Ida Tarbell had exposed the excesses of the standard oil cartel.

And so this was a, a big jubilant moment of thinking that writing could do important kinds of cultural and political work and, and had a, an interesting aftermath when, of course, the standard oil cartel doubled down, retrenched, uh, and there was a moment of petro retrofitting, so to speak, with the teens and, uh, the roaring twenties.

And so there's a question here implicitly about how fiction can do something that nonfiction cannot, uh, how a novel like oil with an exclamation mark might be able to capture the individual personal intimacies that make possible oil culture as, as well as the big structural conditions to map their relationships.

And perhaps to offer us, um, a set of otherwise visions about how we might relate to energy. Again, in ways that Ida b Ida, Ida Herb's book, uh, the history of Standard Oil was not successful necessarily in, in doing in full. And so, um, I, I would sort of just add that to your point about the cartels. 

[00:13:52] Ed Whittingham: It reminded me as I was reading this book where I thought you have the Jay Arnold Ross character, the dad, and I know so many of those characters.

I live, and it depends on your opinion. I live either in an oil and gas producing jurisdiction or I live in a petro state, but I know so many of these characters call them old timers who will talk about the, the, the halian days of the sixties, seventies and eighties. And although here in Alberta, Canada, its oil boom.

Started earlier than that, uh, a little after California, but not that long after California. It really picked up and you had these entrepreneurs, these sympathetic entrepreneurs like the father character like Jay Arnold, Ross, and for those of you whose entry point to the book is only through the film, there will be blood.

Just know that the, the, the character is very different from what Daniel Day Lewis plays his character and he is, he is at times. Malevolent. He's at times sympathetic. He's at times a wonderful father showing his son the ropes so that he too can, can become an oil man. He's at times caring and wanting to take care of a family on whose land or formally their land.

He's developing this, this massive empire, but he also. Pretty much hoodwinked them outta their land and took advantage of their religiosity. And the people I know are kind of like that and including their relationship with climate change because pretty soon, and, and the people today, you knew the science, you could understand the signs unless you had complete cognitive dissonance, you know, some of the social challenges that your industry was causing.

They're not all bad people. They really think that they're doing the world solid and at the same time they're. Incredibly conflicted, and maybe that is more reflected in his son's character Bunny, who seems conflicted throughout the entire book and doesn't really resolve that conflict than the father.

But yeah, he was so relatable in those terms. For someone who is kicked around the oil and gas industry. Wow. Yeah, that's 

[00:16:05] Michael Tondry: absolutely fascinating and I'm wanting to hear more about that and how you see the connection between, uh, Alberta and this, uh, more, you know, earlier formative moment in, in US culture, the relation between tough oil and, uh, the sort of turn to the easy oil, uh, pea petroleum moment.

But just to, to speak to your point about the, um. In fact, this is a novel that formally only kind of works. Uh, I think that's right. Uh, Sinclair was structuring the text as a kind of buildings, Roman, a coming of age novel in which we see Bunny move from a conflicted state of youth to adulthood in a way that traditionally tracks the growth of the nation.

The birth of the industrial, uh, nation state here, bunny, as he develops, can't quite come to terms with, uh, um, the formation of. Us petro state and, um, Sinclair seems to come to a sense of self conflict, a loss formally as to what to do with that. And so, um, there as with the conflicted relationship with his father, with James Arnold, Ross, Sr.

There's a sense that Sinclair is wrestling with the possibilities for what oil might bring for fiction, as well as the impasses, the contradictions and ambivalences that, uh, that they result in formally and aesthetically in trying to tell a coherent narrative, um, that moves from youth to adulthood from a sense of, uh, the nation in its early phase to, uh, a mature petro state and beyond.

And the limits of that, that, that way of thinking. You know, I know that we were talking. At the outset about biographical relationships to the oil and natural gas, um, sector. And, uh, I'd be curious to know more about that as, as, as you both were reading it. 

[00:17:46] Roger Thompson: Yeah, I, and I to pick up on an earlier conversation and, and I wanna get back to that question you posed to Ed also, which I think is great.

You know, resonance is what contemporary Alberta, I think it's really fascinating. But, uh, as I've shared a little bit previously on previous episodes, I'm, I'm a child of a successful oilman and in many ways, uh, this book. Resonated on very deep levels for me. This kind of, uh, bunny I could relate to incredibly in multiple ways, the successes and the, the energy and the excitement and the adoration for, uh, what comes from a successful entrepreneur.

And the father here at times reminded me. Much of my dad. It is hard to describe the degree, you know, other times than not, but times. Absolutely. You know, one reason I like Sinclair's kind of approach here, regardless of, you know, whether fully successful, uh, novel or not, um, this willingness to tread a, a difficult mind, at least I, that's how I read it as.

Trying to give voice to both of these sides. Right? There's, you know, you mentioned earlier Sinclair's, uh, own benefiting from an oil rush, right? Essentially in a very famous area where, where my dad was successful as well. Signal Hill, my dad, first time he rose to full leadership was with Signal Oil many years ago.

And, and so. To read, uh, uh, about or to hear Sinclair having his own successes there. And, and as you mentioned, you know, he benefits at the same time that this book's published or this kind of final thing that, that's super interesting and, and there's ways in which obviously the American state has.

Tremendously benefited. And, and we all, as a result, the rise of our middle class has come on, on the backs of, to some degree, not just, uh, the rise of the petroleum as an industry, um, and fossil fuel industry, but also on the emergence of a working class and middle class that, that, uh, had to fight for, uh, labor rights and that that was a messy battle.

And so all this is. Been really helpful to me, but also created some struggles. I would say also stylistically, there was something there. This text starts with a lot of second person stuff, and it was catching me each time. I was like, oh no, is he meaning me? Like, you know, this, there's something really powerful about the second person, but it's also, it's tough, right?

It's a, it's a tough way to write a novel. 

[00:20:06] Ed Whittingham: Well, well, Roger, I, I gotta ask because a, you know, we should call you Bunny throughout the remainder of the episode, but. B, have you, maybe you've lived it. I think the way that the novel opens with bunny riding with his dad in like a flash car speeding down these ribbons of asphalt, emphasizing it and you know, being able to speed and, and evade the attention of the police while doing so, such a metaphor for freedom as speeding to this community where they're going to wildcat and then it turns out they get to this meeting.

Of, of landowners and they tear themselves apart and they can't come to any agreement and then they end up missing out on the, on the big boom. But was that little Roger at some point? Like, did you ever go like prospecting with your dad? 

[00:20:54] Roger Thompson: No, I did not. I did not. At at least, I mean, I went to office with him a fair bit as a kid with my, I have a twin brother and so he and I would go and, and my brother ended up doing some work in the oil industry and I have a.

Sister who works in is an oceanographic engineer, has worked in the oil industry. So it's hard to say it left us right in certain ways. I, I am far from highly educated in that domain, and in fact, most of it's come since as I've become interested in issues around climate change and I. That's where some of these questions really got lived out.

I, you know, my, my dad was a profoundly just an ethical man. He, we wanted things done right and by people, but at the same time, it's, you know, I don't know all the inter imaginations of large corporations and, and what costs those had. There's trade-offs and what I appreciated here is that we, with Bunny and with his dad, we have a kind of front row seat to some of those trade offs, and I do you my dad.

Passed a few years ago. I, I would love to have talked to him about this, but my dad also was certainly, he loved the halon days. It's, it, you know, it was kind of mad men era rush and excitement and there's an romance to that and an allure that is hard to do. And I, I benefited from it in ways that put me in a different place, and I thank him deeply for that.

Even as I recognize that that came with certain strings attached that. You know, when you're young, when you're Bunny's age, you don't, uh, associate at the beginning. But of course, he, as Michael mentioned, as, as the novel goes through, we, we see him growing up to some degree anyway, um, that we don't, we don't engage with.

Right. And those strings are complicated. And, and you know, part of my life has been trying to figure out which of those to tug on, which are a little too scary yet to keep 

[00:22:36] Michael Tondry: tugging on. That I think really does put a finger on, um, one of the key differences between this novel and there will be blood, which, um, perhaps many people know about, uh, many more people know about.

And the difference between, you know, this kind of hyper violent oil man in, in Daniel Day Lewis, who gets bewitched by liquid sunlight and becomes sort of elementally evil, uh, by an curses substance. You know, kind of get the. Joke at the very start that oil is just another name for blood. Whereas here, uh, in Sinclair's novel, uh, the figure of of of dad of James Arnold Sr.

Ross Sr. Is, and you know, this is a basically benevolent guy, uh, in the era of Little Oil who gets caught up in the transition to big oil conglomerates. You know, rock code, the, uh, sort of multinational complex that he's absorbed into. So we see the, uh, again, ambivalences and complexities of this transition, this energy transition, and, uh, what that means for, for Bunny as someone who is experiencing, you know, on one hand the sort of raw excitement of, uh, the oil field of, um, the, uh, discovery of, of oil and gushers that seem to offer wealth without work and possibility of endless.

Development and growth, nowhere without cost. And on the other hand, all of, I think, Roger, what you were describing, the, um, aspects of, of social reproduction that have been got, that have been tied up with oil, uh, ideas about family, ideas about childhood, uh, the assault we have for, uh, what it means to, you know, grew up, for instance, in the suburbs, uh, with long distances to places of work and.

Uh, a more dis diffuse, uh, way of understanding private life. Uh, Rudy Oil, 

[00:24:20] Ed Whittingham: you, you think of it, the theme of the primacy of energy. And I, I think of a, a quote I heard on Dan Carlin, one of Dan Carlin's podcasts recently in the Second World War. So asked, uh, Monte Montgomery, or Bernard Montgomery Field Marshall for the British Army.

What do you do? And his reply was, and it was a kid, and it was set up as some sort of press interview. I kill people. And I wonder what Jay, Arnold, Ross, if he was asked at his essence, what do you do? And I've wondered if he would say, I provide the lifeblood. Lifeblood that powers everything. And you have that conviction.

And this is so, again, drawing parallels to where I live, these old timers. I talked to who talk about the Halian days, and that included working really hard. But it also included going into the basement of the petroleum club in Calgary and having a three martini lunch and playing cards for two hours before they went back upstairs and then worked and, and you know, finished off the day that they have this conviction that we provide the lifeblood that powers everything.

And yet that comes with a cost. And Michael, just for your benefit. So my relationship with the oil and gas industry is, it's virtually non-existent now, apart from a, a couple strands. But for a time I ran a national environmental group in Canada that not only engaged the oil and gas industry in a good cop, bad cop way, so I was talking to oil and gas executives and engineers and plant managers.

All the time. It also came out of a major industrial accident that happened in 1982 called The Lodge Pole. Sarga well blowout large pole blowout. In which there was a huge blowout. Two, uh, safety workers died. It blew for 30 days before they were able to actually cap it. And at the time, it was the largest industrial accident that had happened in, or the hearing that came was the largest industrial accident hearing that had ever happened in Canada.

And that Paul like characters. Who, and Paul is, you know, a worker and a carpenter and a social justice activist, and he goes to, uh, Siberia and comes back and ultimately, spoiler alert is, is terribly killed. But Paul, like characters came outta that accident, banded together and formed this group in the heart of oil and gas country in Alberta.

Knowing that they would work closely and include oil and gas workers, but fundamentally there to advocate for environmental rights and to try to put, and they, through the, the successes of their advocacy put in place new oil and gas regulations and laws, some of which are still, uh, in, in place today and form the basis of federal laws too.

So that's, that's my connection more to the Paul side of the book. 

[00:27:08] Roger Thompson: That, uh, way you're describing the folks on the, you know, this belief that the li they're the lifeblood. I mean, this is, this echoes my dad. I mean, almost word for word what you were saying sounds like my dad, and, and to say it's a conviction.

It's a deeply profound conviction. And it's true as far as it goes, right? I mean, it's hard to look at the current American state and imagine it not without imagine it as anything other than the, with that lifeblood. I mean that is exactly, so, and this reminds me, Michael, and there where we blood, the, the, is it the opening?

When is the scene where, where the gusher comes and he's covered in stuff and it's, it's, it might as well be blood, right? It, it, it's. It is as though he is covered in, I mean, I assume that's what, uh, what Director Anderson was going for with, with that scene. It was, it's a startling scene, but also stark and, um, demonstrative of what he's trying to accomplish in that movie.

And the, and the way it covers us all, I think is kind of the subtext there. 

[00:28:07] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And Roger, I'll never forget from that scene, so Daniel Day Lewis's character, the Jay Arnold Ross, like character at that blowout because it was so explosive. His son was there and, and a worker came up asked, is your son okay?

And as he's gazing at this gusher, he said, no, he's not. Without, without a hint of remorse. But I, as I said earlier, just want to contrast that is not the Jay Arnold Ross character of Up in Sinclair's Oil book, who is a far more sympathetic character, but also equally conflicted. And as I talked about these old timers, and you mentioned Roger, you don't, neither one of us has really seen the inner workings and machinations of an oil and gas company.

We're not privy to how these sympathetic, deeply convicted characters have bent laws. In order to develop the lifeblood and, you know, make those incredible profits. I don't have any visibility except for knowing that in petro stakes it happens a lot. 

[00:29:07] Michael Tondry: Yeah, 

[00:29:07] Ed Whittingham: absolutely. 

[00:29:08] Michael Tondry: And, and maybe that's part of what we're moving towards is a sense about how you can be liberal minded and sympathetic and.

Due to the, like structural imperatives of what it means to be bound up in an oil culture, complicit in certain ways with its harms, its violence. Um, there's a really interesting modern reworking of oil by a novelist called Liddy Kesling called Mobility just published last year, and that novel is all about.

What it means to be, you know, well-meaning liberal minded on the side of what we think of as justice. And, um, a sort of advocate for a transition to renewables and yet, uh, still bound up with the structures, uh, that have created and, uh, made it. Very difficult to transition to a, a world after oil. Yeah.

Those structural imperatives that Sinclair especially is interested in, in, in talking about. And whereas Paul Thomas Anderson's novel thing thinks about oil in on very individualist terms. Sinclair I think offers a much more structural account about how oil seeps everywhere into universities, into investment systems, into Hollywood.

I would seeps into Hollywood. Yeah, 100%. 

[00:30:19] Ed Whittingham: I will say for the, the, the energy geeks who might be tuning in both of them, uh, into this episode, if you're interested in the oil industry and some of the engineering behind it, this is also like a really engrossing study of that. So, as I say, I've kicked around the industry, but I was reading with fascinations some of the, like, the incredible detail he goes into.

Drilling techniques and now it makes sense. Michael, I didn't know that he also had that personal exposure to the industry, but he really, he really makes it come alive and it reminds me that part of the complexity with the oil and gas industry, and I saw this one, I'd go and see these oil sands mines up in, up in Northern Alberta, that they would be literally incredible.

On one hand, you're looking at a I'll use kilometers, a 10 kilometer by 10 kilometer mine, where there used to be Boreal Forest. And they just sort of taken all that and they've undermined everything. And, and so you're looking at the, an incredible scale of devastation. That's hard to comprehend. But then you're also looking at an incredible engineering feat.

Like, my gosh, humans did this like. That's amazing. And throughout the book, when I'm reading through it, you know, I, I I had that sense. Wow. It's really amazing what human ingenuity and engineering can produce. 

[00:31:41] Michael Tondry: Yeah. And that might be like an early anticipation of what sometimes gets called, uh, the good intimacy and the idea that, um, transfiguring the earth could be money of human master.

Uh, ingenuity again. Uh, which, you know, I think is, uh, problematic in all sorts of ways, uh, to be guarded against. But Sinclair, at an earlier moment was really quite absorbed by, uh, the technical pros and ingenuity of, uh, what it meant to drill for oil and all those long loving technical descriptions of oil drilling speak.

To, you know, his own fascinations, but also become an allegory for what it means to write about oil and trying to capture at an aesthetic level, um, the same beauty and technique that he saw in the industry itself. And so that term we were talking about ambivalence, uh, is something that gets modeled at the sentence level for 

[00:32:31] Roger Thompson: sure.

I wanted to kinda shift a little bit here, and then I, I was gonna just pose this question to Michael, but I realize it's probably a good one for Ed also. So maybe both of you can kind of chime in on this. I, as I'm reading, of course, I'm thinking about, uh, the nature of the, the podcast here. It's one on climate change and, and we're talking about the oil and petroleum industry.

So I, I'm, I'm curious, Michael in particular, and then Ed your response as a reader, but Michael's our expert. Do you read this book as a climate change text and why? And, and what, what leads you to that? 

[00:33:01] Michael Tondry: That's a really fascinating question. Um, you know, Sinclair of course comes before, uh, modern knowledge about anthropogenic climate change.

He doesn't have access to the knowledge that we have in historical hindsight, but he does, as we've been saying. Uh, he does capture a sense of the structural harms brought by, uh, the energy sector, by carbon capitalism, and he understands that it's not a personal. Set of issues, um, but rather a collective political economic set of, uh, interlocking conditions that demand coordinated change.

And so even if it's not a climate novel, it's I think a novel that maps a certain way of understanding our current crisis and of offering, um, not necessarily a blueprint, but a set of thought experiments about how we might collaborate. In contesting and building popular power as we move towards, uh, a world after oil.

You know, instead of thinking about narrowing our carbon footprint, uh, his old left focus on workers leads him to think about things like how frontline communities, uh, laborers are positioned at a. Oils, choke points, uh, places where people could block business as usual and agitate for, uh, democratic reforms.

So, um, this isn't a novel about climate change. It does, you know, evoke some of the imagery of our moment. Um, certainly the novel precedes through a series of gushers that have increasingly disastrous effects. And so I think, ed, you were mentioning that first, um, gusher there in the novel. You know, it's represented.

By Bunny's, um, sort of turn to adolescence. He, he's 13 years old. He sees a gusher and it's, you know, almost hilariously comic, uh, how it's represented as a, a sort of wet dream, an orgasmic ture that bursts out and covers him. Um, by the end, this becomes a gusher that catches on fire and. Literally incinerates the fictional town of Paradise California in a way that I think, uh, anticipates the, the, the raising of Paradise California in 2018.

So, uh, this novel is not a, a sort of self-conscious climate novel. It's ambivalent and conflicted struggles to capture the realities that that Sinclair was groping towards. Um, but it does, I think, offer us an interesting imp. Important resonance, thought, experiment, and the relations between oil, capital and democratic change.

[00:35:26] Ed Whittingham: I, I completely agree. With your description of that? I, I will. And, and I've got a thought, but the one thing I will say is, um, and just as a bit of an energy and climate change geek, the science for climate change was actually understood by the time that Upton Sinclair was writing, but not widely understood.

And, and, and just for our climate historians out there, a Swedish scientist named Savante Hin, uh. Apologies for my poor Swedish pronunciation. First really made the link, uh, between burning a fossil fuel, specifically coal, and the potential for raising their temperature in 1896. But yeah, it really didn't get to prominence until I.

The first time it landed on a US President's desk was on the Johnson administration, where the report that got the science right, the first time it appeared in the popular press was not around Upton Sinclair when he was writing this, he was still alive, but it was in New York Times, I think in 1952. I. Oh, I didn't know that.

That's 

[00:36:23] Michael Tondry: fascinating. Wow. Uh, I knew a bit about ING house, um, however you pronounce it from my, you know, sort of, uh, life as a victorious, but none of its, uh, reverberations and how it's been taken up and how he's been taken up. That's absolutely fascinating. 

[00:36:37] Ed Whittingham: The, the link to climate change is somehow.

Summarize, and I know Sinclair wrote this later when he wrote that, uh, another book in his core personnel that, that I wanna read about His failed bid for the Governorship in California. If I recall, he ran twice, but this book he wrote came later in the thirties. And this is the quote that if. People have heard of Upton Sinclair and they don't know his corpus, they might know this quote.

And that's, it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding. It, isn't it, isn't it beautiful? And, and again, strong parallels, uh, with what's happening today. Uh, strong parallels, I will say with us politics, strong parallels with Canadian politics. But in terms of climate, politics, to me that summarizes.

Bunny is a deeply conflicted and deeply sympathetic character who throughout the novel is put in these difficult positions. And that reminds me of all the climate champions within oil and gas companies that I've worked with throughout my career who are trying to ward off that cognitive dissonance that understand.

You know, the link of climate change. So it's contrary to the quote. They, they understand something and yet still their salary depends on them keeping the machine going. And frankly, a lot of what they're trying to do is lipstick on a pig. If I can be crude when you're trying to decarbonize the oil and gas value chain.

It's not impossible, but it is very, very hard. There are real physical constraints to doing that and you know, the, those, the naysayers will say that all that the oil and gas is doing is lipstick on a pig. And the only thing that's gonna make a difference is us completely stopping the use of oil and gas.

[00:38:29] Michael Tondry: Absolutely. And, and maybe to tie Ed your point, uh, uh, which I think is really so fascinating, resonant back to as well, to, to Rogers, uh, from a moment ago. There's something here about how Sinclair, um, comes up against his own desire to save oil from capital and. To, um, think of a future in which oil might be somehow, uh, used ethically.

Uh, you know, that, that that idea of ethical oil, which I find, um, ubiquitous and problematic, uh, is something that Sinclair was, was trying to wrestle with. And in, in the end, even as he finds it difficult to disavow the possibilities of oil in the future, he. Seems to, through the very process of writing and documenting its harms to find himself unable to do so fully and um, just kind of throws up his hands, you know, bunny becomes someone who decides to study the problem more carefully, um, before figuring out whether change from within or direct action is, uh, is, is needed to confront the oil complex.

And I think that captures our, our current moment in, in ways that you're both noting really nicely. 

[00:39:37] Ed Whittingham: So Michael, I too find ethical oil problematic. And I will say, just as a sort of footnote, the person who coined the term ethical oil and wrote a book at it, a book about it, used his sort of right wing bully pulpit to mount a campaign.

When I, when I was chosen to be on the board of the Alberta energy regulator through a public appointment, and that guy and his very right wing media outlet made me a cause celeb. And eventually created, uh, for a time I was known as the most hated man in Alberta. Because they turned the, yeah, the, the full power of their attack dogs and his bully puppet on me because I had worked in the climate space and they thought, gosh, you know, this is, well, you could say letting the fox in the hen house, or maybe it's letting the hen in the fox house, uh, appointing a guy like me to the, the, uh, the, the board of the energy sheriff.

[00:40:32] Michael Tondry: Wow. What was that like? Did you interact with, with him? Was it, was it just impossible to get around Alberta? 

[00:40:39] Ed Whittingham: Oh yeah, it was, um, if you've read on another book note, John Ronson's, so you've been publicly humiliated. So it was kinda like that, but publicly humiliated, not for, from me sending, like in his book, A-A-A-A-A tweet that just, you know, was, should never have been sent.

It wasn't anything that I did. It was just being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I can tell you for two months, like it was an awful time in my life, death threats, and you couldn't, I couldn't go a place without people recognizing me 'cause my name was constantly in the media or my photo or whatnot.

Part of what 

[00:41:16] Roger Thompson: is Sinclair's book is exposes some of these problems, right? There's the. Media is a major part of that book. I mean, I, I, I actually, as a rhetoric guy, part of what I read with most interest was the ruminations on media, the anxiety. There's this wonderful passage about radio where you talk, where it talks to you, but there's no chance of dialogue involved.

I mean, this is, uh, this is Richard Weaver, kind of the founder, contemporary conservatives concern about radio and television, and so to. See it here coming from the left. It's really fascinating and same concern coming at very different directions and I, I just found it really engaging in that way. I wanna make sure to, uh, point out that Michael's writes about oil also.

It doesn't just edit books on this. And Bloomsbury has a wonderful series for people who are in kind of engaged and kind of really. Uh, careful thinking about, uh, complex, uh, contemporary social issues and cultural issues and called object lessons. And Michael has a book, uh, in that series called Oil. And, and I want to kind of pose an unfair question to you about it.

Uh, Michael is you ruminate at one point, I think fairly early on, and, and you talk about this kind of distinction between whether your text is gonna be kinda the crude oil discussion or the refined oil, right? Like are you, are, is the text refined or crude? Right? And, and let me just say from my perspective, there's nothing crude.

Or unrefined about your thoughts and really nuanced thinking about, about some of the cultural touchstones that you trace through this text. But I'm curious about your take on, on, on Sinclair on this front, um, whether, whether you'd put his book in the text as a crude or the refined, but, um, and whether there's connection there for you.

[00:42:57] Michael Tondry: That's a beautiful question. Thank you. I think that, just for context, what I would say is that in my initial version of the draft of oil, I had a chemical edge and yeah, I think some of that has been maintained in the final version. Um, but I remember showing drafts to friends who said, uh, you know, it feels like you are shaking your finger at me.

I feel like I'm being raed and I think I had wanted, so. Desperately to capture, uh, a sense of my anger or outrage at, uh, the oil complex that I sort of had tended towards that, that kind of a voice. I think as I continued to write, I wanted to be able also to capture, um, the sort of. Reasons why oil is so hard to leave behind all of the beguiling refined magic.

So both ends of, uh, of what it means to live, uh, in a petro state, in, in a developed country run by oil and natural gas and coal. And so, um, both the crude and refined. And so I try to keep, um, both those attributes of the good life and a, a more crude for politics of sanctioned, uh, death and dying and how.

Both ends of the carbon consumption and production chain, um, should be understood together. So to answer the second part of your question, I think that's exactly what Sinclair does anyways, in tracing how oil pumps not only, uh. Through the material infrastructures of extractive technologies, which we were talking about through refineries and processing plants, but also through systems of culture, which I think, ed, you were, uh, excuse me, Roger, you were, uh, mentioning, uh, the Hollywood industry as it moves from a kind of backwater in 1910 to, uh, a, a sort of center of cultural production in 1930, the, um, institutions of higher education that bunny moves through himself.

And, uh, radio and other mass media forms up through the high echelons of, of, of politics. And so Sinclair too is interested in holding together both crude and refined ends of the petroleum processes of, of our era and trying to understand how they cannot be divorced. I think you're. 

[00:45:09] Roger Thompson: Thoughts in that book are worthy of broad dissemination?

I think, um, it's careful. I mean, there's, there's polemic, uh, but it is, it doesn't read if it's any, uh, response. So to kind of your earlier, your drafts. This is not read as strident to me anyway, even if it. Re has set times insistent that, uh, we need to be more careful in our own consideration to some of these questions.

[00:45:36] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, I'm sure it's not strident and yet, uh, given around our politicized environment, some will accuse it of being strident. And this is, this is, this is the crazy time that we live in with such a fluid and shifting political dynamic. For me as, as a lay person, you know, plug for oil is a, it's very readable.

B, it's, it's a really entertaining story. Three. To see, uh, we talked about is wildly ambitious. It just pulls so many threads together. But you can see the influence if you're an energy geek, the influence of energy on so many facets of life, on so many, uh, industries. And then lastly, yeah, it, it can be, it's happy meeting ground, I think for both the left and the right.

So I think both, even if you have pretty stride and political views, you can dive into that book and leave your views. Outside, you know, open the cover, park your views, and you're gonna find something you'll really enjoy in that book. I, 

[00:46:32] Roger Thompson: I, I'm convinced of that myself. Ed, I think that's a great way and probably a great way for us to sign off.

So let me, uh, just thank you again, Michael, for taking the time. Thank you. 

[00:46:42] Michael Tondry: Yeah, it was a pleasure to be able to produce it and, um, to hopefully have it around for folks to, to read and think about. And so thank you as well for having me be on this show. And, um, it's. Been a real, uh, but last to be able to talk about oil and Sinclair and our current moment.

[00:46:57] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. Well, I'm grateful. Thank you, Michael, for your critical view review. And thank you Bunny, uh, I mean Roger for, uh, for pulling this conversation together. It was fun.