Ideas - Why oil is a 'complicated saviour' to the world

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Oil has delivered warmth, mobility, freedom and ruin all at the same time. "It's a very hard religion to ditch," says Don Gillmor, author of On Oil. Yes, religion. Gillmor argues oil is not just a substance — but an idea … one that has come to constitute its own potent system of belief. He joins Nahlah Ayed to discuss how oil became the one true global religion.

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the last-minute winner, and the moments that make sports unforgettable, this is your season. Watch the Northern Super League all season on CBC Jam. This is a CBC podcast. I want to start with a yes or no question. Does oil constitute a kind of belief system? I believe that it does, yes.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. I'm Don Gilmore, and I'm the author of On Oil. Don Gilmore sees oil not simply as a substance or as a commodity, but as an active agent, exercising its own powerful grip on humanity. Oil has a pulse. It evolves and migrates, transforming cities and governments, entire countries. It powered our cars and homes and was used in the manufacture of 1,000 products, from plastics to fertilizers to aspirin.

It powered our lives. The idea of oil has come to undergird our collective identity. We are hydrocarbon man. Homo olium. Yet it remains unseen, the ghost in the machine. And that hydrocarbon ghost represents more than just a belief system. You call it the only or one true global religion. What makes it so? I think it's the one thing that binds everyone at this point. And we're moving away from that religion in a sort of violent way. But at the moment, it still is a factor in virtually every.

everyone's life. On oil traces the arc of homooleum, from the evangelical dawn of the oil era, to the zealotry of Alberta's oil boom in the 1970s through to right now. Don Gilmour joined me in our Toronto studio, where I began by asking him to take us to the very heart of oil as a belief system. I think at the heart of that belief is that it has given us so much over the years that it has delivered us, you know, warmth and freedom and mobility. And it's a very hard religion to ditch. Why is it so hard to ditch? Because right now we really don't have, the replacement isn't really entirely in place. It's moving there.

But right now we still look at oil as the savior. As the savior from? It's a complicated savior because it gives us freedom and warmth and ruin at the same time. And so right now we're dealing with all the good things about it. And we're just starting to recognize and embrace the bad things about it. And one of the problems with the bad things is that all those changes are incremental. That we see rising seas or the temperature. it's heating up and wildfires increasing.

But most of those are happening, for most people, most of those things are happening off stage still, and they're still at a distance, and we're just not ready to capitulate to let oil go out of our line. The early days of big oil had ties to evangelical Christianity, as you point out. What was the nature of those ties?

Well, in Texas especially, you had oil men who believed that oil was a kind of deliverance, and they were very religious people before they found oil, and then oil just sort of confirmed that. And you saw it here with the beginning of the oil sands, which started with John Howard Pugh, who was a Baptist and a staunch believer. In 1967, John Howard Pugh, the 85-year-old chair of Sun Oil and Ernest Manning, Premier of Alberta,

attended the opening of the bitumen upgrading plant near Fort McMurray. It was part of the great Canadian oil sands development, a subsidiary of Sun Oil. Both men were evangelical Christians. In 1930, Manning began preaching on a radio program, back to the Bible hour, and continued to preach as premier, encouraging Christians to live in the light of Jesus' return. Pew was on the board of the magazine Christianity today, which he helped finance, though critics said the magazine was merely a tool of the oil interests. He saw faith and oil as intertwined and conflated both with freedom. Without Christian freedom, no freedom is possible, he said. Both men saw the oil sands as a gift from God.

And so the religious aspect was really wrapped in, and Pew was someone who believed that Christianity and oil were completely intertwined and that both of them represented a kind of freedom. And that's something that has sort of stayed in the culture and stayed in the cultural imagination. over the decade. I was curious where freedom fit in exactly. How does that become intertwined with faith and oil? You know, I think the freedom initially was, I think it was rolled into this kind of American myth of the freedom of the open road.

And so it really, it became part of that, the American way of life. And mythology is such a powerful instrument in the U.S. And I think because oil has been wrapped into that, and you see, I think right now we're looking at, you know, when you look at President Trump and his relationship with oil, which could be described as evangelical, that what he's going back to is a kind of nostalgic past that may not have entirely existed in fact, but that is still in people's imaginations. And they have this idea that everything was better then, and there's this sort of sense of freedom that we don't have anymore.

And so he's looking at oil from that perspective. And I think fighting a kind of odd rearguard action because, in his first, first term, because he was such a champion of oil and gas and fossil fuels, he really kind of seeded the battle of renewables to China. And I think because he's so obsessed with winning, he realized there's no way he can win that particular battle. And so instead he's taken on the idea that oil is going to be the dominant fuel of the future and trying to convince the rest of the world that that's the case. So I think he'd rather, you know, lose the war and win that battle just partly because of an obsession with winning.

The debate over climate change and the environment has rarely been rational. It began as a corporate issue, then became a political issue, and to some extent a generational issue. And finally, like so much these days, it has become a tribal issue. I'm curious as you're speaking, how much of that nostalgia that Trump represents actually is fueled by oil, so to speak. I think a lot of it. And I think he's tapped into that.

And, you know, for example, in the U.K., they phased out the last coal plant not that long ago. And it was under a conservative government with the support of labor. And it was a completely bipartisan initiative. And whereas in North America, especially in the U.S., but to the lesser extent here, you know, we have this back and forth with energy. So that any time there's a democratic government in power in Washington, you suddenly get lots of green, renewable energy initiatives. and at least talk of declining subsidies to oil and gas. And then as soon as the Republicans come in, everything just gets switched. So you have this back and forth and not much headway seems to be made in either case.

And now we have a situation where the big beautiful bill that Trump implemented gave another $40 billion to the fracking industry. And he's essentially propping up an industry that is no longer financially viable. And, you know, once you have a war in the Middle East, you know, you're going to get a spike in oil prices, but it's always temporary. And, you know, the U.S. Energy Information Administration has suggested that the average price of oil for this year in 2026 is going to be $52 a barrel. And next year it's going to be $49 a barrel. And both of those prices are below the break-even point for the majority of American fracking companies. And so you're giving public money to keep this going, but it's going to be losing money on an ongoing basis.

And you can see there's very little investment in infrastructure because even the oil people recognize that there's a limited future to their product. What's the logic in that? You know, I think this goes back to the idea of the belief system where there's no logic economically, but there is this belief. You know, oil is a kind of, it's an inherently kind of Republican resource in terms of its kind of, you know, it's masculine, it's white in terms of its ownership. And renewables are, you know, woke and socialist.

And so even though oil and gas get a lot more in subsidies than renewables ever have, they still get tired with this socialism brush when in fact, oil and gas has been much more heavily subsidized. And in many ways, it's a much more socialist enterprise than renewables are. I was surprised to read at one point that environmentalists had been accused by the Republican side or by the pro-oil side as being something akin to end-time's Christianity, when really it's perhaps the other way around. Yeah. And I mean, there are oil men in Texas who do embrace this sort of end-time's philosophy. And so one of the problems we're facing, you know, from an environmental perspective is you do have. a segment of the population who think, well, what's the point in preserving things? Because it's all going to end at some point in the relatively near future.

And so that idea of kind of the book of revelation happening in our times, which it sort of looks like it is happening in our times. I mean, you see that the language in the Old Testament in terms of the wildfires and the third of the earth is scorched and a third of the seas are poisoned. You know, we're heading there very quickly. So, I mean, I think there is, in fact, now a legitimate correlation between what we're going through and the end times. Who can blame evangelicals for seeing revelation mirrored in our times?

The plagues and wanton excess, the inequality, the smoke, and dying seas. Globally, 2023 was the hottest summer in history, unsurprisingly eclipsed by 2024, which was hotter still. Wildfires reached record levels. In 2021, 9.3 million hectares were lost to wildfires globally. In 2023, Canada alone lost almost twice that, 18.5 million hectares. Swiss glaciers lost more ice in the years between 2021 and 2023 than in the 30 years between 1960 and 1990.

In Antarctica, the world's largest iceberg, 4,000 square kilometers, broke away and moved through the southern seas like a stately predator, a silent harbinger of rising sea levels. 90% of marine life is at risk of extinction if greenhouse gases aren't curbed. In 1937 in New London, Texas, a school built for the children of oil workers was destroyed by a gas explosion, killing 300 children and staff. It was written off as God's will, though one East Texan noted, when you strike oil, you let loose Hades.

Some of the Texas oil men held to pre-millennial beliefs that the oil would eventually run out, and end times would follow. I wanted to ask you this. If oil as a kind of faith has a creed, what do you think that creed might be? Interesting question. You know, I think despite the fact that they are so heavily subsidized,

the creed has to do with this sort of self-sufficiency, and the idea of kind of free enterprise, and it harkens back to, I think, what's at the core of certainly American culture. And because Alberta, you know, to some degree, borrowed a lot of their kind of oil mythology and to some degree cultural mythology in terms of the cowboy and the oil man from the states,

you see it in Alberta as well. And, you know, there is truth to that in terms of there was, you know, in all oil enterprises, whether it's in Texas or the oil sands, there's a tremendous entrepreneurial energy, there's tremendous innovation that has happened. Much of that innovation has ceased to happen, I think, because, in part, I think because they recognize they're at a point where it doesn't make sense to be putting money into innovative technologies

because it makes more sense just to take as much profit as they can at this point because there's a limited timeline. And the innovation isn't going to help that much. certainly I talked to researchers at the University of Calgary who are working on, you know, solutions and innovations for the oil fields and saying it's a very difficult time to go in there with any kind of new technology because they've spent all these billions on infrastructure and they, at this point, they just want to maintain the status quo. I know you as Don Gilmore award-winning writer and novelist. I would have never guessed that you were once a roughneck. I worked on an oil rig for 100 straight days with what was probably the oldest crew in the oil patch, weathered, gnarled men in their late 60s, one in his 70s, ancient for rig work, their lives a country and Western song. Pete, the wobbly 72-year-old Derekman, came home to find his wife gone along with all the furniture, appliances, and curtains.

There was a note on the floor. Your dinner's in the oven. There was no oven. With my first paycheck, I bought a plane ticket to Europe, then counted the days like a convict. Four months later, I was sitting on a beach on the Greek island of Crete, blobs of sticky oil dotting the sand around me. A tanker carrying crude oil from Libya had run aground off the south coast of Crete, and here was the residue.

The 1970s was a banner decade for oil spills. More happened in that decade than any decade before or since. was peak spill, with an alarming 78 of them. By contrast, the 2010 saw 63 spills. Millions of tons spilled into the seas. The world was awash in oil. I moved to Calgary in 1971, and I was going to university there, and I'd heard, I was looking for a summer job, and I heard, you know, the big money was in oil, but you had to know somebody. And so I didn't know anyone. And a friend of mine and myself, we went to, I lived near downtown, and so we just walked to all the oil companies, and we handed off our incredibly slender, you know, 19-year-old resumes. And finally a secretary said,

you two idiots are never going to find a job this way. She said, if you want to find a job, you have to go out to the oil fields, because she said the turnover is very high, and you should just drive out to Medicine Hat, which is about three hours east of Calgary. And so we did. And You literally drove from rig to rig basically. Yeah, I mean, because you're on the flat kind of prairie, you could see these rigs from like 30 kilometers away. So we would just sort of zigzag along the section roads to these different rigs. And the first one we got to had this sign that said this rig has worked zero accident-free days.

And there was a guy sitting on a 40-gallon drum and his hand was banished and there was blood all over his jeans. And so we thought, well, there's a job opening here. But we didn't have any experience, and the driller said, no, I can't use you guys. So we drove around for four days, and we finally got to a rig where the entire crew didn't show up. I mean, it's a small crew. It's three people, but none of them showed up. And so the driller looked at us, and this was the 70s. We had kind of long hair and our Led Zeppelin T-shirts, and he said, well, I guess you girls will have to do.

And he hired us. And so that was the beginning of my rig career. And, you know, it's a terrible job in all kinds of ways. It's dirty and it's dangerous. But it paid very well. And I was an English major. And it's such a colorful subculture that I just found it. And I had just moved to the West as well, which I think was a big part of it.

And so I ended up going back every summer and working on the oil rigs and enjoying it. Were you ever hurt while you were working out there? I was hurt and I was on a midnight shift and my hand got crushed by the breakout tongs, which is how you tear the pipe apart. And so at first, no one did anything and they just, everyone kind of just sat and looked at it. And then finally someone said, well, we better drive you into the hospital at Medicine Hat. And so this was the midnight shift. It was like two in the morning.

And so we drove into Medicine Hat. And they didn't actually have a doctor working at. that they had a doctor on call. And this guy arrived about an hour later, and he was absolutely dead drunk, you know, and one of the few people have ever seen sort of cinematically drunk, you know, where they kind of say he was like the movie Arthur, Dudley Moore,

and Arthur was sort of slurring and staggering. This is the doctor. This is the doctor. And all he did was pour a bottle of aspirin in my hand and tell me to wash it. And then four days later, I was on a Greyhound bus heading for Calgary with this. infected hand that looked like an oven mitt. And I was off for, I think, a month. But I did go back

after that regardless. So you went back, that didn't dissuade you. No, it should have, you know. I mean, I wanted to be a writer. And so your hands are kind of precious commodity. Yeah. So maybe I should have quit. My fellow roughnecks were ex-cons, failed farmers, a British alcoholic who fell into a sump pit filled with drilling mud, and a few students. one of whom quit halfway through the first shift and walked 20 kilometers back to town. There was a short, muscular Derek man who had a dent in his forehead from a pool ball thrown by a woman in a Grand Prairie bar, and an 18-year-old who drove a pink Cadillac and worshipped Elvis. I bought an unreliable eight-year-old Forta-Conline band and listened to sad country songs on the radio

and danced with big-haired waitresses. And every September, I went back to university with a swollen bank account and tales of oil patch madness. Oil offered more than anything else a sense of possibility. 30,000 people moved to Calgary each year drawn to oil. There was a palpable sense of power of being at the center of something. Here was the new Rome. But as you said, you had no experience working on something like a rig.

It must have been a shock, just the environment of it. It was a big shock. And, you know, one of the first shifts I worked on, the crew, it works 24 hours, the eight-hour shifts, and the crew that was going to relieve us didn't show up. And I thought, well, you know, tough luck for them, but we're going to go home. And they said, no, you're going to stay over and work that shift.

And then the next shift didn't show up. So we ended up working 24 hours, and then we're back to our own shift. So it's a 32-hour shift, and I thought, you know, and there's no union, there was no union at the time. But in a way that, you know, I admired their, it was an incredibly efficient, you know, environmentally destructive even back then, but incredibly efficient. And there was, as I said, this sort of entrepreneurial energy that was kind of contagious.

And you could feel that energy in the city of Calgary at the time. You equate Calgary in those days when you arrived there with Babylon. Why? Why Babylon? Well, there was still this strong streak of a kind of biblical sense in terms of, you know, was a very conservative place at the time. You could still hear Texas and Oklahoma accents on the downtown streets because they were bringing in a lot of people as consultants and helping out with the time kind of nascent oil industry.

And, you know, once you have a boom, it changes the tenor, I think, of a city. And it changes the personality of the city. It changes the personality of some of the people in the city. And there's a real, a genuine excitement to a boom. because there's so much money around, there's so much energy, things are getting done, things are being built. You can really feel it. But there's also, I think, this sense of the sort of depravity that's set in with Babylon, and you could sort of feel that we're heading for a crash.

Oil was $35 a barrel, $122, adjusted for inflation, a stratospheric price and house prices moved in lockstep, The wealth of which I had no real share was untrustworthy. That year I went to a Halloween party at a house south of town with my statuess girlfriend. We went as Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the movie Pillow Talk. I was Doris, she was rock. The underlying Fend de Cieckler feeling was heightened by a fierce blizzard that arrived near midnight. We left at 1 a.m. and drove north and skidded off the road. We were pulled out of the snowbank by kind locals in a truck,

with a winch. Standing in that blizzard at 2 a.m. wearing baby doll nightgown and a blonde wig, my pink princess telephone dangling, my ancient Volvo slowly pulled out of the snow. I sensed it was the logical end of something. People would talk about how this can't go on forever, and you'd hear that conversation in the streets,

and yet I think very few people do anything to prepare themselves for the bust, which came a decade after I moved there, 81 was the kind of first year you got a sense of it, and then by 82 it really arrived. And it just changed, the city changed in the course of months. How do you go from being a young man working on the rigs to an older man who's written a book about the twilight of the faith of oil? It's an interesting journey because when I was working on the rigs, you know, there was a real excitement to working in that environment and an excitement. to living in Calgary. And, you know, I still love Calgary,

but now, you know, recognizing the kind of damage that has been inflicted, not just environmentally, but, you know, I would say politically in terms of the way that the oil industry kind of gradually infiltrated the Alberta government and to some degree captured it,

starting with Ralph Klein in 92, and certainly that's the case now. The premier throughout the 1970, was Peter Lohie, a handsome, charismatic man who clearly laid out the relationship between the province and its resources. Well, it was obvious that the oil sands were owned by the people of Alberta, he said in a 2011 interview. But this relationship would evolve, and with the Ralph Klein administration in 1992, it was effectively reversed, with oil companies becoming feudal rulers, the citizens of Alberta reduced to wealthy peasants.

The mythology remained intact, though. Oil was Alberta's central intoxicant, key to the shit-kicking populist image it exported with such care. And so you could see the power of oil back then, and you see the power of oil now, but in a different perspective, the insidious power and how it has infected our lives in a detrimental way, as well as the obvious benefits that we've all reaped. The ambivalent power of oil, insidious, and yet, beneficial. Don Gilmour's book on oil was a finalist for the 26th Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Uncover from CBC podcasts brings you award-winning

investigations year-round. Infiltrate an international network of neo-Nazi extremists. He ranted with racist language. Discover the true story of the CIA's attempts at mind control. Their objective was to wipe my memory. Or dig into a Crypto King's mysterious death and a quarter billion dollars missing. There are deep oddities in this case. With episodes weekly, Uncover is your home for in-depth reporting and exceptional storytelling. Find Uncover wherever you get your podcasts. Oil has become synonymous with the American dream, a symbol of both dominance and freedom.

But the freedom associated with oil is for writer Don Gilmore a mirage. It's a false equivalency of the freedom and oil, and it always has been, but it's a very compelling one. In his book, On Oil, he argues that the equivalence of oil with freedom has always been a dead end, one that leads not to autonomy, but to dependency. The term captured state comes up a lot when we're talking about the same. centrality of oil, how it went from being regulated to being the regulator, from answering to the state, to influencing or even running the state. And in some instances, it's becoming what's called a petro state. Yeah. Rit large, what made this ascension possible? Well, I think it was a gradual

process. And I think what made the ascension possible was partly the economic power that the oil companies had, both Canada and the U.S. And so they have a very powerful lobby group, a very compelling and convincing lobby group. And you could see in Alberta where starting with Klein in 92, you know, because Premier Lawheed in the 70s had been, I think, a very effective steward of the oil industry, which is, you know, the resources are owned by the people of the province, as he had emphasized on many occasions. And they were the landlords and the oil companies were the tenants. And then that really got reversed with Klein, where you started to see a lot of cross-pollination with people coming from the industry into politics

and then leaving politics and going to a very well-paying job in the industry. And so that got blurrier and blurrier until it kind of was completely erased. One of Klein's campaign slogans had been, get government out of the business of business. But now business was in the business of government, a government made by and for the production of oil. As a result between 1990 and 2014 in the wake of Rio and Kyoto, as the world was trying to wean itself off fossil fuels and reduce emissions, Alberta's emissions went from 175 million tons to 274 million tons. Out of 28 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, 20 had reduced per capita emissions between 2010 and 2019.

Canada was among those that increased emissions, the third worst offender. We have a situation now where in Alberta, under the Smith regime, you know, I think the moratorium on renewables that she put in place kind of tipped her hand in terms of Alberta had the most renewables and still has the most renewables in Canada. It has a burgeoning industry. And I think if the issue was energy, then, you know, you would encourage that and you would even maybe, subsidize it. But by putting a moratorium on that, you really are making it difficult for them to succeed, if not impossible, and then giving the oil and gas industry this leg up that they don't need. So I think that's where you see the sort of tribalism and the belief system come back into play, where if this was about, even if it was just about economics or it was about fairness, then you would have the same subsidies, the renewables, or give them a chance. And they were held to a

standard that the oil and gas companies weren't in terms of cleanup, for example. And you see the same thing in the U.S. where, you know, all the subsidies that are going to oil and gas is really what is going to be the only thing propping them up if oils at $49 a barrel. Globally, oil has been the most successful industry when it comes to regulatory capture. Authoritarian governments in oil-producing countries often neglect health, education. education and social services and put a disproportionate amount of money into fuel subsidies. There is less diversification and both labor and capital are swallowed up by oil. It wasn't just authoritarian governments, though. Alaska qualifies as a petro state,

ranked as the U.S. state with the highest percentage of economic contributions by the oil and gas industry. Low taxes are one of the hallmarks of petro states, a way to placate its citizens. Texas, Wyoming, and Alaska have no tax. Saudi Arabia has no personal tax. The United Arab Emirates has the lowest taxes in the world. Alberta has no sales tax and the lowest corporate taxes in Canada. It is presented as a form of freedom, though it could be viewed as a form of bondage,

a modern twist on that revolutionary cry from 250 years ago, no taxation without representation, replaced by little taxation and little representation. You say that oil is the most successful industry in the world when it comes to regulatory capture. And you give examples. So in the states, the Environmental Protection Agency has been captured, in part by the people

who were appointed to run it, the United Nations climate conferences. In Canada, what is most captured when we're talking about regulation? I think historically, partly it's been environmental concerns because you had a situation and certainly back in the 70s and 80s, when things were going well in the 70s, there was very little environmental oversight. There was certainly none that was visible when I was working in the oil fields.

But also you had very limited federal input and very limited provincial input. And then as we got out of the conventional world and more into the oil sands, where that became the kind of predominant producer in Alberta. Then you have the same situation, but you had a lot of the environmental financing was actually coming from the industry. And so if the financing is coming from the industry,

then they're able to kind of control the agenda to a great extent. And we have a situation now where, you know, they're talking about we would build pipelines. We need pipelines. We need to build pipelines. And, you know, the biggest hurdle for pipelines is environmental. And we have to kind of waive these regulatory restrictions. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to build them. But I think we've lost a lot on the environmental front because of the capture. And politically, it's certainly clear, very clear in Alberta, to a lesser extent in Ottawa, where, you know, you still have a very powerful lobby,

and you could see it, you know, under Stephen Harper's regime where a lot of environmental initiatives were canceled. Scientists were muzzled. Canada pulled out of Kyoto. We pulled out of Kyoto. But I think the much bigger hurdle for pipelines is the fact that they're economically unsustainable.

The oil sands were on the cusp of their most profitable year in history with profits from the largest six companies calculated at $35 billion. But they were still heavily subsidized, though there is little agreement on what constitutes a subsidy. The industry declared that it had received no government subsidies. At the other end of the spectrum, the International Monetary Fund, which factors in tax measures, reduced royalties as well as externalities,

calculated the 2020 subsidies to Canadian oil and gas to be $81 billion. Between the extremes offered by industry and the IMF, the OECD had the Canadian figure at $4.5 billion, while environmental defense calculated $18 billion. Oil Change International reported that among G20 nations, Canada had the highest subsidies for oil, gas, and coal, $14 billion per year between 2018 and 2020 and the lowest subsidies for renewable.

Oil is a belief system as much as a quantifiable corporate enterprise, and there are believers, blasphemers, and penitents, each with their own convictions and statistics. As we're approaching, or we in the twilight, perhaps, of oil, the idea of peak consumption has come up, and the International Energy Agency has said it's going to happen in 2013. 30 other people have put the figure a little bit after that. But there's a fair amount of consensus that it's certainly coming soon.

You know, China has peaked, their population has peaked, their oil consumption has peaked. India's building out nuclear reactors. I think they've got 10 on the go and 10 planning. They're aggressively installing solar. And you see Europe decarbonizing. So it's an interesting moment for oil because, you know, what happens in the twilight? And one of the things that happens is there's going to be a greater desperation among the oil interests. And the oil sands have been singled out by some researchers as being one of the first stranded assets because of its heavy emissions and because it's relatively expensive to get out of the ground.

Cheaper than fracking now, but still relatively expensive. So, you know, how do they behave knowing that the end game is somewhere in the near to minimum? So I think we're seeing this battle playing out, and it's going to get more intense over the next few years. In the chapter called Through the Looking Glass, you say this about the way oil companies went about public relations and messaging. The looking glass world of energy was personified by COP28, the annual United Nations Climate Conference, which was held in December 23 in the United Arab Emirates, the world's seventh largest oil producer. There were 2,456 oil and gas lobbyists in attendance at the conference, more than most country's delegations, and it gave the world two weeks of aspirational goals, non-binding agreements,

happy pledges, and misinformation, that the earth is cooling, wildfires are the result of arson, oil and gas companies are leading the net zero revolution. It took 30 years of climate change conferences for the word fossil fuels to appear in any resolution, a welcome addition, though not one that was legally binding. Oil had captured governments around the world, and now arguably captured the UN Conference on Climate Change as well. COP 29 took place in Azerbaijan, the birthplace of oil, a petro state that relies on oil for 90% of its exports. Open quote, language became a potent weapon, usurping environmental tropes, sowing doubt,

undermining science and actively seeking to undermine reality. What environmental tropes did they usurp? Well, one of the things is, you know, you'd have a climate group that was made up entirely of oil companies, for example. And in Canada, we had a couple of organizations that alleged to be kind of environmental organizations and would go around the world and go to these conferences, but in fact be representing oil and gas industries in Alberta. it, and you see it at the cop conferences where I think they recognize that language is a very potent weapon in this battle. And they seized on it decades ago and it just gotten better at it over the decades. What's an example from a cop conference?

I mean, the one that sticks out in my mind is the one in the UAE where, you know, there were more people there who were from oil companies than there were delegations. Yeah, I mean, and you see it with Trump big, beautiful coal, clean coal. Like you're getting these images that he just keeps hammering at. And, you know, at the last COP conference where they're talking about how the oil industry is, in fact, leading the charge in the renewable world. And you do have companies that have are installing solar and have wind farms. But in many cases, they're pulling back on that. And they're certainly not the leaders on this. In a lot of cases, it's either hedging their bets or it's a kind of very effective PR strategy.

And it's a strategy that started long before this moment. but surely in the post-truth world, it has been turbocharged. It has. And again, we go back to the tribalism where you now have people that are so entrenched in their own belief systems on both sides of the ledger. So, you know, you do have people in the renewable world who say, we have to shut down the oil sands tomorrow. And, you know, I don't think that's a viable solution, but you also have oil sands people who, you know, and referring to anyone who's champion of renewables as, you know, a radical Marxist. And so the politicizing of this and the radicalizing of it has worked. And so you'd end up with these belief systems that won't budge.

And there, in fact, could be tremendous dialogue. And you see it in places like Norway where you have this oil industry, and you also have tremendous gains being made on the renewable front. I think 96% of new cars in January sold in Norway were EBs. And so if they had been working together over the last decade, we would be so much farther ahead. There were occasional warnings from scientists about the long-term impact of fossil fuels.

Gordon MacDonald, a geophysicist, had warned the U.S. government as early as 1965 that the Earth was warming. Warnings about climate change go back as far as 1824 when Joseph Fourier published his theories about the Earth's atmosphere. He studied equations relating to heat transfer and calculated the energy being supplied by the sun. By his calculations, the Earth should have been colder than it was.

He decided there must be something in the atmosphere that prevented heat from escaping, and that over time the amount of heat held by the atmosphere could conceivably change. The knowledge was out there for a very long time that fossil fuels would adversely affect the climate. Were you surprised just how far back that recognition went? I was very surprised. I mean, seeing as far back as 1894, calculations showing that the Earth would warm,

and then popular mechanics having the piece about all the coal that was being burned and all the furnaces in the world and how this conceivably would heat up the world over the course of a few centuries. These were sort of theoretical, but by the time we got to the 60s, there was, you know, very specific calculations and predictions that this is exactly what's happening. And people like the CIA had these calculations. And the fact that the oil companies themselves have been doing research and did have very detailed and specific research about what kind of impact their product was having on the world, you know, back in the early 70s. But none of that was released. And the people, those voices in the wilderness that did come out and say that the earth is going to be heating up and that this is the cause, at that point, you didn't even need to combat them because in a way you're just going to be drawing attention to them. So they remain these sort of voices in the wilderness, and the battle really wasn't undertaken for another two decades.

It's hard to think of the CIA as a voice in the wilderness. I mean, they actually prepared a report in 1975 looking at the possible consequences of climate change. Why wasn't it an issue for national defense or for, you know, homeland security? Why was it kept quiet? It's surprising because it's a – it makes the CIA look naive, which they rarely are. But, you know, they said at one point that they assumed that once this was, you know, made clear that we could have this kind of chaos as a result of climate change and then the climate change was being caused by fossil fuels, that you would have the producers and the government would work hand in hand to come to a solution. And, of course, that never happened. And what you had was the producers recognizing that we have to do something about this.

And the best way to do it is to get as much control. of the government as possible, or in the U.S. where you have, you know, ExxonMobil, because they're all over the world and their foreign policy almost has as much influence as, you know, government foreign policy back in the day. You say that there isn't much alarm among the public about climate change because we are, quote, hardwired to ignore climate change. And I'm not sure I'm persuaded by that. Why do you say we're hardwired?

What makes you so sure? Well, I think, you know, because for the most part, for many of us, it's still happening off stage. I think that's the issue. You know, as it gets closer to home, you know, when we saw those images of downtown Manhattan with the wildfire smoke that was coming from Quebec, and it just looked absolutely apocalyptic. It looked like a film. And once we get more of that, and it affects more people and more directly, I think you'll

see more action. But as long as it's a distance or an occasional threat, then we adapt to it. But if we have something that is much more severe, then I think that will force us to act. But I think historically, and just as human beings, we are kind of hardwired for immediate threats and we don't do well with distant threats. War comes up a lot in your book. War both in the geopolitical sense, but also the wars within all of us, as you write. quote, as we are, both hostages and junior partners in the story of oil. And you point out that that war is still raging on. How do you see that war ending? Well, I think it may end the way

other wars on oil have ended. Historically, we've seen oil win wars, lose wars, start wars. You can't really count Venezuela as a war, but certainly it was, you know, an oil-based action. And all of this is to kind of gain control and gain dominance. I think right now, there's sort of the war within us where we would all like to be consuming less, and many of us are. And as it becomes economically more feasible, as solar is now cheaper than natural gas, there will be this switch at the individual level where we kind of just, you know, very quietly move over the way people have moved over to EVs in Norway or in Sweden. or in China, we're going to see that across the board.

And right now we have a couple of governments that are kind of holding us back, but ultimately economic self-interest will triumph over political aspiration. The staunch belief that the market is the surest way to sort out the economy, that government interference only distorts market forces, was almost exclusively the domain of conservative. Oil, with its lingering wildcat image, is often viewed as the Nup, plus ultra of free enterprise. Though oil has rarely operated in a free enterprise model.

In Russia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, China, and other oil-producing countries, it is mostly a state-owned and run enterprise, either explicitly or implicitly. In Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, oil is the state. Globally, it is one of the most subsidized industries, receiving grants, loans, tax credits, and royalty, reductions. The International Monetary Fund, which includes externalities, downstream cost to society in its calculations, put the 2023 figure for global oil subsidies at $7 trillion U.S. The International Institute for Sustainable Development estimated that using 10 to 30 percent of fossil fuel subsidies would be enough to pay for a global transition to clean energy.

And in the geopolitical sense, this war that we're witnessing right now, Do you consider that also a war about oil? The war waged by the U.S. supported by Israel against Iran? You know, I don't think it's an oil-based war the way, say, Iraq was years ago. But oil is lurking there in the background. It's sitting there in the wings. And it's got to be in the back of President Trump's mind, certainly, because once you limit 20% of the world's oil supply from getting to market as is happening,

it's only going to benefit the U.S. So I don't think it's what prompted them to go into Iran, but I think there are benefits there. And oil is such a contradictory product. And never more so than in kind of Trump's dilemma, which is in any war you're going to have the price of oil going up, which is great for the American oil companies, but it's also bad for the American consumer because gasoline is going to be more expensive with the pumps. and that's a real problem for him politically. So that's one of the issues with oil. There's no right answer. And it's never going to disappear,

but it's going to be shunted to the sidelines and the sooner, the better for all of us. It's been described oil as a weapon of mass destruction. And I think it is. I mean, it gave us tremendous benefits and we're now seeing the downside. And we haven't seen the worst of the downside because certainly, you know,

all these orphan wells that are sitting there that need to be cleaned up and are leaking methane, there's a massive cleanup that has to be done. And in places like Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea or even Northern Alberta, they won't be cleaned up because the money simply isn't there and we're going to be left with the residue of the oil world

40 years from now. You began your book describing how evangelical Christian faith and oil development were intertwined and you concluded with a chapter called The Ratcher the end of the world scenario in evangelical theology, the apocalypse revelation. Does that narrative that defines all as a belief system

have to end that way? Well, let's hope not. Let's hope it doesn't end like the book of Revelation. Although I guess Jesus does come down and defeat the great Satan. No, it doesn't have to end that way. I think it's going to end with a whimper, rather, than a bang, as they say. And so I think we will see a slow transition, but it will be a transition that speeds up as we go along. Oil is powered by a compelling mythology, and no country relies on

mythology as much as the U.S. The cowboy, the American dream, the American way of life, these are all powerful narratives that help define a culture and have infected other cultures, including our own. Changing a narrative is a daunting task. Mythology by design is meant to be comforting, but at the heart of the American myth is freedom and dominance, and neither will be found in oil. If oil was a character in one of your novels, what would its psychological profile look like? I have a novel called Long Change, which is a rig term. It's the, when you change shifts on the oil rigs. And oil was a character in that novel. And the idea is that oil was such a pervasive force in both the lives of the main character who was an oil man,

but also the lives of everyone in Calgary really, because no matter what you did, in an oil-based economy, it affects everyone. And so it was this sort of pervasive background force that, in a way, animated the novel. And because so much moves in lockstep with oil prices, when Calgary was booming, it put up more office space than Chicago or New York in the mid-70s. And then when it bust, you know, there's nothing going up. And so your physical landscape even is really due to the price of oil. And of course, no one has any control over the price of oil other than a few of the OPEC countries. You know, so really Saudi Arabia is sort of sitting in the cat bird seat because if they want to flood the market with oil, they can drive the price down. And, you know,

by driving the price down, it affects the livelihoods of millions of people and it changes the landscape for millions of people. So I wanted to have that idea of just how much it affects all of us and how little control we have over it. You see President Trump talking about how oil is equating with freedom. And in fact, it's really the opposite that if you did have all renewable power, you would have far greater autonomy and far greater freedom because there is no price control and you're not depending on a foreign power that's 10,000 miles away that could just, you know, change your lives overnight. So it's a false equivalency, the freedom and oil and it always has been, but it's a very compelling one. And it did represent freedom in certain

ways in terms of mobility, certainly, and the way we lived and the way we heated our home. So I understand that mythology, but it's time to kind of, and it had its place and it was a kind of romantic, heroic era of oil, but that era, I think we have to recognize, is over. One last thing is your book has been described as being about oil's messy, complicated twilight. Is this in some ways kind of like a brutally honest eulogy that you've written? Well, I hope so. And it may, I mean, it's premature to, I guess, write the eulogy for oil.

But certainly at some point in the not too distant future, we're going to see a transition that will require a eulogy. And we'll see more books like this and more in-depth kind of look at the effect it had on our world. It's a really important book. Thank you for writing it. And thanks for being here. Thank you. Not quite a eulogy, but a glimpse into a profound transformation ahead. You just heard my conversation with Canadian writer Don Gilmore.

His book, On Oil, was a finalist for the 26th Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly and Annie Bender. Technical production, Sam McNulty and Emily Carvezio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Lukshic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. Since 1988, Eastern Canada has imported more than $500 billion in foreign oil, coming from U.S., Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, Nigeria, Norway, and others.

That landscape can shift quickly. In 2012, Quebec got 92% of its oil from Kazakhstan, Angola, and Algeria, and just 1% from Alberta. Five years later, it was getting 44% of its oil from Alberta. Oil binds us all. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.