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Long before Jed Clampett discovered “a bubblin’ crude” on The Beverly Hillbillies, the world was captivated by oil. Or, as the journalist, novelist, and historian Don Gillmor recounts in On Oil, captivated by a dream of riches that is leading us down a disastrous path. Since the first rig was built in 1847, in Azerbaijan, oil and gas have seeped into our everyday existence, creating symbols of false pride and the illusory hope that somehow pumping black gold can foster a better way of life.

In his slim but important book, Gillmor exposes the many myths of a multi-billion-dollar industry while also pointing fingers at those who have become phony King Midases, complicit with an array of dictators ruling the world’s petrostates. They have done so while promoting their quest as God’s work. Oilmen, Gillmor notes, display a “strong streak of evangelism.”

Fittingly, then, Gillmor turns to Biblical references throughout. Near the end, he quotes the Book of Revelation: “A third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.” He continues spelling out the destruction by paraphrasing St. John the Evangelist: “A third of the sea becomes blood, a third of the creatures in the sea die, smoke covers the earth, and out of the smoke come locusts. A great beast arises from the sea and deceives the world.” In today’s context, the beast is clearly the Trump administration, accompanied by the industry’s “believers, blasphemers, and penitents, each with their own convictions and statistics.”

“Oil has won wars, started others, been a force for nationalism and colonization, and provided a stubborn mythology,” Gillmor writes of the “one true global religion.” Invoking the spirit of Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, he emphasizes that oil is more a “weapon of mass destruction” than a path to salvation. In doing so, Gillmor joins the ranks of American muckrakers who have shown oil’s potential for harm. In 1904, Ida Tarbell dealt a blow to the powerful monopoly built by John D. Rockefeller with The History of the Standard Oil Company, collecting a series of articles in McClure’s magazine. Later, Upton Sinclair drew public attention to industry wrongdoings with his novel Oil!, which was made into the film There Will Be Blood. Unlike those two, Gillmor spent time getting his hands dirty before he became a writer. He recalls his own youthful experience as a roughneck in Alberta, where the environment and Indigenous communities have been devastated through the costly extraction of bitumen. In referencing the Lodgepole blow‑in, which in 1982 spewed 200 million cubic feet of noxious hydrogen sulphide per day for more than two months, Gillmor describes the “essential duality” of the province’s petroleum industry as “at once economic engine and destroyer of worlds.”

The oilsands represent the front line of “a war fought with science, celebrity, misinformation, and political cudgels,” and Alberta politicians have persistently paved the way. Premier Ernest Manning led the charge from the 1940s to the 1960s. Also a radio preacher, he called oil “the lamp of God’s Word.” He was followed in the 1990s by the “Useful Idiot” Ralph Klein. Most recently, Danielle Smith, the oil company employee turned premier, has become the industry’s “Happy Warrior.” The “political capitalism” of such figures, Gillmor writes, has energized lobbyists to seize power and to craft public policy favourable to their clients.

At times, On Oil reads like a doomsday scenario. Based on well-researched facts, however, this is no conspiracy theory tract. The bad guys really are bad, and they don’t care what happens to local communities or whole countries. Gillmor details several instances of big oil’s capacity for corruption and how all of us have been “cursed by oil’s ease, seduced by its possibilities.”

Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony on the west coast of Central Africa, offers one stark example. When reserves were discovered there in 1995, the dictatorial president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, opened the doors to big oil. He eventually pocketed $700 million in royalties while the poverty-ridden masses went without drinkable water, proper housing, or health care. Nigeria, the world’s sixth-most-populous country, is another example, suffering from what Gillmor calls “the resource curse.” Before the discovery of oil in 1956, “Nigeria had a robust and diversified economy.” By putting all its eggs in the petroleum basket, the government left other industries to wither. Oil became king, with 85 percent of the wealth going to 1 percent of the population. Today Nigerian leaders consider the development of renewable clean energy to be impossible. And then there’s Saudi Arabia, which has been pumping oil since 1938 but, as Gillmor shows, is at least aware that it must develop renewable energy sources for when the wells inevitably run dry.

What the New York Times has called “the money-losing boondoggle” of fracking natural gas is also a problem. The process may be “wildly unprofitable” and destructive, but that didn’t stop the United States from becoming the world’s largest gas producer by 2015. Gillmor notes a Harvard University study that found those living near fracking sites “showed a 3.5 percent increase in premature death,” while other researchers have found a corresponding “prevalence of asthma, cardiology issues, and low birth weights.”

Nine years ago, with Strangers in Their Own Land, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild detailed the fracking nightmare in Louisiana, where the oil and chemical industry has created a toxic backyard. Gillmor paints an equally grim picture of Pennsylvania, where residents have discovered they can sometimes light their drinking water on fire after fracking has arrived. “We are hard-wired to ignore climate change,” Gillmor states, adding later that “we have become inured to environmental outrages.” Yet it is difficult not to feel deepening anger after reading this strong indictment of the most earth-destroying economic force that exists today. Oil may be the silent enemy of the people, asserts Gillmor, “yet there is hope.”

Despite what seems to be the unstoppable destruction of Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” doctrine, On Oil ultimately presents the case for a renewable future. Even now, renewable energy is “cheaper than fossil fuels.” And Alberta and Texas, bucking stereotypes, lead their countries in its production. Ironically, perhaps big oil’s never-ending quest for bigger profits will assist the world’s quest for survival.