- by FJK
- The Guardian
- Issue #2110
How many billion tonnes of CO2 did humanity pump into the atmosphere the year you were born? How about the year your youngest relative was born? I don’t know the answer to these questions for myself – I’d be almost afraid to find out. The facts on climate change can be hard to face directly.
Royce Kurmelovs might know. Early on in Slick, he starts the story of Kate, whose life would later be upended by the last catastrophic Lismore floods. In 1986, the year of Kate’s birth, humanity pumped 20.61 billion tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere.
It’s a moving statistic, and Kate’s is a moving story. Kurmelovs does this a few times throughout Slick, linking the personal and political to an ongoing disaster. Kate’s disrupted life thanks to floods that climate change made a huge difference to is something we have to look at, like the last big unavoidable bushfires, and like the heatwaves currently breaking records in the Northern Hemisphere and heading our way.
A simple description of Slick would be that the fossil fuel companies knew about climate change, and kept doing what they do anyway, making it worse, as well as sabotaging efforts to make things better through the active use of denial.
‘They knew’ doesn’t really do Kurmelovs’ book justice. The petroleum industry in Australia knew while it was being established. It knew in graphic detail. The oil industry went right on practicing influence-peddling that was practically state capture.
Remember when the Premier of South Australia raised fines for protests from $750 to $50,000? An SA cabinet minister assured a roomful of oil executives that the South Australian government was “at your disposal,” as Kurmelovs puts it, “cooing over them like they were a child with a bruised knee.” Incidentally, not all the prose lands that well. There are moments where this reader wanted to tell Kurmelovs to give the stylistic gags a rest.
Australian oil always worried about their legitimacy. Slick tells us in detail how the big oil companies were trying to influence governments from the start, from the days when people believed Australia didn’t have any oil.
The facts of how they do it can be infuriating. Along the way, the oil industry has worked hard to coopt well-meaning people and organisations like STEMPunks, an innovative and successful high school science program who were used to get pro-oil extraction propaganda into schools. There’s a very interesting chapter on the good people in big oil companies and the different ways they deal with working for an industry that they know at some level is working to make the only planet we have uninhabitable. Some are allowed to do some good projects that don’t really make a difference, but help the company look like it cares. Others work it out and leave.
Kurmelovs makes all these facts, most of which any sympathetic reader will already know, live and breathe with carefully-researched and personal stories.
If I had to sum up Slick in one sentence, I’d say that the things we learned are true, but worse than we thought, also more moving.
People who only know Violet CoCo for being sentenced to 15 months in jail for blocking traffic for minutes, will read here about how she got moved from selling search engine optimisation for a Murdoch subsidiary to climate protest. CoCo said “you have to be an expert in all the ways the corruption is happening.”
The narrative finishes at the 2023 Climate Change Conference, COP28 in Dubai, where the CEO of the national oil company presided over the conference on the pretext that getting the oil producers in the tent would force them to cooperate with the urgent need to wind down their industry.
Kurmelovs calls that hope “the search for a global ex machina” – some external force that would magically sweep away all obstacles, without the need for politics or a fight.
Kurmelovs’ final question is this, will we let them get away with it?
This book is definitely worth reading for the background in Australia politics, for the detail about how big Oil is doing it. It inspires passion, but also a sense of realism. Big Oil won’t fold up its tents and stop harming the world just because we shout at it. It certainly won’t stop harming us if we do nothing.
Violet CoCo at one point bemoans the fact that the general public is “illiterate” about how the oil industry works. Slick goes a good job of usefully raising our literacy levels.
