The Tech Bros’ War on Climate Action

How did we get here? And what can be done about it? Amy Westervelt began grappling with these questions while reporting groundbreaking exposés of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to hide and deny the scientific fact that its products dangerously overheat the planet. (Disclosure: Westervelt is on the steering committee of the global journalism network Covering Climate Now, which I co-founded.) Brought To You By tells what Westervelt presents as the origin story of Big Oil’s deceptions. It’s a deeper story that must be reckoned with, she argues, in order to comprehend today’s dizzying information system and replace it with a system that serves democracy and, with it, climate survival.

A self-described “history nerd” whose “happy place” is inside library archives, Westervelt opens her narrative by recounting how the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s U.S. trade association, came into being.

During World War I, a public relations man named Ivy Lee worked behind the scenes to get oil companies to cooperate rather than compete and thus ensure a steady supply of oil for the war. “As the war drew to a close,” Westervelt writes, “Lee thought … if normally competing companies could coordinate on production and supply during the war, why not work together in peacetime to keep prices high and regulation low?” The American Petroleum Institute’s first official meeting took place in Washington barely six months after the fighting ended.