Raising Hell: Issue 78: Receipts
"My interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy." - Major General Smedley Butler, 1932, former US Marine in reply after being asked to organise a fascist coup.
An eerie blue light washed the Brisbane Convention Centre ballroom: blue for petroleum, blue for burning gas, blue for blue hydrogen.
It was a Wednesday evening in mid-May 2022, day three of the oil and gas industry’s big four-day national conference – not counting the golf tournament scheduled for that Friday.
The presence of the industry’s executives, here on the banks of the Brisbane River, was one of life’s great ironies. Two months ago, as the river rose under torrential rain, convention centre staff had worked through the night sandbagging the venue to keep the water at bay. The floodwaters had surged right across South East Queensland and down over the border into northern New South Wales, past Lismore and the Northern Rivers, into areas where the Black Summer bushfires had burned the year before. The water had yet to properly drain from Brisbane, but now venue staff were playing host to a crop of petroleum execs whose core business was driving a change in the chemical composition of the atmosphere that had made those floods worse.
The absolute cream of the industry had begun to gather about an hour before the doors opened. Those present represented some of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world – the ExxonMobils, the Chevrons, the Shells – as well as smaller players, public relations professionals, departmental bureaucrats and elected officials. They formed an impenetrable wall of grey suits in the foyer as they milled around, knocked back drinks and networked. Then, as the annual gala dinner was about to begin, the doors had opened and we were let loose inside.
So marks the opening sequence of Slick: Australia’s Toxic Relationship With Big Oil, my latest book from University of Queensland Press. As those of you who have followed my work over this last few years will know, this is opening kicks off with an adaption of another story I originally wrote for Rolling Stone AU in November 2022 titled, The Oil And Gas Industry Refuses To Die. At the time, I had wrapped a contract working in-house with the Guardian’s environment team and news desk where I had been doing considerable reporting on the activities of oil and gas producers. I decided to tag along to their annual conference to see how it was going.
What I found was bizarre. The country had just experienced its worst fire season on record, and entire cities had been temporarily removed from the map. Now the C-suite was partying at the Brisbane Convention Centre — an experience which started me asking questions.
At some point we have all heard a version of “The Big Lie” — the idea that fossil fuel producers knew about reality of the greenhouse effect and its consequences before anyone else. If you’re anything like me, that conversation always seemed remote, mostly because it was always so heavily focussed on North America or Europe.
The more I began to look into this, however, the more the project began to snowball as my research window grew wider. As I conducted my document sweep — the process of seeing what was out there to help inform further investigation — I began to find more information about what Australia’s petroleum producers were up to, how they got started, how they learned to use influence and how they used their considerable financial, social, cultural and political capital to bring people around to their point of view.
Part of this work involved spending considerable time in state and national archives. At one point I even asked the industry’s peak body whether they would give me access to their archive — only to be told that it was “not open to the public”. Which was an amusing response. I knew it had been made available to other, perhaps friendlier researchers who they felt could be “trusted”.
Though my work on that project is now largely over — with the manuscript going through the final stages of the editorial process before it is printed — my work in this area is ongoing. Just this last week, I travelled to Sydney and Canberra to looking through the state and national libraries. This exercise was a fishing expedition in many ways, and though it didn’t produce a smoking gun, it did provide leads on at least two major stories. Over the course of three days, I took over 3000 images of these materials. Processing this stuff is arduous and dull, as it requires everything from orientating the reference materials correctly so they can be read properly, to actually sifting the wheat from the chaff. Whatever the case, I will be pitching these in the coming weeks and I look forward to talking more about what I found, when I do.
I mention this here because this recent trip only happened thanks to the ongoing financial support of Raising Hell subscribers (and which is why you will find that I haven’t published anything this week). I did cast around for philanthropic funding to help cover the cost of doing some journalism — the extra cash would have gone a long way to allowing me to dig deeper. Unfortunately, in this world, very few organisations or individuals are set up to actually fund journalism — which itself is a costly, time consuming task. Most prefer to give money to registered charities to produce reports for journalists to report in turn. This, for what it’s worth, is not the first time I have sought support to go conduct researcher. In the past I’ve cast-around quick-response grants for travel and to conduct good, public interest journalism. I have either been ignored or refused.
That said, I’m not here to talk about all the ways in which the media is broken — Amy Westervelt of Drilled fame already took care of that a few weeks back with a great long-read that’s very much worth your time if you’re interested in this issue. What am I here to say is a big thank you to those who have stuck with me. I appreciate that much of what I work on is slow-burn, that the world is a depressing place and it is easy to tune-out, but without your support, these sorts of quests would not be possible and stories that deserve to be told would be forgotten in the churn.
Thank you, again and please consider supporting my work. If you haven’t pre-ordered Slick, you can do so through your local independent book (you will find a helpful list here) store or at the link below:
For the period of 9 April to 23 April…
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
The 24-hour news cycle never sleeps, and neither do I. I might not have any publications this fortnight, but I’ve been busy working away in the background. Keep an eye out though — I currently have one active commission and will be pushing for several more in the coming week.
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal — contact me first for how. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!