Geoff Dembicki on How He Wrote a Big Oil Blockbuster Geoff Dembicki’s The Petroleum Papers, set for release Sept. 20, is getting raves while inspiring rage. Kirkus Media has listed it among its top anticipated books for the fall season and the Toronto Star placed the work on its own similar list. Dembicki, a widely published climate journalist who’s written for The Tyee for 15 years, pored over a mountain of historical documents and interviewed key players to expose many key moments when the oil industry and its political allies sowed disinformation about the rising threat of climate catastrophe. He names names and connects dots from Fort McMurray to Washington, D.C. The Tyee spoke with Debicki ahead of his book’s launch to learn how we could have averted disaster decades ago. You can read the full conversation and an excerpt from The Petroleum Papers on our website. The Tyee: The title of your book references a huge collection of confidential oil industry archives. What’s contained in these documents and how did you get access to them? Geoff Dembicki: So for the last few decades major oil companies have been secretly researching climate change and then writing up reports about their findings. Pretty much all the major firms with operations in the oilsands — including Suncor, Shell, BP and the Exxon-owned Imperial Oil — learned internally that their products were making climate change worse and potentially leading to catastrophic impacts around the world. They also produced reports about how to communicate this science to the public. By the early 1990s, the strategy most companies decided on was lying about the science, trying to convince the public it isn’t real. Investigative research groups like DeSmog got access to huge amounts of these documents and posted them online in vast databases. So the documents were publicly available, but no journalist had really gone in and written a book telling the explosive story contained in all those documents. Starting a few years ago, that’s what I decided to do. That sounds like a ton of work. Give me a sense of how you went about it, and maybe something you dug up that amazed you. There’s a site called Climate Files run by a group called the Climate Investigations Center that has a master collection of documents sorted by year and going back to 1953. I began the process of reading every single document on the site. Through that process I found stuff that even the disinformation experts didn’t really know about. The document that really blew my mind was a short summary of talking points about climate solutions created by Imperial Oil in 1993. Exxon had been internally studying climate solutions and learned that a national carbon price in the early 1990s could effectively stabilize the crisis without hurting the economy. It would be bad for profits though, so Imperial urged executives to essentially portray the research in the worst possible light to media and policy-makers, saying that fixing climate change was a reckless strategy that would destroy the economy. Imperial could have helped stop this emergency three decades ago, but chose not to. You are an Alberta kid who started as an intern at The Tyee right out of Carleton’s journalism program in 2008. And you’ve been a regular contributor to our pages ever since. But now you live in Brooklyn and also write for Vice and the Guardian. Why are you in New York and what’s that like? As a writer I’ve always been fascinated with New York and after my partner Kara and I got renovicted from our apartment in East Vancouver in 2019, we checked out rents in Brooklyn and they actually weren’t so much crazier than Vancouver rents. I also wanted to be here to cover the dozens of lawsuits against Big Oil moving forward in U.S. courts, as well as the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The West Coast will always feel like home to me, but New York is fun and exciting. I’ve met a lot of other writers and editors and spent much time exploring the city on my bike. I still regularly read The Tyee and the whole network of awesome climate and environment-focused writers in B.C., including Arno Kopecky, Sean Holman, James MacKinnon, Francesca Fionda, Michelle Gamage — really there’s too many to name.