"Rachel Maddow's Blowout offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe--from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea--exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia's rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power...

"Petrostates play an outsize role in world affairs. The largest producers of oil and natural gas are wealthy states that translate that wealth into influence. They start more wars and support violent proxies abroad. Oil-rich states prop up the global arms trade, but they also use their wealth for diplomatic and aid purposes. Many assume that petrostates can use their contribution to global oil supply as a weapon, but this is more myth than reality....

Across the country, fracking -- the extraction of natural gas by hydraulic fracturing -- is being touted as the nation's answer to energy independence and a fix for a flagging economy. Drilling companies assure us that the process is safe, politicians push through drilling legislation without a serious public-health debate, and those who speak out are marginalized, their silence purchased by gas companies and their warnings about the dangers of fracking...

"Shale gas extraction--commonly known as fracking--is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet--whether or not to extract shale gas and oil...

Rachel Maddow offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil and gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea, exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia's rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading...