Drowning in Oil: BP and the Reckless Pursuit of Profit
by Loren C. Steffy
McGraw Hill, 285 pp., $27.00
A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher
by Joel Achenbach
Simon and Schuster, 276 pp., $25.99
Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster
by John Konrad and Tom Shroder
Harper, 270 pp., $27.99
Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling
a report to the President by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling
US Government Printing Office, 380 pp., $39.00 (paper)
The anniversary of the largest oil spill in American history passed with little notice this summer. Yet the reports of the past year and anniversary-themed books on the disaster provide a trove of data that reveals how the oil and gas industry is as reckless and unaccountable as the too-big-to-fail banks that brought on the financial crisis of 2008. The BP disaster revealed the same problems—lax government regulation, corporate profits despite the risks, a fawning press—that characterized the financial meltdown. Big banks and big oil have more in common than their size.
