Oil is a filthy fuel.
Wars are fought over it, millions of seabirds and fish are regularly suffocated by it, its exhaust fumes saturate the air we breathe whilst the atmospheric C02 it creates disastrously disrupts our climate. Yet the global oil corporations have no problem securing academic expertise to assist in their filthy trade, to defend its economic imperialism and to obfuscate its catastrophic environmental effects. Money talks and oil freely flows through the hallowed halls of academia. Dirty and deadly For a century and a half, industrial societies have been moving underground reserves of coal and oil into the air. Today about 175 billion more tonnes of carbon are circulating in the atmosphere in the form of C02 than before the industrial revolution.