The Guardian Weekly 14 January 2022
36 A dirty job
the oil industry with disasters like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil
spill and with carbon emissions that imperilled the planet.
It was an industry whose pipelines and projects threatened
delicate ecosystems like the Arctic national wildlife refuge
in Alaska; an industry from which more and more reputable
institutions – universities, philanthropic organisations –
had begun divesting; an industry that anyone concerned
about the fate of the Earth would sooner protest against
than turn to for employment.
But while condemning the greed of oil companies was
easy enough, avoiding relying on the product they pro-
duced was more diffi cult. For all the talk of shifting to wind
and solar power, fossil fuels still supplied 84% of the world’s
energy in 2019, and in many places – including China and
India – their use was increasing. Another factor was the
massive carbon footprint of the US , which made up less
than 5% of the world’s population but consumed roughly a
quarter of the world’s energy. More than 80 years after The
Road to Wigan Pier was published, “dirty oil” was no less
important in the metabolism of global capitalism than coal
had been in Orwell’s time. Although he spoke frequently
about addressing the climate crisis, President Obama pre-
sided over a massive increase in crude oil production, which
grew by 3.6m barrels a day during his tenure. When Obama
left offi ce, the US was the world’s leading petroleum pro-
ducer. His successor, Donald Trump, was an even more
unabashed promoter of the fossil fuel industry, rolling back
environmental regulations and proposing to open 90% of
the US’s coastal waters to off shore drilling.
Stephen Stone did not grow up dreaming of working
in the energy industry. Throughout his childhood, his
favourite place to spend time was outdoors, swimming in
the Tennessee River or trekking through the wilderness
near his home in Grant, Alabama , a small town nestled in
the foothills of the Appalachians. The bucolic setting suited
him, at least until he got a bit older, when life in a backwoods
town with limited opportunities felt stifl ing. During what
would have been his senior year in high school, he started
working the night shift at a rug factory in nearby Scottsboro ,
where his mother worked after his parents got divorced.
After graduating, he quit the rug factory and enlisted in the
navy. Two-and-a-half years later, after being discharged, he
returned to Grant and started calling oil companies to see if
he could land a job on a rig. He’d heard that oil companies
liked to hire former navy guys and the work paid well, far
more than any other job a high school graduate from rural
Alabama was likely to stumble across. Some time later, he
fl ew to Houston to interview for a position as a roustabout
with GlobalSantaFe, an off shore drilling company that
would later be bought by Transocean.
It was on this visit to Houston that Stephen decided to
strike up a conversation with the redhead sitting next to
him on the airport shuttle. The redhead was Sara. They
chatted for three hours; within a year, they were married.
From the moment they started talking , Sara was struck by
Stephen’s intelligence, the books he mentioned reading
and the thoughtful gaze in his eyes. Whenever he would go
off shore on a hitch in the years to come, Sara would notice,
Stephen made sure to pack some reading – novels, poetry,
philosophy. He also brought along a couple of pocket-size
notebooks that he would fi ll with poems and drawings. To
some college graduates, marrying a rig worker, even one
who wrote poetry in his spare time, might have seemed
odd. To Sara, it felt natural. Virtually everyone she knew
in Katy came from a family with ties to the oil industry.
Her own father had worked in the industry for decades.
The rhythm of the lifestyle, marked by two- and three-
week hitches during which rig workers were separated
from their spouses, was familiar to Sara, who often went
months without seeing her father during her childhood. She
miss ed Stephen, but she also liked having time to focus on
her own interests. In college, she’d majored in painting and
photography, visual mediums through which she’d always
found it easier to express herself than words.
In the aftermath of the explosion on the Deepwater
Horizon, Sara started a series of portraits of the blast’s
survivors. The paintings were drafted, fi ttingly, in oil and
were inspired by a visit that she and Stephen paid to Wash-
ington DC, where they and other survivors were invited
to testify at a House judiciary committee hearing on the
Deepwater disaster – a disaster that was still unfolding and
that, upon closer inspection, was hardly a surprise.The immediate cause of the blast on the Deepwater
Horizon was a bubble of methane gas that fl oated up
through the drill column, most likely because of a breach
in the cement casing that enclosed it, and spread across the
deck before igniting into a deadly fi reball. In the view of
many analysts, the deeper cause was the recklessness and
greed that pervaded the oil industry. This seemed particu-
larly pronounced at BP, the company that leased the rig from
Transocean and owned the exclusive rights to the Macondo
Prospect well, an oil and gas reservoir located about 80km
off the coast of Louisiana. “Make every dollar count” wasStephen was asked to sign a
document saying he hadn’t
been injured: ‘I don’t know –
this just happened,’ he said