Remember the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Last year it captivated America’s attention as nearly five million barrels of oil gushed into the water, but once the runaway well was capped, the outrage faded away. As I write in a story in The New York Review of Books, drilling has resumed in the area, tourists are back on the beaches, and even Tony Hayward, forced to step down as BP’s CEO, is back in the action, running a multi-billion dollar investment fund. But a spate of reports and books provide a trove of data that reveals how the oil and gas industry remains as 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.

How can you turn $3.2 billion into $500 billion in a day? That’s the question I ask in a post on the New York Review of Book’s blog. The answer, if you are Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, and Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon, is that you announce a deal that allows Exxon to explore for oil in Russia’s Arctic waters. According to Putin, who last week said, “It’s scary to utter such huge figures,” the deal could reach $500 billion. According to Exxon’s news release, all that’s been agreed so far is an investment of $3.2 billion. The only certainty is that the energy industry’s numbers game sometimes resembles the magical calculations the financial industry relied on before the 2008 crash. For more, click here.