Columbia University has suspended its environmental journalism program. Not because the world needs fewer journalists who are schooled in environmental sciences. Actually, the world needs more of those, lots more. But because jobs aren’t available for them in the suffering journalism industry. The professors who ran the program said in a joint letter, “Although our students are assuming huge debt for knowledge and skills that we think are valuable, we do not feel comfortable exhorting young people to take on that burden when their chances of repaying it have so diminished.” This is not good news.

Because you can never get enough…
—Grist (Interview by Jonathan Hiskes)
—The Economist (A review)
—SeattlePI.com (Story by Joel Connelly)
—Zocalo Public Square (Interview)

A devastatingly great story in today’s NYT about Allegheny Energy installing scrubbers at a coal plant to reduce carbon emissions. The problem, however, is that the scrubbing is done by spraying water and chemicals through the plant’s chimneys; the pollution-laden water is dumped into the Monongahela River, which supplies drinking water to 350,000 people. “It’s like they decided to spare us having to breathe in these poisons, but now we have to drink them instead,” said Philip Coleman, who lives about 15 miles from the plant and has asked a state judge to toughen the facility’s pollution regulations. “We can’t escape.”

—Washington Post (Review by Steven Mufson)
—CBC Dispatches (Interview by Rick Macinnes-Rae)
—Zocalo Public Square (Video of my Los Angeles lecture)
—Huffington Post (Interview by Adriana Dunn)

—San Francisco Chronicle (Review by Adam Lashinsky)
—Tech Ticker (Yahoo!Finance interview with Aaron Task)
—TakePart.com (Question-and-answer interview by Adriana Dunn)
—CNAS.org (Review by Christine Parthemore at the Center for a New American Security)

—Approval Matrix (New York Magazine)
—KERA-FM (NPR station in Dallas-Fort Worth)
—The Business Insider

That’s the headline over a wonderful story Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote for e360, the webzine published by Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Rosenthal, who covers environmental issues for The New York Times, explains that CO2 emissions in the U.S. are 19.8 tons per capita while in the U.K. they are 9.6 tons and 6.6 tons in France. What’s the secret for Europeans’ vastly smaller footprint?

As an American, if you go live in a nice apartment in Rome, as I did a few years back, your carbon footprint effortlessly plummets. It’s not that the Italians care more about the environment; I’d say they don’t. But the normal posh apartment in Rome doesn’t have a clothes dryer or an air conditioner or microwave or limitless hot water. The heat doesn’t turn on each fall until you’ve spent a couple of chilly weeks living in sweaters. The fridge is tiny. The average car is small. The Fiat 500 gets twice as much gas mileage as any hybrid SUV. And it’s not considered suffering. It’s living the dolce vita. My point is that the low-carbon footprints depend on the infrastructure of life, and in that sense Europeans have an immediate advantage. To live without a clothes dryer or AC in the United States is considered tough and feels like a sacrifice. To do so in Rome — where apartments all include a clothes-drying balcony or indoor rack, and where buildings have thick walls and shutters to help you cope with the heat — is the norm.

Rosenthal explains how a few lifestyle changes that might seem inconvenient or impossible for Americans would not only make a big difference in our footprint but would be surprisingly easy to adapt to. Worthwhile reading…

Warning: Updates about Crude World ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

The World, which is the great radio program co-produced by WGBH, PRI and the BBC, has aired an interview with me. They made me sound a lot sharper than I was in the studio. Thank you, wonderful people at The World, especially Jeb Sharp, who conducted the interview! Click here to listen.

A New York institution interviewed me, too. Leonard Lopate, whose WNYC program is invaluable. I even got to shake Nick Hornby’s hand as I departed the studio and he entered (though I didn’t have a chance to tell Hornby that my Bosnia book had a cameo in the movie version of High Fidelity). Click here to listen.

Lastly, Peter Rowe of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote a deft story about the debate over how much oil remains. I like the headline: “The 1.258 Trillion Barrel Question.” Yes, the story quotes me.

You know print editions of newspapers are dying when the Wall Street Journal runs a positive review of your book and you read it online and then blog about it and fail to realize, until three days later, that you never got a copy of the print edition it appeared in. And then you realize you don’t mind that much; the digital version is what matters most, at least to you. I still haven’t seen a hard copy of Robert Kaplan’s review of Crude World in the Journal and I’m not sure I ever will. Same for the wonderful USA Today review that ran on Tuesday—I excitedly blogged and tweeted about it yet never thought to get an actual copy of the paper (so I don’t have one). I love newspapers and I think they are essential for our society but their digital iteration is the default setting of my life. And I am happy to pay for it when given the opportunity to do so—I subscribe to the online edition of the Journal, for instance.

This is nice. The New York Times Sunday Book Review runs a positive review by Michael Hirsh, a Newsweek correspondent who describes Crude World as “powerfully written.” Hirsh adds that the book “teaches us an old lesson anew: that the true wealth of nations is not discovered in the ground, but created by the ingenuity and sweat of citizens.” I agree! And I like the illustration, featuring a cobra, that accompanies the review.

If printed words are not enough for you, I’ll be a guest on Leonard Lopate’s NPR program on Monday (as they say, check your local listings for showtimes), and afterwards I’m doing a reading at Half King in New York on Monday night. On Wednesday evening I’ll be reading at Politics & Prose in DC, and on Thursday I’ll be back in New York for a reading at Barnes & Noble. For details, click here or go to the list of “Upcoming Events” at the sidebar on this page.

A pair of really nice reviews yesterday. Robert Rapier, a great energy blogger at theoildrum.com, calls Crude World “a fascinating read.” He writes, “I still have a stack of books that have been sent to me to review, but I jumped this one to the front of the queue. I hadn’t really intended to, as I am working on two other books right now, and would normally finish those before starting another. But once I picked this book up and started thumbing through it, I couldn’t put it down.”

Robert Kaplan, in the Wall Street Journal, is extremely kind, too. He calls Crude World an “engaging work of reporting and travel writing” and adds, “As Mr. Maass demonstrates, oil is almost as essential to our lives as the air we breathe, yet its effect on the countries that produce it, and on the alpha males who run the oil industry, is quite sinister … Whether Mr. Maass is in the primeval, environmentally ruined Niger Delta region of southern Nigeria, or in a Venezuelan slum where ‘even the jobless are mugged,’ or in a menacing and soulless Moscow high-rise, or among wayward, spoiled-brat Saudi youth, he shows how the trail of oil leads a traveler to either grim poverty or repulsive wealth.”

If you’d like to go straight to the source, TheBigMoney.com, which is Slate.com’s financial spinoff, is running an excerpt about the struggles and souls of oilmen. It’s one of my favorite bits from Crude World.

I have never met Steve Weinberg, who reviews books for USA Today, but I now owe him a beer or two. Weinberg has written a wonderful review of Crude World. The review says, “Thousands of books about the oil culture exist in English, and thousands more in other languages. Maass’ book is in a class by itself, as he constructs his relentless indictment on a foundation of first-rate reporting and superb writing.” It’s particularly great to hear that from a writer like Weinberg, who has two oil books under his belt. He’s the author of a biography of Armand Hammer and, more recently, Taking on the Trust, about Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.

Harper’s Magazine asked me six questions about Crude World. I replied.

Foreign correspondents tend to be early adopters of technology. When the first laptops came along (before the word “laptop” really existed) I got one of them—a Tandy TRS-80, which had a screen that showed about eight lines of text. I’ve heard that the code for those things was written in the early 1980s by a young geek named Bill Gates. As they say, that story is too good to check. Then along came the TRS-200, soon nudged aside by the Toshiba 1000SE. Skip forward a decade and my peer group was the first to use Thuraya satphones to transmit stories from far-flung locations that had no international phone lines (hello Kandahar 2001). But I’ve been late to the social networking party; the usual excuses apply. Now I’m on board. Give me a shout on Facebook (here’s the link for my page and here’s one for the Crude World group, or follow me on Twitter (please!).

I’ve never worked with Antonin Kratochvil, the photographer, but I know him slightly and love his work, which is beautiful and disturbing (perhaps an appropriate description of Antonin, too). Outside magazine has just published a profile of Antonin, and the story is as offbeat and entertaining and necessary as his pictures. A few graphs into the piece Chris Anderson, whose work is also amazing and to whom Antonin is a mentor, has this to say: “In what we do, the most important faculties are instinct and intuition. Antonin is the embodiment of instinct. His persona is that of an ogre, but he is frighteningly intelligent, the most astute observer of human behavior I know.” Read the story, see his photos.

In Gabon, it was known as “the Bongo system.” For 41 years, Omar Bongo ruled Gabon and stole its oil revenues. As the Times explains, the system consisted of “forsaking roads, schools and hospitals for the sake of Mr. Bongo’s 66 bank accounts, 183 cars, 39 luxury properties in France and grandiose government constructions in Libreville.” The elite lived in mansions and sipped French wines while everyone else lived on $2 a day. The good news is that Bongo died in June. The not-so-good news is that his son, Ali, is the new president.

A chapter of my book (publication is a week from today) focuses on a multi-billion dollar environmental lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador. Joe Berlinger, director of the incomparable “Brother’s Keeper” and “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” has just released his documentary about the Chevron lawsuit. Because Berlinger is more succinct than I am, the title of his doc is, quite simply, “Crude.” It’s gotten rave reviews. The Times called it “thorough and impassioned” and Rolling Stone described it as a “powerhouse of a documentary.” Documentaries do not tend to linger at movie theaters, so please check your local listings or the film’s website for showtimes and see it soon!

The September issue of Foreign Policy includes an excerpt from Crude World. The issue just hit the newstands and has been posted online, too. (I’ve also posted the excerpt in the articles section of my site). The excerpt, with scenes from Nigeria, Houston, Venezuela and Iraq, is running alongside a series of remarkable oil photos by Michael Kamber, Ed Kashi and Marcus Bleasdale. If only to see the pictures, it’s definitely worth a look.

A while back my editor at Knopf, Jon Segal, showed me a proposed cover for Crude World. I really liked some elements of the design but other things didn’t work for me. So what to do? Knopf would not use a cover I didn’t approve of, but Jon reminded me that Knopf had a bit more experience with book designs than I did. Should I trust my instincts or Knopf’s? The decision was easy; I signed off on the cover. A few days ago I got an advance copy of the book, which arrives in stores in a few weeks. Wow. The thing is beautiful. Ignore the digital reproduction on this site—it does no justice. Go to a store and look at it. You don’t have to buy it. Just look at it. I’ve shown my copy to a few friends and the first thing they say is, Amazing cover. The designer is Peter Mendelsund.

No, I’m not talking about you, though I’m sure you’re good looking, too. I’m talking about this website, which has been redesigned to focus on Crude World. Please go ahead and rummage through the revised site, which looks fantastic (I know, I’m biased). The wonderful Andrew Hearst is responsible for the design and coding; once you’ve browsed around, please check out his site, too!