Oil and gas is an unpredictable industry. – Progress often accompanies a price in our busy, energy-demanding world. Perhaps we dream of a greener world, but little about our tangled relationship with this vital yet unstable resource occurs to us. ‘Ugly Side of Petrobusiness’ is more than a novel; it wants readers to consider the consequences of the industry, detailing how it has shaped countries, changed places, and been driven by ambition and greed. It tells the life of Jack Thompson, a leading oil executive and a cautionary tale to the lengths to which societies will go in their quest for power and self-preservation. Jack’s thriving career is crushed by the aftermath of an oil spill and then faces painful moral dilemmas about profit and responsibility. His choice is whether it is worth the damage to the environment and the local community. With him is Maria Lopez, a passionate activist who represents the most impacted by corporate neglect. Through her, we see what environmental damage means, and the fight for justice, worldwide, is still ongoing. Ahmed Al-Farsi, a young geologist from the Middle East, is trapped in a world of corruption and has to choose between his own goals and telling the truth. His tale illustrates how the oil industry’s reach cuts both ways, through people and governments. Linda Carter, an investigative journalist, exposes the dark webs of oil money and politics: she was responsible for breaking the veil on oil money through corruption. Together, these characters represent the conflict between greed and duty, power and righting wrongs. “Ugly Side of Petrobusiness” asks readers to consider their own role in designing the future, and to consider the choices we make in boardrooms and everyday life too. This novel is both a cautionary tale and a call to action that urges readers to engage the story and seek a balance between doing the right thing and fulfilling the demands of energy.

Journalist who insists on diversifying her coverage of the oil business beyond the glitzy façade of profitability. Linda’s investigative career leads her down a conspiracy-fueling rabbit hole, exposing corrupt arrangements between oil money and high-pressure government campaigns that expose deep-seated rot at the service of power. Now her story takes the petrobusiness story to another level, allowing the reader to explore just how tangled the worlds of politics and profit can be. Through such connections, we come to recognise the many ways that the spectacle of power is much like the pollution-spewing murmur: both are a pernicious and endemic reality, and they are often wrapped in speeches to conceal their origins in larger social forces. “Ugly Side of Petrobusiness” asks the reader to linger at the site of your participation in power addiction and how you create the future of the collective. It is a quilt made up of greed versus responsibility, power and corruption, redemption and the search for moral salvation in the midst of the din of moral decay. For herein are characters to whom you will empathize, clashing with and supporting, as they journey into and out of their intertwined doom amidst the multiplicity of complexities that extend beyond mere pages. This piece of storytelling goes both dark and light, creating a picture, one with something of a force behind it, through which to see the truths of our warming world. As you plunge into this story, prepare for a wave of emotions and thoughts. You should face those realities in your face, the discomforting, absurd aspects of the absurdity and the emotional depth that will go beyond simple observations: a bitter touch long after you have turned off your book. The stories of “Ugly Side of Petrobusiness,” woven from “Good Side of Petrobusiness,” both make you look and think on both sides and make you wonder and reflect, as well as what effect is going to occur within each stage if you ask yourself at the end of the last few pages. This book is both a call to arms and a cautionary tale. It’s a reminder that the things we as citizens make choices in boardrooms, at national gatherings and from our political office desks, out at the polls and everyday lives all echo. As one walks down a literary path, may you not only emerge as a reader, in this imaginary world, as a part of this literary adventure, it is your task to become not just a reader, but a member of it, one who dares to live in a world where ethics and energy find an interesting coherence between them both.