This weekend the Financial Times featured a great essay by Ed Crooks on some accounts of the oil industry. We were thrilled that Crooks led with Fuel on the Fire and Platform’s new book The Oil Road, as well as Jeff Rubin’s The Big Flatline. Fuel on the Fire, published in 2011, reveals the oil…
Today, BP’s Baku mega-oil project – one of its largest in the world – comes of age, 18 years since the Contract of the Century was signed in September 1994. To mark the anniversary, Verso Books and Platform are releasing a new book detailing its hidden story of geo-political manipulation, imprisonment of critics and environmental…
James Marriott talks about Platform’s new book The Oil Road in advance of the Transition Network Conference taking place at Battersea Arts Centre. James will be inspiring people with stories of his travels from the oil fields of the Caspian to the refineries and financial centres of Northern Europe. He will also consider how we…
‘The Oil Road’ opens the lid on the often-shady energy economy, weaving absorbing travel reportage into powerful investigative journalism…If you want to know why oil matters read this book. (Time Out – 5th September 2012) Platform’s campaign to put the Oil Road on the map has been given a fine start with our new travel…
A Guest Blog by John de Falbe of Sandoe’s Books. I just received an early copy of “The Oil Road: A Journey from the Caspian Sea to the City of London” by Platform’s James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, published by Verso, due out in mid-September. I read it in manuscript: it’s a brilliant analysis of…
The new Paperback edition has a brand new Afterword… “★★★★★…The Oil Road opens the lid on the often-shady energy economy, weaving absorbing travel reportage into powerful investigative journalism…. If you want to know why oil matters, read this book.” – Time Out (book of the week) “An elegantly written travel book…will make you think the next…
While the Tory government forces through unpopular cutbacks to the NHS, education and pensions, British public institutions plan to invest hundreds of millions – if not billions – of pounds into new fossil fuel infrastructure on the Caspian. Both the British Export Credit Agency (the ECGD – recently rebranded "UK Export Finance") and the Royal…
To mark Sunday’s performance of “The Ballad of Those tho Drink the Sun” celebrating the life and work of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Platform is publishing a book excerpt on Nazim Hikmet, poetry & technology, the Euphrates versus BP’s Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. This is an edited excerpt from our upcoming book “The Oil Road: A Journey…
There are two Platform events coming up which explore themes in our forthcoming book The Oil Road by Mika Minio and James Marriott, due out in September. The first event is a talk in the Bristol Festival of Ideas – What if we left the oil in the ground? Taking place at Arnolfini on Sunday 20th…
Some Common Concerns was written by PLATFORM and published with Corner House, Friends of the Earth & Kurdish Human Rights Project in October 2002. The book imagines what the proposed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline system would be like if it were built. It recounts the 13 years of planning, the political positioning of the three host countries…