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Searching for my publisher’s radioactive oil waste

Illustrations by Giovanni Alberti. Source images courtesy the author

Out in the country north of New York City, Karret and I cut a pathway through reeds and wildflowers, and one day drove to the end of it in an old Fleetwood Bounder, parked under a black oak tree, and moved in. This was in the summer of 2020. There was a major river nearby, mountains across the way, and a small town with a few stores. We had no electricity or running water, but the RV had a minibar, a coffee maker, and a DVD player; we set up an outdoor shower and hooked up solar panels. Karret worked at her atelier in a nearby town, and I worked on a book I had been writing for years about radioactive oil and gas waste.

While my job as a journalist drew me toward the problems of industrialized society, here we tracked the sun and saw stars fall from the sky, and I biked the country roads at night under Cassiopeia, the spotlight moon, and even in pitch black, realizing that freedom meant having the privilege to take a risk and glide, through the dark, nearly blind. Then, one early August day in 2023, the material world intruded in the form of an email from my publisher. It read:

Dear Simon & Schuster Author,

I am delighted to announce that Paramount Global has agreed to a sale of Simon & Schuster to KKR, one of the world’s largest and most respected investment firms.

Over the three years since the sale process initially began, we have had the privilege of meeting with numerous interested buyers. In the spring of 2023, we began a series of fascinating and stimulating conversations with members of KKR’s Media and Entertainment industry team about every aspect of our business, reflective of their keen interest in acquiring our company. All of us from Simon & Schuster who participated came away from those conversations impressed by KKR’s acumen, as well as their team’s desire to help our business grow and thrive in the future.

I knew nothing about KKR, but I soon learned that it was a private-equity company headquartered in New York. It had significant assets in oil and gas, receiving a D rating on a climate-risk scorecard put out in 2022 by a financial-reform group, as well as investments in a pipeline going through land of the Wet’suwet’en, in British Columbia. The firm had connections to a nonprofit that had pushed Republican state treasurers to quash investments in renewables and promote oil and gas interests. And it had formed, in 2021, its own oil and gas exploration and production company called Crescent Energy, with assets in the Rocky Mountains and South Texas.

Shortly after learning of the deal, I spoke with Lynn, a friend of mine who worked at a farm market. She told me how it was with organic food companies: Naked Juice, purchased in 2006 by PepsiCo; Annie’s, now part of General Mills; Kashi, owned by Kellogg; Honest Tea and Odwalla, both swallowed by Coca-Cola. I also mentioned the purchase to a friend of my sister’s, who used to work for WebMD. She told me that KKR bought it, things got worse, and then she left. That my book had ended up in the lap of the very thing I was investigating was stunning to me, but few others seemed surprised.

I waited for Simon & Schuster’s high-profile authors to raise a word of complaint, but as far as I could see, none did. I monitored Stephen King’s social-media accounts, thinking that he, who had stood up to defend writers a few years earlier when Penguin Random House had attempted to purchase Simon & Schuster, might say something: crickets. In the absence of any prominent outrage, I wondered what responsibility fell to me.

My book, Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It, due to be published by Simon & Schuster the following spring, was the product of a seven-year investigation into the radioactivity brought to the surface by oil and gas development, and the various threats it posed to the industry’s workers, the public, and the environment. KKR’s purchase of Simon & Schuster meant that the book would be owned by a publishing house that was owned by a private-equity company that owned an oil and gas company. A few days after receiving the email, I spoke to my editor over the phone and told him I intended to pull the book.

The decision came with that uncomfortable hollow feeling you get when you know you are making an irreversible choice. I would have to return to Simon & Schuster the $30,000 of the advance I had received. It also likely meant that fewer people would read the book, which threatened the impact I wanted it to have in the first place. I suppose I wanted proof, beyond climate-risk scorecards, that I had been right to sever ties with the company. I wanted to see the thing that I had reacted to up close. It just so happened that one of my sources, Sister Elizabeth Riebschlaeger, an eighty-eight-year-old nun, lived in Texas, near some of KKR’s Crescent Energy wells. I gave her a call.

To be a writer is to want the world to care, and the first task is getting someone to print your words. What I didn’t realize when I started—when I chose to get degrees in earth and environmental science and journalism; when I wrote for small newspapers, then online literary journals, then bigger ones with printed pages—is that if you actually succeed, you can lose track of yourself. Soon enough, the writing becomes the life.

“I’ve long been a great admirer of your work and would be absolutely thrilled to work with you on something,” read the message I received from Sean, who was an editor at a national magazine. This, I was learning, is how freelance journalism works. You anxiously send your stories out into the void, and editors find them, read them, and ask you to write bigger things for larger publications, ones that pay better but often have just a little less soul. You would be a fool to not take the opportunity, because in the end the words are what matter, and you want people to see them—and you need money.

So, I wrote for Sean. A story about a Utah truck driver who hauled potatoes and built a telescope the size of his truck through which he could see the rings of planets, and another one about a rich Russian adventurer who crashed a helicopter into Arctic sea ice. There were freaky geniuses stuck on the outer edges of the earth, while the egotists ran the core. The former, I realized, were my people.

But I couldn’t disregard the battle between earth and ego, and so I became interested in fracking. I had spent years covering rising seas, melting ice, and offshore spills, but the controversial drilling technique was new to me. To better understand it, I took a tour in 2018 through the Marcellus and the Utica, black-shale formations that underlie northern Appalachia and represent one of America’s booming natural-gas production zones. I met sick workers who had been doused with fracking waste, and a person who had lived for months in the treetops to block a natural-gas pipeline’s passage through a pristine forest. I learned about injection wells, where wastewater that gushes to the surface is shot back into the deep earth.

I started working on my book when Tish O’Dell, an Ohio community organizer, told me that a company in the Cleveland area had made a liquid deicer out of radioactive oil and gas waste, though it was supposedly “Safe for Environment and Pets” and was being sold at Lowe’s for use on home driveways and patios. The U.S. oil and gas industry generates a trillion gallons of oil-field brine per year—put into barrels and laid end to end, it would reach to the moon and back nearly twenty-nine times. Brine can contain elevated levels of heavy metals like lead and arsenic, and often so much radium that, under certain Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, it would be classified as radioactive waste. A brine hauler I met named Richard had sneaked samples out of his truck and stashed them in his backyard shed. “Ten or fifteen years down the road, if I get sick,” he told me, “I want to be able to prove this.”

Oil and gas waste can accumulate as a wildly radioactive sludge at the bottom of brine tanks and trucks, which can be mixed with coal ash or ground-up corn cobs in a dastardly attempt to cloak its toxicity. It can take the form of drilling waste, which in Oklahoma has been spread across farmland under the misguided belief that it’s good for crops and cows. Much of this waste arrives at facilities where workers attempt to treat and clean it, but often end up concentrating the radioactivity and becoming contaminated themselves.

Jesse Lombardi, a former bank robber from Ohio who became a fracking-waste manager and later a whistleblower, joined me and a former Department of Energy scientist on a mission to scout out these treatment facilities. In West Virginia, we found a site more radioactive than 99 percent of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone; we saw a mattress floating in a moat of radioactive water surrounded by discarded beer cans and condoms. “Man,” Jesse said. “We polluted the living fuck out of this place.”

In 2019, some years after Sean had become an editor at Simon & Schuster, my agent sold him Petroleum-238. There were nights when I spun out on my bicycle into the dark, believing I had unearthed information that could bring the oil and gas industry to its knees and save the world from climate chaos. In these moments, I convinced myself I could go several months without sleeping to finish the book. Of course, I still had years of work ahead of me. But when I received that email from Simon & Schuster, I had to consider not just myself, but all the people whose stories I had brought home in my notebooks. The book had taken over, become its own planet, and I orbited around it like an obedient moon.

Last February, I boarded a plane in New York City and four and a half hours later descended over a terrain of thorn scrub to touch down on the tarmac in San Antonio, a gateway to the Eagle Ford Shale, an oil- and gas-bearing geologic formation that slinks like a snake northeast from the Mexican border. This is the terrain that Sister Elizabeth knows best. She first helped me traverse it on a reporting trip in 2019; KKR’s Crescent Energy had acreage in places I hadn’t yet seen, in a remote western part of the formation, near the border. Sister Elizabeth and I had decided not just to locate the wells, but, as best as we could, to determine where the waste was ending up. This would be the proof I was looking for that Crescent Energy—meaning KKR, meaning Simon & Schuster—was marred by an ungodly liability. Proof that I hadn’t given up everything for nothing.

“Driving White Nissan Rogue,” Sister Elizabeth texted me as I stepped out of the airport. She pulled up wearing a pair of black wraparound sunglasses and a headset fit for an air-traffic controller, which she used to take hands-free calls from her activist contacts flung far and wide across the great, petroleum-contaminated state of Texas. A small jeweled cross hung over her heart.

Sister Elizabeth was born on the ninth day of the ninth month at nine minutes past nine in the morning in 1936. At eighteen, inspired by a Passionist priest she heard speak at a mission in Cuero, Texas, she was accepted as a candidate into the order of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, who arrived in Galveston in 1866 from Lyon, France, to tend to those sick with cholera and yellow fever. Sister Elizabeth believes that we have a spiritual connection to the earth and a moral obligation to protect it. After the reforms of the Second Vatican Council enabled nuns like her to drop the habit, live in apartments rather than convents, and focus on social-justice issues beyond caring for the sick, poor, and elderly, Sister Elizabeth began to “understand the abuse of capitalism and the loss of spiritual values that had affected the economic systems of the West like a cancer,” as she once put it to me. When fracking came to South Texas, she recognized it as a point where the capitalist motor of America ran up against her commitment to the earth. She decided to observe the industry, learn about it, “and reflect on the environmental science and technology of fracking in the light of the gospel.”

Sister Elizabeth has taken Russian petroleum engineers, a member of the German Green Party, college students, and journalists like myself on tours of the Eagle Ford, bringing her visitors to the sites of spills and explosions, and introducing them to affected residents. She also works to help those residents understand, and perhaps try to curtail, the toxic infrastructure of fracking. This is how she came to help the Eagle Ford community of Nordheim, population 350, fight a landfill for oil and gas waste. The development belonged to a company called Petro Waste, founded in 2014 by a young man in commercial real estate from Midland, Texas, named George Wommack. “I think the best advice I’d give to anyone young who’s looking to be successful in the industry,” Wommack once said, “is don’t worry about failure, because if you fall, you’re probably going to fall forward.”

This sort of cowboy entrepreneurialism serves a critical role in dealing with—or at least attempting to deal with—oil and gas waste, as it has since the first successful commercial oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. Although brine, sludge, and drilling waste have been copiously spilled and spread across the country since the nineteenth century, and although scientists have documented extensive amounts of contamination, a 1980 federal exemption legally defines oil and gas waste as nonhazardous. Figuring out what to do with it is now a multibillion-dollar industry.

When I accompanied Sister Elizabeth to Nordheim in 2019, I met the Baumanns, a ranching family whose driveway ran along the southeast edge of the Petro Waste landfill. We spent time in their front yard peering through a chain-link fence, watching truck after truck dump piles of black waste, a material that could be confused for mulch you might purchase in a garden-supply store. We watched excavators move it around, and dust devils move it around again. In 2013, researchers in Texas found that living near drilling waste increases the risk of radiological exposure, whether from drinking toxic groundwater or eating contaminated vegetables and dairy products. Sister Elizabeth had spent years fighting with the community against the permits issued by Texas regulatory agencies, to no avail.

To her, Wommack was not just a businessman. “He’s an exploiter of people, of land, of ranchers, of the environment,” I recall her saying as we relaxed with the Baumanns one day in the shade of a tree. That year, Wommack indeed fell forward when he sold Petro Waste to a subsidiary of Waste Management, a giant in the industry. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust has over thirty million shares in it. Waste Management is “relatively recession-proof,” read an article in Forbes on why Gates had invested so much in the company, “since people will always generate garbage.” Reporting on oil and gas waste has clarified this widespread corporate tactic for me: take a liability, transform it into a usable product, and turn it into an asset.

In the late Sixties, Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, and George Roberts all worked at the prestigious New York investment firm Bear Stearns. The three men homed in on an uncommon form of company takeover that came to be known as the leveraged buyout, or LBO. The tactic involves buying companies with debt while using the newly obtained assets as collateral, then stripping the company for parts—often by unloading subsidiaries and workers—to repay the debt. An important aspect of these deals, noted a 1988 Fortune article, is capturing the “hearts and minds” of the company’s managers by giving them a share of the ownership, only to “sell it off later.”

Roberts grew up in Houston, where his father was an oilman. Kravis grew up in Tulsa as the son of a petroleum engineer; at age seventeen, he took his first job in the mail room of an oil company. While at Bear Stearns, Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts tried an LBO on an oil-field services company called L. B. Foster. “We bought them and then proceeded to make them better than when we found them,” Kravis once told an oral-history organization. Not all LBOs succeeded. In 1971, Kohlberg and his colleagues orchestrated a buyout of the shoe manufacturer Cobblers; shortly after the deal went through, its president committed suicide, and then the company went bankrupt. But even in failure, the LBOers could make fabulous amounts of money through a variety of fees.

The men left Bear Stearns in 1976 to found KKR, aiming to focus on ambitious LBOs, and made numerous acquisitions during the Eighties buyout boom. “I’m the kind of person who could fall out of a window, land on my head,” Kravis told an interviewer in a building perched above Central Park. “I might bounce a couple times, and I’m going to come up on my feet.”

In 1983, Kohlberg was diagnosed with a brain tumor and underwent surgery. When he returned to KKR a year later, he found the culture had changed for the worse. “His signature down-to-earth style and sense of fairness had been replaced,” a friend of his later recalled, “with fast-paced hostile takeovers that included extra fees to enrich KKR.” In 1987, he left the firm, stating in a final boardroom speech: “We must all insist on ethical behavior, or we will kill the golden goose.” Kohlberg retired to Martha’s Vineyard, where he backed sustainable farming initiatives and bought the local newspaper in a move he called “an investment in preserving something that’s worth preserving.”

Meanwhile, KKR went on to apply its LBO technique to companies that made crackers and cigarettes, and that operated power grids, movie theaters, and hospital emergency rooms. The practices perfected by KKR are buying out a growing share of the American economy. Private equity, wrote Rogé Karma in The Atlantic in 2023, has swallowed one fifth of the market, and, in turning public companies private, made it “effectively invisible.”

When the fracking boom began in the Aughts, KKR was quick on the scene, with a purchase in 2009 of acreage in the Marcellus Formation. The next year, the firm partnered with a private company to enter the Eagle Ford, and in the years that followed made deals that gained it acreage and assets in Utah, Wyoming, Canada, and Mexico. In 2010, Natural Gas Intelligence, an industry news site, proclaimed: kkr continues shale rampage. But the firm apparently wanted a more direct way to control its interests. In December 2021, KKR merged one of its companies with another in Texas to create Crescent Energy, whose shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange and which, according to another industry news site, would be “KKR’s primary platform for pursuing upstream oil and natural gas opportunities.” Crescent expanded into the oil fields of Utah in 2022, and in 2023 it acquired additional assets in the western Eagle Ford. As has become the trend, Crescent pitched the move to investors as part of the fight for a green future. Crescent is dedicated to “climate, environment, safety, community, and diversity and inclusion,” said David Rockecharlie, Crescent’s CEO and the head of KKR’s Energy Real Assets division, in a 2022 sustainability report.

KKR’s venture into publishing and media had begun several years before, with acquisitions and investments ranging from OverDrive, a digital reading platform for schools and libraries, to ByteDance, the Chinese tech company that owns TikTok. In March 2021, it was announced that KKR would “join forces” with Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) to acquire music rights and catalogues and “deliver a compelling solution for artists.” BMG is part of the German company Bertelsmann, which owns America’s largest publishing company, Penguin Random House, which itself tried to buy Simon & Schuster in 2022, a move that was blocked by a federal judge. “The proposed merger,” Jonathan Kanter, an assistant attorney general working in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said in October 2022, “would have reduced competition . . . and [the] diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.” One year later, Simon & Schuster would be acquired by KKR.

I was supposed to stay the night at the apartment of a friend of Sister Elizabeth’s who lives in oil and gas country. But that contact was out of town, so after dinner, she dropped me off at a Holiday Inn Express. I spent the evening printing out maps near the waffle irons in the lobby and hand-drawing others, scribbling notes and creating a path for us to take through Crescent’s acreage.

Before the trip, I had spoken with one of my industry contacts, Blake Scott, who runs a data company called Waste Analytics. I told him I was looking for Simon & Schuster’s wells, meaning KKR’s wells, meaning Crescent Energy’s wells. Many are operated by subsidiaries, making their real footprint difficult to measure, but he pulled up a Securities and Exchange Commission document that listed each by name.

Scott’s expertise lies in drilling waste, which in Texas is often buried in pits at the drilling sites. “The industry calls them toxic tacos,” Scott told me, a reference to the way these pits are constructed, with plastic liners on the bottom and sides and the waste in the middle. They can be located anywhere that drilling has occurred, and they all stand to eventually leach contaminants. Pits aren’t disclosed on a property’s title, meaning that thousands of American families may be living atop drilling waste without knowing it. (Scott believes that these pits, and the inadequate accounting of them, means that properly appraising these homes could bring on something “like the 2008 financial crisis, only worse.”) Landfills are one alternative to pits. But pile all the drilling waste in a landfill, and a mountain will rise from the Texas plain.

When we spoke, Scott used a mapping tool that showed every single oil and gas well in Texas and who owned them; then he zoomed in on the western Eagle Ford. He pulled up the list of Crescent subsidiaries, cross-referencing them with the wells on the map. The list included sixty-five companies, and we assumed that many of them operated the wells located in the middle of sprawling private ranches that we couldn’t access. I keyed in on a stretch of County Road 3715. It was rough-looking but accessible, and surrounded by wells owned by a Crescent subsidiary, one of many it owns with the name Javelin.

The following morning, Sister Elizabeth texted me: “Do they have breakfast tacos? If they do, can you pick me up a couple?”

Not tacos, but soft tortillas with scrambled eggs on the side. She had parked outside the hotel, and I handed them to her on a paper plate through the car window. It was another day of dreary South Texas winter weather—gray and chilly, but humid, with heat lurking. Sister Elizabeth leaned out the window. “Where we are going, there’s no coffee,” she said. I brought her a cup and three creamers, which she poured into a sky-blue thermos.

She is always good conversation, and that morning she wanted to talk about her principled upbringing by a pharmacist father and a teacher mother, a story from her childhood involving a little dog named Scotty, and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. This is not the Kohlberg who left KKR to fund gardening initiatives on Martha’s Vineyard; this is the American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who said that individuals move through fixed stages of moral progress, and that as people get older, they tend to exercise more sophisticated moral reasoning. “His research,” Sister Elizabeth told me, “suggests that most Americans operate on the level of a fourth grader.”

As we cut south on Interstate 35, Sister Elizabeth and I discussed the KKR deal and some of the firm’s scandals, such as its acquisition of BrightSpring Health Services, a company running group homes for people with severe disabilities. A BuzzFeed investigation had reported horrendous lapses in care after the takeover—one resident swallowed a battery, another was left alone in a hot car, and a third nearly died after drinking antifreeze. We agreed that this was immoral. “Not just from a Christian standpoint, but also from a standpoint of love.” Love can be beneficent, she said, or it can be the love of Eros. And love can be agape. “That is totally selfless love, and that is the great commandment,” she explained. “If you think the goal in life is to make money by hook or by crook and commodify human dignity, you have valued money over love.”

When I asked her, somewhat hopefully, if it was possible that KKR was an agent of Satan, she answered indirectly. “Satan has crept in,” she declared, “and taken over people’s hearts, without people even knowing it’s there.”

I reached out to a number of sources in the months following the KKR announcement to get their take on what I had done. Many environmental activists believed I had made the right decision. Jesse Lombardi, the former bank robber, wondered if KKR had purchased Simon & Schuster simply to kill my book. It was flattering that he would think so.

But not everyone agreed with me, and one who didn’t was an entrepreneur named Marvin Nash. We first met in 2018 at the EPA’s headquarters in Washington, in a room full of people who had journeyed to the nation’s capital, seemingly to try to loosen regulations and make it easier to transform fracking waste into commercial products. Nash was a former rodeo clown—“Starvin’ Marvin”—but at the time, he and his wife, Darlene, managed a company called Encore Green that partly aimed to treat wastewater for use in agriculture. He believed in finding the safest routes possible for waste, but he knew some companies often devised schemes to profit from it. “Energy companies,” he told me, “are getting ready to be the climate wellness leaders of the United States.”

I called Nash to ask him what he thought about KKR’s purchase of Simon & Schuster. “That’s an interesting question,” he said. “Theoretically, when you’re looking at the stock market, publishing is not a good buy.” But, he suggested, with traditional publishing in decline, KKR may see Simon & Schuster as “a survival company”—one that could weather the storm as most others drown. He also pointed out that private-equity firms can manipulate and use media to improve the performance of their investments.

As for my book, Nash thought I should have stuck it out with Simon & Schuster. “I think this is a growth challenge for Justin Nobel,” he told me. “No matter how good the words are, if you don’t get them out there, what good is it gonna be?”

When I explained to him that I had already pulled the book, he listened, then told me a maxim from his time on the range. “In the cowboy world,” Nash said, “we say, ‘Give someone enough rope and they hang themselves.’ ” I wasn’t sure whether he meant me, the publishing firm, or something else entirely.

In late October 2023, just as the KKR deal was being finalized, Karret and I traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, for the world’s largest book fair. She had installed herself as my literary agent, and now, without a publisher—for a book I was still convinced could neutralize the oil and gas industry’s arrogance and change the world—we were hoping to find a new one. We had finagled a booth in one of the halls of the fair’s labyrinthine convention center. Each day, we marched into the swarm and handed out packets of information on fracking waste, then retreated to our corner to strategize. There was interest, but few could grasp the dire relevance of the subject. It was as if there were some agenda we had not been informed of that everyone else knew. Several publishing representatives advised us to send emails to a general inbox; another editor, with a jaded demeanor, told us that “science is tricky.”

Toward the end of the fair, it became clear we were not going to succeed. I experienced again that uncomfortable hollow feeling. I had made a decision that could not be reversed, and it was the wrong decision. Late at night in our hotel, Karret and I argued, and she disappeared into the night. We were on only the second floor, and the bushes below looked inviting. To have the privilege to fall out a window—would I bounce on my head?

Instead, I shut myself in the bathroom and emailed Sean. “If Simon & Schuster is willing to reconsider the book, I would be honored to rejoin your list,” I wrote. It was an awful moment. When Karret discovered what I’d done, she was furious, and hurled insults at me until she collapsed. (Sean never replied.)

On the final day of the fair, as the big publishers packed up, we spoke to a book-distribution company called Ingram, which had a self-publishing platform. The up-front costs were minimal, but we would have to construct, design, and market the book all on our own. And we still had to pay Simon & Schuster $30,000.

Consulting my paper maps, I had gotten us lost in the wilderness south of Pearsall, but Sister Elizabeth said she had an internal compass, having learned how to fly a Piper Cub before entering the convent, and she straightened us out. We turned onto State Highway 85, then eventually onto County Road 3715, a dirt path beaten into the earth of Frio County by the weight of multiton oil-field trucks. The land yielded only a low scraggly brush that obscured the horizon, a treeless terrain that was completely disorienting to me. According to the pen marks on my map, we were close to the wells.

As we approached, signs posted along the county road indicated the names of the oil and gas companies that hid down the long red dusty driveways through the brush; the companies were all in the process of fracking or preparing to frack, if they hadn’t fracked already. A black pickup emerged from a turnoff and seemed to be following us, but Sister Elizabeth clocked it immediately. We pulled off the road to let another one pass. Fastened to the fence and caked in dust were the signs of the site’s operator: Javelin Energy Partners, a Crescent subsidiary. “This is what I call being led by the spirit,” Sister Elizabeth said.

We continued along the road and found a trail of Javelin wells, but all of them were gated, some even guarded. I imagined that the harms of KKR lay hidden out there somewhere in the brush, on land no one seemed to give a shit about. Even Blake Scott had no way of knowing what was happening behind the fences, and he couldn’t necessarily tell me what was being done with the resultant drilling waste. But we had a backup plan. The Texas environmental-justice group Commission Shift, where Sister Elizabeth is an adviser, had a lead on a set of landfills in Dimmit County. They weren’t far.

In the last light of day, we tacked across an eerie, tangled landscape. “It doesn’t get any brushier than this,” Sister Elizabeth said. Yellow light dripped through the clouds as she pointed to a Mexican eagle eating a carcass on the side of the road. There was a black mound on the distant horizon, and as we neared, it got larger. “Oh my Lord,” Sister Elizabeth said. “I hope that’s not it.”

But it was: fourteen million barrels of waste from across the Eagle Ford, piled in a landfill beside U.S. Highway 83, with modest homes on either side that made up the communities of Catarina and Asherton. The landfill was owned by the Texas oil-field waste-disposal company R360 Environmental Solutions, and reports I later obtained suggested that thousands of barrels were dumped there every day. They had been generated by familiar firms, including Shell and Hess, and companies with lesser-known names, like Nature’s Way Energy Services, Pursuit Oil and Gas—and Javelin Oil and Gas, another Crescent subsidiary. Just across the street was a second landfill, belonging to a Texas company called Weeks Environmental, whose own black mountain—nearly ten million additional barrels of waste—rose into the Texas gloaming.

Inside mountains like these are crushed up bits of black-shale formations, which form from the organic muck accumulated at the bottom of seas, heated and compressed over time. They compose most of the oil- and gas-bearing formations presently being fracked to pieces across America. “These landfills,” Julie Weatherington-Rice, an Ohio earth scientist who was one of my earliest sources, told me, “will be radioactive until the sun burns out.”

In a turnout on the side of the road beyond the R360 landfill, with the sun disappearing and the asphalt crumbling into dust, Sister Elizabeth parked the Rogue. We were at the end of the line. Had the trip validated the decisions I had made? Buried somewhere in the mountain of waste in front of us was the answer. It might, as Weatherington-Rice said, smolder, hidden, and be lost for good only when the earth is swallowed by its star. Or it might leak out, get caught in the wind, and lodge in the lungs of a nearby resident, where it could spawn cancer. “We have to live here, because we don’t really have anywhere else to go,” a resident of Asherton later told me. “So people who have money can do with us whatever they want.”

“You know,” said Sister Elizabeth, as we headed back toward San Antonio, “there were guys going around giving out Bibles to fracking crews at the beginning, telling people how holy it was to frack the earth.” We ate at a festive downtown restaurant and said our goodbyes. She ordered chicken enchiladas and bought me a T-shirt bearing a line attributed to Emiliano Zapata: it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

A few weeks after returning east from the Eagle Ford, I rocketed toward the sun in an elevator inside the building that holds KKR’s new Manhattan headquarters. I wasn’t there to intercept any executives. I had seen their stash of waste, and now I wanted to bask in the wealth the firm had amassed. At the top of the skyscraper is the Edge, the tallest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere, a triangular patio jutting over the metropolis. Not far above ran a highway of helicopters, and the infrastructure of the city stretched out below, with seagulls floating in the middle. It was the warmest March on record, but up there everyone loved the sun. A small child posed for a photo on the glass floor of the observation deck, and for a moment she defied gravity and perception, levitating above Midtown.

Kohlberg has long since passed into the soil of Martha’s Vineyard, and Kravis now runs the city. His name is attached to a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a building on Columbia University’s new business school campus, and Mount Sinai’s children’s hospital. Beyond all that were the Meadowlands, the low distant mountains of New Jersey, and the Hudson River, which wound north to my home. KKR did not reply directly to my questions about its reasons for acquiring Simon & Schuster, the nature of its oil and gas holdings, or the levels of radioactive elements in the waste, including in the landfills beside Asherton and Catarina. Instead, I received a response from a spokesperson, saying that this essay “belongs in the fiction section of the magazine.” KKR defended its nearly half-century track record of “building and fortifying companies and communities,” and pointed out that it had invested billions in “climate and environmental sustainability” and offered workers in the companies it acquired “significant financial payouts.” Jonathan Karp, Simon & Schuster’s CEO, meanwhile, never replied to my questions at all, including one about what role he believes writers have in standing up to wrongdoing—and what role he may have in the same. I am still in the process of answering this question myself.

But I do know that my book came out in an unconventional manner. Karret and I arranged a launch event at a folk-music theater in New York. We brought in a puppet troupe and Jesse Lombardi, who told the crowd his stories of robbing banks and peddling fracking waste. The book received no reviews, and no major newspapers covered it. Instead I gave interviews all around the country and across the political spectrum, to grassroots radio and conservative podcasts and college newspapers. I journeyed with the book through the Marcellus and Utica regions, performing with a pianist at bars, at bookstores, and at an event at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland that was organized by Tish O’Dell, the community organizer who had first told me about the radioactive deicer made from oil and gas waste. We have sold about 1,300 copies.

We lacked glossy coverage, but I did speak in front of officials, often at the request of grassroots health- and environmental-advocacy groups. In New Mexico, I delivered testimony at the state capitol before the Water Quality Control Commission about a proposed rule that advocates worry would make it easier to reuse fracking waste in agriculture. In my testimony, I raised concerns about the disposal of waste, but also about the treatment of it, as so many of the workers I had met were employed to do. After I finished, Sharon Shaheen, representing the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, cross-examined me at length. Toward the end, she asked me a question. “What is the answer?” she said. “Do you have an answer?”

I told her that I wasn’t the one she should be asking; her client’s industry needed to solve the problem or it would continue to put everyone at risk. And yet the bill, with the state’s governor behind it, is likely to become law. I realized in that moment that I was, in a way, bringing the industry to its knees, by at least forcing an admission, however weak, of its sins. But even on its knees, the industry could throw up its hands and keep digging.

Now I finally get my gambit. Ambition drives the world forward—or back. In that, I am not so different from Kravis in his moment of suspension above Central Park. I may have failed Marvin Nash’s growth challenge, and there is still the matter of the money I owe. But under Cassiopeia, I bike the country roads. I think about the rings of outer planets, and whether we will frack space, and what Karret and I will do when winter, or what’s left of it, again arrives at the door of our Fleetwood Bounder.

And so I glide down the hill to our little town, and I apply for a job at a gas station, part of a regional chain. When I go in a few weeks later for the interview, I meet Sue, who has colorful tattoos spilling down her arm. She tells me about the shop’s strict policy on spoiled milk, how to ring up lotto tickets, and the company’s history. It is family-owned and thriving—perfectly primed for an LBO.

I ask Sue if there is a chance the owners will sell out to private equity, and she shakes her head.

“This,” Sue says, “is a really, really, really good company.”

 is the author of Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.



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