The Risks of Dead Reckoning: A Postscript on Oil, Climate Change, and Political Time.

The article discusses the petroleum industry, climate change, and politics as of June 2012 and how contemporary historians can establish a foundation for studying such subjects. The author examines what she calls U.S. attachment to petroleum-based energy and the implications it has upon the environment, the responses to climate change by the U.S. government, and the identification of historical turning points in the petroleum industry, politics, and public opinion. She examines the work of climate-change activist Bill McKibben.