Book Description Review Quotes Contents
Book Description

How much would you pay for a gallon of gas? $4.00? $10.00? Would you pay with the health of your lungs or with years taken from your lifespan?
The infamous "pain at the pump" runs much deeper than our wallets, argues Terry Tamminen, former Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and current Special Advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Petroleum may power our cars and heat our homes, but it also contributes to birth defects and disorders like asthma and emphysema, not to mention cancer.
 
In Lives Per Gallon, Tamminen takes a hard look at these and other health, environmental, and national security costs hidden in every barrel of oil.
While the petroleum industry is raking in huge profits, Tamminen shows, it is studiously avoiding measures that would lessen the hazards of its products. Using the successful lawsuits by state governments against big tobacco as a model, the author sets forth a bold strategy to hold oil and auto companies accountable and force industry reform. He also offers a blueprint for developing alternative energy sources based on California's real world experiences.

Certain to be controversial, Lives Per Gallon is an unblinking assessment of the true price of petroleum and a prescription for change. The choice is clear: continuing paying with our health, or kick our addiction and evolve beyond an oil-dependent economy.

Review Quotes

"Tamminen's personal and impassioned overview of the evidence against Big Oil makes a persuasive argument for the urgency of ending our petroleum habit."
Orion

"...launches a blistering attack on the practices of the world's oil and automobile industries..."
Sacramento Bee

"America's prosperity, our independence and security, our democracy and our ideals, our international leadership and national pride are all dependent on our breaking our lethal oil addiction. Terry Tamminen has turned the spotlight of clarity on the defining issue of our age."
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Waterkeeper Alliance

"We all thought we knew the costs of oil addiction—power to terrorists and tyrants, and global climate change. But Tamminen's book demonstrates that we don't know the half of it. Gasoline is a deadly carcinogen like tobacco. The health, environmental, and climatic impact of our oil dependency, he shows, is catastrophic. And the economic cost of subsidizing the oil industry is bankrupting. But Tamminen does more than point to the problems. He lays out step-by-step solutions to ending our oil addiction. I only wish that all members of Congress would read this book."
Dick Morris, Fox News political analyst and former advisor to President Clinton

"The book reads like a gangster thriller, while providing detailed and painful truths about how much the oil and auto industries have controlled development (or lack thereof) in the U.S....a definite 'must read' for anyone interested in improving America's future and national security."
Jonathan Patz, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies & Population Health Sciences at Univ. Wisconsin-Madison

Contents

Prologue: The Origin of the Specious
 
Chapter 1. The Breath of Our Fathers
Chapter 2. A Losing Proposition
Chapter 3. Desperate Enterprise
Chapter 4. All That Glitters
Chapter 5. Wealth Seems Rather to Possess Them
Chapter 6. Worse Poison to Men's Souls
Chapter 7. 2025—A Future without Oil
Chapter 8. The Quality of Mercy—Oil on Trial
 
Epilogue: The Seventh Generation
Notes
Bibliography
Index