"... a U.S. Oil executive who disregarded who disregarded a dire warning about climate change in 1959... and instead tapped a new source of oil in Canada."
This quote illuminates just how long executives and other higher-ups were aware of the threat of climate change. In 1959, only a few decades after oil was discovered after the first car was put on the road, executives were aware of the grave harm that their industry posed. Instead of working to clean up their industry (or invent other forms of energy), those executives instead searched for new sources of oil for one reason and one reason alone: greed.
"When NASA scientist James Hansen brought the [climate] emergency to the public's attention in 1988, the oil industry was able to quickly sow doubt via media campaigns."
This quote shows that oil companies had anticipated someone (in this case, James Hansen) bringing up the threat that climate change poses as a result of the retrieval and use of oil. And because they anticipated someone sounding the alarm about the threat of climate change, they prepared media campaigns for years about the threat of oil. After all, they didn't want their income source to be looked upon in a negative light. The companies wouldn't be rich that way, so they did everything they could—including lying and performing a deception on the public on a massive scale—to keep earning money.
"Because of the difficulties [of extracting the oil from the tar sands], oil companies mostly stayed away, and Canadian policymakers figured the gigantic oil reserves, estimated around 170 billion recoverable barrels, would mostly be of use as a raw material for road construction... but the allure of vast oil wealth didn't go away, and in 1924 Alberta scientist Dr. Karl Clark invented a process for separating the oil from bitumen solids that in theory could make the development of a large commercial oil sands project possible."
This quote shows the lengths someone would go to earn money. Instead of giving up on extracting oil from the tar sands in Canada, humans became motivated to tap the vast resources available there and invented a process that allowed people to extract oil from the tar sands, which otherwise wouldn't have been possible. Humans will do anything to earn a buck, including destroying and polluting the Earth. And that's because, according to Dembicki, humans are inherently selfish people who are more interested in themselves and their own enrichment than anything else.
