Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Subverted the Alternatives

Written by Edwin Black

Narrated by Stephen Hoye

Edwin Black, the award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, has mined scores of corporate and governmental archives to assemble thousands of previously uncovered and long-forgotten documents and studies into this dramatic story. Black traces a continuum of rapacious energy cartels and special interests dating back nearly 5,000 years, from wood to coal to oil, and then to the bicycle and electric battery cartels of the 1890s, which created thousands of electric vehicles that plied American streets a century ago. But those noiseless and clean cars were scuttled by petroleum interests, despite the little-known efforts of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to mass-produce electric cars powered by personal backyard energy stations. Black also documents how General Motors criminally conspired to undermine mass transit in dozens of cities and how Big Oil, Big Corn, and Big Coal have subverted synthetic fuels and other alternatives.



Black then brings the story full-circle to the present-day oil crises, global warming, and beyond. He showcases overlooked compressed-gas, electric, and hydrogen cars on the market today, as well as inexpensive all-function home energy units that could eliminate much oil usage. His eye-opening call for a Manhattan Project for immediate energy independence will help energize society to finally take action.



Internal Combustion, along with its interactive Web site www.internalcombustionbook.com, will generate a much-needed national debate at a crucial time. It should be heard by every citizen who consumes oil—everyone. Internal Combustion can change everything not by reinventing the wheel but by excavating it from where it was buried a century ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Audio
• Release date: Dec 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781400173242

Edwin Black

Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international investigative author of 80 bestselling editions in 14 languages in 61 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel. With a million books in print, his work focuses on genocide and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropy abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy and historical investigation. Editors have submitted Black's work nine times for Pulitzer Prize nomination, and in recent years he has been the recipient of a series of top editorial awards. He has also contributed to a number of anthologies worldwide. For his work, Black has been interviewed on hundreds of network broadcasts from Oprah, the Today Show, CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports and NBC Dateline in the US to the leading networks of Europe and Latin American. His works have been the subject of numerous documentaries, here and abroad. All of his books have been optioned by Hollywood for film, with three in active production. His latest film is the screen adaptation War Against the Weak, based on his book of the same name. Black's speaking tours include hundreds of events in dozens of cities each year, appearing at prestigious venues from the Library of Congress in Washington to the Simon Wiesenthal Institute in Los Angeles in America, and in Europe from London's British War Museum and Amsterdam's Institute for War Documentation to Munich's Carl Orff Hall. He is the editor of The Cutting Edge News, which receives more than 1.5 million visits monthly. Black's ten award-winning bestselling books are IBM and the Holocaust (2001), British Petroleum and the Redline Agreement (2011), The Farhud (2010), Nazi Nexus (2009), The Plan (2008), Internal Combustion (2006), Banking on Baghdad (2004), War Against the Weak (2003), The Transfer Agreement (1984), and a 1999 novel, Format C:. His enterprise and investigative writings have appeared in scores of newspapers from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune to the Sunday Times of London, Frankfurter Zeitung and the Jerusalem Post, as well as scores of magazines as diverse as Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Reform Judaism, Der Spiegel, L'Express, BusinessWeek and American Bar Association Journal. Black's articles are syndicated worldwide by Los Angeles Times Syndicate International, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post Syndicate, JTA and Feature Group News Service.

Reviews for Internal Combustion

[carterchristian1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A truly eyeopening book. Who would have thought ? Well written. A great contribution to not only American automative history but general American history. A "what if" tale.

[3wheeledlibrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The early history of automobiles was interesting, but then he jumps around a bit, first visiting the destruction of the electrical rail lines in the midwest, and then chronicling the torpedoing of the street car industry by GM. The last two chapters are a polemic. He's interested in Hydrogen power.

[raymond_and_sarah · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Drawing on 58 pages of references and sources, including the court proceedings in United States vs National City Lines, this book is both an excellent survey of the shameful catalog of failings in motive power in the last century, and an authoritative deeper resource.In Black's chapter on the GM Conspiracy he refers to specific testimony from the actual court proceedings, giving an accurate portrayal of the unfolding events in which GM and its co-conspirators Firestone, Standard Oil, and others ripped up electrified transit infrastructure, and put dearly loved electric streetcars to the torch. He adds balance by noting the relative size percentage-wise of infrastructure destroyed and explaining that the conspirators campaign didn't really intend to promote the private car. I knew about the conspiracy before reading the book but the myriad extra details this book unearths reveals the ruthlessness and illegality of what they did - for example I did not realize that on one of the two charges the conspirators were convicted. Drenched in factual accounts and historical details as it is, the book is still readable and engaging. It does not come across as a polemic either. Its drawbacks as a book are mostly in that it fails to bring a coherent message across the chapters, although each chapter tends to work reasonably well as an essay in its own right.My main argument with Black is his avowed love of hydrogen technologies, laid out as a manifesto in his chapter "Hydrogen Solution". Here he appears to lose his balance, and is effusive in his praise of the Honda FCX hydrogen car, clearly swayed by his personal experience in the vehicle. He does not treat at all the love affairs of electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle proponents with their chosen solution to the energy problem.The book is an eye-opener and works well in its goal of lifting the lid on how dirty the corporations are, and why we cannot leave to the corporations the earths much needed salvation in an energy solution for transit and transport. In this uncovering role Black's journalistic style shines. My take home message from the book: the free market is not free, as long as the GMs, Standard Oils and other players break the rules and get away with it.As I write this review the Obama administration has slashed funding for Hydrogen initiatives - these very same initiatives being implicated in the killing of the electric car (see Sherry Boscherts book "Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars which will Recharge America" for more on that). Black's book finishes up with a two page epilogue titled "The Green Fleet Initiative". Again here in the offering solutions department Black is out of his strong suit, but the idea is a sound one. Fleets are the place to begin the green car revolution.Let hope it happens soon.