WHAT THEY ARE SAYING ABOUT THE BOOK:

Royal Dutch Shell is a giant oil company with annual gross sales exceeding $175 billion. It is typically ranked as the world's No. 1 or No. 2 oil company.  It is also the world's seventh largest chemical company. Shell has been developing fossil energy — coal, oil, and gas — for more than 100 years, providing jobs, wealth, and economic opportunity in more than 140 countries. Yet behind the hydrocarbon prosperity there is something else: volatility, danger, and pollution. Whether chemical worker or indigenous people, refinery community or tropical forest, a price has been paid — and continues to be paid — in the hydrocarbon quest. Well blowouts, oil spills, refinery explosions, polluted rivers and oceans, and now global warming — all come with the territory. Shell, for the most part, has done what it thought best in "managing" these risks. Still, the hydrocarbon dragon is a fire-breathing beast that neither Shell, nor any other oil company, has tamed. Royal Dutch Shell says it is now committed to sustainable development and protecting people and planet. Yet the company's record points to continuing problems and decades of missed opportunities. "Riding The Dragon" tells the tale of one "good oil company" and its struggle to rein-in the hydrocarbon peril. It concludes, however, that the fossil fire is essentially unmanageable, holding inherent dangers in all its forms — whether oil refining or persistent toxic chemicals. The charge to Shell and its industry: either make fossil energy safe or move on to alternatives that are. Riding The Dragon challenges Shell to lead the way to a new era of safe, renewable energy, forming a working partnership with communities, labor, and investors to build a new kind of socially-responsible business institution for the 21st century.