On Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver examined the oil boom in North Dakota that inspired ABC’s new nighttime soap Blood Oil. Oliver quipped, “Like Channing Tatum, North Dakota turned out to be a lot more interesting once it was covered in oil.”
The oil boom in North Dakota may have brought money and jobs to the state but, as Oliver points out, it’s also brought dangerous working conditions that resulted in horrific workplace deaths (at a rate of one death every six weeks in the Bakken oil fields), environmental mayhem and corporate corruption that exposes the danger of capitalism run amok.
Watch John Oliver break down the history and provide some helpful suggestions for how the state should handle its oil problem, below:
