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he had picked up in Saudi Arabia. The farwas, he said, would protect us from the brutal mid - continental Wyoming November cold. If having a good conversation partner is the key to a successful road trip, Knapp should be inducted into the road -trip hall of fame. Not only has he accumulated an endless supply of good stories in his young but colorful life aboard oil rigs —from the Gulf of Mexico to North Dakota to Nigeria ( "people would go up to the pipeline and make holes in it in and fill their Zodiac boats with crude oil ") —but he can illuminate the featureless stretches of middle America with the revelatory light of geology. The unassuming, diffuse infrastructure of flyover land is, in fact, the country's circulatory system. Western Kansas is crushingly boring to drive across, but a little less so when you realize its flatness belies a former life at the bottom of the Cretaceous Interior Seaway, an inland ocean filled with 50- foot -long killer mosasaurs. Knapp can convincingly hold forth on virtually anything you point at —which is exactly what I did as we drove through the long, drawing board -flat monotony of the heartland. "Natural gas compression station," he said, as I pointed to an anonymous facility in the distance. "Natural gas pipeline transfer station," he said, when I indicated another. And another. "Unconventional well pad," he said. "It probably goes down a mile and then goes over two miles." In the hubbub of a New York City or San Francisco one gets the intoxicating sense that the city streets and skyscrapers are where the business of the country is conducted —that that's where the action is. But driving around the heartland with an oil geologist you realize these glitzy coastal diversions are a facade. The unassuming, diffuse infrastructure of flyover land is, in fact, the country's circulatory system: unmarked metal boxes on the side of the highway, inscrutable pipes and polished valves behind fences at the edge of the prairie. This is the inconspicuous hardware that delivers the glowing screens and cheap meat of modernity. The road trip reminded me that the coasts are separated by a sea, just as they were a hundred million of years ago, but this one is made of corn and soy rather than seawater. These amber waves of grain are fed by fertilizers synthesized from fossil fuels. The artificial bounty is then transformed into the millions of cows crowded on the vast, sweeping feedlots of western Kansas and eastern Colorado that we passed along a 150 -mile stretch of road that smelled like shit, even with the windows rolled up. In some of these roadside tableaus the entire modern life cycle was in view, with oil pumpjacks bobbing up and down in the middle of the vast cattle multitudes, whose farts account for a more than a quarter of US methane emissions. Knapp noted that the road we were driving on was made of asphaltene, the heaviest component of crude oil. Food, livestock, electricity, pharmaceuticals, roads, plastics —it's fossil fuels all the way down. "ExxonMobil is a chemical company," says Knapp. "That's what we forget." Those who rail against the corporate sins of companies like Exxon tend not to appreciate the extent to which their existence, as well as the entire upside -down ecosystem of modernity, depends on it. And now that we have 7 billion people, most of whom sprang from this artificial surfeit of geological energy, it will be far harder to put that genie back in the bottle than most imagine. But the failure to do so will mean the end of the world as we know it. Knapp's familiarity with burning hydrocarbons and coal wasn't incidental to his study of the worst mass extinction in Earth's history. It was the kill mechanism. "Need petroleum ?" Knapp asked me, offering chapstick. No industry is more responsible for our knowledge of the ancient Earth than fossil fuel companies, which have funded much of the world's geology research for over a century. It makes their calculated and coordinated misdirection on the topic of climate change all the more jarring. At a recent geology conference, sponsors like Hess and Exxon were prominently thanked for their generosity, while climate change activists and academics like Naomi Oreskes and James Hansen were invited to take center stage as honorees and keynote speakers. The energy industry is schizophrenic: at its best, staffed with brilliant geochemists who understand the carbon cycle better than anyone on Earth and, at its worst, recklessly following economic incentives into a civilization- threatening tailspin.