Speaker 1: I was sitting on the sea wall.
Speaker 2: I didn't see the way coming.
Speaker 1: It just pushed me off, and I thought it was
Speaker 1: something else that way. I thought it was like a monster.
Speaker 1: My grandmother told me to come to the church. So
Speaker 1: I read here and sit washing, everybody yelling, washing, the
Speaker 1: babies drying, and it was not good.
Speaker 3: What can you do to go up with each impact
Speaker 3: of climate change?
Speaker 4: I think the best thing I learned is to do
Speaker 4: an action plan. And so I'm dedicated to this place,
Speaker 4: like I was destined to be in this place.
Speaker 5: That's why I'm gonna stay here.
Speaker 4: I'm not gonna leave. I'm gonna stay watched, even if
Speaker 4: it means to try.
Speaker 6: The effects were already very visible because we were doing
Speaker 6: a film, so we wanted to capture it. So while
Speaker 6: we were there, we talked to all these kids and
Speaker 6: we were really struck by how much they knew about
Speaker 6: climate change, Like they were more conversant in the causes
Speaker 6: and effects of climate change than like most adults that
Speaker 6: I know.
Speaker 5: This is Katie Worth. She's a reporter for Frontline and
Speaker 5: this project she did on the Marshall Islands is really incredible.
Speaker 5: It's super interactive, very immersive, super interesting project. I'll link
Speaker 5: to it in the show notes, but for our purposes today,
Speaker 5: this thing she said about how even really little kids
Speaker 5: in the Marshall Islands were pretty knowledgeable and conversant about
Speaker 5: climate change. It really struck me.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure that I didn't even learn half of
Speaker 3: what those kids said until I was like well into
Speaker 3: my career as a climate reporter.
Speaker 5: Darna Nor, welcome to Drilled.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 3: I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 5: If you don't already know. Darna is a climate reporter
Speaker 5: for Earther, that's giz Moto's climate and justice site. She
Speaker 5: and I have been working together the past few months
Speaker 5: to pull together this series about the fossil fuel industry's
Speaker 5: influence on education in America, particularly when it comes to
Speaker 5: how we think about solutions to climate change. We're calling
Speaker 5: it the ABC's of Big Oil. So back to the
Speaker 5: Marshall Islands. That trip a few years ago prompted Frontline
Speaker 5: reporter Katie Worth to want to look into what American
Speaker 5: kids know about climate change. Oh man, and aren't there.
Speaker 3: Like a ton of Marshall Islands refugees here in the
Speaker 3: US too, in Arkansas and Oklahoma?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Yeah, both So Katie went to some schools in Arkansas,
Speaker 5: where there's a large Marshallese population, to see what American
Speaker 5: kids are learning there about climate change, and also to
Speaker 5: kind of get a sense of, Okay, if these kids
Speaker 5: on the Marshall Islands were to leave there and go
Speaker 5: to one of these communities in the US, what would
Speaker 5: those same kids be learning here. She was expecting them
Speaker 5: to know less, but she was not prepared for them
Speaker 5: to be steeped in climate denial.
Speaker 6: We went to Springdale, Arkansas to visit some schools there
Speaker 6: because of this connection to the Marshall Islands, because it's
Speaker 6: such a large marshal Leze community in Springdale. And so
Speaker 6: I went and visited a few different schools, and one
Speaker 6: of them was a middle school, and I started talking
Speaker 6: to the science teachers and in walks this lobbyist for
Speaker 6: the oil and gas industry.
Speaker 5: Katie actually shared some of the audios she recorded during
Speaker 5: non physic part.
Speaker 7: Of the way we are made in the demand for
Speaker 7: more energy here in the United States is we've had
Speaker 7: some transformative of technological advances. It used to be then
Speaker 7: in a section we would drill thirty six holls straight
Speaker 7: down the draft, thousands of feet in the early two thousands,
Speaker 7: an engineer from Texas, George Mitchell, and then at the
Speaker 7: drilling loder that would go down thousands of feet and
Speaker 7: turn out horizontally or laterally, they call it kicking out.
Speaker 7: Today we have wells that kick out up to two miles.
Speaker 7: So when he did that, that changed everything. They combined
Speaker 7: horizontal drilling with something we've been doing.
Speaker 3: For a long time, hydro All Oh my god, that's unbelievable.
Speaker 3: But we've been hearing about this sort of thing, right
Speaker 3: Natural Gas Company is heading out pamphlets and schools sending
Speaker 3: people out to talk to the youth.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, totally, but usually they focus on either how
Speaker 5: great it is to work the oil and gas industry
Speaker 5: or on skewing the science in some way. Katie ended
Speaker 5: up writing about how American schools teach climate change in
Speaker 5: her new book, Miseducation, and she included something from this
Speaker 5: woman's presentation that really just floored me, especially when you
Speaker 5: keep in mind that this was a seventh grade class.
Speaker 6: A lot of what she was talking about was kind
Speaker 6: of legitimate information, like, you know, how oil is taken
Speaker 6: from the ground and the machinery that does that, and
Speaker 6: kind of the geology of it all. But then she
Speaker 6: got into talking about carbon emissions, and she didn't really
Speaker 6: explain what carbon emissions were. She didn't explain why they
Speaker 6: might be a problem. She said that it would be
Speaker 6: a problem, but she didn't explain anything about global warming
Speaker 6: or climate change. But instead immediate immediately launched into this
Speaker 6: list of all the problems that exist with all of
Speaker 6: the different fuels. So, like's solar. If it's cloudy, you
Speaker 6: don't get energy, and wind mills kill birds and so on.
Speaker 5: Here's that part of the lobbyist presentation.
Speaker 7: But with any source, I mean, like this problems with
Speaker 7: fossil fuels in terms of carbonission.
Speaker 8: There's problems with all these energies.
Speaker 7: Sort of, somebody's gonna have a problem with it.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 7: Geofile powers right, super expensive. The parts of the layer
Speaker 7: that they did works really wet, but it's expensive.
Speaker 10: Solar.
Speaker 7: The p what that the materials they use to make
Speaker 7: solar caws some sometime when you have a chance to
Speaker 7: look up rare earth minerals.
Speaker 2: Nice, some of those some of these space.
Speaker 7: They make them with are not things that you would
Speaker 7: want laying around in your yap. Another thing, solar is
Speaker 7: a tornado, what happens the.
Speaker 8: Solar feeling, So.
Speaker 11: Wind power lot invent.
Speaker 7: Because I say it's burked that. You know, there's somebodys
Speaker 7: have a problem, don't lot haital powers.
Speaker 12: I'd say that we shouldn't be damn.
Speaker 5: About bodies and lot luck of them on biomass.
Speaker 7: Because I said we shouldn't be growing food for fuel
Speaker 7: when they are people starting on there. So you're gonna
Speaker 7: find a problem in any.
Speaker 1: One of these sources.
Speaker 6: And then she talks about how important fossil fuels are
Speaker 6: to the world and how how they've lifted people out
Speaker 6: of poverty, and if we stop using fossil fuels, we'll
Speaker 6: leave a whole bunch of people in poverty, according to her,
Speaker 6: which is not supported by evidence, but you know that
Speaker 6: was the narrative that she was telling. So she was
Speaker 6: talking about how when you're considering energy, you have to
Speaker 6: do some thinking about your value. She says, first of all,
Speaker 6: you need to decide your standard of value. You need
Speaker 6: to decide is human life the most important? Humans getting healthier, wealthier, happier,
Speaker 6: living longer, or is prison team nature more important? Do
Speaker 6: you want to quit building new houses, stop getting stuff
Speaker 6: out of the ground, do we want to leave it
Speaker 6: exactly as it is, because that would be difficult. Thankfully,
Speaker 6: we don't have to choose in this country. We are
Speaker 6: working in a happy medium at this point.
Speaker 3: A happy medium. Tell that to all the people evacuating
Speaker 3: hurricanes and fires and floods this year. And this really
Speaker 3: gets to the heart of what we wanted to focus
Speaker 3: on in this series, because you're right, we know a
Speaker 3: little bit about how oil companies try to shape the
Speaker 3: way kids understand the problem and the science, and that's
Speaker 3: really bad. But then there's this other thing that seems
Speaker 3: so much more insidious and potentially like an even bigger problem.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, this way the industry positions itself in the
Speaker 5: world and in people's lives and in the economy, and
Speaker 5: the way it tries to frame what is or isn't possible.
Speaker 5: It's like all the solutions to climate change have been
Speaker 5: narrowed before we even start.
Speaker 3: So that's what we're to look at in this series.
Speaker 3: Why and how the fossil fuel industry invaded social science
Speaker 3: curricula and what impact that's had on how Americans approached
Speaker 3: these big problems like climate change and how to stop
Speaker 3: climate change.
Speaker 5: Over the next four episodes will trace the industry's influence
Speaker 5: from elementary schools through to universities. But first, how did
Speaker 5: the fossil fuel industry get into schools in the first place.
Speaker 5: That's today's story coming up after this quick break.
Speaker 9: And using the magic of research. Oil companies compete with
Speaker 9: each other in taking the petroleum molecular parts and real
Speaker 9: arranging it into where you name it. Fabriaks, tooth brushes, tires, insecticides, cosmetics, wheatkillers,
Speaker 9: a whole galaxy of things to make a better life
Speaker 9: on earth.
Speaker 5: And you know it isn't just oil.
Speaker 9: Companies that try to outdo each other competing for the
Speaker 9: customer's dollar. The same story is true of almost every
Speaker 9: successful business enterprise in America.
Speaker 13: Some of the miracles of petroleum are familiar to us. All.
Speaker 13: We know, for instance, that oil made possible one of
Speaker 13: the greatest inventions of history, the internal combustion engine, which
Speaker 13: gave us mastery over the air, meant mass transportation for
Speaker 13: the world, changed, the face of continence quickened, the very
Speaker 13: pulse of civilization provided man with an ease of living.
Speaker 2: Is the magic barrel of your life, and we've opened
Speaker 2: it so we can show you some of the modern
Speaker 2: day miracles that it contains.
Speaker 5: That were made with the.
Speaker 2: Help of petro chemicals, which means chemicals from petroleum.
Speaker 5: The nineteen fifties were a real heyday for corporate sponsored
Speaker 5: pro capitalist infotainment. That last one there was called the
Speaker 5: Magic Barrel. It's an early example of an industry funded
Speaker 5: curriculum used in schools. It was actually a partnership between
Speaker 5: DuPont and the American Petroleum Institute to promote petro chemicals.
Speaker 5: The barrel in question is actually an oil barrel. Magic
Speaker 5: but you can hear a common thread through all of
Speaker 5: these that links oil to capitalism and American idea entity
Speaker 5: and reminds you that your entire life revolves around this stuff.
Speaker 12: There are very interesting common themes. You know, energy is
Speaker 12: vital to your life. Your whole existence is dependent on energy.
Speaker 12: You better love us, we make energy for you. That's
Speaker 12: super effective to show somebody, whether they are conscious of
Speaker 12: it or not, how much they're dependent on fossil fuels.
Speaker 3: That's Kurt Davies, and he's the founder and director of
Speaker 3: the Climate Investigation Center. He spent the last twenty years
Speaker 3: or so researching fossil fuel propaganda, and he's found a
Speaker 3: lot of it in schools. One thing case that he's
Speaker 3: noticed is that oil companies and industry groups like the
Speaker 3: American Petroleum Institute will often combine a curriculum package that's
Speaker 3: targeted at kids with these ad campaigns that are meant
Speaker 3: for their parents.
Speaker 12: So that the ad campaigns that are aimed at the
Speaker 12: parents through whether it's American Petroleum Institute or Exxon broadcasting
Speaker 12: during sporting events, mimic or mirror what we see in
Speaker 12: these curricula packages of showing how how cool energy is,
Speaker 12: how it creates jobs, how it's the lifeblood of our economy,
Speaker 12: how we can't live without it, and how changing that
Speaker 12: would hurt you.
Speaker 5: There are some early examples in the nineteen forties of
Speaker 5: Standard Oil and the American Petroleum Institute sending materials to
Speaker 5: schools that are very pro oil and pro industry, but
Speaker 5: the practice seems to have really ramped up during the
Speaker 5: Cold War in the nineteen fifties, when the industry felt
Speaker 5: the need to remind Americans over and over again how
Speaker 5: prosperous and happy oil and capitalism had made them. Then
Speaker 5: you see this same sort of messaging explode again in
Speaker 5: the nineteen seventies as a reaction to the social movements
Speaker 5: of the nineteen sixties. There's this incredible series that Phillips
Speaker 5: Petroleum commissioned called American Enterprise.
Speaker 14: When we needed coal and iron, the raw materials of
Speaker 14: the Industrial Revolution, we had them right under our feet.
Speaker 5: There were huge It came out in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 5: and it's hosted by William Shatner, and it just kind
Speaker 5: of very subtly and persistently delivers this message that America
Speaker 5: is great because of extraction and capitalism.
Speaker 14: Sources here in our backyard. When we needed petroleum, we
Speaker 14: had it, black gold in Pennsylvania and the Southwest. When
Speaker 14: we needed uranium for nuclear power, we had it. Our
Speaker 14: hills hold enough to last for centuries. The land has
Speaker 14: provided on a grand scale. This open pit copper mine
Speaker 14: and Utah you're looking at is so large you can
Speaker 14: see it from the moon. Thanks to the Earth's bounty,
Speaker 14: we've increased and multiplied at a rate unmatched by any
Speaker 14: nation in history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that whole series is really something, and not just
Speaker 3: because you hear William Shatner's voice in it so much.
Speaker 3: And we know from marketing reports that this was sent
Speaker 3: out to more than half of America. At high schools
Speaker 3: in the nineteen seventies. Obviously that wasn't the only thing
Speaker 3: that people were learning about in terms of economics or
Speaker 3: politics or natural resources in high school, I hope. But
Speaker 3: that's still a lot of people who are getting the
Speaker 3: same narratives that you now hear really often in response
Speaker 3: to climate policy proposals.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, okay, you see this pattern throughout history where
Speaker 5: the industry steps up certain types of curricula when they
Speaker 5: feel ideologically threatened, and there are lots of reasons they
Speaker 5: might want to have a hand in shaping the minds
Speaker 5: of future voters and politicians. But why would schools go along.
Speaker 3: Well, we kind of heard the same thing from everyone.
Speaker 12: Education's underfunded, so that's a vulnerability.
Speaker 6: I remember talking to one person who was like, look,
Speaker 6: I barely have three minutes in the day to pee,
Speaker 6: So if somebody sends me this lesson plan and it's
Speaker 6: like really well produced and looks very professional, I might
Speaker 6: use it.
Speaker 12: So these people who make their own curriculum take advantage
Speaker 12: of that. They give away free lesson plans. That's great
Speaker 12: if you're a teacher and you suddenly get this whole
Speaker 12: kit that's set up for you to teach science through
Speaker 12: teaching about energy or teach you know, teach about economics.
Speaker 12: It's like easy, easy stuff.
Speaker 6: And what they usually do some of them are like
Speaker 6: outright climate denial, but then there's a lot of materials
Speaker 6: that are much subtler and you wouldn't necessarily catch if
Speaker 6: you weren't really looking for it.
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, So teachers are overworked and underpaid, and at
Speaker 3: the same time, schools are underfunded. So if you're producing
Speaker 3: this really slight looking curricula, it's really not that hard
Speaker 3: to get it into schools. And then we also found
Speaker 3: in our research that companies have targeted groups like the
Speaker 3: National Science Teachers of America and even the Department of
Speaker 3: Energy to get them all to push these really industry
Speaker 3: friendly curricula. And Katy talks about another type of organization too.
Speaker 6: There's an organization called the National Energy Education Development Project.
Speaker 6: I think their whole purpose is to create educational materials
Speaker 6: about energy, which seems like a good thing, you know,
Speaker 6: and they talk about energy conservation. They talk about every
Speaker 6: all kinds of energy, including some renewables, which, like in theory,
Speaker 6: sounds like a good thing. But they are sponsored by
Speaker 6: all of these energy companies and some of them are
Speaker 6: you know, wind or solar companies, but most of them
Speaker 6: are fossil fuel companies and that's how they get the
Speaker 6: vast majority of their budget. And so they told me
Speaker 6: that they aren't influenced by their sponsors. But then if
Speaker 6: you actually look at the materials they produce, it's really
Speaker 6: industry friendly. And so like, for example, they have this
Speaker 6: whole set of these packets of things of activities and
Speaker 6: lessons for different age groups about all the different energy sources,
Speaker 6: and there's like fourteen pages of information and activities about petroleum.
Speaker 6: Nowhere in those materials is carbon dioxide mentioned. Climate change
Speaker 6: isn't mentioned, and the only environmental impacts they do talk
Speaker 6: about environmental impact, but what they talk about is water
Speaker 6: pollution or air pollution. And then they say, I'm going
Speaker 6: to quote this directly, and then there's a paragraph there
Speaker 6: is the petroleum industry works hard to protect the environment.
Speaker 6: Gasoline and diesel fuel have been changed to burn cleaner,
Speaker 6: and oil companies work to make sure that they drill
Speaker 6: and transport oil as safely as possible.
Speaker 5: Wow, so this really gets us back to what's in
Speaker 5: it for the industry. For more on that, we had
Speaker 5: Carol Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International
Speaker 5: Environmental Law, walk us through a presentation he found where
Speaker 5: a well known oil industry consultant laid out why investing
Speaker 5: in building education programs was a good idea for the industry.
Speaker 5: Carol took us to Zoom School.
Speaker 10: This presentation is being presented against the backdrop of an
Speaker 10: industry that has been doing this aggressively and somewhat successfully
Speaker 10: for years. And I think it's really important to know
Speaker 10: that the presentation is given by a guy named John Tobin,
Speaker 10: who whose expertise was not in education. His expertise was
Speaker 10: in speculating about oil and gas. But he brought something
Speaker 10: valuable to the table. And nowhere is that value there
Speaker 10: than in the names of the inaugural board members that
Speaker 10: signed on to his.
Speaker 12: Energy literacy project.
Speaker 10: Now Here was was a tiny, tiny nonprofit. But he's
Speaker 10: got senior executives from Chevron and Phillips both on his board.
Speaker 10: He's got an executive the head of a co funded
Speaker 10: think tank that advocated for property rights and free market environmentalism.
Speaker 10: He had Pennsylvanian Power and Light, which was a major
Speaker 10: coal plant operator at the time, and a member of
Speaker 10: the Global Climate Coalition.
Speaker 3: I think it's really important for everyone listening to kind
Speaker 3: of have a picture in their minds of what this
Speaker 3: presentation looks like, because it's really something. There's a black
Speaker 3: background and this weird Neon orb thing at the top
Speaker 3: of every page.
Speaker 5: It's truly, truly a lot, very very good example of
Speaker 5: like late nineties, early two thousands graphic skills.
Speaker 3: And there's all these quo and clip art and these
Speaker 3: bizarre stock photos. This one side that I love just
Speaker 3: has an illustration of it elephant, with the saying when
Speaker 3: eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.
Speaker 8: So deep.
Speaker 3: But then there's this one thing that this guy, John Tobin,
Speaker 3: who made the presentation, seems to really want to drive
Speaker 3: home to people, and that's something that he calls the
Speaker 3: three e's, and that's energy, economy, and environment and they're
Speaker 3: in that order for a reason.
Speaker 5: Okay, back to Zoom School.
Speaker 10: I want to start by both talking about the threes
Speaker 10: and highlighting what the three ees means for industry. And
Speaker 10: Tobin's presentation is compelling because it's so very explicit about
Speaker 10: that the three e's that we're pushed into classrooms by
Speaker 10: Excellent Mobile for decades stood for energy, economy, and environment
Speaker 10: and in that order, and we'll talk about why that
Speaker 10: order is important as we go along. This presentation is
Speaker 10: making the case for why those three e's are so
Speaker 10: important to the industry in itself. What Chobin highlights is
Speaker 10: that the oil and gas industry suffers from severe image problems,
Speaker 10: and educating around the three e's is key to addressing
Speaker 10: those image problems and with it, making the companies themselves
Speaker 10: more profitable.
Speaker 5: Next line, there are more than fifty slides in his presentation,
Speaker 5: so we're going to skip ahead to the highlights.
Speaker 10: And again bear in mind that he's speaking on behalf
Speaker 10: of an organization that has senior executives for many of
Speaker 10: the industry's largest companies behind it. What they're looking to
Speaker 10: instill is a belief in a twenty eighth amendment that
Speaker 10: the people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
Speaker 10: happiness shall be fueled by cheap and abundant energy, yet
Speaker 10: again equating energy not only with the economy, but with
Speaker 10: liberty and freedom itself. This presentation happened in the wake
Speaker 10: of what was in fact a major victory for these programs,
Speaker 10: because in the Energy Policy Act of two thousand and five,
Speaker 10: which was recognized at the time to be filled with
Speaker 10: massive giveaways to the oil and gas industry, and part
Speaker 10: of what was incorporated were provisions for millions of dollars
Speaker 10: for educational programs focused specifically on the three e's on energy,
Speaker 10: economy and environment.
Speaker 5: Okay, hold up a minute.
Speaker 3: I just want to make sure that everyone caught that
Speaker 3: the US government put millions of dollars toward pro oil
Speaker 3: industry energy education in two thousand and five, So a
Speaker 3: good like thirty forty years after several signed has had
Speaker 3: already been sounding the alarm about climate change.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and after world leaders had agreed to come together
Speaker 5: and reduce emissions because everyone understood the problem was that bad,
Speaker 5: until the US just said, just getting we're out.
Speaker 3: You're talking about the Kyoto Protocol, of course, And yeah,
Speaker 3: this is two thousand and five. So that's just a
Speaker 3: few years after the US Senate voted ninety five to
Speaker 3: zero against ratifying Kyoto, and our lovely President George W.
Speaker 3: Bush officially pulled out of the agreement. And now the
Speaker 3: government wasn't just not taking any action, it was actually
Speaker 3: funding an industry friendly take on energy education in American schools.
Speaker 10: And at the moment that he's presenting to ask THEE
Speaker 10: what he's acknowledging here is that between DOE and IOGCC,
Speaker 10: which is the independent oily gas companies, there were more
Speaker 10: than three hundred active school outreach programs, and I think
Speaker 10: most fundamentally, you see the explicit equation of the economy
Speaker 10: with freedom. The economy is economic growth, the economy is freedom.
Speaker 10: And when you know that economic growth is dependent on energy,
Speaker 10: anything that you do to restrict the growth of energy
Speaker 10: is restricting the growth of the economy and is a
Speaker 10: threat to your freedom. Again, the targets for this were
Speaker 10: kids from kindergarten through college. And when you do that,
Speaker 10: when you take your message and you put it in
Speaker 10: the mouth of someone who is teaching your children, who
Speaker 10: children are told to believe and to trust, it is
Speaker 10: among the most insidious and among the most effective forms
Speaker 10: of propaganda. And we are still dealing with and reeling
Speaker 10: from decades of that propaganda.
Speaker 5: That last part really really hits home for me, because
Speaker 5: when you think about especially little kids, I mean, you
Speaker 5: really trust what your teachers tell you in school, at
Speaker 5: least for a while.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's so cynical, and it's honestly, really smart of them.
Speaker 3: I was really struck by how much funding was going
Speaker 3: into this and how many government programs there were at
Speaker 3: that point and probably now too, honestly, but the fact
Speaker 3: that there were over three hundred back in two thousand
Speaker 3: and five, that's pretty incredible.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 5: One thing that really struck me in looking not just
Speaker 5: at this presentation that Carol Muffett was talking about, but
Speaker 5: also at various materials that we found, is that they're
Speaker 5: just filled with what sociologists have started to call discourses
Speaker 5: of delay. That term comes from this paper that came
Speaker 5: out last year. It was written by an economist named
Speaker 5: Will Lamb and several other economics and social science researchers
Speaker 5: who just started to pull together examples of messages like
Speaker 5: these that the industry uses and that we see over
Speaker 5: and over and start to catalog them and categorize them
Speaker 5: into groups.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So these are these messages that have sort of
Speaker 3: taken the place of straight up climate denial.
Speaker 8: Amy.
Speaker 3: It's done some great writing on that, and a lot
Speaker 3: of them have been around for like a century or more.
Speaker 3: There are things like the importance of fossil fuels in America,
Speaker 3: or how on top of problems. The fossil fuel industry
Speaker 3: is or how so called cheap energy. It keeps everyone
Speaker 3: out of poverty. Here's Carol Muffet again.
Speaker 8: We see Exxon Mobile having pushed its energy Cube training
Speaker 8: materials into schools across the country for decades, making Exxon's
Speaker 8: Energy Cube one of the most widely used educational resources
Speaker 8: in the entire United States for literally tens of years.
Speaker 8: And so the question becomes, what is that energy cube?
Speaker 8: The energy queube stood for energy economy and the environment,
Speaker 8: and the entire strategy behind it, and we see the
Speaker 8: oil industry push this over and over again is to
Speaker 8: mainstream with kids. The idea that energy is absolutely essential
Speaker 8: to not only the economy but ultimately to freedom, That
Speaker 8: you can't have a functioning economy without energy, that anything
Speaker 8: that accordingly, anything that restricts or regulates energy has an
Speaker 8: immediate effect on the economy. And therefore, whenever you talk
Speaker 8: about the environmental impacts of energy production in any form,
Speaker 8: you immediately have to aweigh those environmental impacts against their
Speaker 8: presumed economic impact.
Speaker 3: Does that all sound familiar?
Speaker 5: I mean, it's really striking to me just how often
Speaker 5: you hear these exact talking points, even from moderate Democrats
Speaker 5: who think we do need to do some thing on climate,
Speaker 5: but it's like they just have this framework in their heads.
Speaker 5: It's been a super effective strategy, and one of the
Speaker 5: reasons that's been effective is exactly this thing that Katie
Speaker 5: Worth was talking about. It's not denial, so it kind
Speaker 5: of has this veneer of credibility.
Speaker 11: You're allowed to legitimately discuss delay in mainstream context. So
Speaker 11: it's more difficult to promote climate denial these days, I
Speaker 11: think because, for example, the BBC has now quite strict
Speaker 11: guidance on the kind of balance that it's going to
Speaker 11: offer in its interviews around climate change, so they don't
Speaker 11: invite on a dissenting view on climate science anymore.
Speaker 5: This is Will Lamb, the lead author of that Discourses
Speaker 5: of Delay paper, and.
Speaker 11: I think that's happened more and more and now it's
Speaker 11: more difficult to discuss through denial in the public arena.
Speaker 11: But delay is tricky. Delay is tricky because often there
Speaker 11: are grains of truth in delay arguments, and often you
Speaker 11: can pose it as really a legitimate discussion on what
Speaker 11: the shape of climate policy should look like.
Speaker 3: Right, So then the issue becomes like if we want
Speaker 3: to separate the credible stuff from the industry talking points.
Speaker 3: Do we need all teachers to be these experts in
Speaker 3: climate disinformation? That's just completely unrealistic.
Speaker 5: Totally if Like, one of the reasons that this has
Speaker 5: worked so well is a teachers are stretched really thin
Speaker 5: and schools are underfunded. Like the solution can't be that
Speaker 5: they need to take on more work and become experts
Speaker 5: in this field. So, you know, you can see how
Speaker 5: being bombarded with all of this reasonable sounding stuff about
Speaker 5: trade offs and the need to keep energy affordable and
Speaker 5: how on top of environmental issues the industry is might
Speaker 5: lead to a whole lot of inaction on climate. But
Speaker 5: that's not the only reason fossil fuel companies do this stuff,
Speaker 5: is it, Darna? That's right, there's more.
Speaker 3: Here's Kurt again.
Speaker 12: Why do they need this? Because they want to be
Speaker 12: more popular than they are. You know, most people do
Speaker 12: oil industries not very popular. The coal industry is not
Speaker 12: very popular, or they bemoan the fact that nobody knows
Speaker 12: where they where you get your electricity and they want
Speaker 12: people to understand that. So, I mean, you have these
Speaker 12: fossil fuel interests or electric utilities, coal oil interests who.
Speaker 2: Have been.
Speaker 12: Craving attention and craving acceptance and social license for a
Speaker 12: good long time, and they have tried to do that
Speaker 12: with a variety of things, and often in conjunction they'll
Speaker 12: do curriculum, but they also are doing an ad campaign
Speaker 12: on television or in local newspapers.
Speaker 3: And then Carol Muffett, again from the Center for International
Speaker 3: Environmental Law, pointed out that schools are also really big
Speaker 3: recruitment targets for the oil industry, especially now when fewer
Speaker 3: and fewer younger people are interested in working for them
Speaker 3: for obvious reasons. In twenty fourteen, former ex ON CEO
Speaker 3: and later Trump administration appointee Rex Tillerson actually talked pretty
Speaker 3: openly about the role that education can play in this
Speaker 3: really really gross way. He said that schools are quote
Speaker 3: producing a product, and that product is the students going
Speaker 3: into the workforce.
Speaker 8: To summarize Rex Tillerson, the oil industry got involved in
Speaker 8: education because for the oil industry, the students are the product.
Speaker 8: And I think when Tillerson said that, he was obviously
Speaker 8: talking in the context of workers and future workers and prospects.
Speaker 8: But what you see when you look at the history
Speaker 8: of the oil industry's engagement in education is that for
Speaker 8: the oil industry, the students are the product in a
Speaker 8: much more profound and extensive and pervasive.
Speaker 5: Way that Yeah, that really is really is gross. Okay,
Speaker 5: So I don't want to end this episode without talking
Speaker 5: about a side of the school curriculum game that people
Speaker 5: might not necessarily think of, and that's universities.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 3: So oil company is actually fund research centers at like
Speaker 3: all the top schools MIT Harvard, Stanford. But that's not
Speaker 3: the only way that they get involved on university campuses either.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right. They also fund chairs in economic departments
Speaker 5: or law schools, or programs at public policy schools. Oil
Speaker 5: companies were actually among the first to see universities as
Speaker 5: a huge opportunity. So there was this kind of small,
Speaker 5: seemingly obscure tax law change in the fifties that made
Speaker 5: corporate donations to universities a write off, and that prompted
Speaker 5: a little bit of an increase in sort of industry
Speaker 5: funding at the university level. But a lot of corporations
Speaker 5: just kind of saw it as a tax break. And
Speaker 5: there was this VP at Standard Oil of New Jersey,
Speaker 5: which is now Exonmobile. His name is Frank Abrams, and
Speaker 5: he started to really see this as a golden opportunity
Speaker 5: for way more than just some nice tax breaks. So
Speaker 5: he started talking to everyone in the oil industry and
Speaker 5: beyond about, you know, really what they could do.
Speaker 6: Here.
Speaker 5: I found this speech of his from nineteen fifty three
Speaker 5: where he's like, yeah, yeah, the tax break is great,
Speaker 5: but don't forget all this other stuff. So he says,
Speaker 5: the important thing is that corporate gifts should be made
Speaker 5: when the direct or indirect benefits, and I want to
Speaker 5: underscore indirect benefits are worth more to the company than
Speaker 5: the costs after tax adjustments. And then he goes on
Speaker 5: to give an example of one of these great indirect benefits.
Speaker 5: He says, there is a tendency on the part of
Speaker 5: some people to call on the government to take over
Speaker 5: more and more functions and responsibilities born previously by citizens.
Speaker 5: My observation of political history both here and abroad during
Speaker 5: forty years with Standard Oil Company provides evidence of how
Speaker 5: the sinking can develop. Even in a soil like ours
Speaker 5: where the tradition of democracy and free enterprise is well developed.
Speaker 5: Each time government takes over a new function, the free
Speaker 5: society shrinks by that much a step has been taken
Speaker 5: towards statism, a system holding great dangers for the general
Speaker 5: wellbeing of the country and incidentally for stockholders, investments and corporations.
Speaker 5: This is a problem with great dimension.
Speaker 8: In my view.
Speaker 5: But I think finally we can rely on a prudent
Speaker 5: and mature people, that is, an educated people to deal
Speaker 5: properly with it.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it seems like oil executives and oil companies
Speaker 3: have really been worried about creeping socialism for a long time.
Speaker 5: They really really have been, and they really spent decades
Speaker 5: looking to use education as a tool to solidify their
Speaker 5: position in society. That's it for this time. We're taking
Speaker 5: you to school. In this collaboration between Drilled and Earther,
Speaker 5: Darna and I have found a lot of really interesting
Speaker 5: and shocking things, so stay with us. Drilled is an
Speaker 5: original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. This series
Speaker 5: is a collaboration with Earther gis motos Climate and Justice site.
Speaker 5: My co host and co reporter for the series is
Speaker 5: Darna nor. Our producer is Juliana Bradley. Our factchecker is
Speaker 5: Trevor Gowan. Music is by Martin Wissenberg, and our artwork
Speaker 5: was created by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is
Speaker 5: James Wheaton, founder and director of the First Amendment Project.
Speaker 5: You can find corresponding stories, videos, and documents for this
Speaker 5: series on earther dot com.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.