Speaker 1: My name is William Shatner.
Speaker 2: In this film, I play a successful American farmer, Eric Pearson.
Speaker 2: There are many opinions about America's rapid growth. Some say
Speaker 2: the character of our people cause it, some say our
Speaker 2: gift for organization. Eric Pearson believes there is one main reason,
Speaker 2: the land. In this program, he tries to prove that
Speaker 2: the ground we stand on inspired, even dictated America's pattern
Speaker 2: of growth.
Speaker 3: Welcome to high school, Meet your teacher, William Shatner. This
Speaker 3: is from that series you mentioned in episode one. It's
Speaker 3: called American Enterprise and it was commissioned by Phillips Petroleum
Speaker 3: and in nineteen seventies they got William Shatner to host
Speaker 3: the whole thing. And in each of five vignettes, he
Speaker 3: plays a different character, each with a different take on
Speaker 3: why the American economy grew the way it.
Speaker 4: Did so right off the bat, unshocked economic growth. His
Speaker 4: position does a good thing, There's no questioning that. And
Speaker 4: the series was created for high school civics and economics
Speaker 4: classes to help teach American teens about how the American
Speaker 4: economy was shaped and how it's supposed to work.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 3: It was distributed to schools and community groups through a
Speaker 3: company called Modern Talking Pictures. Their distribution plan for the
Speaker 3: series had it reaching twelve million people a year. Darna,
Speaker 3: Let's take a listen to the one liberal character that
Speaker 3: Shatner plays in this series.
Speaker 1: My name is William Shatner.
Speaker 2: In this film, I played Tom Novak, a community college
Speaker 2: professor who was field as ethnic studies. Tom's the third
Speaker 2: generation American and the first member of his family to
Speaker 2: graduate from college. He has some strong ideas about what,
Speaker 2: or rather who made America happen for him. Our economic
Speaker 2: growth is rooted in the special character of the American people.
Speaker 2: Alice Island America's immigration gateway.
Speaker 5: God, I love it.
Speaker 4: What so immigrants make America great, but only because their
Speaker 4: hard work grows the American economy, right, got it?
Speaker 5: Got it? And you'll notice that.
Speaker 4: So far there's been no mention of petroleum, and later
Speaker 4: references to it do show up here and there, But
Speaker 4: mostly this series is actually focused on these two broader ideas.
Speaker 4: The first one is that capitalism is great, and the
Speaker 4: second one is that nature is a resource that's basically
Speaker 4: to be used for economic benefit. Only that totally sums
Speaker 4: it up, and that's the focus of all lot.
Speaker 3: Of oil funded educational materials. Again, this idea goes way
Speaker 3: back to way before anyone was talking about climate change.
Speaker 3: American industrialists were really invested in pushing a particular approach
Speaker 3: to nature, really from the early days of America's founding.
Speaker 3: Melissa Roncik, a media studies professor at Rutgers University, has
Speaker 3: spent a ton of time digging into how this very
Speaker 3: particular approach to nature came about in America.
Speaker 6: So essentially, if we want to look at the beginning
Speaker 6: of a twentieth century national awareness about the need to
Speaker 6: protect the natural environment, we have to look at the
Speaker 6: naturalist John Muir and the forester different Pinchot, and we
Speaker 6: especially have to look at how they interacted, because each
Speaker 6: of them came to stand for very different idea of
Speaker 6: what nature and forests in the environment meant in the
Speaker 6: United States.
Speaker 4: So, okay, Melissa mentioned John Muir, who I think most
Speaker 4: of us have probably heard of, but Gifford Pinchot maybe
Speaker 4: not so much. He was the country's first forester, the
Speaker 4: very first head of the US Forestry Service, And while
Speaker 4: mirror really pushed this idea of conservation and nature for
Speaker 4: nature's sake, like this pristine nature idea that the fossil
Speaker 4: fuel industry has been trying to pin on environmentalists ever
Speaker 4: since then.
Speaker 5: Pinchot viewed it as a resource.
Speaker 4: He viewed nature as a resource, or more specifically, as
Speaker 4: an economic resource.
Speaker 6: For Gifford Pinchot, natural resources were just that resources. It
Speaker 6: was lumber that Americans needed for development. It was water
Speaker 6: that may be needed for serving cities that didn't have
Speaker 6: enough natural water resources. And there was an economic benefit
Speaker 6: to protecting forests, but you had to protect them for
Speaker 6: the service of American enterprise in the American economy.
Speaker 3: And we all know who went out in the debate
Speaker 3: between Mirror and Pincho. Merr's name may be remembered, but
Speaker 3: it's Pincho's ideas about nature that underpin the American approach
Speaker 3: to the environment.
Speaker 5: This, of course, leaves out the approach.
Speaker 3: Of the many nations of people who were already living
Speaker 3: on this land before the colonizers showed up.
Speaker 6: But it's really important to just mention that neither John
Speaker 6: Muir's nor different Pinchot's visions included the indigenous people who
Speaker 6: were living on this land long before either of them
Speaker 6: came along, and that entire story of what the indigenous
Speaker 6: people's on the land, did with nature, how they viewed nature,
Speaker 6: their relationship with nature, that was completely ignored in this
Speaker 6: American story.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's wild.
Speaker 4: I mean, so many people I think are just realizing
Speaker 4: now that maybe indigenous approaches to environmental management actually hold
Speaker 4: some wisdom at any rate. This turn toward nature as
Speaker 4: an economic resource happened in the late eighteen hundreds, and
Speaker 4: Pinchot actually pushed the idea through tech books way back
Speaker 4: then too.
Speaker 6: He was very aware of the value of public support
Speaker 6: for his vision of forestry, and he used every means
Speaker 6: at his disposal to accomplish that. He wrote textbooks that
Speaker 6: he expected would be taught from kindergarten on up about forestry,
Speaker 6: and indeed they were. There were thousands of copies of
Speaker 6: his book sold. He created what we would today call
Speaker 6: I guess.
Speaker 7: Press events, you know, pr events, sometimes with Teddy Roosevelt,
Speaker 7: where he would be sure to invite all of the
Speaker 7: news media of the time to cover the event when
Speaker 7: he appeared to announce a new policy or in front
Speaker 7: of an important natural resource. And he also made very
Speaker 7: close behind the scenes connections with lumber operators and others
Speaker 7: who would then of course end up supporting Pincho whenever
Speaker 7: he wanted a new policy to be put forward.
Speaker 3: So yeah, starting in the late eighteen hundreds, this idea
Speaker 3: is already being.
Speaker 5: Pushed in schools.
Speaker 3: Then the oil industry gets in on the education game
Speaker 3: in the nineteen twenties and really continually pushes that idea
Speaker 3: from then until now. Beginning in the nineteen fifties, they
Speaker 3: start to lean on the free enterprise story more and
Speaker 3: more so by the.
Speaker 4: Time the public really starts talking about global warming in
Speaker 4: the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, the groundwork to limit
Speaker 4: the conversation had basically already been laid for decades. There's
Speaker 4: this very clear idea in American's minds about how you
Speaker 4: can and can't address environmental problems.
Speaker 7: YEP.
Speaker 3: And for high school kids, the industry's focus is all
Speaker 3: things economy, from stuff like the American Enterprise series that
Speaker 3: show kids how the economy works, to stun programs that
Speaker 3: highlight all the job opportunities in the energy industry. That's
Speaker 3: our focus today. I'm Darna Noor from Earth and I'm
Speaker 3: Amy Westerveldt. In this series The Abcs of Big Oil.
Speaker 3: We're digging into the fossil fuel industry's involvement in shaping
Speaker 3: how Americans think about the economy and policy and how
Speaker 3: those things intersect with environmental issues.
Speaker 4: And last time we looked at how the industry has
Speaker 4: used comic books and coloring books and cartoon characters to
Speaker 4: start shaping the minds of little kids in elementary school.
Speaker 4: But today we're headed to high school, where big oil's
Speaker 4: efforts get a little more sophisticated.
Speaker 1: Certainly, we get marketed to a lot.
Speaker 8: I get emails pretty frequently from different companies trying to
Speaker 8: either sell us like textbooks, textbook licensing, supplemental like online resources.
Speaker 1: There's tons of that all the time.
Speaker 3: This is William Van Doren. He's a high school science
Speaker 3: and math teacher in Oakland, California. He works at a
Speaker 3: private school, but he says that just like a lot
Speaker 3: of public school teachers, he's often on the lookout for
Speaker 3: supplemental materials and maybe more to the point, educational publishers
Speaker 3: are constantly trying to market stuff to him. So if
Speaker 3: you saw something from Discovery Education, what would that say
Speaker 3: to you?
Speaker 5: Like, what does that brand kind of signify to you?
Speaker 8: I would want to take a look at it, But Yeah,
Speaker 8: I wouldn't be too suspicious.
Speaker 1: I mean ideally, like, no matter where.
Speaker 8: It's from, you kind of screen it before you turn
Speaker 8: it loose on your students.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be.
Speaker 8: Particularly suspicious about it, but I would want to look
Speaker 8: closely at it, just to see what it's actually about.
Speaker 3: So this one that we were looking at recently is
Speaker 3: Discovery Education STEM Careers Portal, and they offer all kinds
Speaker 3: of stuff for like, you know, high school guidance counselors,
Speaker 3: but also for teachers to do like a science fair
Speaker 3: or like a career fair around STEM. And then they
Speaker 3: have some activities and things that are around particularly encouraging
Speaker 3: women in STEM and people of color and staff, all.
Speaker 9: Of these kinds of things. And then you go to
Speaker 9: the partner page and it's entire and it's funded by
Speaker 9: like Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and you know a
Speaker 9: handful of other sort of oil and gas companies.
Speaker 8: Wow, that's really interesting. I would not have guessed that
Speaker 8: or been suspicious of that. Oh, it's like back to
Speaker 8: our propaganda.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: And you were asking him about this new program from
Speaker 4: Discovery Education called the STEM Careers Coalition, And if you
Speaker 4: go to their homepage it kind of looks like any
Speaker 4: other part of the Discovery Universe. It's well designed, it
Speaker 4: seems super legit, and it says connecting stem from k
Speaker 4: through careers. But then if you go to the about
Speaker 4: us page and you click on partners, and then you
Speaker 4: scroll down.
Speaker 5: A little bit, you'll find a lot of oil and
Speaker 5: gas folks.
Speaker 4: There's as the Power and Energy Distribution Company, There's Chevron,
Speaker 4: there's the American Petroleum Institute, of course, and then under
Speaker 4: content partners you find this philanthropy initiative called IF then Philanthropies.
Speaker 4: And if you dug around a little bit on them,
Speaker 4: like I did, you'll find that they're connected to this
Speaker 4: oil heiress in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker 5: Her name is Lyda Hill. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: And then if you scroll all the way down to
Speaker 3: the bottom of the page where the association partners are listed,
Speaker 3: they're described as trusted advisors and subject matter experts, and
Speaker 3: there you'll find the Manufacturing Institute. Manufacturing Institute is the
Speaker 3: education partner of the National Association of Manufacturers, a manufacturing
Speaker 3: trade group that was key to orchestrating climate denial campaigns
Speaker 3: throughout the nineties and two thousands.
Speaker 4: And this doesn't actually seem to be unusual for discovery
Speaker 4: education at all. Like if you go to the main
Speaker 4: discovery education site and look for a curricula related to
Speaker 4: the environ One of the two main options that pop
Speaker 4: up is called to Dig into Mining and it's funded
Speaker 4: by Freeport McMoRan, which is one of the largest mining
Speaker 4: companies in the world. Here's a snippet from the virtual
Speaker 4: field trip they provide there.
Speaker 10: Hi, I'm Lynn LANDI I am a geologist and a
Speaker 10: reclamation specialist. Reclamation is the process of restoring the land
Speaker 10: that has been disturbed by mining adam mine. Large amounts
Speaker 10: material is moved every day, but only a small percent
Speaker 10: of that material is copper bearing. Therefore, we have to
Speaker 10: understand how to store the rest of that material. That
Speaker 10: material is stored in piles that we call stockpiles or
Speaker 10: tailing dams. When they are filled to capacity, we can
Speaker 10: reclaim them. The goals of reclamation are threefold. We want stability,
Speaker 10: we want to manage the water, and we want to
Speaker 10: create a self sustaining ecosystem. We bring together a group
Speaker 10: of engineers, geotechnical engineers, civil engineers, and a kind societ
Speaker 10: that work on reclamation are environmental scientists, biologists, geologists, soil
Speaker 10: scientists do this work for us. First we reshape these
Speaker 10: large facilities and that helps reduce erosion, and then we
Speaker 10: add water drainage systems. This will allow us to take
Speaker 10: the precipitation or stormwater off the facility, reducing infiltration. Then
Speaker 10: we could posit cover material and we spread that all
Speaker 10: over these facilities.
Speaker 3: So in this video, this woman who works on reclamation
Speaker 3: with Freeport McMoRan keeps saying the word facilities, but what
Speaker 3: she's actually talking about is land, and by disturbed she
Speaker 3: means turned into a giant open pit mine. Reclamation is
Speaker 3: where they put all the dirt and rocks back on
Speaker 3: that land and try to engineer it to approximate nature.
Speaker 3: There's zero discussion here of the impact that copper mining
Speaker 3: has on water or soil.
Speaker 5: It's just, hey, we take the copper, it's.
Speaker 3: In a bunch of stuff you use, and then we
Speaker 3: put the earth back together again, no problem.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: God, that whole video is wild, and it's also just
Speaker 4: wild how similar it is to that chocolate chip cookie
Speaker 4: experiment that Kurt Davies told us about in episode two.
Speaker 4: But I want to pause here and dig a little
Speaker 4: bit more into that STEM Careers coalition because there's actually
Speaker 4: this section of the Discovery education site called social Impact,
Speaker 4: and it lists that STEM project as one of the
Speaker 4: three areas where a Discovery says it's having like a
Speaker 4: social effect, and all of them.
Speaker 5: Have corporate sponsors.
Speaker 4: Here's one of the videos that you'll find on the
Speaker 4: STEM Careers Coalition site.
Speaker 11: One of the things I really love is every day
Speaker 11: there's a new challenge and I find myself learning constantly
Speaker 11: or on the edge of technology. We're able to come
Speaker 11: up with new ways of solving problems, and Chevron backs
Speaker 11: those initiatives, and we're able to use technology to help
Speaker 11: us succeed. I'm Jessica Holly, a drilling engineered with Shevron.
Speaker 3: At one point, this Chevron drilling engineer describes flying out
Speaker 3: to an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico
Speaker 3: in this weirdly glamorous way, like the way you would
Speaker 3: hear the Kardashians talk about going to a concert or something.
Speaker 11: Our locations, our well sites are about two hundred miles
Speaker 11: off the coast of Louisiana, and so we'll take helicopters
Speaker 11: from the shore of Louisiana two hundred miles out and
Speaker 11: we'll actually land a little heliped on pretty much what
Speaker 11: looks like a cruise ship in the middle of the
Speaker 11: Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 4: Not sure I've ever heard an offshore oil platform described
Speaker 4: as being remolely like a cruise ship before.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I have to.
Speaker 3: Say I was pretty surprised at just how much corporate
Speaker 3: sponsored content Discovery Education has on offer, not just from
Speaker 3: oil companies, but just you know, across the board. There
Speaker 3: are so many examples of like you know, Procter and
Speaker 3: Gamble is there and Campbell Soup and all of these
Speaker 3: different companies. But then I thought about it more and
Speaker 3: I was like, well, my husband is kind of a
Speaker 3: Discovery TV addict, and I feel like every time I
Speaker 3: walk by him watching a show on there, it's either about.
Speaker 5: Like some kind of mining or like treasure hunting.
Speaker 3: There's like a lot of weird trutive stuff on there,
Speaker 3: you know, Or it's like about nature, but in this
Speaker 3: way where nature is this thing over there for us
Speaker 3: to admire sometimes. But you found kind of a weird
Speaker 3: corporate connection between Discovery's TV content recently too.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, I did.
Speaker 4: It was for a pretty different Discovery project than the
Speaker 4: education stuff. It was for a new TV show that
Speaker 4: they have called six Degrees, which is hosted by Micro.
Speaker 4: Like Micro, the reality TV host best known for hosting
Speaker 4: Dirty Jobs. So the whole conceit of this new show,
Speaker 4: Six Degrees is basically like tying things that are seemingly
Speaker 4: unrelated together. So like in the first episode, Micro connects
Speaker 4: the history of Tinder, like the dating app to the
Speaker 4: invention of the horseshoe.
Speaker 1: Well, when the dust settles, you will see the undeniable
Speaker 1: to a controvertible truth of exactly how welk we're shooting
Speaker 1: and find your soul mate.
Speaker 4: But the show also connects everything to the fossil fuel
Speaker 4: industry is Surprise Surprize. Like in that first episode, Mike says,
Speaker 4: this inventor who created the precursor to Wi Fi used
Speaker 4: money that her boyfriend made in the oil fields to
Speaker 4: fund her work. Every episode of this Micro show is
Speaker 4: sponsored by the oil and gas industry, specifically the American
Speaker 4: Petroleum Institute and Distribution Contractors Association, which is like a
Speaker 4: lobbying group for fossil fuel pipeline contractors. Mike says that
Speaker 4: this is who's funding the show himself. At the end
Speaker 4: of every single episode.
Speaker 2: Sixth agree is sponsored by the oil and natural gas industry. Why,
Speaker 2: because oil and natural gas connects everything.
Speaker 4: He says that in every single episode, like every episode
Speaker 4: has something like and the crazy thing is like sometimes
Speaker 4: it's just you know, six degrees is sponsored by the
Speaker 4: oil and gas industry because we need oil and gas
Speaker 4: for everything whatever. But other times, like in this episode,
Speaker 4: he actually goes back through the story and it's like,
Speaker 4: here's why the existence of Tinder is also like connected
Speaker 4: to the oil industry because like this random inventor who
Speaker 4: invented a precursor to Wi Fi, her boyfriend made a
Speaker 4: whole bunch of money in the oil fields, and so
Speaker 4: we would have no Internet if it weren't for oil
Speaker 4: and gas. Like you know, we need oil and gas
Speaker 4: for everything to run, and we need the money from
Speaker 4: oil and gas for everything to run.
Speaker 5: It's really wild.
Speaker 3: It is wild because like the whole conceit of the
Speaker 3: show is very much a thing that the industry likes
Speaker 3: to push a lot too, which is like we are
Speaker 3: the center of everything.
Speaker 5: You cannot live without us. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3: This feels like a good moment to note that we
Speaker 3: did reach out to Discovery to ask them about their
Speaker 3: various corporate partnerships, specifically with respect to these education initiatives.
Speaker 3: No one has gotten back to us yet, but we're
Speaker 3: still very interested in talking to them and we're still
Speaker 3: trying to reach them. So if you have any information
Speaker 3: on Discovery Education's relationships with its various corporate partners, hit
Speaker 3: us up at tips at gizmoto dot com. Or if
Speaker 3: you want to submit something anonymously, you can do that
Speaker 3: through drilled secure drop link which will stick in the
Speaker 3: show notes.
Speaker 5: Yes, please do.
Speaker 4: And Discovery Education is kind of known as a major
Speaker 4: player in schools worldwide. My mom was a teacher for
Speaker 4: like twenty eight years and she's definitely used their materials. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And on their website they claim to serve approximately four
Speaker 4: point five million educators and forty five million students worldwide.
Speaker 4: Their resources are accessed in over one hundred and forty countries,
Speaker 4: which is wild.
Speaker 5: It's incredible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that is a lot of opportunities for companies
Speaker 3: to shape people's ideas about the world, how it works,
Speaker 3: and how.
Speaker 5: It should work.
Speaker 3: And Discovery doesn't just focus on science and tech. They
Speaker 3: offer curricula in social studies too. They're obviously not the
Speaker 3: only educational publisher out there or the only educational company
Speaker 3: with corporate partners, but they're a really, really big one.
Speaker 3: I asked that teacher we heard from earlier on William
Speaker 3: van Doren, about what he thought about this stuff and
Speaker 3: whether he thought it would be an effective way for
Speaker 3: companies to message or whether you know, high school students
Speaker 3: are too shrewd and too cool to fall for some
Speaker 3: of this stuff.
Speaker 8: If you can reach the youths, if you can reach
Speaker 8: them in school, like, if it's in school, it lends
Speaker 8: this credibility to it, right and is not be essing though.
Speaker 8: You know, I think if there's a speaker in the classroom,
Speaker 8: the kids are generally going.
Speaker 1: To think it's pretty credible.
Speaker 8: I mean, you know, teenagers can be suspicious on some level,
Speaker 8: but I think fundamentally they trusted the teacher knows what
Speaker 8: they're talking about, has some expertise and authority. I mean,
Speaker 8: if I were a propagandist, I'd be wanting to get
Speaker 8: into classrooms.
Speaker 1: That's major.
Speaker 4: It is major, And yet people working in the fossil
Speaker 4: fuel industry still really push this narrative that they're at
Speaker 4: a disadvantage in schools, Like they say that kids are
Speaker 4: being brainwashed by leftist teachers who hate the oil and
Speaker 4: gas industry. And we obtained this audio from this recent
Speaker 4: National Association of Petroleum Engineers expo where several industry leaders
Speaker 4: are actually complaining about just that our.
Speaker 12: Kids and grandkids have been taught by a bunch of
Speaker 12: Vietnam draft dodge and tenured professors, but how terrible our
Speaker 12: country is and how terrible oil and gas is.
Speaker 3: This is Wayne Christian from the Texas Railroad Commission, which
Speaker 3: is the state agency overseeing oil gas pipeline and cool
Speaker 3: not rail in Texas. It's kind of little known outside
Speaker 3: of I think energy and climate circles, but it wields
Speaker 3: a lot of power.
Speaker 12: And in this day in time, folks, it's time we
Speaker 12: get on our big boy and girl bitches and stand
Speaker 12: up and get the facts out for what's good of
Speaker 12: oil and guess in the state of Texas in America period.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really just remarkable how similar this whole narrative
Speaker 4: is to one of the big messages in that industry
Speaker 4: presentation that we talked about in episode one, this idea
Speaker 4: that kids are like not learning enough about oil and
Speaker 4: gas in school, so the industry needs to close that
Speaker 4: education gap.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: It's very much talked about as oh, people are just
Speaker 3: worried about environmental issues because they don't know how awesome
Speaker 3: oil and gas is, or how much they need it,
Speaker 3: or how much we're actually doing about environmental issues. Here's
Speaker 3: Stephanie Read, a VP of marketing at Pioneer Natural Resources,
Speaker 3: it's a natural gas company, also talking at that EXMO.
Speaker 13: And I love hearing that there are even some high
Speaker 13: schools in around the Permian Basin that are offering oil
Speaker 13: and gas one oh one courses and it's incredible and
Speaker 13: I feel look back and I'm like, where was all
Speaker 13: of this when I was a kid.
Speaker 5: I agree.
Speaker 13: I think it can really drive that change in the
Speaker 13: narrative that other students are hearing about the industry.
Speaker 5: And I love that.
Speaker 13: I love that there's a huge push just to give
Speaker 13: people exposure.
Speaker 5: So I think that's fantastic.
Speaker 4: This whole thing of like publishing these ideas through really
Speaker 4: reputable educational publishers and pushing content or ideas that just
Speaker 4: generally make space for the industry or talk about this
Speaker 4: idea of trade offs between the environment and the economy,
Speaker 4: or how the practical thing is to always put the
Speaker 4: economy first. All of these ideas are really subtle and
Speaker 4: really smart, and they clearly work even on suspicious teams.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I mean, if there's one thing I've learned
Speaker 3: from reporting on oil companies for twenty years, it's that
Speaker 3: they generally don't invest money in things that don't pay dividends,
Speaker 3: you know, like they're they're not going to keep doing
Speaker 3: something for decades if it's not working. And we've been
Speaker 3: hearing for a while that the industry is worried about
Speaker 3: a shrinking talent pipeline. So on top of you know,
Speaker 3: obviously wanting to shape people's ideas about how the industry
Speaker 3: works and its rule in society and all of those things,
Speaker 3: they're worried about this very practical issue of not having
Speaker 3: enough workers going into oil companies. Fewer and fewer young
Speaker 3: people see it as a good industry to go into.
Speaker 3: The American Petroleum Institute's announcement about the STEM Careers Coalition
Speaker 3: that they're doing with Discovery really actually frames that whole
Speaker 3: project as an API initiative around training future works.
Speaker 5: It reads quote to mark National STEM Day.
Speaker 3: API and a group of partners are launching the STEM
Speaker 3: Careers Coalition that focuses on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
Speaker 3: in the K through twelve grades with an emphasis on
Speaker 3: equity and access.
Speaker 4: And then it gets even clearer with this quote from
Speaker 4: API's president Mike Summers. Later in the release, he says, quote,
Speaker 4: investing in STEM education and introducing young people to innovative
Speaker 4: careers in the natural gas and oil industry is a
Speaker 4: critical step toward tackling the world's greatest energy challenges and
Speaker 4: creating a better tomorrow. As an industry that supports more
Speaker 4: than ten million American jobs, we're committed to building the
Speaker 4: workforce of the future and preparing the next generation of
Speaker 4: leaders with the skills they need to succeed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a good double message there. We're going to train
Speaker 3: and attract young people, but also.
Speaker 5: Don't forget how many jobs we provide. Yeah, don't forget that.
Speaker 5: You uh, don't forget that you need us, you need us.
Speaker 4: It seems to be the main focus in high school,
Speaker 4: really reminding people over and over and over again that
Speaker 4: the economy is dependent on fossil fuels.
Speaker 3: That's right, and reminding people what kind of economy we're
Speaker 3: supposed to have as Americans, that whole free enterprise equals
Speaker 3: freedom equals America. Thing only ramps up when you get
Speaker 3: to the university programs. I mean it really kicks into
Speaker 3: high gear there, and that's where we're going to head
Speaker 3: next time. It's going to be a razer.
Speaker 5: So good.
Speaker 3: Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network.
Speaker 3: This series is a collaboration with Earther, his moto's climate
Speaker 3: and justice site. My co host and co reporter for
Speaker 3: the series is Darna Noor. Our editors are Julia Richie
Speaker 3: for Drilled and Brian Kahn for Earther. Our producer is
Speaker 3: Juliana Bradley. Mixing and mastering by Peter Duff. Our factchecker
Speaker 3: is Trevor Gowan. Music is by Martin Wissenberg.
Speaker 5: Our artwork was created.
Speaker 3: By Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton
Speaker 3: of the First Amendment Project. You can find corresponding stories, videos,
Speaker 3: and documents for this series on earther dot com. Thanks
Speaker 3: for listening and we'll see you next time.