Speaker 1: I'm Bethany McLain. This is making a killing in this show.
Speaker 1: I cut through the hype and handwringing to reframe the
Speaker 1: stories you thought you understood and uncover the ones you
Speaker 1: didn't know were important. In some ways, today's episode is
Speaker 1: a classic tale of innovation going hand in hand with destruction.
Speaker 1: Fracking is a technology that prioritizes big picture progress and
Speaker 1: short term economics over protecting the citizens in its path.
Speaker 1: Just ten years ago, Congress was moaning about shortages of
Speaker 1: natural gas, and most people believe the price of oil
Speaker 1: was heading in only one direction higher. But at the
Speaker 1: end of twenty eighteen, the news broke that the United
Speaker 1: States was now the world's largest producer of crude oil,
Speaker 1: responsible for almost twenty percent of the world's oil production.
Speaker 1: That's more than Saudi Arabia and Russia for the first
Speaker 1: time since the nineteen seventies. In other words, it's the
Speaker 1: so called shale revolution, which is better known as fracking,
Speaker 1: has changed everything. For decades, the US had this grand
Speaker 1: goal of energy independence. Now President Trump's administration talks about
Speaker 1: something even bigger, energy dominance. The ideas that our oil
Speaker 1: and gas riches will change the geopolitical game, both by
Speaker 1: weakening Russia and by disentangling US from the messy Middle East.
Speaker 1: And yet there are many questions and even more controversy.
Speaker 1: Most of that focus is on the environmental cost. The
Speaker 1: truth is, there isn't anything pretty about fracking. Fracking basically
Speaker 1: involves injecting tons of sand and millions of gallons of
Speaker 1: water and an undisclosed cocktail of chemicals directly into the
Speaker 1: ground beneath our feet. This helps force oil and gas
Speaker 1: through rock that was previously considered too tight to yield it.
Speaker 1: So what does this mean for our markets, for our environment,
Speaker 1: for us? Enter Eliza Griswold, my friend and New Yorker
Speaker 1: journalist whose book Amity and Prosperity does a terrific job
Speaker 1: of illuminating the environmental and human costs of the fracking revolution.
Speaker 1: Eliza's book just one the Pulletzer Prize for General Nonfiction,
Speaker 1: so it's especially exciting for me to sit down with
Speaker 1: her today to dig in on the controversy at hand.
Speaker 1: Even if you think fracking is one of the best
Speaker 1: things ever to happen to this country, it's worth hearing
Speaker 1: Eliza's take because then you'll understand why there are so
Speaker 1: many people who are so determined to stop it. For
Speaker 1: my part, I'm deeply curious about the nuances of the economic, global,
Speaker 1: and political impacts of fracking. I wrote my own mini
Speaker 1: book which focused in on the fragile economics of fracking
Speaker 1: last year, but mine didn't win a pulletz er, so
Speaker 1: please read Eliza's. I see the story of fracking on
Speaker 1: a grand scale is one of a technological innovation that
Speaker 1: is literally and figuratively fracturing our country, and yet it
Speaker 1: is also sustaining our way of life. Is anyone willing
Speaker 1: to live without access to energy which charges our smartphones
Speaker 1: and powers our electric cars? If there are good guys
Speaker 1: and bad guys here, is it always clear which one
Speaker 1: is which. Before the book came out, I met this
Speaker 1: amazing young woman named Ronnie Coptis, and she is a
Speaker 1: coal activist who's from Appalachia, and she has the complicated
Speaker 1: identity that so many people do. You know, she's big
Speaker 1: on the Second Amendment, and she hunts for her own protein,
Speaker 1: and she's also fiercely anti coal. Her husband was a minor,
Speaker 1: so she's really engaged in what does it mean to
Speaker 1: move to the next generation of energy development? In America
Speaker 1: and she's big on how rural Americans have paid the
Speaker 1: price for urban Americans energy appetites. So before the book
Speaker 1: came out, she and I were driving around you know,
Speaker 1: rural Appalachia, and she turned to me and she said,
Speaker 1: you know, resources aren't the only thing that can be
Speaker 1: taken from communities like ours. Stories can be taken to
Speaker 1: This is very familiar to me from the war zones
Speaker 1: I've worked in most of my career. You know, you
Speaker 1: can show up in a refugee camp and you can
Speaker 1: spend a day with people and become another level of extraction,
Speaker 1: like become something else taking from them. And is that
Speaker 1: because you're bringing your own ideas of what the stories
Speaker 1: should be to them, or just because any kind of
Speaker 1: storytelling is taking their story. So I think it does
Speaker 1: have something to do with the ideas, but it has
Speaker 1: more to do with feeding the engine of the media.
Speaker 1: I have some friends in Greece, and when the Greek
Speaker 1: economic crisis hit, these Greek journalists were saying that literally
Speaker 1: journalists had sat with them outside banks and been like,
Speaker 1: find me a family where the people are missing their teeth,
Speaker 1: where they sold their teeth for gold, Like casting stories
Speaker 1: and whether we're doing that in Iraq or Afghanistan or
Speaker 1: in Appalachia. It's something that as a journalist I really
Speaker 1: want to resist, and I think we're king in a
Speaker 1: place over time has forced that to happen. This is
Speaker 1: a great place for you to introduce Stacy Haney, who's
Speaker 1: the character that forms the core of your book, and
Speaker 1: tell us how you found her and what her connection
Speaker 1: to fract Ponds are. Stacy Haney is a single mom
Speaker 1: and a nurse who lives in Washington County, Pennsylvania, which
Speaker 1: is about an hour southwest of Pittsburgh. Her family has
Speaker 1: lived on the same land for more than a century.
Speaker 1: Her family comes from two towns, and those towns are
Speaker 1: named Amity and Prosperity, which is the name of the ball.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, I love it when truth is stranger
Speaker 1: than fiction. That's one of my favorite things about business,
Speaker 1: and really, who needs fiction when you have towns named
Speaker 1: Amity and Prosperity. It's fantastic, totally, and I met Stacy
Speaker 1: in the spring of twenty eleven. I went to southwestern
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania to look at America's crumbling infrastructure because I wanted
Speaker 1: to look at how our collective poverty I wanted to
Speaker 1: look at how our failing systems, our lifeline systems, roads, bridges,
Speaker 1: the grid we could go on are inadequate, and how
Speaker 1: that's costing us, right, the human cost of that. But
Speaker 1: when I got to southwestern Pennsylvania pretty quickly, the entire
Speaker 1: conversation was the boom. It was the oil and gas
Speaker 1: industry's arrival, dating back a few years really to the
Speaker 1: late two thousands, right, And this was two eleven. So
Speaker 1: one day, you know, I was looking at locks and levees,
Speaker 1: as looking at river traffic, really everything you can imagine.
Speaker 1: And I became friends with this remarkable biologist named Rose Riley,
Speaker 1: and she works for the Army Corps of Engineers. And
Speaker 1: one day she asked me if I wanted to go
Speaker 1: with her to hear how this new industry was impacting people.
Speaker 1: That farmers and other landholders were meeting at the airport
Speaker 1: in Morgantown, West Virginia, because another symbol of what I
Speaker 1: would call this public poverty is there's no meeting place
Speaker 1: in Appalacha like where you're going to meet publicly at
Speaker 1: the airport, right. Wow. She knew nothing about fracking, and
Speaker 1: she was going down to learn about what was going
Speaker 1: on firsthand from people who had experienced it, and she
Speaker 1: asked if I wanted to go, and did you know
Speaker 1: what fracking as at that point? Absolutely not, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean I knew that it was this technological innovation.
Speaker 1: I knew the buzzwords around fracking, but what it really
Speaker 1: entailed how one drilled more than a mile down into
Speaker 1: the earth and then out for a couple more miles
Speaker 1: to crack rock and harvest oil and gas from these
Speaker 1: ancient bubbles. I did not understand that at all. So
Speaker 1: we started driving south and she pointed out to me,
Speaker 1: like where mountains had flatlined, and I was like, what,
Speaker 1: how is that happening? And she's that's mountaintop removal. So
Speaker 1: she pointed out to me how for more than a century,
Speaker 1: these communities in Appalachia had really been harvesting America's energy.
Speaker 1: So we got to the airport. I was sitting behind
Speaker 1: Stacy and her eleven year old daughter, who was still
Speaker 1: in her pajamas and was complaining to her mom she
Speaker 1: was hungry. Her mom was being like, you should have
Speaker 1: eaten breakfast, right, I've been there, right, yeah, So you
Speaker 1: know I did what i'd do, which is like I
Speaker 1: carry these disgusting you know, all natural alf bars right,
Speaker 1: oh sugar exactly. So I gave her one of these
Speaker 1: like earnest bars, like all for the girl, and she
Speaker 1: very wisely was like, no, thank you. And then her
Speaker 1: mom got up and started to talk and said, you know,
Speaker 1: she was Stacy Haney. She was a nurse, and she
Speaker 1: and her kids had benzine and tallyween in their bodies,
Speaker 1: and her fourteen year old son Harley, was really, really sick,
Speaker 1: and they knew a little bit about what was going
Speaker 1: on with them. They lost some of the animals on
Speaker 1: their farm, as had their neighbor, but it was really
Speaker 1: the beginning, and she was terrified. She was terrified to
Speaker 1: speak out. This was the first time she spoke publicly
Speaker 1: because at that point the company was supplying her drinking water,
Speaker 1: and she was terrified that if she spoke against them,
Speaker 1: they would take the water away. And if they took
Speaker 1: the water, she couldn't afford to stay there. Because this
Speaker 1: is an area where again we get back to infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Drinking water is actually scarce. Some people have working wells.
Speaker 1: But what she had grown up doing, Stacy and her
Speaker 1: family is doing something called hauling water. They'd grown up
Speaker 1: traveling ten miles with a pickup truck to a public
Speaker 1: water station to fill like a massive water tank called
Speaker 1: a water buffalo, and they filled basically a cement jug
Speaker 1: outside their house, a cistern, and that's what they used
Speaker 1: to bathe and to drink. So she'd grown up pour
Speaker 1: of water and pour in every way, and this farm
Speaker 1: that she'd bought had good water, and when fracking came,
Speaker 1: the loss of that water represented for her really really
Speaker 1: a tragedy. And it's a result of this frac pund right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So next to her house, unbeknownst to her, there was
Speaker 1: at least a six acre waste pond that was almost
Speaker 1: as big. They live on eight acres of land, so
Speaker 1: if you want to imagine it, it was this tar black.
Speaker 1: It actually, at one point many points actually went septic
Speaker 1: like a wound. It started to rot, it got infected,
Speaker 1: and was off gassing massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide. FRAC
Speaker 1: pond super basically is you know, you pump into the earth,
Speaker 1: you pump a ton of water. As the technology advances,
Speaker 1: so too does the amount of water and chemicals we use.
Speaker 1: So at that point it was like two million gallons
Speaker 1: of water. Now we could look upwards of eight millions
Speaker 1: and millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals are
Speaker 1: pumped down to the earth. What's in that pond is
Speaker 1: everything that comes back out, So it's all that waste,
Speaker 1: but it's also ancient bacteria that's been in the earth
Speaker 1: obviously for millions of years, along with radioactive material, so
Speaker 1: all of that and masses of salt because all of
Speaker 1: this area was an ancient inland sea, which is why
Speaker 1: it's rich in fossil fuels. So all of this comes
Speaker 1: back to the surface, and because of Pennsylvania's geology, it
Speaker 1: had to be stored on the surface. And where these
Speaker 1: guys really went wrong is that, yes, these ponds exist
Speaker 1: in places like Texas, not eight hundred feet from somebody's house.
Speaker 1: So the pond itself was leaking, but also it was
Speaker 1: what was in the air was making them sick. And
Speaker 1: at one point you had it wasn't just the hydrogen
Speaker 1: sulfide that was rotting this pond. You had workers come
Speaker 1: in in hazmat suits applying a biaside that's a known
Speaker 1: carcinogen acroleine. They are wearing masks and white outfits. Right
Speaker 1: where a few hundred feet away. You have Stacy in
Speaker 1: her neighbor Beth in cool lots right watering their goats
Speaker 1: for the fair. One of the oil and gas workers
Speaker 1: describe the smell as rotting beef jerky. Okay, to call it,
Speaker 1: I've smelled it. To call it sewage doesn't even do.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's an insult to sewage. It's an insult
Speaker 1: to sewage. It is ungodly the smell when this thing
Speaker 1: is rotting, Okay, So what does that mean for it
Speaker 1: to be rotting and leaking? So, first of all, this
Speaker 1: is one of the problems with the pond, and this
Speaker 1: is one of the problems with the technology because these
Speaker 1: guys didn't understand when and they lined the pond with
Speaker 1: two layers of basically black garbage bag. Okay, the lining
Speaker 1: was compromised in all kinds of ways. First of all,
Speaker 1: wildlife deer and foxes got into the pond and ripped
Speaker 1: up the lining. That could be how it leaked. There
Speaker 1: was a leak detection unit, a way to detect the leaks,
Speaker 1: but it was put under both of the liners of
Speaker 1: the pond, which means that by the time the thing
Speaker 1: is ripped, you already have groundwater. Being impacted by every
Speaker 1: element of what's what's in that pond, radioactive material, anti freeze,
Speaker 1: all kinds of carcinogens. So and it isn't that nobody
Speaker 1: knew the pond was leaking. The Department of Environmental Protection,
Speaker 1: the state agency, the regulators issued what are called notices
Speaker 1: of violation that said very clearly, the pond is leaking.
Speaker 1: And again internal documents that came out in the course
Speaker 1: of the lawsuit from the oil and gas company there's
Speaker 1: one worker saying we all know they leak. So Range
Speaker 1: was using many of these ponds. When I finished the reporting,
Speaker 1: they still had a couple. And these ponds are a serious,
Speaker 1: serious problem. Done right on the surface, but all wrong underneath.
Speaker 1: So it's a classic example of checking the boxes. You've
Speaker 1: lined the pond, you've got the equipment in place that's
Speaker 1: supposed to be watching this, but in fact the surface
Speaker 1: box checking does nothing for the underlying reality, does absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1: And who's designing that pond somebody who's come from landfills
Speaker 1: because you have such a demand for labor, and in
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania you didn't have to know how. So again, I mean,
Speaker 1: just time and time again, the failure on every front
Speaker 1: is it's human like. The scale of this is tragedy,
Speaker 1: human tragedy, again and again, and it shows you how
Speaker 1: dangerous it can be these failures, even when it's done
Speaker 1: according to regulation quote unquote, what drew you from your
Speaker 1: previous work because going from the tenth parallel fought lines
Speaker 1: between Islam and Christianity to fracking. You know, I was
Speaker 1: in rural Nigeria some years ago, northern Nigeria, doing what
Speaker 1: you do as a journalist. So I was riding on
Speaker 1: an empty oil barrel across a flooded river. I've never
Speaker 1: done that as a journalist. It sounds maybe fun. I
Speaker 1: think I see that in your future. So we were,
Speaker 1: we were crossing this river and a bridge had collapsed,
Speaker 1: and it was about two weeks after the bridge in Minneapolis,
Speaker 1: I thirty five w had collapsed, killing thirteen people. And
Speaker 1: there was something about that moment where I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: I've been traveling the world for more than a decade
Speaker 1: looking at the problems that so much of the world faces.
Speaker 1: But it's time to look at the problems that America
Speaker 1: is facing. You know, since the nineties, liberal economists have
Speaker 1: talked about something called the resource curse. Yes, right, that
Speaker 1: why is it that people who live on land richest
Speaker 1: and natural resources tend to be some of the poorest,
Speaker 1: right right. And there are a lot of complex causes.
Speaker 1: A lot of that has to do with corruption, But
Speaker 1: it doesn't just apply we look at that in Nigeria,
Speaker 1: you know, we cast that away from ourselves, but it
Speaker 1: applies in America too, and really nowhere so more than Appalachia.
Speaker 1: And that's what I wanted to explore. And it's a
Speaker 1: great irony that it does apply in America because we
Speaker 1: tend to think of it as somebody else's problem, but
Speaker 1: it's actually right here, it's our problem too, exactly. A
Speaker 1: lot of what happened with fracking is that multinationals which
Speaker 1: had a practice of operating abroad came back to America
Speaker 1: and brought some of those practices, even those contracts that
Speaker 1: had safeguarded them while passing the cost on to others,
Speaker 1: and they applied them here in the States. How given
Speaker 1: the lessons from elsewhere, what we think of as rules
Speaker 1: and regulations in the United States, how has that been
Speaker 1: able to happen here? That is the question. In different places,
Speaker 1: I think, because of different reasons. The term I would
Speaker 1: use as public poverty. You know, what do you mean
Speaker 1: by that? I mean, in Pennsylvania, basically a failure of
Speaker 1: the state to have enough sources to even safeguard regulations.
Speaker 1: I mean before I began this project. And certainly they're
Speaker 1: a husband and wife legal team in the book, you know,
Speaker 1: and they're no hand ringing environmentalists. The wife, Kendra Smith,
Speaker 1: is a corporate defense attorney who mostly handles asbestos and
Speaker 1: exposure cases for railroads, and she defends them, right, and
Speaker 1: she defends railroads, and yet for this case, she decided
Speaker 1: to take on her first plane off case and to
Speaker 1: switch sides, and both she and her husband the reason
Speaker 1: they did that is they, like so many of us,
Speaker 1: had assumed that the regulations were not only in place,
Speaker 1: but they were also being enforced. And the truth is
Speaker 1: neither of those is accurate. So it was really you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I think we have to
Speaker 1: do a better job at is you know, when we
Speaker 1: see people talking about fracking, they're usually talking about the
Speaker 1: abuses of the corporations themselves. But Kendra, who's a corporate
Speaker 1: defense attorney, would make the case that that's what corporations do.
Speaker 1: They protect their own interests, that it's really the failure
Speaker 1: on behalf of the state that is most shocking in
Speaker 1: this case. And is it a failure on the state's failure.
Speaker 1: Is it a failure to put in place the right
Speaker 1: regulations or is it a failure to enforce those are
Speaker 1: in place that are in place, or is it both?
Speaker 1: It's absolutely both. So when it comes to how they
Speaker 1: even think, how they even come up with the adequate
Speaker 1: with the regulations at all, what they're doing is they're
Speaker 1: usually working with the oil and gas company. That's not new.
Speaker 1: That's how regulation is made. You know, the regulation from
Speaker 1: the beginning can be compromised because corporate interests are involved
Speaker 1: in establishing what the regulation should be. But in this case,
Speaker 1: there are two other problems. One is that these sites
Speaker 1: are so isolated, they're so protected that the regulators are
Speaker 1: dependent on the companies for knowing what the hell is
Speaker 1: going on there. You know, they they don't have the expertise,
Speaker 1: they don't have the instrument it's to test. They need
Speaker 1: the companies themselves to tell them what's going on. And
Speaker 1: that is obviously a problem. On top of which they
Speaker 1: just have inadequate numbers of people. They don't have enough
Speaker 1: bodies to go out there and do the kind of
Speaker 1: regulation that needs to be done. Is that a microcosm
Speaker 1: of regulation in America? In other words, what you just
Speaker 1: said is perhaps exacerbated by the conditions in Appalachia. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, it reminds me a lot of
Speaker 1: what happens in Washington, DC with the finance industry, right,
Speaker 1: government being dependent on business to write the laws. That's
Speaker 1: exactly right. And on top of that, I think one
Speaker 1: other parallel there to draw. You know, a friend of
Speaker 1: mine who's a bnchor is always talking about who she's
Speaker 1: meeting as regulators. One thing that happens here is that,
Speaker 1: you know, the regulators themselves, these guys who are going
Speaker 1: out and doing basically monitoring these sites, are not making
Speaker 1: enough money. And you know in the book, one of
Speaker 1: the things one of the people who is harmed in
Speaker 1: the course of the book is standing there at one
Speaker 1: of these sites and the state regulator asks the gas
Speaker 1: company representative if their jobs available? Right? So then who's
Speaker 1: to blame there? You know, when we say in Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: State Impact, the MPR station has done some excellent reporting
Speaker 1: on the revolving door between public interests and private industry
Speaker 1: and I think that kind of one day I'm a regulator,
Speaker 1: the next I'm working for a corporation that definitely applies
Speaker 1: in the financial industry. I never forget. I was sitting
Speaker 1: with Dan mud who was the CEO Fanny May during
Speaker 1: the financial crisis, and we are in front of a
Speaker 1: room full of students, and they were complaining about Fanny
Speaker 1: May's behavior and how the regulators hadn't reined it in.
Speaker 1: And Dan looked around the room and said, Okay, raise
Speaker 1: your hand if you're here going to the University of
Speaker 1: Chicago planning to be a regulator. Right of course? Right?
Speaker 1: Not a single hand went up, right. And even people
Speaker 1: who do go into regulation are doing that with a
Speaker 1: short term thinking, well, I'm going to get the expertise
Speaker 1: to flip sides, and are they to be blamed for that?
Speaker 1: You know, we'll have families to support. Isn't another part
Speaker 1: of the complexity with what happens with natural resources though,
Speaker 1: that there is a very real trade off here, right
Speaker 1: The business itself may exploit people, and yet it provides jobs.
Speaker 1: And so there's a willingness perhaps on the part of governments,
Speaker 1: or an inclination maybe to look the other way because
Speaker 1: of this very real issue of jobs a thousand percent.
Speaker 1: And this is especially true in Pennsylvania because of the
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight crisis. The financial crisis really was massive, crazy,
Speaker 1: the ways in which the financial crisis reverberated in all
Speaker 1: these ways we don't think about, right whether giving birth
Speaker 1: to fracking, which will come back to, but in this
Speaker 1: way too, making Pennsylvania need a fracking revolution economically absolutely,
Speaker 1: and making basically making politicians willing to sign off on
Speaker 1: vast tracts of land for oil and gas interests where
Speaker 1: they wouldn't have been otherwise because they had to plug
Speaker 1: a budget shortfall. And I just want to note that
Speaker 1: that was a Republican governor who did that. That was
Speaker 1: Ed Rendell. That was a Democrat. So when we get
Speaker 1: into like the easy polarization on fracking in Pennsylvania, it's
Speaker 1: much more complex, and that's one reason it's so interesting,
Speaker 1: well so complex everywhere. If you think about it, it's
Speaker 1: President Barack Obama who overturned the ban on exports, right,
Speaker 1: So it's a Democrat, a democratic administration arguably somewhat friendly
Speaker 1: to environmentalists, who overturned a forty year ban on fracking.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry on oil exports a thousand percent. I mean
Speaker 1: time and again in this book didn't take place under
Speaker 1: the Trump administration. This is all on Obama that if
Speaker 1: you think about other industries that are resource extractive, whether
Speaker 1: coal or iron mining, where I grew up, you had
Speaker 1: a sort of alliance among the people who live there
Speaker 1: in the sense of unions and everybody. Kind of maybe
Speaker 1: I'm oversimplifying, but it seems to me that people felt
Speaker 1: the same way and were unified in the sense of
Speaker 1: better conditions for the miners. But fracking uniquely has divided
Speaker 1: communities in a way that I think these other industries haven't.
Speaker 1: And what's the other side of this divide? Why were
Speaker 1: some people in amity and prosperity extremely supportive of fracking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're an r We're an our supportive of wrecking. And
Speaker 1: it's really important to say that because for some of
Speaker 1: the people in the community. I'm thinking of a farmer
Speaker 1: named Ray Day in particular, fracking not only has allowed
Speaker 1: him to repair the roof on his farm and buy
Speaker 1: new tractors, it allowed him to put a first floor
Speaker 1: basement into his mother's farmhouse, which allowed her to die
Speaker 1: at home. Ray lives on one of the larger farms
Speaker 1: in Washington County, and he and his brothers signed a
Speaker 1: very very lucrative deal pretty early on. And they too
Speaker 1: have a frackpond. They're frackpond leaked. They have all kinds
Speaker 1: of emphasis, but he doesn't care. He believes very strongly
Speaker 1: that the company was responsible in how they handled that leak.
Speaker 1: And did they handle it differently than they handled Stacy's leak?
Speaker 1: Or is it simply he was also getting money from
Speaker 1: the royalty riots he sold, whereas Stacy was getting very little.
Speaker 1: It's so hard to know. Ultimately, I think there are
Speaker 1: ideological pieces of why Ray supports fracking that go beyond
Speaker 1: that paycheck. He's an honorable man, and I don't think
Speaker 1: he would deliberately put people at harm just for a paycheck.
Speaker 1: That said that money has changed the course of his
Speaker 1: family's life. Ray hates the federal government, and I, being
Speaker 1: an outsider coming in, you know, well, regulation has to
Speaker 1: be good. And he just explained to me he and
Speaker 1: a pig farmer, Jason Clark, who keeps his pigs on
Speaker 1: Ray's farm, just said, let's tell you how this works.
Speaker 1: So according to federal regulation. Every time I got to
Speaker 1: give a pig a shot. I have to have a
Speaker 1: vet come out that costs one hundred dollars. But I
Speaker 1: say my shoulder hurts, I go up the road. I
Speaker 1: get a prescription for oxy at the little clinic that's
Speaker 1: for free. Right. And so you tell me what kind
Speaker 1: of government has my interest at heart when they regulate
Speaker 1: my pigs more heavily than they regulate me. Right. And
Speaker 1: while there isn't a direct link between that and a
Speaker 1: pro fracking stance, you actually can see the links. You
Speaker 1: can see how the progression builds. Right. This is another
Speaker 1: thing that I think rarely gets told in stories about
Speaker 1: the evils of fracking. So often the people who live
Speaker 1: in these communities are painted as naive in some way,
Speaker 1: and the opposite is true. Ray and Stacy and these
Speaker 1: families have been signing mineral uses for a century. They
Speaker 1: have extraordinarily sophisticated understandings of mineral rights and what they
Speaker 1: make from what. And with coal they've made nothing. I mean,
Speaker 1: the coal rights on this land have been sold away
Speaker 1: for since the Civil War in many cases, so the
Speaker 1: coal mine can come underneath your land without even any
Speaker 1: You get no benefit, and you usually lose your water.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of industrial coal mine and long all mining.
Speaker 1: So Stacy and some of her neighbors actually signed these
Speaker 1: oil and gas leases to protect themselves from coal mining.
Speaker 1: Well that's an irony. Yeah, So again with understanding what's
Speaker 1: really at stake for these communities and why they're making
Speaker 1: the decisions they're making, it's to tell a story that
Speaker 1: begins ten years ago is simply not good enough. We
Speaker 1: got to start a hundred years ago. One reviewer wrote
Speaker 1: this about your book because she wrote, Stacy Haney's journey
Speaker 1: is to remember a core truth. Exploiting energy often involves
Speaker 1: exploiting people as their way around that. I definitely agree
Speaker 1: with that. You know, I really did start this book
Speaker 1: from as neutral a position as I could. I just
Speaker 1: didn't want to be preaching to the choir one more time.
Speaker 1: Right that said, after seven years of reporting, I have
Speaker 1: seen this to be a lived reality for thousands of people.
Speaker 1: Do I think there is another possible model? I do?
Speaker 1: Is that because I remain an idealist? Yeah? Yes, But
Speaker 1: I also think that when we are seeing a future
Speaker 1: of renewables, which you and I have talked about a lot,
Speaker 1: like when would that be viable? Is it? Now? How
Speaker 1: do we model that out. I do think there are
Speaker 1: solutions that are more mutually beneficial. I think we have
Speaker 1: come to the end of an era. That is where
Speaker 1: I'm hopeful. I'm excited by these new voices, even if
Speaker 1: their ideology isn't always where I am. I'm excited because
Speaker 1: they're thinking outside of the box, and I do believe
Speaker 1: there could be solutions outside of the box. And I
Speaker 1: do see my job as a reporter as trying to
Speaker 1: go find what they are. In oil and gas, it's
Speaker 1: more complicated than other things because in certain things that
Speaker 1: we think of as scen areas, you can say, okay,
Speaker 1: well I don't smoke, so but we all use energy,
Speaker 1: and eighty percent of the world's energy still comes from
Speaker 1: fossil fuels. So given that dynamic, it is simplistic to
Speaker 1: say this is the fault of a lack of government regulations,
Speaker 1: or this is the fault of business that's gone wrong, right,
Speaker 1: because we're all feeding it. We are all feeding it.
Speaker 1: Are we willing to change? Are we really willing to
Speaker 1: change in convenience and cost? We need to as America,
Speaker 1: let's say, right, as the developed nations, right, we need
Speaker 1: to be willing to say that we will take a hit.
Speaker 1: Once again, we are passing the costs of our consumption
Speaker 1: of energy all to you know, the woman in Bangladesh
Speaker 1: who's living on a coast right who climate change is
Speaker 1: having lived impact right now. This is not news to anyone.
Speaker 1: But in order to change this model, we're going to
Speaker 1: have to give up more and we're going to have
Speaker 1: to be willing to let others develop as they choose,
Speaker 1: which is both hard perhaps to have a broader notion
Speaker 1: of who bears the cost. It seems in some ways
Speaker 1: the progression of our society has been to narrow the
Speaker 1: pool of those who bear the costs and increase the
Speaker 1: burden on them over time, and maybe that that burden
Speaker 1: needs to be shared a little more without a question,
Speaker 1: not even again, we're not talking about like handwringing. We're
Speaker 1: talking about our survival and how practically that's going to happen.
Speaker 1: So what do you think about all of this in
Speaker 1: the face of this notion that Pennsylvania is going to
Speaker 1: reinvent itself as the land of plastics. Every time I
Speaker 1: hear that, I think of that great line from the graduate.
Speaker 1: The guy is speaking about what's this future? And it's
Speaker 1: just one word plastics. That is such. That's a perfect
Speaker 1: terrifying metonym. It's a really frightening time if you look
Speaker 1: at Pennsylvania because very very quietly, Pennsylvania is gearing up
Speaker 1: to be Yeah, it's future is in plastics. You know,
Speaker 1: we have Carlisle Group coming in and buying the largest
Speaker 1: refinery as I understand it in the United States, coastal refinery.
Speaker 1: Once private equity gets involved, come on, right, industry and
Speaker 1: Wall Street together, just the blind engine that that is
Speaker 1: driving this business forward, not like oh again, not oo
Speaker 1: pooh pooh business, but against its own interests. Right. That
Speaker 1: notion of a blind engine is really powerful because one
Speaker 1: of the big debates in the business world is short
Speaker 1: term versus long term, right, And I think the short
Speaker 1: termism in the business world is it's a blind engine. Right.
Speaker 1: That's a perfect way to describe it. How is the
Speaker 1: market already reflecting the reality of climate change? Right? And
Speaker 1: the answer was it's not because it's not even thinking
Speaker 1: eleven years ahead. It doesn't have that capacity. And that
Speaker 1: I wonder if that could change. Yeah, there's been discussion
Speaker 1: for years, as long as I've been covering business. The
Speaker 1: discussion has been the need to be more long term
Speaker 1: in nature, that that would solve a lot of the
Speaker 1: problems we have, whether it's the financial crisis or whether
Speaker 1: it's a lack of ability to think about climate change.
Speaker 1: And each year, this is the pessimist in me, But
Speaker 1: each year we become more short term oriented instead of
Speaker 1: more long term oriented. And I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: a function of the world moving at a faster pace
Speaker 1: or if that's Wall Street. It's simplistic to move at
Speaker 1: a faster pace, right. Short term is easier because you
Speaker 1: can measure in metrics, and the long term it's perhaps
Speaker 1: more complicated in some ways. I also wonder if that
Speaker 1: favors kleptocracy, because you know, again, like if you look
Speaker 1: at Nigeria, right, and you think, well, what drives this
Speaker 1: resource curse? Right? What drives corruption? If I think I'm
Speaker 1: going to be out of power tomorrow, I will absolutely
Speaker 1: take everything I can today and put it in a
Speaker 1: Swiss bank account. And when we look here in America,
Speaker 1: you know, we look at our own kleptocrat in the
Speaker 1: White House, we see that same pattern. You know, we
Speaker 1: see take as much as I can get today, because
Speaker 1: who knows what will happen tomorrow? Right, So about a
Speaker 1: year after your book came out, there was a twist
Speaker 1: on the story coming out of Pennsylvania. Tell us about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is just happening now and it's super exciting.
Speaker 1: So the Attorney General of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, who brought
Speaker 1: to light the abuses within the Catholic Church, has just
Speaker 1: launched a criminal investigation looking at environmental crimes committed by
Speaker 1: the oil and gas industry. Particularly it seems in relation
Speaker 1: to Stacy and our family to think that this company
Speaker 1: and the subcontractors may be held responsible for not only
Speaker 1: what it did, because a lot of what happens in
Speaker 1: the course of this book isn't just a leaking pond,
Speaker 1: and it's not just a spill that isn't cleaned up.
Speaker 1: All those are essential and the impact that people who
Speaker 1: live next door, it's the cover up. To think that
Speaker 1: there may be some accountability here is really exciting, not
Speaker 1: just for me, but I'd imagine for the people who've
Speaker 1: lived this, lived this and shouted into the wind for
Speaker 1: a decade now and watch their animals die, and watch
Speaker 1: their kids get so sick that they think they're going
Speaker 1: to die, not have the money to move because they
Speaker 1: can't cover two mortgages. Not get the company being able
Speaker 1: to respond, get the company to say that they're crazy publicly.
Speaker 1: You know, all of these things have happened. I mean,
Speaker 1: this has just been This has been a period of
Speaker 1: outrage for the families in this story in a way
Speaker 1: I can't really imagine living. So to think just even
Speaker 1: that there may be accountability, I can imagine, would be
Speaker 1: hugely life changing. It's hard not to be on the
Speaker 1: side of Stacy Haney and her family. And yet there
Speaker 1: is this very real tension between jobs now and our
Speaker 1: energy needs now and the long term cost of those
Speaker 1: jobs and those energy needs. How we struggle through that
Speaker 1: will define the next decade and much more. Making a
Speaker 1: Killing is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Talking Blade.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Ruth Bards. My executive producers are Alison
Speaker 1: McClean no relation and Megan Casey. The executive producer at
Speaker 1: Pushkin is Mia Lobell. Engineering by Jason Gambrel, Mixed by
Speaker 1: Adam leebertch Dick. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin.
Speaker 1: Everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLean. Thanks so much
Speaker 1: for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve