Speaker 1: Petrochemicals has become a kind of mantra for the oil
Speaker 1: industry that thank goodness for petro chemicals, because that's where
Speaker 1: all the growth lies.
Speaker 2: A few years ago, I started to see an explosion
Speaker 2: in disposable plastic at restaurants, at my kids' school. It
Speaker 2: was everywhere, and this was even before the pandemic brought
Speaker 2: more and more of it into our lives. It seemed weird,
Speaker 2: and it reminded me of what had happened with climate change,
Speaker 2: where a big environmental problem really seemed like it was
Speaker 2: being addressed, like people were turning their attention to solving it,
Speaker 2: and then suddenly everything shifted. I wanted to know what
Speaker 2: had happened, and when I looked into it, I found fracking.
Speaker 1: With the fracking of gas, a lot of ethane and propane,
Speaker 1: and they're considerably cheaper as a feedstock than oil. And
Speaker 1: all these companies had the bright idea, well, let's turn
Speaker 1: this ethane into plastic and then we can undercut our
Speaker 1: competitors and we can make very high superprofits. That's basically
Speaker 1: was the idea.
Speaker 2: That was infuriating because I had also just discovered that fracking,
Speaker 2: on top of creating a whole bunch of environmental problems.
Speaker 2: Radioactive waste, polluted water had never even been profitable.
Speaker 3: That's something that I think has actually been in emblematic
Speaker 3: with the shale industry as a whole, that it's an
Speaker 3: industry that's been phenomenally successful at producing oil and gas,
Speaker 3: but has been terrible at producing cash.
Speaker 2: Now it was fueling a plastics boom, bringing a whole
Speaker 2: new host of environmental problems.
Speaker 4: There's a big build out going on in the Gulf
Speaker 4: Coast as well as in Appalasia, so using gas liquids
Speaker 4: from fract gas and turning those into plastics and these
Speaker 4: giant industrial cities.
Speaker 5: Really the school shut down, there's no school.
Speaker 2: Promosa is using the school for a training center now,
Speaker 2: so it's Promosa's town. My community was suffering. People were
Speaker 2: getting sick, my classmates. I've had several classmates die of
Speaker 2: rare cancers.
Speaker 3: We had no big health issues until the insist started
Speaker 3: to come in.
Speaker 2: But the fossil fuel industry is still pushing quote unquote
Speaker 2: natural gas as a climate solution a bridge fuel.
Speaker 5: Renewables are great, but we need natural gas too. That's
Speaker 5: what we use now. So when the sun is down,
Speaker 5: you have a backup.
Speaker 2: You found just like your granddad.
Speaker 5: Plus, emissions have gone down because natural gas is the
Speaker 5: number one electricity, Grandma, American Energy is leading the world.
Speaker 5: Natural gas equals a cleaner future.
Speaker 2: And they're fighting like hell against various local and state
Speaker 2: moves to electrify everything and get off of gas.
Speaker 3: At the local level, they're trying to make it as
Speaker 3: miserable as possible for locally elected officials to move forward
Speaker 3: policy to restrict natural gas.
Speaker 2: There's too much going on here for anyone's story, So
Speaker 2: we're doing something a little different with this one. A
Speaker 2: season in three parts looking at all sides of the
Speaker 2: fossil gas industry. We're calling it the Bridge to Nowhere.
Speaker 2: Part one is coming soon. Make sure you're subscribed to
Speaker 2: Drilled wherever you get your podcasts so you won't miss it.