Speaker 1: Early in my career, I did a ton of reporting
Speaker 1: on the plastic problem, why there was so much of it,
Speaker 1: how the industry operated, the pr guys who created fake
Speaker 1: front groups for plastic manufacturers. It was a lot of
Speaker 1: the same stuff the oil and gas guys had done,
Speaker 1: which makes sense because it was mostly the same companies
Speaker 1: making plastic. But at a certain point I shifted my
Speaker 1: focus away from plastic, partly because it seemed like a
Speaker 1: problem that.
Speaker 2: Was being solved.
Speaker 1: The public was aware of the problem, there were various
Speaker 1: alternatives to plastic being embraced. Even consumer behavior was changing.
Speaker 1: Now to California, where a new law will ban single
Speaker 1: use plastic bags at grocery and convenience stores. Instead of
Speaker 1: buying a plastic tube of toothpaste then throwing it away
Speaker 1: or recycling it, maybe you can now buy toothpaste tablets
Speaker 1: that come in this little compostable paper packets.
Speaker 3: It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Speaker 4: I like that in the Pacific Ocean contains plastic waste
Speaker 4: twice the size of Texas.
Speaker 3: That's big.
Speaker 1: And then a few years ago I started to see
Speaker 1: more and more plastic everywhere, restaurants, stores, my kids' school,
Speaker 1: and I wondered what had happened to shift the course
Speaker 1: of things so dramatically. Had I missed some kind of
Speaker 1: policy change, had some celebrity said something pro plastic? But
Speaker 1: it also jumped out of me because it was so
Speaker 1: similar to what had happened on climate change during the nineties,
Speaker 1: high public awareness momentum toward change, and then boom, this
Speaker 1: complete shift of course. So I started looking into it,
Speaker 1: and the first place I looked was this sort of
Speaker 1: cartoonishly evil PR guy who had been the head of
Speaker 1: all of these pro plastic campaigns when I'd looked into
Speaker 1: the issue before. His name was Rick Berman. His nickname
Speaker 1: is doctor Evil, and I'm not joking. He's the guy
Speaker 1: who ran a ton of the PR campaigns for Philip
Speaker 1: Morris back in the day. The lead character in the
Speaker 1: movie Thank You for Smoking is based on him. I
Speaker 1: don't have an MD or law degree.
Speaker 2: I have a bachelor's and kicking button taking names.
Speaker 1: I get paid to talk.
Speaker 5: What do you talk about?
Speaker 3: I speak on behalf of cigarettes.
Speaker 2: My mommy cigarettes kill?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: Is your mommy a doctor?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: Well she doesn't exactly sound like a credible expert, now
Speaker 2: does she.
Speaker 1: Rick Berman has also targeted Mothers against Drunk Driving for
Speaker 1: alcohol clients, and the Humane Society for beef clients.
Speaker 5: Mysteres, how many alcohol related does a year?
Speaker 2: Well, that's what two hundred and seventy a day.
Speaker 1: Tragedy. I front an organization that killed him. So I
Speaker 1: had followed Berman a lot when I was reporting on
Speaker 1: plastic because he was working for all the plastic bag
Speaker 1: manufacturers and the food and beverage guys who all wanted
Speaker 1: to fight against plastic bag bands. Burman was the guy
Speaker 1: behind my all time favorite fake grassroots group, the Save
Speaker 1: the Plastic Bag Coalition. They claimed to be a group
Speaker 1: of concerned citizens who loved plastic bags, I guess, but
Speaker 1: was actually one guy paid by Rick Bourban. So when
Speaker 1: I dove back in in twenty fourteen, the first thing
Speaker 1: I did was google Rick Berman, and I found a
Speaker 1: New York Times story October thirtieth, twenty fourteen, about how
Speaker 1: Berman was suddenly very involved with natural gas companies and
Speaker 1: fracking hard nosed advice from veteran lobbyist win ugly or
Speaker 1: lose pretty.
Speaker 2: A speech he'd.
Speaker 1: Given in Colorado for a group of natural gas companies
Speaker 1: called the West Start Energy Alliance had been leaked here's
Speaker 1: a little bit from it.
Speaker 5: And again we've had a lot of ads on this thing.
Speaker 5: You get in people's mind a tie, they don't know
Speaker 5: who's right, and you win all ties.
Speaker 3: Because the tie.
Speaker 1: Basically ensures the status quote.
Speaker 3: People are not prepared.
Speaker 6: To get aggressive in moving whus layers together. So I'll
Speaker 6: take a tie any day if I'm trying to deserve
Speaker 6: the status quote.
Speaker 1: A tie is a win because that basically ensures the
Speaker 1: status quo. Wow, But also what was Bourban doing there?
Speaker 1: He had worked with every other industry before, tobacco, alcohol, meat, chemicals,
Speaker 1: but weirdly he had never worked for oil and gas,
Speaker 1: and now here he was in one of the hubs
Speaker 1: of the fracking boom. Quick orientation on that front. Fracking
Speaker 1: is slang for hydraulic fracturing. It's a drilling process where
Speaker 1: you basically blast water and chemicals into shale rock at
Speaker 1: really high pressure, busting open the rocks and pumping out
Speaker 1: the gas or oil that's hiding inside of them. Around
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, a few independent companies figured out
Speaker 1: how to do fracking economically, and the price of oil
Speaker 1: and gas made it smart to pursue. That kicked off
Speaker 1: a fracking boom. But around twenty ten, people in communities
Speaker 1: where fracking was happening had started to talk about how
Speaker 1: it was ruining their water, in some cases making it flammable,
Speaker 1: a thing you don't really want your water to be.
Speaker 1: Then stories started to come out about the radioactive waste
Speaker 1: being generated by fracking, Yes, radioactive waste. Fracking had some
Speaker 1: pretty bad press going into that conference Berman was at
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen. Neighbors in that Colorado town are being
Speaker 1: in the heat as well.
Speaker 6: The groundwater there is apparently contaminated by natural gas.
Speaker 7: A Colorado homeowners living in fear because their tap water
Speaker 7: is flammable.
Speaker 8: And the brine that these truckers are hauling radium can
Speaker 8: be as high as twenty eighty five hundred. These levels
Speaker 8: are extraordinary.
Speaker 1: So it made sense that the industry would go looking
Speaker 1: for a hitman like Berman to save it. At the
Speaker 1: Western Energy Alliance conference, Berman was presenting on his latest campaign,
Speaker 1: Big Green Radicals, an attempt to discredit the top three
Speaker 1: critics of fracking at the time SERRA Club, NRDC, and
Speaker 1: Food and Water Watch. Here's Berman's colleague Jack Hubbard explaining,
Speaker 1: more so, we.
Speaker 4: Thought, how are we going to kick off this campaign.
Speaker 4: Take the typical Bourbon and Company model in undermining.
Speaker 9: These folks credibility and diminish their moral authority.
Speaker 1: Ah, Yes, the typical Berman and Company model of undermining
Speaker 1: people's credibility and diminishing their moral authority. Berman's fur a
Speaker 1: into the natural gas world got me wondering if fracking
Speaker 1: and gas were linked to the sudden resurgence of plastic
Speaker 1: And then over the next couple of years, I started
Speaker 1: to hear more about another problem with fracking, a natural
Speaker 1: gas glut. The story was that fracking companies had been
Speaker 1: so successful at getting gas out of shale rock that
Speaker 1: they were just kind of swimming in this stuff.
Speaker 10: It was very good at producing gas, but terrible at
Speaker 10: producing profits.
Speaker 1: This is Clark Williams Dairy, an analyst with the Institute
Speaker 1: for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis AIFA.
Speaker 10: And that's something that I think has actually been emblematic
Speaker 10: the shale industry as a whole, that it's an industry
Speaker 10: that's been phenomenally successful at producing oil and gas, but
Speaker 10: it's been terrible at producing cash.
Speaker 1: The fracking industry actually never produced profits, but it did
Speaker 1: produce a lot of gas, and it needed to find
Speaker 1: a market for it. Here's Kingsmill Bond, an analyst with
Speaker 1: the nonprofit Carbon Tracker.
Speaker 5: With the fracking of gas a lot of ethane and propane,
Speaker 5: and they're considerably cheaper as a feedstock than oil. And
Speaker 5: all these companies had the bright day, well, let's turn
Speaker 5: this ethane into plastic, and then we can undercut our
Speaker 5: competitors and we can make very high superprofits. That's basically
Speaker 5: was the idea.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now it was starting to make some sense.
Speaker 1: Just a few years after public awareness of the plastic
Speaker 1: problem was peaking, fossil fuel companies realized if they could
Speaker 1: make plastic with the byproducts of fracking instead of with oil,
Speaker 1: they could solve the natural gas clout problem and supercharge
Speaker 1: their petro chemical profits. Again, remember, most of the companies
Speaker 1: making plastic or providing the building blocks of plastic are
Speaker 1: oil and gas companies. And here's where we get back
Speaker 1: to the involvement of Berman and his cronies. Thanks to
Speaker 1: some very clever messaging over the years, the general public
Speaker 1: has largely forgotten that plastic is made out of fossil fuels.
Speaker 4: But when you look at their websites, when you look
Speaker 4: at their communication stuff and business. They're very clear that
Speaker 4: they are all about plastics, and so this is an
Speaker 4: industry has been very effective at on the one hand,
Speaker 4: promoting the use of plastic residence across ever wider ranges
Speaker 4: of product streams and an evermore tes around the world,
Speaker 4: and on the other hand, keeping their own role in
Speaker 4: these processes largely invisible from the public.
Speaker 1: This is Carol Muffett, President and CEO of the nonprofit
Speaker 1: Center for International Environmental Law.
Speaker 4: You know, the plub public when they think about who
Speaker 4: produces plastic, they think about Procter and Gamble, they think
Speaker 4: about Starbucks, they think about Amazon. All those are completely legitimate,
Speaker 4: But ultimately, at the end of the day, you know,
Speaker 4: the molecules going into that plastic are all coming from
Speaker 4: a handful of companies, and they have names like Exxon
Speaker 4: and Chevron Shell.
Speaker 1: Oftentimes those oil and gas companies own and operate the
Speaker 1: petrochemical facilities making plastic two, but they don't really advertise it.
Speaker 1: Exon's big plastic factory in Louisiana, it's just called the
Speaker 1: Baton Rouge Plastics Company. Even when they're not making the
Speaker 1: plastics themselves. The connection is pretty direct between the oil
Speaker 1: and gas industry and plastic. In twenty eleven, construction of
Speaker 1: a new pipeline began. It would run from the eagle
Speaker 1: Ford Shale, one of the first big fracking plays in Texas,
Speaker 1: to a petrochemical plant on the Gulf in Callum County.
Speaker 1: That pipeline was fully operational by early twenty thirteen, supplying
Speaker 1: a plant owned by a little known Taiwanese company called Formosa.
Speaker 1: I'm Amy Westervelt. Welcome to a new season of Drilled
Speaker 1: the Bridge to Nowhere. We're tackling the natural gas industry
Speaker 1: this season, and we're doing something a little different. Instead
Speaker 1: of telling you one story, over the course of several episodes,
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you a few different stories about
Speaker 1: the natural gas industry. First up, plastic pipelines. That pipeline
Speaker 1: from the eagle Ford Shale to the foremost of plastics plant.
Speaker 1: It's not alone. There's a very very direct pipeline direct
Speaker 1: connection between these two industries. Over the next few episodes,
Speaker 1: we're going to look at how the fracking boom led
Speaker 1: to a plastics boom through the story of Formost of
Speaker 1: plastics on the Gulf Coast. Coming up right after this
Speaker 1: quick break.
Speaker 2: I've spent my whole life around the water.
Speaker 9: I've been shrimpen since I was eight years old, and
Speaker 9: even when I was smaller, when I was like four
Speaker 9: and five years old, my dad would come in from
Speaker 9: shrimp and all of us kids would go to the bay.
Speaker 2: And I can remember going out in.
Speaker 9: The bay and when you leave her early, you got
Speaker 9: the spoon bills, you know, these pink birds flying, they
Speaker 9: coming about the marshes, and you're going past the reefs
Speaker 9: and you're heading out into the bay, and it was,
Speaker 9: it was, It was beautiful, and it always kept that magic.
Speaker 9: And I think if I gave up on the bay,
Speaker 9: I would be given up on the best part of myself.
Speaker 1: Meet Diane Wilson. She's a fourth generation shrimp boat captain
Speaker 1: in Point Comfort, Texas. That was a clip of her
Speaker 1: from the documentary Texas Gold, but I got the chance
Speaker 1: to speak with her too.
Speaker 6: For a while, I ran a shrimp house, and you know,
Speaker 6: I think I handled about fifteen shrimp boats. And it's
Speaker 6: a it's an old tin building and it's right at
Speaker 6: the dock.
Speaker 1: That shrimp house. She ran the little tin building on
Speaker 1: the dock. It basically processes all the shrimp for the
Speaker 1: shrimpers in the area, so they go out fishing, come back,
Speaker 1: and Diane would sort of take it.
Speaker 6: From there, so I know all the comings and goings
Speaker 6: of those shrimpers. And one day I had a shripper
Speaker 6: come in. And this shripper, he was a real nice
Speaker 6: looking guy, and he had about three types of cancers,
Speaker 6: and he had these lumps all over they were like
Speaker 6: tennis falls up and down his arm. And anyway, he
Speaker 6: threw this magazine at me and he wanted me to
Speaker 6: read it. And it was the first time the toxic
Speaker 6: release inventory ever came out. And our little county, Calsing County,
Speaker 6: I bet we didn't have twelve thousand people in this county.
Speaker 6: We were number one in the nation for toxic disposal.
Speaker 6: We had half the ways generated in Texas was right here.
Speaker 6: And it's like wow, it blew my mind, it really did.
Speaker 1: Diane was shocked and worried about her little community. She
Speaker 1: describes herself as a quote genuine introvert.
Speaker 3: I am one of these people that doesn't like to speak.
Speaker 3: I don't like to be around crowds. I can remember
Speaker 3: when I was a child adding under a bed to
Speaker 3: get away from people. It was probably a reason why
Speaker 3: I was so good on the bay because there's a
Speaker 3: lot of solitude out there.
Speaker 1: But this seemed like something the community should really be
Speaker 1: talking about.
Speaker 3: But when I saw that article, I did something totally
Speaker 3: out of character. I walked down to city Hall and
Speaker 3: I said, I want to have a meeting about this information.
Speaker 1: So apparently there's this little room at city hall in
Speaker 1: Diane's town and they let people use it for meetings.
Speaker 1: So she went in and booked that room.
Speaker 6: But then I had the city secretary. She come down
Speaker 6: there and she said, Dian you you just got to
Speaker 6: not do this. And I'm like, uh, well, I'll do
Speaker 6: it in the elementary in the cafeteria and she said, no, Diane,
Speaker 6: you've got You've got to stop it completely. You can't
Speaker 6: do this. There's red flags. There's red flags, and I'm like,
Speaker 6: what red flag?
Speaker 1: Dan didn't understand what the problem was. But pretty soon
Speaker 1: it wasn't just the secretary, it was local politicians and
Speaker 1: businessmen too.
Speaker 3: By President, who I had never talked to in my life,
Speaker 3: come out on the dock and he said, Diane, are
Speaker 3: you trying to start a mid Gilani group to roast
Speaker 3: industry of life economic development? Called my brother, and they
Speaker 3: told them to make me shut up and not have
Speaker 3: this meeting. They were trying everything to shut me up
Speaker 3: on just having a meeting.
Speaker 1: Dane thought this was all really weird. She had assumed
Speaker 1: the waste they were talking about in that toxic inventory
Speaker 1: was kind of old news. It was stuff that had
Speaker 1: been dumped back when there was a big Alcoa plant
Speaker 1: in the area, and that was part of it. But
Speaker 1: there was also new waste and a big industrial plant
Speaker 1: in town that was planning a major expansion.
Speaker 6: It was the biggest expansion in Texas history, and the
Speaker 6: biggest in the United States in ten years. And I
Speaker 6: mean the governor, the senators, the you name it, the
Speaker 6: even Silbraham who was running for president. Everybody was pushing.
Speaker 6: They were going to give promost every single thing they wanted.
Speaker 1: Formosa, a Taiwanese petrochemical company, had been in the area
Speaker 1: since nineteen eighty one, and now it was planning a
Speaker 1: one point three billion dollar expansion.
Speaker 6: Someone had in the mail sent me a letter and
Speaker 6: in the letter was just these type simple words that,
Speaker 6: miss Wilson, do you know this? And in it was
Speaker 6: the uh it was you know it was a newspaper
Speaker 6: clipping in the back. You know, it's on the back
Speaker 6: pages of a newspaper and it had UH Promosa's uh
Speaker 6: public notice for Promosa's air permits and UH and I'm like, hell,
Speaker 6: this is something I can do for the first meeting
Speaker 6: of this little group.
Speaker 1: Diane's been fighting the company ever since, mostly with the
Speaker 1: help of whistleblowers who worked at the foremosta plant.
Speaker 6: There's no unions, there's no safety, and you will get
Speaker 6: fired if you open your mouth. And they did not
Speaker 6: trust uh TCQ, the state agency. They didn't trust EPA,
Speaker 6: and they didn't definitely did not trust OSHA. They thought
Speaker 6: that was nothing but a way to get them fired,
Speaker 6: to tell a lot of anything. And so who was
Speaker 6: on the bottom of the list. It was me, And
Speaker 6: so they came to me, and that were I really
Speaker 6: got the information.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety three, when Formosa expanded, it bought five
Speaker 1: hundred residents out of their homes and took over the
Speaker 1: town's school.
Speaker 6: Formosa's has got all their houses, the school shut down,
Speaker 6: there's no school. Formosa is using the school for a
Speaker 6: training center now, so it's for Mosa's town.
Speaker 1: But over a decade, Diane kept building her case often
Speaker 1: meeting with Formosa workers out of town because they were
Speaker 1: worried about getting fired or retaliation of some kind. They
Speaker 1: told her about Formosa cutting corners, dumping chemicals and plastic
Speaker 1: pellets into the ocean, burning off toxic chemicals through their smokestacks,
Speaker 1: and generally not implementing appropriate safety measures. Diane spent three
Speaker 1: years collecting plastic pellets that Formosa had dumped into the
Speaker 1: bees and waterways around its Port Comfort facility.
Speaker 6: I would get into kayak and go up and down
Speaker 6: all skin of their outfalls, and sometimes that would take
Speaker 6: me like five or six syres. I was all day long,
Speaker 6: going up and down that singing kayak and taking all
Speaker 6: these pictures.
Speaker 1: At the time when she was going out in her
Speaker 1: kayak all day, Diane was in her late sixties, and
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen she took Formosa to court.
Speaker 8: Just down the Gulf coast from Houston lies an enormous
Speaker 8: plastics plant, one of the nation's biggest. It's been a
Speaker 8: driving force in the local economy, and now it's expanding
Speaker 8: with promises of new jobs and tax revenue. But a
Speaker 8: handful of coastal residents are suing the plant, claiming it's
Speaker 8: polluted the waters in their red for years.
Speaker 1: After fighting the company for decades, in twenty nineteen, Diane
Speaker 1: had a big win.
Speaker 7: Last year, Formosa agreed to pay fifty million dollars to
Speaker 7: settle a lawsuit in which it agreed to zero discharge
Speaker 7: of pellets. A federal judge called Formosa a serial offender.
Speaker 1: It was the largest settlement granted in a citizen lawsuit
Speaker 1: in US history.
Speaker 6: And we got fifty million dollars for environmental projects, and
Speaker 6: we put twenty million into a sustainable fishery co op
Speaker 6: for the local fishermont.
Speaker 1: But Diane isn't retiring her kayak just yet. Her group
Speaker 1: is staying on top of Formosa to make sure it
Speaker 1: complies with the court ruling. And she's been talking to
Speaker 1: activists down the coast a bit in Louisiana. They're trying
Speaker 1: to prevent Formosa from building a plant there. She's hoping
Speaker 1: that which he's learned over the past thirty years might
Speaker 1: help them do the one thing she couldn't.
Speaker 6: My only regret, my only regret is that I did
Speaker 6: not try hard enough to keep them out. Is they
Speaker 6: need to try everything to keep them up. They do
Speaker 6: not want Formosa in there.
Speaker 1: We'll bring you that story next time next week on Drilled.
Speaker 2: It will be too much hottick in the air just
Speaker 2: to bring it. We will not live.
Speaker 9: That's where I'm fighting for my life and the life
Speaker 9: of my community.
Speaker 1: It's the single largest proposed source that we've been tracking
Speaker 1: of greenhouse gas emissions in the country.
Speaker 11: Certainly, I don't think there's any way you can divorce
Speaker 11: what's happening now in terms of the sighting of these
Speaker 11: facilities and who's burying the biggest gardens from the history
Speaker 11: of slavery and that in that area.
Speaker 6: It's all.
Speaker 11: There's a straight line connecting it all.
Speaker 1: Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network.
Speaker 1: The show is reported, written, and hosted by me Amy Westervelt.
Speaker 1: Our producer this season is Juliana Bradley. Our editor is
Speaker 1: Julia Ritchie. Our theme song this season is Death Song
Speaker 1: by be Beamon. Additional music for the season composed by
Speaker 1: Elliott Peltzman. Her artwork for the season is done by
Speaker 1: Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James at the
Speaker 1: First Amendment Project. You can find additional reporting and photos
Speaker 1: for this season on our Twitter feed at we are
Speaker 1: Drilled or online at drillednews dot com. If you're a
Speaker 1: fan of the show, please consider supporting us in two ways. One,
Speaker 1: if you want to spend some money and get some
Speaker 1: extra bonus content at early episodes, check out our Patreon
Speaker 1: at patreon dot com slash Drilled. You can also support
Speaker 1: us by giving us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1: It really helps us find new listeners and combat the
Speaker 1: army of climate denier trolls that are constantly trying to
Speaker 1: tank our ratings. Thanks for doing that and we'll see
Speaker 1: you next week.