Speaker 1: Last episode, we talked about the fossil fuel industry's plan
Speaker 1: to make up for any revenue it might lose as
Speaker 1: the world transitions away from its products in the residential
Speaker 1: and transport sectors.
Speaker 2: Petrochemicals has become a kind of mantra for the oil
Speaker 2: industry that thank goodness for petrochemicals, because you know, that's
Speaker 2: where all the growth lies. And it's quite interesting if
Speaker 2: you take the data now from VP and the IA,
Speaker 2: probably the two leading forecasters of the entire system, then
Speaker 2: from our calculations, about half the growth of oil demand
Speaker 2: in the next twenty years in the IA numbers is
Speaker 2: actually from plastics, and suppressingly enough, it's basically all of
Speaker 2: the growth in oil demand today.
Speaker 1: We're going to dig a bit further into the industry's
Speaker 1: plan on this front, because just a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: before that episode came out, a team of journalists from
Speaker 1: the UK revealed the fruits of an undercover investigation they've
Speaker 1: been running for years, a video and a companying article
Speaker 1: in which two former high level lobbyists for Exon Mobile
Speaker 1: walked through every step of how the company messages and
Speaker 1: lobbies on climate policy and environmental regulations.
Speaker 3: I'm Lawrence Carsa.
Speaker 4: I'm an investative reporter for Unearthed, which is an investative
Speaker 4: journalism project funded by Green based in the UK.
Speaker 5: Awesome, And I'm going to play a little bit from
Speaker 5: the video that you guys released so that anyone who
Speaker 5: hasn't seen it yet will get a bit of a
Speaker 5: believer for it.
Speaker 1: This is Keith McCoy, one of exon Mobil's top Capitol
Speaker 1: Hill lobbyists.
Speaker 6: Did we aggressively fight against uh some of the science?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 6: Did we hide our science?
Speaker 4: Absolutely not?
Speaker 6: Uh? Did we uh? Did we join some of these
Speaker 6: shadow groups uh to work against uh some of the
Speaker 6: early efforts. Yes, that's true, but there's nothing there's nothing
Speaker 6: illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments.
Speaker 6: We were looking out for our shareholders. And you're not
Speaker 6: going to be able to just switch to battery operated
Speaker 6: vehicles or wind for your electricity. And just having that
Speaker 6: conversation around why that's not possible in the next ten years,
Speaker 6: it's critically important to the work that we do. So
Speaker 6: and and and that's an every phase, that's that's that's it.
Speaker 6: The Senate, that's in the House, that's with the administration.
Speaker 1: Lawrence Carter talked to me about how they set the
Speaker 1: whole thing up and some of the things that he
Speaker 1: was surprised to learn. You can listen to that whole
Speaker 1: interview as a bonus episode in the Feed next week.
Speaker 1: But today we're going to share something that wasn't in
Speaker 1: the unearthed video or story, but that was part of
Speaker 1: what former excellent lobbyist Keith McCoy talked about the industry's
Speaker 1: plastics playbook.
Speaker 4: I then talked at length about how he basically said
Speaker 4: that the vast majority of the American Chemistry Council's resources
Speaker 4: is going into their plastics work. Yeah, keeping plastics on,
Speaker 4: preventing bands, talking up the ability of recycling to deal
Speaker 4: with the problem. Yeah, and that actually did you know,
Speaker 4: like working on model legislation. In Keith Boy's words too,
Speaker 4: they would rather have legislation come from them, right, So
Speaker 4: super aggressive politician.
Speaker 1: I'm Amy Westervelt, and this is Drilled season six, the
Speaker 1: Bridge to Nowhere today the continuation of Part one plastic
Speaker 1: pipelines that's coming up right after this click break.
Speaker 7: So they're talking about moving fracked gas as L and
Speaker 7: g over to petrochemical facilities in other countries to.
Speaker 4: Make Yeah, how important that was for their business. You know,
Speaker 4: he said plastics of the future.
Speaker 1: I'll quote McCoy directly here from the transcript of this conversation.
Speaker 1: He said, petrol chemicals are expanding in the United States
Speaker 1: because of, you know, the cheap access to natural gas.
Speaker 1: Looking at how we can make these plastics more environmentally
Speaker 1: friendly is going to be key, because that's the next
Speaker 1: big frontier.
Speaker 4: Peter McCoy talks about how they want to take this
Speaker 4: kind of cheap feedstock. I think he refers to the Permian,
Speaker 4: but I guess it if applied to Pennsylvania and actually
Speaker 4: rather than manufactured plastic in the US, to turn it
Speaker 4: into liquified natural gas and ship it over to petrochemical
Speaker 4: facilities that they have in Asia and in Australia so
Speaker 4: that they can crank up plastic sales in those places.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we know this already. We know that cheap
Speaker 1: natural gas is fueling a plastics boom, and that the
Speaker 1: industry is banking on plastic to save it, and that
Speaker 1: plastic recycling is basically greenwashing. But there's something different about
Speaker 1: an oil lobbyist just come and write out and saying it.
Speaker 1: That was journalist Lawrence Carter again that you heard there.
Speaker 1: He and his colleagues at Unearthed, an investigative outlet in
Speaker 1: the UK that's funded by Greenpeace, set up an undercover
Speaker 1: operation to get Exxon to share its playbook. Ultimately, they
Speaker 1: had a reporter pose as a corporate recruiter and interviewed
Speaker 1: two high level Exon staffers who had recently left. That
Speaker 1: reporter asked the men all kinds of questions about the
Speaker 1: company's strategy, and they answered in great detail. After we talked,
Speaker 1: Carter sent me a transcript of the part of the
Speaker 1: conversation between his undercover reporter and former ex On lobbyist
Speaker 1: Keith McCoy that focused on plastic. It's fourteen pages long,
Speaker 1: just to give you an idea of how much time
Speaker 1: he's spent talking about Exon's plastic strategy. In that conversation,
Speaker 1: McCoy said that all the Exon petrochemical facilities that are
Speaker 1: being retooled or that are just now being built are
Speaker 1: geared toward plastics. He says, quote, we see that as
Speaker 1: a big business, a growing business, but the issue is
Speaker 1: going to be disposal and recycling of plastics. And then
Speaker 1: he explains that to deal with the pesky problem of
Speaker 1: disposal and recycling of plastics. Exon is working with the
Speaker 1: American Chemistry Council. Here's a snippet from one of the
Speaker 1: many American Chemistry Council videos about how plastics aren't a
Speaker 1: problem and recycling is working just fine.
Speaker 8: Plastics, our society demands their benefits and an environment free
Speaker 8: of plastic waste. Recycling helps keep plastics out of our
Speaker 8: oceans and environment, but traditional recycling technologies have some limitations.
Speaker 8: While mechanical recycling can handle most bottles and containers, today's
Speaker 8: light weight packaging designs are a bit trickier. Fortunately, emerging
Speaker 8: and innovative technologies can repurpose these plastics into new and
Speaker 8: useful products.
Speaker 1: And again keep in mind here that right now the
Speaker 1: industry's plan is to shift whatever fossil fuels we manage
Speaker 1: to stop using in cars and homes over to plastic.
Speaker 1: So what we're talking about here comes with both immediate
Speaker 1: and long term consequences. There's the immediate environmental scourge of
Speaker 1: plastic waste. Less than ten percent of it is actually recycled,
Speaker 1: it never breaks down in the environment, and it is
Speaker 1: filling up and poisoning our oceans. The birds and marine
Speaker 1: life that survive off of them and many other waterways.
Speaker 1: And there's the air and water pollution associated directly with
Speaker 1: the facilities that make plastic and with the fossil fuel
Speaker 1: infrastructure required to feed into those factories. And then there's
Speaker 1: the climate impact. Here's Carol Muffett, President and CEO of
Speaker 1: the Center for International Environmental Law.
Speaker 9: Again, and if you look specifically at the refineries and
Speaker 9: the crackers, even in the completely hypothetical, mythical world where
Speaker 9: you were where you were fueling those refineries and crackers
Speaker 9: with one hundred percent renewable energy, which is not possible
Speaker 9: within the footprint of the plants, you'd still only cut
Speaker 9: the emissions in half because the chemical processes themselves are
Speaker 9: so greenhouse gas intensive. And this becomes particularly important when
Speaker 9: you recognize that, because of the success of the growth
Speaker 9: of renewable energy, within the next couple of years, the
Speaker 9: industrial sector will surpass the power sector as the primary
Speaker 9: source of greenhouse gas emissions in this country.
Speaker 1: And just like with climate change, the fossil fuel industry
Speaker 1: has known about the various environmental impacts of plastic for decades,
Speaker 1: at least since the sixties.
Speaker 9: Just as we did with the oil and gas crisis.
Speaker 9: We've begun to look at what did the industry know
Speaker 9: about what was happening to plastics in the environment. And
Speaker 9: what we've found, and we've published some of this research
Speaker 9: and there's more to come, was that it was very
Speaker 9: clear from the very early stages that plastics were showing
Speaker 9: up in the environment, showing up in the ocean, showing
Speaker 9: up in water ways, from certainly the nineteen sixties onward.
Speaker 9: In the late nineteen fifties and the sixties, research funded
Speaker 9: by the oil industry to look at oil spills and
Speaker 9: oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico kept finding oil
Speaker 9: related toxics adhering to plastic that was floating the water,
Speaker 9: trading and raising the first evidence that plastics actually tend
Speaker 9: to accumulate and concentrate other environmental toxins and become vectors
Speaker 9: for those toxics.
Speaker 1: So industry knew that plastic was bad news in waterways,
Speaker 1: and it also knew that plastic doesn't break down.
Speaker 9: Ever, it becomes equally clear that the industry was aware
Speaker 9: that plastics wouldn't break down in landfills, wouldn't break down
Speaker 9: an environment. And there's this rather remarkable, rather remarkable o
Speaker 9: ed from a plastic industry executive from the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 9: where he argues, yes, we know it won't break down
Speaker 9: in landfills. We consider that a feature.
Speaker 5: Not a bug.
Speaker 9: It'll provide stability to the landfill.
Speaker 1: Now, public awareness and concern around the plastic problem is growing,
Speaker 1: and according to lobbyist Keith McCoy, the fossil fuel industry
Speaker 1: will use the same tax here that it used on
Speaker 1: climate change. Here's how he laid it out. You want
Speaker 1: to get smart on it, right, because you know it's coming,
Speaker 1: so you want to get It's just like on climate change, right.
Speaker 1: So when climate change came, well it's here. But well
Speaker 1: when it started, you started to have conversations to say, well,
Speaker 1: you can't completely change the electric grid from coal and
Speaker 1: gas into wind and here's why. It's the same conversation.
Speaker 1: You can't ban plastics because here's why. Or you can't recycle,
Speaker 1: you know, or legislate one hundred percent recycling because here's why.
Speaker 1: It's just not technologically feasible. So that's the public messaging.
Speaker 1: When it comes to Congress, McCoy says, they look for solutions.
Speaker 1: They can talk about ways to maybe change the chemistry
Speaker 1: to make plastics slightly more recyclable, or laws that would
Speaker 1: need to change to make one hundred percent recycling feasible,
Speaker 1: ideally laws that would be too far reaching and too
Speaker 1: complicated for Congress to actually change. He says, I would
Speaker 1: love something like that to say, look, we're happy to
Speaker 1: do one hundred percent recycling, we think it's technologically feasible,
Speaker 1: but as an example, interstate commerce clause prevents us from
Speaker 1: doing it. I don't know if that's true, but you know,
Speaker 1: having that type of conversation, like you have to change
Speaker 1: the interstate commerce clause because that prevents us from carrying
Speaker 1: plastic across state lines or something. Yeah, what a gift
Speaker 1: that would be, right. The scary thing here is that
Speaker 1: it's not just Exxon or the oil industry. It's also
Speaker 1: the chemical industry, which has been in the lobbying and
Speaker 1: spin game just as long and just as successfully as
Speaker 1: fossil fuel. It's like an industry voltron, which is why
Speaker 1: this idea that the plastic problem is a distraction from
Speaker 1: the climate problem or just about making different consumer choices
Speaker 1: is so off base. Here's Muffett again.
Speaker 9: For a long time, the fight against plastics was presented
Speaker 9: as something that was ultimately about suburban moms, you know,
Speaker 9: impressing each other with not using straws.
Speaker 7: It really was.
Speaker 9: Yeah, But that argument breaks down when you go to
Speaker 9: the Philippines and you look at how plastics there are
Speaker 9: affecting human rights. It breaks down when you see mountains
Speaker 9: of waste piled up in India. It breaks down when
Speaker 9: you talk to fishermen from Louisiana and Texas who are
Speaker 9: pulling plastic out of their bays and out of their fish. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and it really, really fun namentally breaks down when you
Speaker 9: talk to the people who are living in the shadows
Speaker 9: of the fracking wells and the and the crackers. Plastics
Speaker 9: are one of the highest admitting of all industrial sectors,
Speaker 9: and they're also the most rapidly growing, and on their
Speaker 9: present trajectory, you know, they could contribute fifty six gigatons
Speaker 9: of carbon to the global atmosphere about twenty fifty. But
Speaker 9: Exxon and Chevron and API and the American Chemistry Council
Speaker 9: will go on asking you, well, are you turning off
Speaker 9: your lights? Are you buying the electric cars that are
Speaker 9: only just now becoming available and are still only barely affordable.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode. Next time, we'll head back
Speaker 1: to the Gulf Coast to check in on Diane and Sharon,
Speaker 1: who are still holding the line against the petrochemical boom.
Speaker 1: There come back for that. Drilled is an original production
Speaker 1: of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. The show is reported, written,
Speaker 1: and hosted by me Amy Westervelt. Our producer this season
Speaker 1: is Juliana Bradley. Our editor is Julia Ritchie. Our theme
Speaker 1: song this season is Death Song by b Bemon. Additional
Speaker 1: music for the season composed by Elliott Peltzman. Our artwork
Speaker 1: for the season is done by Matthew Fleming. Our First
Speaker 1: Amendment attorney is James Wheaton at the First Amendment Project.
Speaker 1: You can find additional reporting and photos for this season
Speaker 1: on our Twitter feed at We Are Drilled or online
Speaker 1: at drillednews dot com. If you're a fan of the show,
Speaker 1: please consider supporting us in two ways. One, if you
Speaker 1: want to spend some money and get some extra bonus
Speaker 1: content at early episodes, check out our Patreon at patreon
Speaker 1: dot com slash Drilled. You can also support us.
Speaker 3: By giving us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 3: It really helps us by new listeners and combat the
Speaker 3: army of climate gnera trolls that are constantly trying to
Speaker 3: tank our ratings.
Speaker 1: Thanks for doing that, and we'll see you next week.