Speaker 1: Just about everybody on Moca had some special work to do.
Speaker 1: Ian was the best fisherman on the island, so he
Speaker 1: more or less kept everybody supplied with fresh fish. Then
Speaker 1: there was Benny six Toes, who, by a gift of nature,
Speaker 1: could climb trees better than anybody else, so he became
Speaker 1: the coconut cellar. Big Daddy's daughter Raquel, presided over the
Speaker 1: village melon patch.
Speaker 2: Resh right, melons here there was a call.
Speaker 3: This is from a nineteen seventy six educational cartoon about
Speaker 3: a fictional place.
Speaker 2: Called the Kingdom of Moga.
Speaker 3: It was made by Amaco Oil, which is now BP,
Speaker 3: and it's full of just all kinds of racist and
Speaker 3: sexist garbage. The man in that clip who's delegated to
Speaker 3: fishing is a caricature of a black man, and the
Speaker 3: woman presiding over at the melon patch, well, let's just
Speaker 3: say they're clearly not just talking about cantalopes.
Speaker 4: Each other morning was Regualemban the coconut tang.
Speaker 5: Oh fine, just fine man. So a couple of little yeah.
Speaker 6: So the movie is based on film strips that Amaco
Speaker 6: Oil started making about the Kingdom of Moca in the
Speaker 6: early nineteen seventies. And the film strips are just as bad,
Speaker 6: not only because of the obvious stereotypes and bigotry, but
Speaker 6: also because they're full of insidious messages about how our
Speaker 6: economy should work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: The Kingdom of Moca presents itself as a story of
Speaker 3: how the economy.
Speaker 2: Just sort of evolved.
Speaker 3: So at the beginning of the story, the Mochans have
Speaker 3: a barter system, but then they realize that's inefficient, which, okay, whatever.
Speaker 2: Then they start using.
Speaker 3: Clamshells as currency, and one character starts selling wood, and then,
Speaker 3: as if because there's some innate force in all of
Speaker 3: us pushing us to become capitalists, he creates a corporation.
Speaker 4: Well, I incorporated myself. Heyt No, what I mean is
Speaker 4: I formed a company like they have over on the
Speaker 4: Beaver Islands.
Speaker 6: Ah.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 6: In the Kingdom of Muca, wood is what's used to
Speaker 6: power cars. And this guy who has the logging company,
Speaker 6: he's supposed to be the voice of reason in the story,
Speaker 6: the hero, and one message he brings is that taxation
Speaker 6: is a burden, that it mainly just benefits politicians.
Speaker 4: If we don't make profits, we can't keep our company
Speaker 4: growing to take care of everybody's needs. We can't go
Speaker 4: exploring for new sources, and we can't step up our
Speaker 4: replanning program.
Speaker 3: Some people complain about the fact that this s guy's
Speaker 3: logging too much. For sure, they're saying he's chopping down
Speaker 3: the forest that they love. But they're just dismissed as
Speaker 3: like a silly special interest group rather than a group
Speaker 3: of people trying to protect the natural world and it's
Speaker 3: benefits for both mental health and keeping the kingdom inhabitable.
Speaker 6: That's right, and it will bum you out to hear
Speaker 6: that this cartoon, which sounds like some sort of silly
Speaker 6: bit of archival from the.
Speaker 2: Seventies, it's out there, come.
Speaker 6: On up, was in fact still shown in college economics
Speaker 6: one on one classes today the Year of Our Lord
Speaker 6: twenty twenty one, and.
Speaker 2: Not as a joke, not as an example of propaganda.
Speaker 2: If you look at the.
Speaker 6: Comments under it on YouTube, a whole bunch of folks
Speaker 6: are like, wow, I got here from econ class. But
Speaker 6: it originally targeted little kids, kids who were still in
Speaker 6: grade school. And the message is clear, extractive capitalism is progress,
Speaker 6: and anyone who goes against it, particularly to protect nature,
Speaker 6: is primitive and backwards. Ammaco made a coloring book of
Speaker 6: the Mokens for grade school kids too, and Carol Muffett
Speaker 6: from the Center for International Environmental Law walked me.
Speaker 2: Through it a few years back.
Speaker 5: So in nineteen seventy six, Amico Oil Company and Standard
Speaker 5: Oil Company, which is now Exxonmobile published a comic book,
Speaker 5: A coloring Book about the Mochens, a mythical economic society. Now,
Speaker 5: the coloring book is as remarkable and notable for its
Speaker 5: pervasive racism as it is for its arch conservative neoliberal economics.
Speaker 5: But at the root of its argument is the idea
Speaker 5: that children should be wary of any form of regulation,
Speaker 5: any form of social control, because it gets in the
Speaker 5: way of economics, it gets in the way of free choices,
Speaker 5: and it's ultimately disruptive. And so this educational package was
Speaker 5: presented as a study in economics, but at its heart
Speaker 5: it was really about being innately wary of any form
Speaker 5: of collective government action.
Speaker 3: There's something that's just about putting it in the form
Speaker 3: of a coloring book that somehow may it's so much worse.
Speaker 3: And Carol reminds us right about why the industry would
Speaker 3: bother spending any money on stuff like this.
Speaker 5: What's remarkable is that by reaching children in schools, you're
Speaker 5: shaping not only their understanding of individual facts, but their
Speaker 5: understanding of the world. Why because what you learn in
Speaker 5: school you learn as the truth about the world. You
Speaker 5: don't learn that it's advertising, you don't learn that it's propaganda.
Speaker 5: What you're taught, particularly in those early formative years, is
Speaker 5: this is the world. These are the basic facts about
Speaker 5: how we live. And so if you can shape children's
Speaker 5: understanding of those basic facts, if you can inculcate that,
Speaker 5: it is remarkably difficult to remove.
Speaker 6: And that is what we're digging into in this series.
Speaker 6: I'm Amy Westervelt and I'm Darna Nora.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to the Abcs of Big Oil, a mini
Speaker 3: series from Earther and Drilled Today. Elementary School Stay with Us.
Speaker 7: The Standard School Broadcast, radio's oldest network musical and educational program,
Speaker 7: presented as a public service by the Standard Oil Company
Speaker 7: of California.
Speaker 6: This is from a record I found of the Standard
Speaker 6: Oil School Broadcast Darta.
Speaker 2: Do you want to guess when that broadcast started? God
Speaker 2: like nineteen forties.
Speaker 3: Maybe that was sort of the company's heyday, right.
Speaker 2: Good guess, But no, it was nineteen twenty.
Speaker 7: Eight Standard School Broadcast, which was inaugurated on October eighteenth,
Speaker 7: nineteen twenty eight, as a pioneer in education by radio.
Speaker 7: The School Broadcast was first heard by only seventy two schools,
Speaker 7: and today it is received regularly in many thousands of schools,
Speaker 7: by millions of school students and educators, and by many
Speaker 7: additional thousands of parents and other home listeners.
Speaker 6: It's the oldest educational radio program in the country, the
Speaker 6: very first one, and it was technically a music appreciation program.
Speaker 6: It went alongside a classical music show that Standard Oil
Speaker 6: also sponsored on the regular radio. The kids weren't just
Speaker 6: learning about John Phillips, SUSA and Louis Armstrong. The show
Speaker 6: also regularly smuggled in bits of American history told through
Speaker 6: the lens of Standard Oil.
Speaker 8: Convenience is the great thing. The automobile is an incredible
Speaker 8: convenience to the average American in his everyday life. For
Speaker 8: parents getting to work, running down to the store, picking
Speaker 8: up the kids, and for the kids themselves going on
Speaker 8: vacation trips, going on dates. Almost everything we am Americans
Speaker 8: do involve the automobile in some way. Don't forget that
Speaker 8: most of us took a quick ride in a car
Speaker 8: on our way to being born.
Speaker 7: Miss Scratch, anything on the debit side for the automotive industry.
Speaker 8: May I remind you that many of us will take
Speaker 8: a quick ride in a car to our death, Missscratch.
Speaker 8: Would you give up your automobile? Would you give up
Speaker 8: your standard of living? Would you prefer to live like
Speaker 8: an Australian aborigine without even a vessel to carry water
Speaker 8: in and a lifespan of thirty years?
Speaker 3: Like this is the sort of thing that I don't
Speaker 3: think people necessarily realize that oil companies have been doing
Speaker 3: for well in this case, I guess almost like a century.
Speaker 3: And it's not science or environmental focused at all. It's
Speaker 3: presenting a very specific picture of what America is and
Speaker 3: what it's supposed to be.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 6: And really the first company to figure out how valuable
Speaker 6: getting into schools is was actually Standard Oil, So it's
Speaker 6: not really overstating things to say the fossil fuel industry
Speaker 6: pioneer this tactic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And later in this series we're also going to
Speaker 3: get into how they were the first to infiltrate university
Speaker 3: curricula too.
Speaker 2: First more cartoons that's right.
Speaker 6: The Mochns weren't the only cartoon characters used to tell
Speaker 6: kids how the world works. Some companies didn't have to
Speaker 6: make up their own characters. They could put their messages
Speaker 6: in the mouths of already beloved cartoons.
Speaker 5: A couple of my favorite my favorite possessions are comic
Speaker 5: books Mickey and Goofy, comic books that Exxon Mobile put
Speaker 5: out in conjunction with Disney to teach kids about renewable
Speaker 5: energy and energy conservation and environmental concerns.
Speaker 2: Carol Muffett again.
Speaker 5: And it's perhaps unsurprising that what children learn from Mickey
Speaker 5: and Goofy about energy conservation and environmental concerns was we
Speaker 5: really need gas, We really need fracking. Nuclear energy is fine.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of problems with wind and solar.
Speaker 5: It may work out eventually, but thank goodness for this
Speaker 5: bountiful resource of oil, gas and tarcans. And these comic
Speaker 5: books were from the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: I happen to own these comic books too.
Speaker 6: They're also amongst my prized possessions. And on the inside
Speaker 6: flap they tell you that they're part of a whole package.
Speaker 6: So these were sent out to teachers and there's like
Speaker 6: an ordering form on the inside flap that tells you
Speaker 6: that you can order more copies of the comic books,
Speaker 6: and you can also order a film that goes along
Speaker 6: with it. And the package included not only these comic
Speaker 6: books and filmstrip, but also.
Speaker 2: A ride at Disney World in Epcot Center.
Speaker 6: Yep it was called the Universe of Energy.
Speaker 9: There we go, self vetchy, second, it's the.
Speaker 10: Venit.
Speaker 6: But what's extra crazy about it, and I just learned
Speaker 6: about this fairly recently, is that the original proposal for
Speaker 6: this ride slash exhibit at Epcot Center was supposed to
Speaker 6: be called the Future World of Energy, and it was
Speaker 6: supposed to be all about solar and other renewables.
Speaker 3: It's kind of unbelievable, but then it also kind of
Speaker 3: makes sense. Right, we're talking about the late nineteen seventies here,
Speaker 3: So that's right on the heels of the oil embargo
Speaker 3: that fuel producing countries imposed against the US in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy three. And also it's right in the middle of
Speaker 3: this year's long energy crisis in America that followed it.
Speaker 3: So the mid to late seventies is when you got
Speaker 3: Americans rationing gas and having to line up for it
Speaker 3: for hours at the gas station.
Speaker 11: Funding for this program has been provided by this station
Speaker 11: and other public television stations, and by grants from Exon Corporation,
Speaker 11: Allied Chemical Corporation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Speaker 2: Did you catch the funding announcement tonight?
Speaker 12: Is gas rationing the answer? But first, for those of
Speaker 12: you who've been spared the experience so far, we want
Speaker 12: to share the emotions Americans are feeling on the gas lines.
Speaker 12: Late last week, independent producer Phil Garvin spent a day
Speaker 12: on a line at a service station in Queens, New York.
Speaker 12: As has become common in many states in the East,
Speaker 12: cars have been lining up before dawn. By the time
Speaker 12: the pumps opened, many had been waiting two and three hours.
Speaker 6: This is a period of time when Jimmy Carter was
Speaker 6: installing solar at the White House and there was this
Speaker 6: big turn in general towards solar as a way to
Speaker 6: get off of foreign oil. But Exon was like, no, no, no,
Speaker 6: The solution to foreign oil is domestic oil.
Speaker 2: So, in addition to all.
Speaker 6: Their lobbying and everything else, they sign on in nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy eight to sponsor this Future World of Energy exhibit.
Speaker 2: But they suggest widening the scope a little bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I bet they did.
Speaker 6: Instead of focusing on a future that left fossil fuels
Speaker 6: out of the picture, now the ride would focus on
Speaker 6: today and tomorrow and all the available forms of energy.
Speaker 6: Here's the promo that eventually came out about it.
Speaker 10: Even from the outside, the energy pavilion will be a
Speaker 10: strong visual statement as it generates power via its own
Speaker 10: solar energy systems. Here the formation of fossil fuel energy
Speaker 10: will be portrayed, climaxed by a sudden energy storm of wind, lightening, rain, fire,
Speaker 10: and volcanic eruptions, demonstrating the almost endless potential of raw
Speaker 10: energy available for man. Visitors will see the alternatives and
Speaker 10: choices he must consider it today, racing against the clock
Speaker 10: and a search for new energy, and finally harnissing tomorrow's
Speaker 10: best news sources for the future world of energy.
Speaker 3: And again, what's being pushed in the exhibit and the
Speaker 3: accompanying comic books and film strip is the idea that
Speaker 3: all these other energy sources are sort of nice little supplements,
Speaker 3: but they're not really up to the big task of
Speaker 3: powering America.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 6: And there's a bunch of messaging that pins the responsibility
Speaker 6: to solve the energy crisis on individuals and conservation. It's
Speaker 6: all about how you can conserve energy by turning the
Speaker 6: lights off, stuff like that, so you know, the precursor
Speaker 6: to the individual carbon footprint calculator, and how you are
Speaker 6: basically responsible for any of the downsides of fossil fuel use,
Speaker 6: because after all, you're the one that's using this energy.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And of course we see this all the time,
Speaker 3: and you start to see this talking point that we
Speaker 3: heard in reporter Katie Worth's tape that oil and gas
Speaker 3: industry spokesperson in Arkansas that we heard last episode kind
Speaker 3: of bubbling up here too. So there's this idea that
Speaker 3: actually the industry is actively minimizing environmental impacts, and that's
Speaker 3: still super prevalent in schools today too. Kurt Davies from
Speaker 3: the Climate Investigation Center actually experienced it firsthand with his
Speaker 3: daughter when she was an elementary school I.
Speaker 13: Can't remember how the conversation started, but somehow my daughter
Speaker 13: came home from school in probably third or fourth grade,
Speaker 13: and she said, we did this really cool lesson today
Speaker 13: where the teacher gave us a chocolate chip cookie and
Speaker 13: a toothpick, and we had to carefully extract the chocolate
Speaker 13: chips without breaking the cookie. And the lesson was, you
Speaker 13: can do mining safely. You can get the yummy chocolate
Speaker 13: chips out of the cookie without ruining the cookie, the
Speaker 13: cookie being the land. And I flipped out. I was like,
Speaker 13: oh my god, you're getting mining propaganda.
Speaker 6: Oh my god. That was about a decade ago. But
Speaker 6: you talk to someone who had a similar experience just
Speaker 6: this year, right.
Speaker 2: Darna I did.
Speaker 3: I did, yeah, And in some ways it's actually kind
Speaker 3: of even more bizarre. So this past spring, in the
Speaker 3: spring of twenty twenty one, this guy Gleb bach Mutav
Speaker 3: was picking up his nine year old kid from his
Speaker 3: elementary school, which is called John M. Tobin Montessori School,
Speaker 3: and it's in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he found something really
Speaker 3: weird in his son's bag.
Speaker 14: I pick up my son and it was such a
Speaker 14: beautiful day in the spring, and usually, you know, they
Speaker 14: release the kids and they go straight to the playground
Speaker 14: there right running around monkey bars, and then we go
Speaker 14: home and my son usually has a backpack with lunch box,
Speaker 14: and I was reaching something like I was trying to
Speaker 14: pack his who deal something back into the backpack. And
Speaker 14: when I see he has a couple of booklets inside
Speaker 14: the backpack, and you know sometimes they give school books,
Speaker 14: right or materials to read, and I actually like to me,
Speaker 14: it was like, oh, yeah, it looks like a color
Speaker 14: and book.
Speaker 6: I cannot believe that of all places for this to
Speaker 6: show up, it's not in Midland, Texas, It's in Cambridge,
Speaker 6: Massachusetts at a Monassory school.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We talked about that too.
Speaker 3: It's just the most like blue liberal enclave of the
Speaker 3: most liberal state, at the most liberal school you could
Speaker 3: possibly fined in this enclave.
Speaker 6: So Gleb took a closer look at the booklets and
Speaker 6: saw that they were both stamped with the logo Forever Source,
Speaker 6: the energy utility company that serves Cambridge residents and millions
Speaker 6: of other people all over New England. One book had
Speaker 6: the title natural Guess Your Invisible Friend.
Speaker 2: The other was called Nat and Guss.
Speaker 6: Both were about how amazing gas is and how important
Speaker 6: it is for our lives. There's literally a page titled
Speaker 6: natural gas is Great.
Speaker 14: Every other page is like has something positive, right, like
Speaker 14: using natural gas is the cleanest way to power cars,
Speaker 14: for example, right where there's literally a natural gas is
Speaker 14: great activity. Whereas a page we've cut out of a
Speaker 14: like a regular standalone house, right, and it's as homespit
Speaker 14: home and natural gas has many uses in and around
Speaker 14: the home, and you're supposed to matchable number and wherever
Speaker 14: gas is used, right, and you use it for barbecue
Speaker 14: degree or full heater or furness fireplaces, range, vehicle water heater,
Speaker 14: and then you have to like going further would be
Speaker 14: like talk to your family members about how they use
Speaker 14: gas in their homes, right, and why they prefer them.
Speaker 6: So you've got the industry using new music and cartoon
Speaker 6: characters to shape kids understanding of the world and America's
Speaker 6: place in it. And then you've got them infiltrating specific
Speaker 6: curricula in later years with things like the chocolate chip
Speaker 6: cookie experiment or that lady in Arkansas talking about the
Speaker 6: happy medium that gas gives us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really just like incredible and kind of shocking
Speaker 3: how comprehensive it is, Like how many ways kids are
Speaker 3: being hit with these talking points, linking free enterprise to
Speaker 3: fossil fuels and then connecting all of that to like
Speaker 3: American identity and freedom. And I think it's really important
Speaker 3: to remember that these are multiple companies doing all of
Speaker 3: this at once. So for instance, one kid could be
Speaker 3: getting the Exxon comics and the Mokens and the chocolate
Speaker 3: chip cookie experiment and probably more than that, just while
Speaker 3: they're in elementary school.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, totally. The ride at Disney World is the
Speaker 6: one that I think.
Speaker 2: Shocked to bate them most, just.
Speaker 6: Because it's like, I don't know, it seems so next
Speaker 6: level to me because Exon got involved, not just in
Speaker 6: sort of sponsoring the exhibit and putting its name on
Speaker 6: the sign and all that kind of stuff and making
Speaker 6: these ancillary materials, but they actually completely shifted the whole
Speaker 6: focus of.
Speaker 2: That ride and exhibit.
Speaker 3: And you know, maybe, like one Disney World ride by
Speaker 3: itself doesn't have the power to change the whole world,
Speaker 3: but it's not hard to think about what might have
Speaker 3: happened if all the people who experienced Exxon's Universe of
Speaker 3: Energy had instead experienced the original vision that future of
Speaker 3: energy powered entirely by renewables.
Speaker 6: I mean, I feel like we hear all the time
Speaker 6: about the fact that people can't imagine a future without fossil.
Speaker 2: Fuels, and then I'm like, well, I wonder why it's totally.
Speaker 2: It's also just really eerily familiar to the what.
Speaker 6: Ifs that come up when you look into all the
Speaker 6: research that Exon was doing during these exact same years
Speaker 6: into alternative energy sources and what greenhouse gas emissions were
Speaker 6: doing to the planet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and actually the existence of all these educational materials
Speaker 3: that sort of steer people away from those ideas at
Speaker 3: the same time make it pretty clear that Exon never
Speaker 3: really had any intention to shift away from its core
Speaker 3: product from.
Speaker 2: Oil at all.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it definitely does not seem like it.
Speaker 6: I think that's been kind of a pervasive story that
Speaker 6: like I think people want to believe, maybe because thanks
Speaker 6: to one hundred years worth of propaganda, people like to
Speaker 6: give companies souls. But this idea that like, oh, you know,
Speaker 6: the road not taken, Exon was totally going to become
Speaker 6: an alternative.
Speaker 2: Energy company, and it's like, eh, I think maybe not.
Speaker 3: Evidence says otherwise totally, and no one ever forced them
Speaker 3: to write.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: God yeah, And it gets I think, in some ways
Speaker 3: even worse in a high school, which is where we're
Speaker 3: going to go in our next episode, and we're going
Speaker 3: to take a look at how the industry is up
Speaker 3: in civics classes, and economics and social studies, So please
Speaker 3: come back for that.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 6: I promise we won't give you a wedgie. That's it
Speaker 6: for this time.
Speaker 2: We're taking you to school.
Speaker 6: In this collaboration between Drilled and Earther, Darna and I
Speaker 6: have found a lot of really interesting and shocking things.
Speaker 2: So stay with us.
Speaker 6: Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network.
Speaker 6: This series is a collaboration with earther is motos climate.
Speaker 2: And justice site.
Speaker 6: My co host and co reporter for the series is
Speaker 6: Darna nor Our editors are Julia Richie for Drilled and
Speaker 6: Brian Kahn for Earther. Our producer is Juliana Bradley. Mixing
Speaker 6: and mastering by Peter Duff. Our factchecker is Trevor Gowan.
Speaker 6: Music is by Martin Wissenberg. Our artwork was created by.
Speaker 2: Math You Fleming.
Speaker 6: Our First Amendment Attorney is James Wheaton of the First
Speaker 6: Amendment Project. You can find corresponding stories, videos, and documents
Speaker 6: for this series on earther dot com.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.