Big Oil's High School Agenda

My name is William Shatner.

In this film, I play a successful American farmer, Eric Pearson. There are many opinions about America's rapid growth. Some say the character of our people cause it, some say our gift for organization. Eric Pearson believes there is one main reason, the land. In this program, he tries to prove that the ground we stand on inspired, even dictated America's pattern of growth.

Welcome to high school, Meet your teacher, William Shatner. This is from that series you mentioned in episode one. It's called American Enterprise and it was commissioned by Phillips Petroleum and in nineteen seventies they got William Shatner to host the whole thing. And in each of five vignettes, he plays a different character, each with a different take on why the American economy grew the way it.

Did so right off the bat, unshocked economic growth. His position does a good thing, There's no questioning that. And the series was created for high school civics and economics classes to help teach American teens about how the American economy was shaped and how it's supposed to work.

That's right.

It was distributed to schools and community groups through a company called Modern Talking Pictures. Their distribution plan for the series had it reaching twelve million people a year. Darna, Let's take a listen to the one liberal character that Shatner plays in this series.

My name is William Shatner.

In this film, I played Tom Novak, a community college professor who was field as ethnic studies. Tom's the third generation American and the first member of his family to graduate from college. He has some strong ideas about what, or rather who made America happen for him. Our economic growth is rooted in the special character of the American people. Alice Island America's immigration gateway.

God, I love it.

What so immigrants make America great, but only because their hard work grows the American economy, right, got it?

Got it? And you'll notice that.

So far there's been no mention of petroleum, and later references to it do show up here and there, But mostly this series is actually focused on these two broader ideas. The first one is that capitalism is great, and the second one is that nature is a resource that's basically to be used for economic benefit. Only that totally sums it up, and that's the focus of all lot.

Of oil funded educational materials. Again, this idea goes way back to way before anyone was talking about climate change. American industrialists were really invested in pushing a particular approach to nature, really from the early days of America's founding. Melissa Roncik, a media studies professor at Rutgers University, has spent a ton of time digging into how this very particular approach to nature came about in America.

So essentially, if we want to look at the beginning of a twentieth century national awareness about the need to protect the natural environment, we have to look at the naturalist John Muir and the forester different Pinchot, and we especially have to look at how they interacted, because each of them came to stand for very different idea of what nature and forests in the environment meant in the United States.

So, okay, Melissa mentioned John Muir, who I think most of us have probably heard of, but Gifford Pinchot maybe not so much. He was the country's first forester, the very first head of the US Forestry Service, And while mirror really pushed this idea of conservation and nature for nature's sake, like this pristine nature idea that the fossil fuel industry has been trying to pin on environmentalists ever since then.

Pinchot viewed it as a resource.

He viewed nature as a resource, or more specifically, as an economic resource.

For Gifford Pinchot, natural resources were just that resources. It was lumber that Americans needed for development. It was water that may be needed for serving cities that didn't have enough natural water resources. And there was an economic benefit to protecting forests, but you had to protect them for the service of American enterprise in the American economy.

And we all know who went out in the debate between Mirror and Pincho. Merr's name may be remembered, but it's Pincho's ideas about nature that underpin the American approach to the environment.

This, of course, leaves out the approach.

Of the many nations of people who were already living on this land before the colonizers showed up.

But it's really important to just mention that neither John Muir's nor different Pinchot's visions included the indigenous people who were living on this land long before either of them came along, and that entire story of what the indigenous people's on the land, did with nature, how they viewed nature, their relationship with nature, that was completely ignored in this American story.

Yeah, and it's wild.

I mean, so many people I think are just realizing now that maybe indigenous approaches to environmental management actually hold some wisdom at any rate. This turn toward nature as an economic resource happened in the late eighteen hundreds, and Pinchot actually pushed the idea through tech books way back then too.

He was very aware of the value of public support for his vision of forestry, and he used every means at his disposal to accomplish that. He wrote textbooks that he expected would be taught from kindergarten on up about forestry, and indeed they were. There were thousands of copies of his book sold. He created what we would today call I guess.

Press events, you know, pr events, sometimes with Teddy Roosevelt, where he would be sure to invite all of the news media of the time to cover the event when he appeared to announce a new policy or in front of an important natural resource. And he also made very close behind the scenes connections with lumber operators and others who would then of course end up supporting Pincho whenever he wanted a new policy to be put forward.

So yeah, starting in the late eighteen hundreds, this idea is already being.

Pushed in schools.

Then the oil industry gets in on the education game in the nineteen twenties and really continually pushes that idea from then until now. Beginning in the nineteen fifties, they start to lean on the free enterprise story more and more so by the.

Time the public really starts talking about global warming in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, the groundwork to limit the conversation had basically already been laid for decades. There's this very clear idea in American's minds about how you can and can't address environmental problems.

YEP.

And for high school kids, the industry's focus is all things economy, from stuff like the American Enterprise series that show kids how the economy works, to stun programs that highlight all the job opportunities in the energy industry. That's our focus today. I'm Darna Noor from Earth and I'm Amy Westerveldt. In this series The Abcs of Big Oil.

And last time we looked at how the industry has used comic books and coloring books and cartoon characters to start shaping the minds of little kids in elementary school. But today we're headed to high school, where big oil's efforts get a little more sophisticated.

Certainly, we get marketed to a lot.

I get emails pretty frequently from different companies trying to either sell us like textbooks, textbook licensing, supplemental like online resources.

There's tons of that all the time.

This is William Van Doren. He's a high school science and math teacher in Oakland, California. He works at a private school, but he says that just like a lot of public school teachers, he's often on the lookout for supplemental materials and maybe more to the point, educational publishers are constantly trying to market stuff to him. So if you saw something from Discovery Education, what would that say to you?

Like, what does that brand kind of signify to you?

I would want to take a look at it, But Yeah, I wouldn't be too suspicious.

I mean ideally, like, no matter where.

It's from, you kind of screen it before you turn it loose on your students.

I wouldn't be.

Particularly suspicious about it, but I would want to look closely at it, just to see what it's actually about.

So this one that we were looking at recently is Discovery Education STEM Careers Portal, and they offer all kinds of stuff for like, you know, high school guidance counselors, but also for teachers to do like a science fair or like a career fair around STEM. And then they have some activities and things that are around particularly encouraging women in STEM and people of color and staff, all.

Of these kinds of things. And then you go to the partner page and it's entire and it's funded by like Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and you know a handful of other sort of oil and gas companies.

Wow, that's really interesting. I would not have guessed that or been suspicious of that. Oh, it's like back to our propaganda.

Wow.

And you were asking him about this new program from Discovery Education called the STEM Careers Coalition, And if you go to their homepage it kind of looks like any other part of the Discovery Universe. It's well designed, it seems super legit, and it says connecting stem from k through careers. But then if you go to the about us page and you click on partners, and then you scroll down.

A little bit, you'll find a lot of oil and gas folks.

There's as the Power and Energy Distribution Company, There's Chevron, there's the American Petroleum Institute, of course, and then under content partners you find this philanthropy initiative called IF then Philanthropies. And if you dug around a little bit on them, like I did, you'll find that they're connected to this oil heiress in Dallas, Texas.

Her name is Lyda Hill. Yeah, that's right.

And then if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page where the association partners are listed, they're described as trusted advisors and subject matter experts, and there you'll find the Manufacturing Institute. Manufacturing Institute is the education partner of the National Association of Manufacturers, a manufacturing trade group that was key to orchestrating climate denial campaigns throughout the nineties and two thousands.

And this doesn't actually seem to be unusual for discovery education at all. Like if you go to the main discovery education site and look for a curricula related to the environ One of the two main options that pop up is called to Dig into Mining and it's funded by Freeport McMoRan, which is one of the largest mining companies in the world. Here's a snippet from the virtual field trip they provide there.

Hi, I'm Lynn LANDI I am a geologist and a reclamation specialist. Reclamation is the process of restoring the land that has been disturbed by mining adam mine. Large amounts material is moved every day, but only a small percent of that material is copper bearing. Therefore, we have to understand how to store the rest of that material. That material is stored in piles that we call stockpiles or tailing dams. When they are filled to capacity, we can

So in this video, this woman who works on reclamation with Freeport McMoRan keeps saying the word facilities, but what she's actually talking about is land, and by disturbed she means turned into a giant open pit mine. Reclamation is where they put all the dirt and rocks back on that land and try to engineer it to approximate nature. There's zero discussion here of the impact that copper mining has on water or soil.

It's just, hey, we take the copper, it's.

In a bunch of stuff you use, and then we put the earth back together again, no problem.

Yeah.

God, that whole video is wild, and it's also just wild how similar it is to that chocolate chip cookie experiment that Kurt Davies told us about in episode two. But I want to pause here and dig a little bit more into that STEM Careers coalition because there's actually this section of the Discovery education site called social Impact, and it lists that STEM project as one of the three areas where a Discovery says it's having like a social effect, and all of them.

Have corporate sponsors.

Here's one of the videos that you'll find on the STEM Careers Coalition site.

One of the things I really love is every day there's a new challenge and I find myself learning constantly or on the edge of technology. We're able to come up with new ways of solving problems, and Chevron backs those initiatives, and we're able to use technology to help us succeed. I'm Jessica Holly, a drilling engineered with Shevron.

At one point, this Chevron drilling engineer describes flying out to an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in this weirdly glamorous way, like the way you would hear the Kardashians talk about going to a concert or something.

Our locations, our well sites are about two hundred miles off the coast of Louisiana, and so we'll take helicopters from the shore of Louisiana two hundred miles out and we'll actually land a little heliped on pretty much what looks like a cruise ship in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

Not sure I've ever heard an offshore oil platform described as being remolely like a cruise ship before.

Yeah, I have to.

Say I was pretty surprised at just how much corporate sponsored content Discovery Education has on offer, not just from oil companies, but just you know, across the board. There are so many examples of like you know, Procter and Gamble is there and Campbell Soup and all of these different companies. But then I thought about it more and I was like, well, my husband is kind of a Discovery TV addict, and I feel like every time I walk by him watching a show on there, it's either about.

Like some kind of mining or like treasure hunting.

There's like a lot of weird trutive stuff on there, you know, Or it's like about nature, but in this way where nature is this thing over there for us to admire sometimes. But you found kind of a weird corporate connection between Discovery's TV content recently too.

Right, Yeah, I did.

It was for a pretty different Discovery project than the education stuff. It was for a new TV show that they have called six Degrees, which is hosted by Micro. Like Micro, the reality TV host best known for hosting Dirty Jobs. So the whole conceit of this new show, Six Degrees is basically like tying things that are seemingly unrelated together. So like in the first episode, Micro connects the history of Tinder, like the dating app to the invention of the horseshoe.

Well, when the dust settles, you will see the undeniable to a controvertible truth of exactly how welk we're shooting and find your soul mate.

But the show also connects everything to the fossil fuel industry is Surprise Surprize. Like in that first episode, Mike says, this inventor who created the precursor to Wi Fi used money that her boyfriend made in the oil fields to fund her work. Every episode of this Micro show is sponsored by the oil and gas industry, specifically the American Petroleum Institute and Distribution Contractors Association, which is like a lobbying group for fossil fuel pipeline contractors. Mike says that

Sixth agree is sponsored by the oil and natural gas industry. Why, because oil and natural gas connects everything.

He says that in every single episode, like every episode has something like and the crazy thing is like sometimes it's just you know, six degrees is sponsored by the oil and gas industry because we need oil and gas

It's really wild.

It is wild because like the whole conceit of the show is very much a thing that the industry likes to push a lot too, which is like we are the center of everything.

You cannot live without us. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

This feels like a good moment to note that we did reach out to Discovery to ask them about their various corporate partnerships, specifically with respect to these education initiatives. No one has gotten back to us yet, but we're still very interested in talking to them and we're still trying to reach them. So if you have any information on Discovery Education's relationships with its various corporate partners, hit

Yes, please do.

And Discovery Education is kind of known as a major player in schools worldwide. My mom was a teacher for like twenty eight years and she's definitely used their materials. Yeah, And on their website they claim to serve approximately four point five million educators and forty five million students worldwide. Their resources are accessed in over one hundred and forty countries, which is wild.

It's incredible.

Yeah, and that is a lot of opportunities for companies to shape people's ideas about the world, how it works, and how.

It should work.

And Discovery doesn't just focus on science and tech. They offer curricula in social studies too. They're obviously not the only educational publisher out there or the only educational company with corporate partners, but they're a really, really big one.

If you can reach the youths, if you can reach them in school, like, if it's in school, it lends this credibility to it, right and is not be essing though. You know, I think if there's a speaker in the classroom, the kids are generally going.

To think it's pretty credible.

I mean, you know, teenagers can be suspicious on some level, but I think fundamentally they trusted the teacher knows what they're talking about, has some expertise and authority. I mean, if I were a propagandist, I'd be wanting to get into classrooms.

That's major.

It is major, And yet people working in the fossil fuel industry still really push this narrative that they're at a disadvantage in schools, Like they say that kids are being brainwashed by leftist teachers who hate the oil and gas industry. And we obtained this audio from this recent National Association of Petroleum Engineers expo where several industry leaders are actually complaining about just that our.

Kids and grandkids have been taught by a bunch of Vietnam draft dodge and tenured professors, but how terrible our country is and how terrible oil and gas is.

This is Wayne Christian from the Texas Railroad Commission, which is the state agency overseeing oil gas pipeline and cool not rail in Texas. It's kind of little known outside of I think energy and climate circles, but it wields a lot of power.

And in this day in time, folks, it's time we get on our big boy and girl bitches and stand up and get the facts out for what's good of oil and guess in the state of Texas in America period.

Yeah, it's really just remarkable how similar this whole narrative is to one of the big messages in that industry presentation that we talked about in episode one, this idea that kids are like not learning enough about oil and gas in school, so the industry needs to close that education gap.

Yeah, exactly.

It's very much talked about as oh, people are just worried about environmental issues because they don't know how awesome oil and gas is, or how much they need it, or how much we're actually doing about environmental issues. Here's Stephanie Read, a VP of marketing at Pioneer Natural Resources, it's a natural gas company, also talking at that EXMO.

And I love hearing that there are even some high schools in around the Permian Basin that are offering oil and gas one oh one courses and it's incredible and I feel look back and I'm like, where was all of this when I was a kid.

I agree.

I think it can really drive that change in the narrative that other students are hearing about the industry.

And I love that.

I love that there's a huge push just to give people exposure.

So I think that's fantastic.

This whole thing of like publishing these ideas through really reputable educational publishers and pushing content or ideas that just generally make space for the industry or talk about this idea of trade offs between the environment and the economy, or how the practical thing is to always put the economy first. All of these ideas are really subtle and really smart, and they clearly work even on suspicious teams.

Yeah yeah, I mean, if there's one thing I've learned from reporting on oil companies for twenty years, it's that they generally don't invest money in things that don't pay dividends, you know, like they're they're not going to keep doing something for decades if it's not working. And we've been hearing for a while that the industry is worried about

It reads quote to mark National STEM Day.

API and a group of partners are launching the STEM Careers Coalition that focuses on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the K through twelve grades with an emphasis on equity and access.

And then it gets even clearer with this quote from API's president Mike Summers. Later in the release, he says, quote, investing in STEM education and introducing young people to innovative careers in the natural gas and oil industry is a critical step toward tackling the world's greatest energy challenges and

Yeah, a good double message there. We're going to train and attract young people, but also.

Don't forget how many jobs we provide. Yeah, don't forget that. You uh, don't forget that you need us, you need us.

It seems to be the main focus in high school, really reminding people over and over and over again that the economy is dependent on fossil fuels.

That's right, and reminding people what kind of economy we're supposed to have as Americans, that whole free enterprise equals freedom equals America. Thing only ramps up when you get to the university programs. I mean it really kicks into high gear there, and that's where we're going to head next time. It's going to be a razer.

So good.

Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. This series is a collaboration with Earther, his moto's climate and justice site. My co host and co reporter for the series is Darna Noor. Our editors are Julia Richie for Drilled and Brian Kahn for Earther. Our producer is Juliana Bradley. Mixing and mastering by Peter Duff. Our factchecker is Trevor Gowan. Music is by Martin Wissenberg.

Our artwork was created.

By Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment Project. You can find corresponding stories, videos, and documents for this series on earther dot com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.