Don't Mess with Texas

Early in my career, I did a ton of reporting on the plastic problem, why there was so much of it, how the industry operated, the pr guys who created fake front groups for plastic manufacturers. It was a lot of the same stuff the oil and gas guys had done, which makes sense because it was mostly the same companies making plastic. But at a certain point I shifted my focus away from plastic, partly because it seemed like a problem that.

Was being solved.

The public was aware of the problem, there were various alternatives to plastic being embraced. Even consumer behavior was changing. Now to California, where a new law will ban single use plastic bags at grocery and convenience stores. Instead of buying a plastic tube of toothpaste then throwing it away or recycling it, maybe you can now buy toothpaste tablets that come in this little compostable paper packets.

It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

I like that in the Pacific Ocean contains plastic waste twice the size of Texas.

That's big.

And then a few years ago I started to see more and more plastic everywhere, restaurants, stores, my kids' school, and I wondered what had happened to shift the course of things so dramatically. Had I missed some kind of policy change, had some celebrity said something pro plastic? But it also jumped out of me because it was so similar to what had happened on climate change during the nineties, high public awareness momentum toward change, and then boom, this

I have a bachelor's and kicking button taking names.

I get paid to talk.

What do you talk about?

I speak on behalf of cigarettes.

My mommy cigarettes kill?

Now?

Is your mommy a doctor?

No?

Well she doesn't exactly sound like a credible expert, now does she.

Rick Berman has also targeted Mothers against Drunk Driving for alcohol clients, and the Humane Society for beef clients.

Mysteres, how many alcohol related does a year?

Well, that's what two hundred and seventy a day.

Tragedy. I front an organization that killed him. So I had followed Berman a lot when I was reporting on plastic because he was working for all the plastic bag manufacturers and the food and beverage guys who all wanted to fight against plastic bag bands. Burman was the guy behind my all time favorite fake grassroots group, the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition. They claimed to be a group of concerned citizens who loved plastic bags, I guess, but

A speech he'd.

Given in Colorado for a group of natural gas companies called the West Start Energy Alliance had been leaked here's a little bit from it.

And again we've had a lot of ads on this thing. You get in people's mind a tie, they don't know who's right, and you win all ties.

Because the tie.

Basically ensures the status quote.

People are not prepared.

To get aggressive in moving whus layers together. So I'll take a tie any day if I'm trying to deserve the status quote.

A tie is a win because that basically ensures the status quo. Wow, But also what was Bourban doing there? He had worked with every other industry before, tobacco, alcohol, meat, chemicals, but weirdly he had never worked for oil and gas, and now here he was in one of the hubs of the fracking boom. Quick orientation on that front. Fracking

The groundwater there is apparently contaminated by natural gas.

A Colorado homeowners living in fear because their tap water is flammable.

And the brine that these truckers are hauling radium can be as high as twenty eighty five hundred. These levels are extraordinary.

So it made sense that the industry would go looking for a hitman like Berman to save it. At the Western Energy Alliance conference, Berman was presenting on his latest campaign, Big Green Radicals, an attempt to discredit the top three critics of fracking at the time SERRA Club, NRDC, and Food and Water Watch. Here's Berman's colleague Jack Hubbard explaining, more so, we.

Thought, how are we going to kick off this campaign. Take the typical Bourbon and Company model in undermining.

These folks credibility and diminish their moral authority.

Ah, Yes, the typical Berman and Company model of undermining people's credibility and diminishing their moral authority. Berman's fur a into the natural gas world got me wondering if fracking and gas were linked to the sudden resurgence of plastic And then over the next couple of years, I started to hear more about another problem with fracking, a natural

It was very good at producing gas, but terrible at producing profits.

This is Clark Williams Dairy, an analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis AIFA.

And that's something that I think has actually been emblematic the shale industry as a whole, that it's an industry that's been phenomenally successful at producing oil and gas, but it's been terrible at producing cash.

The fracking industry actually never produced profits, but it did produce a lot of gas, and it needed to find a market for it. Here's Kingsmill Bond, an analyst with the nonprofit Carbon Tracker.

With the fracking of gas a lot of ethane and propane, and they're considerably cheaper as a feedstock than oil. And all these companies had the bright day, well, let's turn this ethane into plastic, and then we can undercut our competitors and we can make very high superprofits. That's basically was the idea.

Okay, so now it was starting to make some sense. Just a few years after public awareness of the plastic problem was peaking, fossil fuel companies realized if they could make plastic with the byproducts of fracking instead of with oil, they could solve the natural gas clout problem and supercharge their petro chemical profits. Again, remember, most of the companies making plastic or providing the building blocks of plastic are oil and gas companies. And here's where we get back

But when you look at their websites, when you look at their communication stuff and business. They're very clear that they are all about plastics, and so this is an industry has been very effective at on the one hand, promoting the use of plastic residence across ever wider ranges of product streams and an evermore tes around the world, and on the other hand, keeping their own role in these processes largely invisible from the public.

This is Carol Muffett, President and CEO of the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law.

You know, the plub public when they think about who produces plastic, they think about Procter and Gamble, they think about Starbucks, they think about Amazon. All those are completely legitimate, But ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, the molecules going into that plastic are all coming from a handful of companies, and they have names like Exxon and Chevron Shell.

Oftentimes those oil and gas companies own and operate the petrochemical facilities making plastic two, but they don't really advertise it. Exon's big plastic factory in Louisiana, it's just called the Baton Rouge Plastics Company. Even when they're not making the plastics themselves. The connection is pretty direct between the oil and gas industry and plastic. In twenty eleven, construction of

I've spent my whole life around the water.

I've been shrimpen since I was eight years old, and even when I was smaller, when I was like four and five years old, my dad would come in from shrimp and all of us kids would go to the bay.

And I can remember going out in.

The bay and when you leave her early, you got the spoon bills, you know, these pink birds flying, they coming about the marshes, and you're going past the reefs and you're heading out into the bay, and it was, it was, It was beautiful, and it always kept that magic. And I think if I gave up on the bay, I would be given up on the best part of myself.

Meet Diane Wilson. She's a fourth generation shrimp boat captain in Point Comfort, Texas. That was a clip of her from the documentary Texas Gold, but I got the chance to speak with her too.

For a while, I ran a shrimp house, and you know, I think I handled about fifteen shrimp boats. And it's a it's an old tin building and it's right at the dock.

That shrimp house. She ran the little tin building on the dock. It basically processes all the shrimp for the shrimpers in the area, so they go out fishing, come back, and Diane would sort of take it.

From there, so I know all the comings and goings of those shrimpers. And one day I had a shripper come in. And this shripper, he was a real nice looking guy, and he had about three types of cancers, and he had these lumps all over they were like tennis falls up and down his arm. And anyway, he threw this magazine at me and he wanted me to read it. And it was the first time the toxic

Diane was shocked and worried about her little community. She describes herself as a quote genuine introvert.

I am one of these people that doesn't like to speak. I don't like to be around crowds. I can remember when I was a child adding under a bed to get away from people. It was probably a reason why I was so good on the bay because there's a lot of solitude out there.

But this seemed like something the community should really be talking about.

But when I saw that article, I did something totally out of character. I walked down to city Hall and I said, I want to have a meeting about this information.

So apparently there's this little room at city hall in Diane's town and they let people use it for meetings. So she went in and booked that room.

But then I had the city secretary. She come down there and she said, Dian you you just got to not do this. And I'm like, uh, well, I'll do it in the elementary in the cafeteria and she said, no, Diane, you've got You've got to stop it completely. You can't do this. There's red flags. There's red flags, and I'm like, what red flag?

Dan didn't understand what the problem was. But pretty soon it wasn't just the secretary, it was local politicians and businessmen too.

By President, who I had never talked to in my life, come out on the dock and he said, Diane, are you trying to start a mid Gilani group to roast industry of life economic development? Called my brother, and they told them to make me shut up and not have this meeting. They were trying everything to shut me up on just having a meeting.

Dane thought this was all really weird. She had assumed the waste they were talking about in that toxic inventory was kind of old news. It was stuff that had been dumped back when there was a big Alcoa plant in the area, and that was part of it. But there was also new waste and a big industrial plant in town that was planning a major expansion.

It was the biggest expansion in Texas history, and the biggest in the United States in ten years. And I mean the governor, the senators, the you name it, the even Silbraham who was running for president. Everybody was pushing. They were going to give promost every single thing they wanted.

Formosa, a Taiwanese petrochemical company, had been in the area since nineteen eighty one, and now it was planning a one point three billion dollar expansion.

Someone had in the mail sent me a letter and in the letter was just these type simple words that, miss Wilson, do you know this? And in it was the uh it was you know it was a newspaper clipping in the back. You know, it's on the back pages of a newspaper and it had UH Promosa's uh public notice for Promosa's air permits and UH and I'm like, hell, this is something I can do for the first meeting of this little group.

Diane's been fighting the company ever since, mostly with the help of whistleblowers who worked at the foremosta plant.

There's no unions, there's no safety, and you will get fired if you open your mouth. And they did not trust uh TCQ, the state agency. They didn't trust EPA, and they didn't definitely did not trust OSHA. They thought that was nothing but a way to get them fired, to tell a lot of anything. And so who was on the bottom of the list. It was me, And so they came to me, and that were I really got the information.

In nineteen ninety three, when Formosa expanded, it bought five hundred residents out of their homes and took over the town's school.

Formosa's has got all their houses, the school shut down, there's no school. Formosa is using the school for a training center now, so it's for Mosa's town.

But over a decade, Diane kept building her case often meeting with Formosa workers out of town because they were worried about getting fired or retaliation of some kind. They told her about Formosa cutting corners, dumping chemicals and plastic pellets into the ocean, burning off toxic chemicals through their smokestacks,

I would get into kayak and go up and down all skin of their outfalls, and sometimes that would take me like five or six syres. I was all day long, going up and down that singing kayak and taking all these pictures.

At the time when she was going out in her kayak all day, Diane was in her late sixties, and in twenty seventeen she took Formosa to court.

Just down the Gulf coast from Houston lies an enormous plastics plant, one of the nation's biggest. It's been a driving force in the local economy, and now it's expanding with promises of new jobs and tax revenue. But a handful of coastal residents are suing the plant, claiming it's polluted the waters in their red for years.

After fighting the company for decades, in twenty nineteen, Diane had a big win.

Last year, Formosa agreed to pay fifty million dollars to settle a lawsuit in which it agreed to zero discharge of pellets. A federal judge called Formosa a serial offender.

It was the largest settlement granted in a citizen lawsuit in US history.

And we got fifty million dollars for environmental projects, and we put twenty million into a sustainable fishery co op for the local fishermont.

But Diane isn't retiring her kayak just yet. Her group is staying on top of Formosa to make sure it complies with the court ruling. And she's been talking to activists down the coast a bit in Louisiana. They're trying to prevent Formosa from building a plant there. She's hoping that which he's learned over the past thirty years might help them do the one thing she couldn't.

My only regret, my only regret is that I did not try hard enough to keep them out. Is they need to try everything to keep them up. They do not want Formosa in there.

We'll bring you that story next time next week on Drilled.

It will be too much hottick in the air just to bring it. We will not live.

That's where I'm fighting for my life and the life of my community.

It's the single largest proposed source that we've been tracking of greenhouse gas emissions in the country.

Certainly, I don't think there's any way you can divorce what's happening now in terms of the sighting of these facilities and who's burying the biggest gardens from the history of slavery and that in that area.

It's all.

There's a straight line connecting it all.

Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. The show is reported, written, and hosted by me Amy Westervelt. Our producer this season is Juliana Bradley. Our editor is Julia Ritchie. Our theme song this season is Death Song by be Beamon. Additional music for the season composed by Elliott Peltzman. Her artwork for the season is done by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James at the