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