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