I was sitting on the sea wall.
I didn't see the way coming.
It just pushed me off, and I thought it was something else that way. I thought it was like a monster. My grandmother told me to come to the church. So I read here and sit washing, everybody yelling, washing, the babies drying, and it was not good.
What can you do to go up with each impact of climate change?
I think the best thing I learned is to do an action plan. And so I'm dedicated to this place, like I was destined to be in this place.
That's why I'm gonna stay here.
I'm not gonna leave. I'm gonna stay watched, even if it means to try.
The effects were already very visible because we were doing a film, so we wanted to capture it. So while we were there, we talked to all these kids and we were really struck by how much they knew about climate change, Like they were more conversant in the causes and effects of climate change than like most adults that I know.
This is Katie Worth. She's a reporter for Frontline and this project she did on the Marshall Islands is really incredible. It's super interactive, very immersive, super interesting project. I'll link to it in the show notes, but for our purposes today, this thing she said about how even really little kids in the Marshall Islands were pretty knowledgeable and conversant about climate change. It really struck me.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't even learn half of what those kids said until I was like well into my career as a climate reporter.
Darna Nor, welcome to Drilled.
Thank you.
I'm excited to be here.
If you don't already know. Darna is a climate reporter for Earther, that's giz Moto's climate and justice site. She and I have been working together the past few months to pull together this series about the fossil fuel industry's influence on education in America, particularly when it comes to how we think about solutions to climate change. We're calling it the ABC's of Big Oil. So back to the
Marshall Islands. That trip a few years ago prompted Frontline reporter Katie Worth to want to look into what American kids know about climate change. Oh man, and aren't there.
Like a ton of Marshall Islands refugees here in the US too, in Arkansas and Oklahoma?
Yeah? Yeah, both So Katie went to some schools in Arkansas, where there's a large Marshallese population, to see what American kids are learning there about climate change, and also to kind of get a sense of, Okay, if these kids on the Marshall Islands were to leave there and go to one of these communities in the US, what would those same kids be learning here. She was expecting them to know less, but she was not prepared for them to be steeped in climate denial.
We went to Springdale, Arkansas to visit some schools there because of this connection to the Marshall Islands, because it's such a large marshal Leze community in Springdale. And so I went and visited a few different schools, and one of them was a middle school, and I started talking to the science teachers and in walks this lobbyist for the oil and gas industry.
Katie actually shared some of the audios she recorded during non physic part.
Of the way we are made in the demand for more energy here in the United States is we've had some transformative of technological advances. It used to be then in a section we would drill thirty six holls straight down the draft, thousands of feet in the early two thousands, an engineer from Texas, George Mitchell, and then at the drilling loder that would go down thousands of feet and turn out horizontally or laterally, they call it kicking out. Today we have wells that kick out up to two miles.
So when he did that, that changed everything. They combined horizontal drilling with something we've been doing.
For a long time, hydro All Oh my god, that's unbelievable. But we've been hearing about this sort of thing, right Natural Gas Company is heading out pamphlets and schools sending people out to talk to the youth.
Yeah, yeah, totally, but usually they focus on either how great it is to work the oil and gas industry or on skewing the science in some way. Katie ended up writing about how American schools teach climate change in her new book, Miseducation, and she included something from this woman's presentation that really just floored me, especially when you keep in mind that this was a seventh grade class.
A lot of what she was talking about was kind of legitimate information, like, you know, how oil is taken from the ground and the machinery that does that, and kind of the geology of it all. But then she got into talking about carbon emissions, and she didn't really explain what carbon emissions were. She didn't explain why they might be a problem. She said that it would be a problem, but she didn't explain anything about global warming
or climate change. But instead immediate immediately launched into this list of all the problems that exist with all of the different fuels. So, like's solar. If it's cloudy, you don't get energy, and wind mills kill birds and so on.
Here's that part of the lobbyist presentation.
But with any source, I mean, like this problems with fossil fuels in terms of carbonission.
There's problems with all these energies.
Sort of, somebody's gonna have a problem with it.
Uh.
Geofile powers right, super expensive. The parts of the layer that they did works really wet, but it's expensive.
Solar.
The p what that the materials they use to make solar caws some sometime when you have a chance to look up rare earth minerals.
Nice, some of those some of these space.
They make them with are not things that you would want laying around in your yap. Another thing, solar is a tornado, what happens the.
Solar feeling, So.
Wind power lot invent.
Because I say it's burked that. You know, there's somebodys have a problem, don't lot haital powers.
I'd say that we shouldn't be damn.
About bodies and lot luck of them on biomass.
Because I said we shouldn't be growing food for fuel when they are people starting on there. So you're gonna find a problem in any.
One of these sources.
And then she talks about how important fossil fuels are to the world and how how they've lifted people out of poverty, and if we stop using fossil fuels, we'll leave a whole bunch of people in poverty, according to her, which is not supported by evidence, but you know that was the narrative that she was telling. So she was talking about how when you're considering energy, you have to do some thinking about your value. She says, first of all, you need to decide your standard of value. You need
to decide is human life the most important? Humans getting healthier, wealthier, happier, living longer, or is prison team nature more important? Do you want to quit building new houses, stop getting stuff out of the ground, do we want to leave it exactly as it is, because that would be difficult. Thankfully, we don't have to choose in this country. We are working in a happy medium at this point.
A happy medium. Tell that to all the people evacuating hurricanes and fires and floods this year. And this really gets to the heart of what we wanted to focus on in this series, because you're right, we know a little bit about how oil companies try to shape the way kids understand the problem and the science, and that's really bad. But then there's this other thing that seems so much more insidious and potentially like an even bigger problem.
Yeah, exactly, this way the industry positions itself in the world and in people's lives and in the economy, and the way it tries to frame what is or isn't possible. It's like all the solutions to climate change have been narrowed before we even start.
So that's what we're to look at in this series. Why and how the fossil fuel industry invaded social science curricula and what impact that's had on how Americans approached these big problems like climate change and how to stop climate change.
Over the next four episodes will trace the industry's influence from elementary schools through to universities. But first, how did the fossil fuel industry get into schools in the first place. That's today's story coming up after this quick break.
And using the magic of research. Oil companies compete with each other in taking the petroleum molecular parts and real arranging it into where you name it. Fabriaks, tooth brushes, tires, insecticides, cosmetics, wheatkillers, a whole galaxy of things to make a better life on earth.
And you know it isn't just oil.
Companies that try to outdo each other competing for the customer's dollar. The same story is true of almost every successful business enterprise in America.
Some of the miracles of petroleum are familiar to us. All. We know, for instance, that oil made possible one of the greatest inventions of history, the internal combustion engine, which gave us mastery over the air, meant mass transportation for the world, changed, the face of continence quickened, the very pulse of civilization provided man with an ease of living.
Is the magic barrel of your life, and we've opened it so we can show you some of the modern day miracles that it contains.
That were made with the.
Help of petro chemicals, which means chemicals from petroleum.
The nineteen fifties were a real heyday for corporate sponsored pro capitalist infotainment. That last one there was called the Magic Barrel. It's an early example of an industry funded curriculum used in schools. It was actually a partnership between DuPont and the American Petroleum Institute to promote petro chemicals.
The barrel in question is actually an oil barrel. Magic but you can hear a common thread through all of these that links oil to capitalism and American idea entity and reminds you that your entire life revolves around this stuff.
There are very interesting common themes. You know, energy is vital to your life. Your whole existence is dependent on energy. You better love us, we make energy for you. That's super effective to show somebody, whether they are conscious of it or not, how much they're dependent on fossil fuels.
That's Kurt Davies, and he's the founder and director of the Climate Investigation Center. He spent the last twenty years or so researching fossil fuel propaganda, and he's found a lot of it in schools. One thing case that he's noticed is that oil companies and industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute will often combine a curriculum package that's targeted at kids with these ad campaigns that are meant for their parents.
So that the ad campaigns that are aimed at the parents through whether it's American Petroleum Institute or Exxon broadcasting during sporting events, mimic or mirror what we see in these curricula packages of showing how how cool energy is, how it creates jobs, how it's the lifeblood of our economy, how we can't live without it, and how changing that would hurt you.
There are some early examples in the nineteen forties of Standard Oil and the American Petroleum Institute sending materials to schools that are very pro oil and pro industry, but the practice seems to have really ramped up during the Cold War in the nineteen fifties, when the industry felt the need to remind Americans over and over again how
prosperous and happy oil and capitalism had made them. Then you see this same sort of messaging explode again in the nineteen seventies as a reaction to the social movements of the nineteen sixties. There's this incredible series that Phillips Petroleum commissioned called American Enterprise.
When we needed coal and iron, the raw materials of the Industrial Revolution, we had them right under our feet.
There were huge It came out in the nineteen seventies and it's hosted by William Shatner, and it just kind of very subtly and persistently delivers this message that America is great because of extraction and capitalism.
Sources here in our backyard. When we needed petroleum, we had it, black gold in Pennsylvania and the Southwest. When we needed uranium for nuclear power, we had it. Our hills hold enough to last for centuries. The land has provided on a grand scale. This open pit copper mine and Utah you're looking at is so large you can see it from the moon. Thanks to the Earth's bounty, we've increased and multiplied at a rate unmatched by any nation in history.
Yeah, that whole series is really something, and not just because you hear William Shatner's voice in it so much. And we know from marketing reports that this was sent out to more than half of America. At high schools in the nineteen seventies. Obviously that wasn't the only thing that people were learning about in terms of economics or
politics or natural resources in high school, I hope. But that's still a lot of people who are getting the same narratives that you now hear really often in response to climate policy proposals.
Yeah, so, okay, you see this pattern throughout history where the industry steps up certain types of curricula when they feel ideologically threatened, and there are lots of reasons they might want to have a hand in shaping the minds of future voters and politicians. But why would schools go along.
Well, we kind of heard the same thing from everyone.
Education's underfunded, so that's a vulnerability.
I remember talking to one person who was like, look, I barely have three minutes in the day to pee, So if somebody sends me this lesson plan and it's like really well produced and looks very professional, I might use it.
So these people who make their own curriculum take advantage of that. They give away free lesson plans. That's great if you're a teacher and you suddenly get this whole kit that's set up for you to teach science through teaching about energy or teach you know, teach about economics. It's like easy, easy stuff.
And what they usually do some of them are like outright climate denial, but then there's a lot of materials that are much subtler and you wouldn't necessarily catch if you weren't really looking for it.
Okay, Yeah, So teachers are overworked and underpaid, and at the same time, schools are underfunded. So if you're producing this really slight looking curricula, it's really not that hard to get it into schools. And then we also found in our research that companies have targeted groups like the National Science Teachers of America and even the Department of Energy to get them all to push these really industry friendly curricula. And Katy talks about another type of organization too.
There's an organization called the National Energy Education Development Project. I think their whole purpose is to create educational materials about energy, which seems like a good thing, you know, and they talk about energy conservation. They talk about every all kinds of energy, including some renewables, which, like in theory,
sounds like a good thing. But they are sponsored by all of these energy companies and some of them are you know, wind or solar companies, but most of them are fossil fuel companies and that's how they get the vast majority of their budget. And so they told me that they aren't influenced by their sponsors. But then if you actually look at the materials they produce, it's really
industry friendly. And so like, for example, they have this whole set of these packets of things of activities and lessons for different age groups about all the different energy sources, and there's like fourteen pages of information and activities about petroleum. Nowhere in those materials is carbon dioxide mentioned. Climate change isn't mentioned, and the only environmental impacts they do talk about environmental impact, but what they talk about is water
pollution or air pollution. And then they say, I'm going to quote this directly, and then there's a paragraph there is the petroleum industry works hard to protect the environment. Gasoline and diesel fuel have been changed to burn cleaner, and oil companies work to make sure that they drill and transport oil as safely as possible.
Wow, so this really gets us back to what's in it for the industry. For more on that, we had Carol Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, walk us through a presentation he found where a well known oil industry consultant laid out why investing in building education programs was a good idea for the industry. Carol took us to Zoom School.
This presentation is being presented against the backdrop of an industry that has been doing this aggressively and somewhat successfully for years. And I think it's really important to know that the presentation is given by a guy named John Tobin, who whose expertise was not in education. His expertise was in speculating about oil and gas. But he brought something valuable to the table. And nowhere is that value there than in the names of the inaugural board members that signed on to his.
Energy literacy project.
Now Here was was a tiny, tiny nonprofit. But he's got senior executives from Chevron and Phillips both on his board. He's got an executive the head of a co funded think tank that advocated for property rights and free market environmentalism. He had Pennsylvanian Power and Light, which was a major coal plant operator at the time, and a member of the Global Climate Coalition.
I think it's really important for everyone listening to kind of have a picture in their minds of what this presentation looks like, because it's really something. There's a black background and this weird Neon orb thing at the top of every page.
It's truly, truly a lot, very very good example of like late nineties, early two thousands graphic skills.
And there's all these quo and clip art and these bizarre stock photos. This one side that I love just has an illustration of it elephant, with the saying when eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.
So deep.
But then there's this one thing that this guy, John Tobin, who made the presentation, seems to really want to drive home to people, and that's something that he calls the three e's, and that's energy, economy, and environment and they're in that order for a reason.
Okay, back to Zoom School.
I want to start by both talking about the threes and highlighting what the three ees means for industry. And Tobin's presentation is compelling because it's so very explicit about that the three e's that we're pushed into classrooms by Excellent Mobile for decades stood for energy, economy, and environment and in that order, and we'll talk about why that order is important as we go along. This presentation is making the case for why those three e's are so
important to the industry in itself. What Chobin highlights is that the oil and gas industry suffers from severe image problems, and educating around the three e's is key to addressing those image problems and with it, making the companies themselves more profitable.
Next line, there are more than fifty slides in his presentation, so we're going to skip ahead to the highlights.
And again bear in mind that he's speaking on behalf of an organization that has senior executives for many of the industry's largest companies behind it. What they're looking to instill is a belief in a twenty eighth amendment that the people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shall be fueled by cheap and abundant energy, yet again equating energy not only with the economy, but with
liberty and freedom itself. This presentation happened in the wake of what was in fact a major victory for these programs, because in the Energy Policy Act of two thousand and five, which was recognized at the time to be filled with massive giveaways to the oil and gas industry, and part of what was incorporated were provisions for millions of dollars for educational programs focused specifically on the three e's on energy, economy and environment.
Okay, hold up a minute.
I just want to make sure that everyone caught that the US government put millions of dollars toward pro oil industry energy education in two thousand and five, So a good like thirty forty years after several signed has had already been sounding the alarm about climate change.
Yeah, and after world leaders had agreed to come together and reduce emissions because everyone understood the problem was that bad, until the US just said, just getting we're out.
You're talking about the Kyoto Protocol, of course, And yeah, this is two thousand and five. So that's just a few years after the US Senate voted ninety five to zero against ratifying Kyoto, and our lovely President George W. Bush officially pulled out of the agreement. And now the government wasn't just not taking any action, it was actually funding an industry friendly take on energy education in American schools.
And at the moment that he's presenting to ask THEE what he's acknowledging here is that between DOE and IOGCC, which is the independent oily gas companies, there were more than three hundred active school outreach programs, and I think most fundamentally, you see the explicit equation of the economy with freedom. The economy is economic growth, the economy is freedom.
And when you know that economic growth is dependent on energy, anything that you do to restrict the growth of energy is restricting the growth of the economy and is a threat to your freedom. Again, the targets for this were kids from kindergarten through college. And when you do that, when you take your message and you put it in the mouth of someone who is teaching your children, who children are told to believe and to trust, it is among the most insidious and among the most effective forms
of propaganda. And we are still dealing with and reeling from decades of that propaganda.
That last part really really hits home for me, because when you think about especially little kids, I mean, you really trust what your teachers tell you in school, at least for a while.
Yes, it's so cynical, and it's honestly, really smart of them. I was really struck by how much funding was going into this and how many government programs there were at that point and probably now too, honestly, but the fact that there were over three hundred back in two thousand and five, that's pretty incredible.
Yeah.
One thing that really struck me in looking not just at this presentation that Carol Muffett was talking about, but also at various materials that we found, is that they're just filled with what sociologists have started to call discourses of delay. That term comes from this paper that came
out last year. It was written by an economist named Will Lamb and several other economics and social science researchers who just started to pull together examples of messages like these that the industry uses and that we see over and over and start to catalog them and categorize them into groups.
Yeah. So these are these messages that have sort of taken the place of straight up climate denial.
Amy.
It's done some great writing on that, and a lot of them have been around for like a century or more. There are things like the importance of fossil fuels in America, or how on top of problems. The fossil fuel industry is or how so called cheap energy. It keeps everyone out of poverty. Here's Carol Muffet again.
We see Exxon Mobile having pushed its energy Cube training materials into schools across the country for decades, making Exxon's Energy Cube one of the most widely used educational resources in the entire United States for literally tens of years. And so the question becomes, what is that energy cube? The energy queube stood for energy economy and the environment, and the entire strategy behind it, and we see the oil industry push this over and over again is to
mainstream with kids. The idea that energy is absolutely essential to not only the economy but ultimately to freedom, That you can't have a functioning economy without energy, that anything that accordingly, anything that restricts or regulates energy has an immediate effect on the economy. And therefore, whenever you talk about the environmental impacts of energy production in any form, you immediately have to aweigh those environmental impacts against their presumed economic impact.
Does that all sound familiar?
I mean, it's really striking to me just how often you hear these exact talking points, even from moderate Democrats who think we do need to do some thing on climate, but it's like they just have this framework in their heads. It's been a super effective strategy, and one of the reasons that's been effective is exactly this thing that Katie Worth was talking about. It's not denial, so it kind of has this veneer of credibility.
You're allowed to legitimately discuss delay in mainstream context. So it's more difficult to promote climate denial these days, I think because, for example, the BBC has now quite strict guidance on the kind of balance that it's going to offer in its interviews around climate change, so they don't invite on a dissenting view on climate science anymore.
This is Will Lamb, the lead author of that Discourses of Delay paper, and.
I think that's happened more and more and now it's more difficult to discuss through denial in the public arena. But delay is tricky. Delay is tricky because often there are grains of truth in delay arguments, and often you can pose it as really a legitimate discussion on what the shape of climate policy should look like.
Right, So then the issue becomes like if we want to separate the credible stuff from the industry talking points. Do we need all teachers to be these experts in climate disinformation? That's just completely unrealistic.
Totally if Like, one of the reasons that this has worked so well is a teachers are stretched really thin and schools are underfunded. Like the solution can't be that they need to take on more work and become experts in this field. So, you know, you can see how being bombarded with all of this reasonable sounding stuff about trade offs and the need to keep energy affordable and how on top of environmental issues the industry is might
lead to a whole lot of inaction on climate. But that's not the only reason fossil fuel companies do this stuff, is it, Darna? That's right, there's more.
Here's Kurt again.
Why do they need this? Because they want to be more popular than they are. You know, most people do oil industries not very popular. The coal industry is not very popular, or they bemoan the fact that nobody knows where they where you get your electricity and they want people to understand that. So, I mean, you have these fossil fuel interests or electric utilities, coal oil interests who.
Have been.
Craving attention and craving acceptance and social license for a good long time, and they have tried to do that with a variety of things, and often in conjunction they'll do curriculum, but they also are doing an ad campaign on television or in local newspapers.
And then Carol Muffett, again from the Center for International Environmental Law, pointed out that schools are also really big recruitment targets for the oil industry, especially now when fewer and fewer younger people are interested in working for them for obvious reasons. In twenty fourteen, former ex ON CEO and later Trump administration appointee Rex Tillerson actually talked pretty openly about the role that education can play in this
really really gross way. He said that schools are quote producing a product, and that product is the students going into the workforce.
To summarize Rex Tillerson, the oil industry got involved in education because for the oil industry, the students are the product. And I think when Tillerson said that, he was obviously talking in the context of workers and future workers and prospects. But what you see when you look at the history of the oil industry's engagement in education is that for the oil industry, the students are the product in a much more profound and extensive and pervasive.
Way that Yeah, that really is really is gross. Okay, So I don't want to end this episode without talking about a side of the school curriculum game that people might not necessarily think of, and that's universities.
Right.
So oil company is actually fund research centers at like all the top schools MIT Harvard, Stanford. But that's not the only way that they get involved on university campuses either.
Yeah, that's right. They also fund chairs in economic departments or law schools, or programs at public policy schools. Oil companies were actually among the first to see universities as a huge opportunity. So there was this kind of small, seemingly obscure tax law change in the fifties that made corporate donations to universities a write off, and that prompted a little bit of an increase in sort of industry funding at the university level. But a lot of corporations
just kind of saw it as a tax break. And there was this VP at Standard Oil of New Jersey, which is now Exonmobile. His name is Frank Abrams, and he started to really see this as a golden opportunity for way more than just some nice tax breaks. So he started talking to everyone in the oil industry and beyond about, you know, really what they could do.
Here.
I found this speech of his from nineteen fifty three where he's like, yeah, yeah, the tax break is great, but don't forget all this other stuff. So he says, the important thing is that corporate gifts should be made when the direct or indirect benefits, and I want to underscore indirect benefits are worth more to the company than the costs after tax adjustments. And then he goes on to give an example of one of these great indirect benefits.
He says, there is a tendency on the part of some people to call on the government to take over more and more functions and responsibilities born previously by citizens. My observation of political history both here and abroad during forty years with Standard Oil Company provides evidence of how the sinking can develop. Even in a soil like ours where the tradition of democracy and free enterprise is well developed.
Each time government takes over a new function, the free society shrinks by that much a step has been taken towards statism, a system holding great dangers for the general wellbeing of the country and incidentally for stockholders, investments and corporations. This is a problem with great dimension.
In my view.
But I think finally we can rely on a prudent and mature people, that is, an educated people to deal properly with it.
So yeah, it seems like oil executives and oil companies have really been worried about creeping socialism for a long time.
They really really have been, and they really spent decades looking to use education as a tool to solidify their position in society. 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 gis motos Climate and Justice site.
My co host and co reporter for the series is Darna nor. Our producer is Juliana Bradley. Our factchecker is Trevor Gowan. Music is by Martin Wissenberg, and our artwork was created by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton, founder and director 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.