# Don't Mess with Texas

An episode of [Drilled](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1439735906), 16 Jul 2021, 25 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/pdrl.fm/3e5572/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/9a7ab5ee-ce11-48ff-a544-b3ec00ea9b1e/e779c94b-4a91-4ec5-b639-b3ec00f2b0d1/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f82f371-6316-4ea6-a108-b3ec00ea9b2d

How did the fracking boom lead to a plastics boom? We examine how the gas and plastics industries have embedded themselves in society through the story of one petrochemical company operating on the Gulf Coast and two women, one in Louisiana, one in Texas, taking them on. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: Early in my career, I did a ton of reporting
[0:05] Speaker 1: on the plastic problem, why there was so much of it,
[0:08] Speaker 1: how the industry operated, the pr guys who created fake
[0:13] Speaker 1: front groups for plastic manufacturers. It was a lot of
[0:17] Speaker 1: the same stuff the oil and gas guys had done,
[0:20] Speaker 1: which makes sense because it was mostly the same companies
[0:25] Speaker 1: making plastic. But at a certain point I shifted my
[0:29] Speaker 1: focus away from plastic, partly because it seemed like a
[0:33] Speaker 1: problem that.
[0:34] Speaker 2: Was being solved.
[0:37] Speaker 1: The public was aware of the problem, there were various
[0:40] Speaker 1: alternatives to plastic being embraced. Even consumer behavior was changing.
[0:46] Speaker 1: Now to California, where a new law will ban single
[0:49] Speaker 1: use plastic bags at grocery and convenience stores. Instead of
[0:52] Speaker 1: buying a plastic tube of toothpaste then throwing it away
[0:55] Speaker 1: or recycling it, maybe you can now buy toothpaste tablets
[0:59] Speaker 1: that come in this little compostable paper packets.
[1:02] Speaker 3: It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
[1:05] Speaker 4: I like that in the Pacific Ocean contains plastic waste
[1:08] Speaker 4: twice the size of Texas.
[1:10] Speaker 3: That's big.
[1:11] Speaker 1: And then a few years ago I started to see
[1:13] Speaker 1: more and more plastic everywhere, restaurants, stores, my kids' school,
[1:21] Speaker 1: and I wondered what had happened to shift the course
[1:24] Speaker 1: of things so dramatically. Had I missed some kind of
[1:27] Speaker 1: policy change, had some celebrity said something pro plastic? But
[1:33] Speaker 1: it also jumped out of me because it was so
[1:35] Speaker 1: similar to what had happened on climate change during the nineties,
[1:39] Speaker 1: high public awareness momentum toward change, and then boom, this
[1:44] Speaker 1: complete shift of course. So I started looking into it,
[1:49] Speaker 1: and the first place I looked was this sort of
[1:52] Speaker 1: cartoonishly evil PR guy who had been the head of
[1:57] Speaker 1: all of these pro plastic campaigns when I'd looked into
[2:00] Speaker 1: the issue before. His name was Rick Berman. His nickname
[2:07] Speaker 1: is doctor Evil, and I'm not joking. He's the guy
[2:11] Speaker 1: who ran a ton of the PR campaigns for Philip
[2:14] Speaker 1: Morris back in the day. The lead character in the
[2:17] Speaker 1: movie Thank You for Smoking is based on him. I
[2:21] Speaker 1: don't have an MD or law degree.
[2:23] Speaker 2: I have a bachelor's and kicking button taking names.
[2:28] Speaker 1: I get paid to talk.
[2:29] Speaker 5: What do you talk about?
[2:30] Speaker 3: I speak on behalf of cigarettes.
[2:32] Speaker 2: My mommy cigarettes kill?
[2:34] Speaker 3: Now?
[2:35] Speaker 2: Is your mommy a doctor?
[2:36] Speaker 3: No?
[2:36] Speaker 2: Well she doesn't exactly sound like a credible expert, now
[2:39] Speaker 2: does she.
[2:41] Speaker 1: Rick Berman has also targeted Mothers against Drunk Driving for
[2:45] Speaker 1: alcohol clients, and the Humane Society for beef clients.
[2:49] Speaker 5: Mysteres, how many alcohol related does a year?
[2:51] Speaker 2: Well, that's what two hundred and seventy a day.
[2:55] Speaker 1: Tragedy. I front an organization that killed him. So I
[2:58] Speaker 1: had followed Berman a lot when I was reporting on
[3:01] Speaker 1: plastic because he was working for all the plastic bag
[3:04] Speaker 1: manufacturers and the food and beverage guys who all wanted
[3:09] Speaker 1: to fight against plastic bag bands. Burman was the guy
[3:13] Speaker 1: behind my all time favorite fake grassroots group, the Save
[3:18] Speaker 1: the Plastic Bag Coalition. They claimed to be a group
[3:22] Speaker 1: of concerned citizens who loved plastic bags, I guess, but
[3:27] Speaker 1: was actually one guy paid by Rick Bourban. So when
[3:31] Speaker 1: I dove back in in twenty fourteen, the first thing
[3:35] Speaker 1: I did was google Rick Berman, and I found a
[3:40] Speaker 1: New York Times story October thirtieth, twenty fourteen, about how
[3:46] Speaker 1: Berman was suddenly very involved with natural gas companies and
[3:50] Speaker 1: fracking hard nosed advice from veteran lobbyist win ugly or
[3:54] Speaker 1: lose pretty.
[3:55] Speaker 2: A speech he'd.
[3:56] Speaker 1: Given in Colorado for a group of natural gas companies
[3:59] Speaker 1: called the West Start Energy Alliance had been leaked here's
[4:03] Speaker 1: a little bit from it.
[4:05] Speaker 5: And again we've had a lot of ads on this thing.
[4:07] Speaker 5: You get in people's mind a tie, they don't know
[4:11] Speaker 5: who's right, and you win all ties.
[4:14] Speaker 3: Because the tie.
[4:16] Speaker 1: Basically ensures the status quote.
[4:18] Speaker 3: People are not prepared.
[4:19] Speaker 6: To get aggressive in moving whus layers together. So I'll
[4:23] Speaker 6: take a tie any day if I'm trying to deserve
[4:25] Speaker 6: the status quote.
[4:27] Speaker 1: A tie is a win because that basically ensures the
[4:31] Speaker 1: status quo. Wow, But also what was Bourban doing there?
[4:40] Speaker 1: He had worked with every other industry before, tobacco, alcohol, meat, chemicals,
[4:46] Speaker 1: but weirdly he had never worked for oil and gas,
[4:49] Speaker 1: and now here he was in one of the hubs
[4:53] Speaker 1: of the fracking boom. Quick orientation on that front. Fracking
[4:59] Speaker 1: is slang for hydraulic fracturing. It's a drilling process where
[5:03] Speaker 1: you basically blast water and chemicals into shale rock at
[5:08] Speaker 1: really high pressure, busting open the rocks and pumping out
[5:11] Speaker 1: the gas or oil that's hiding inside of them. Around
[5:16] Speaker 1: two thousand and six, a few independent companies figured out
[5:19] Speaker 1: how to do fracking economically, and the price of oil
[5:23] Speaker 1: and gas made it smart to pursue. That kicked off
[5:27] Speaker 1: a fracking boom. But around twenty ten, people in communities
[5:32] Speaker 1: where fracking was happening had started to talk about how
[5:36] Speaker 1: it was ruining their water, in some cases making it flammable,
[5:42] Speaker 1: a thing you don't really want your water to be.
[5:45] Speaker 1: Then stories started to come out about the radioactive waste
[5:49] Speaker 1: being generated by fracking, Yes, radioactive waste. Fracking had some
[5:56] Speaker 1: pretty bad press going into that conference Berman was at
[6:00] Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen. Neighbors in that Colorado town are being
[6:06] Speaker 1: in the heat as well.
[6:08] Speaker 6: The groundwater there is apparently contaminated by natural gas.
[6:12] Speaker 7: A Colorado homeowners living in fear because their tap water
[6:16] Speaker 7: is flammable.
[6:17] Speaker 8: And the brine that these truckers are hauling radium can
[6:21] Speaker 8: be as high as twenty eighty five hundred. These levels
[6:24] Speaker 8: are extraordinary.
[6:26] Speaker 1: So it made sense that the industry would go looking
[6:29] Speaker 1: for a hitman like Berman to save it. At the
[6:34] Speaker 1: Western Energy Alliance conference, Berman was presenting on his latest campaign,
[6:39] Speaker 1: Big Green Radicals, an attempt to discredit the top three
[6:43] Speaker 1: critics of fracking at the time SERRA Club, NRDC, and
[6:48] Speaker 1: Food and Water Watch. Here's Berman's colleague Jack Hubbard explaining,
[6:52] Speaker 1: more so, we.
[6:54] Speaker 4: Thought, how are we going to kick off this campaign.
[6:56] Speaker 4: Take the typical Bourbon and Company model in undermining.
[7:00] Speaker 9: These folks credibility and diminish their moral authority.
[7:05] Speaker 1: Ah, Yes, the typical Berman and Company model of undermining
[7:10] Speaker 1: people's credibility and diminishing their moral authority. Berman's fur a
[7:16] Speaker 1: into the natural gas world got me wondering if fracking
[7:19] Speaker 1: and gas were linked to the sudden resurgence of plastic
[7:24] Speaker 1: And then over the next couple of years, I started
[7:27] Speaker 1: to hear more about another problem with fracking, a natural
[7:31] Speaker 1: gas glut. The story was that fracking companies had been
[7:35] Speaker 1: so successful at getting gas out of shale rock that
[7:39] Speaker 1: they were just kind of swimming in this stuff.
[7:42] Speaker 10: It was very good at producing gas, but terrible at
[7:44] Speaker 10: producing profits.
[7:45] Speaker 1: This is Clark Williams Dairy, an analyst with the Institute
[7:50] Speaker 1: for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis AIFA.
[7:55] Speaker 10: And that's something that I think has actually been emblematic
[8:00] Speaker 10: the shale industry as a whole, that it's an industry
[8:02] Speaker 10: that's been phenomenally successful at producing oil and gas, but
[8:07] Speaker 10: it's been terrible at producing cash.
[8:10] Speaker 1: The fracking industry actually never produced profits, but it did
[8:15] Speaker 1: produce a lot of gas, and it needed to find
[8:20] Speaker 1: a market for it. Here's Kingsmill Bond, an analyst with
[8:24] Speaker 1: the nonprofit Carbon Tracker.
[8:26] Speaker 5: With the fracking of gas a lot of ethane and propane,
[8:29] Speaker 5: and they're considerably cheaper as a feedstock than oil. And
[8:36] Speaker 5: all these companies had the bright day, well, let's turn
[8:39] Speaker 5: this ethane into plastic, and then we can undercut our
[8:43] Speaker 5: competitors and we can make very high superprofits. That's basically
[8:48] Speaker 5: was the idea.
[8:49] Speaker 1: Okay, so now it was starting to make some sense.
[8:53] Speaker 1: Just a few years after public awareness of the plastic
[8:57] Speaker 1: problem was peaking, fossil fuel companies realized if they could
[9:02] Speaker 1: make plastic with the byproducts of fracking instead of with oil,
[9:07] Speaker 1: they could solve the natural gas clout problem and supercharge
[9:12] Speaker 1: their petro chemical profits. Again, remember, most of the companies
[9:17] Speaker 1: making plastic or providing the building blocks of plastic are
[9:21] Speaker 1: oil and gas companies. And here's where we get back
[9:25] Speaker 1: to the involvement of Berman and his cronies. Thanks to
[9:29] Speaker 1: some very clever messaging over the years, the general public
[9:34] Speaker 1: has largely forgotten that plastic is made out of fossil fuels.
[9:40] Speaker 4: But when you look at their websites, when you look
[9:42] Speaker 4: at their communication stuff and business. They're very clear that
[9:45] Speaker 4: they are all about plastics, and so this is an
[9:48] Speaker 4: industry has been very effective at on the one hand,
[9:51] Speaker 4: promoting the use of plastic residence across ever wider ranges
[9:56] Speaker 4: of product streams and an evermore tes around the world,
[10:01] Speaker 4: and on the other hand, keeping their own role in
[10:04] Speaker 4: these processes largely invisible from the public.
[10:07] Speaker 1: This is Carol Muffett, President and CEO of the nonprofit
[10:12] Speaker 1: Center for International Environmental Law.
[10:16] Speaker 4: You know, the plub public when they think about who
[10:18] Speaker 4: produces plastic, they think about Procter and Gamble, they think
[10:21] Speaker 4: about Starbucks, they think about Amazon. All those are completely legitimate,
[10:27] Speaker 4: But ultimately, at the end of the day, you know,
[10:29] Speaker 4: the molecules going into that plastic are all coming from
[10:32] Speaker 4: a handful of companies, and they have names like Exxon
[10:35] Speaker 4: and Chevron Shell.
[10:40] Speaker 1: Oftentimes those oil and gas companies own and operate the
[10:43] Speaker 1: petrochemical facilities making plastic two, but they don't really advertise it.
[10:48] Speaker 1: Exon's big plastic factory in Louisiana, it's just called the
[10:52] Speaker 1: Baton Rouge Plastics Company. Even when they're not making the
[10:56] Speaker 1: plastics themselves. The connection is pretty direct between the oil
[11:01] Speaker 1: and gas industry and plastic. In twenty eleven, construction of
[11:07] Speaker 1: a new pipeline began. It would run from the eagle
[11:10] Speaker 1: Ford Shale, one of the first big fracking plays in Texas,
[11:15] Speaker 1: to a petrochemical plant on the Gulf in Callum County.
[11:19] Speaker 1: That pipeline was fully operational by early twenty thirteen, supplying
[11:23] Speaker 1: a plant owned by a little known Taiwanese company called Formosa.
[11:30] Speaker 1: I'm Amy Westervelt. Welcome to a new season of Drilled
[11:34] Speaker 1: the Bridge to Nowhere. We're tackling the natural gas industry
[11:39] Speaker 1: this season, and we're doing something a little different. Instead
[11:42] Speaker 1: of telling you one story, over the course of several episodes,
[11:45] Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you a few different stories about
[11:48] Speaker 1: the natural gas industry. First up, plastic pipelines. That pipeline
[11:53] Speaker 1: from the eagle Ford Shale to the foremost of plastics plant.
[11:57] Speaker 1: It's not alone. There's a very very direct pipeline direct
[12:01] Speaker 1: connection between these two industries. Over the next few episodes,
[12:06] Speaker 1: we're going to look at how the fracking boom led
[12:09] Speaker 1: to a plastics boom through the story of Formost of
[12:12] Speaker 1: plastics on the Gulf Coast. Coming up right after this
[12:15] Speaker 1: quick break.
[12:50] Speaker 2: I've spent my whole life around the water.
[12:52] Speaker 9: I've been shrimpen since I was eight years old, and
[12:56] Speaker 9: even when I was smaller, when I was like four
[12:58] Speaker 9: and five years old, my dad would come in from
[13:01] Speaker 9: shrimp and all of us kids would go to the bay.
[13:04] Speaker 2: And I can remember going out in.
[13:06] Speaker 9: The bay and when you leave her early, you got
[13:09] Speaker 9: the spoon bills, you know, these pink birds flying, they
[13:13] Speaker 9: coming about the marshes, and you're going past the reefs
[13:16] Speaker 9: and you're heading out into the bay, and it was,
[13:20] Speaker 9: it was, It was beautiful, and it always kept that magic.
[13:25] Speaker 9: And I think if I gave up on the bay,
[13:28] Speaker 9: I would be given up on the best part of myself.
[13:31] Speaker 1: Meet Diane Wilson. She's a fourth generation shrimp boat captain
[13:36] Speaker 1: in Point Comfort, Texas. That was a clip of her
[13:39] Speaker 1: from the documentary Texas Gold, but I got the chance
[13:42] Speaker 1: to speak with her too.
[13:44] Speaker 6: For a while, I ran a shrimp house, and you know,
[13:48] Speaker 6: I think I handled about fifteen shrimp boats. And it's
[13:52] Speaker 6: a it's an old tin building and it's right at
[13:54] Speaker 6: the dock.
[13:56] Speaker 1: That shrimp house. She ran the little tin building on
[13:58] Speaker 1: the dock. It basically processes all the shrimp for the
[14:01] Speaker 1: shrimpers in the area, so they go out fishing, come back,
[14:04] Speaker 1: and Diane would sort of take it.
[14:06] Speaker 6: From there, so I know all the comings and goings
[14:09] Speaker 6: of those shrimpers. And one day I had a shripper
[14:14] Speaker 6: come in. And this shripper, he was a real nice
[14:19] Speaker 6: looking guy, and he had about three types of cancers,
[14:22] Speaker 6: and he had these lumps all over they were like
[14:25] Speaker 6: tennis falls up and down his arm. And anyway, he
[14:27] Speaker 6: threw this magazine at me and he wanted me to
[14:30] Speaker 6: read it. And it was the first time the toxic
[14:35] Speaker 6: release inventory ever came out. And our little county, Calsing County,
[14:42] Speaker 6: I bet we didn't have twelve thousand people in this county.
[14:46] Speaker 6: We were number one in the nation for toxic disposal.
[14:51] Speaker 6: We had half the ways generated in Texas was right here.
[14:55] Speaker 6: And it's like wow, it blew my mind, it really did.
[15:00] Speaker 1: Diane was shocked and worried about her little community. She
[15:04] Speaker 1: describes herself as a quote genuine introvert.
[15:07] Speaker 3: I am one of these people that doesn't like to speak.
[15:11] Speaker 3: I don't like to be around crowds. I can remember
[15:14] Speaker 3: when I was a child adding under a bed to
[15:16] Speaker 3: get away from people. It was probably a reason why
[15:20] Speaker 3: I was so good on the bay because there's a
[15:23] Speaker 3: lot of solitude out there.
[15:25] Speaker 1: But this seemed like something the community should really be
[15:29] Speaker 1: talking about.
[15:30] Speaker 3: But when I saw that article, I did something totally
[15:36] Speaker 3: out of character. I walked down to city Hall and
[15:40] Speaker 3: I said, I want to have a meeting about this information.
[15:45] Speaker 1: So apparently there's this little room at city hall in
[15:48] Speaker 1: Diane's town and they let people use it for meetings.
[15:51] Speaker 1: So she went in and booked that room.
[15:54] Speaker 6: But then I had the city secretary. She come down
[15:58] Speaker 6: there and she said, Dian you you just got to
[16:03] Speaker 6: not do this. And I'm like, uh, well, I'll do
[16:08] Speaker 6: it in the elementary in the cafeteria and she said, no, Diane,
[16:12] Speaker 6: you've got You've got to stop it completely. You can't
[16:15] Speaker 6: do this. There's red flags. There's red flags, and I'm like,
[16:19] Speaker 6: what red flag?
[16:20] Speaker 1: Dan didn't understand what the problem was. But pretty soon
[16:23] Speaker 1: it wasn't just the secretary, it was local politicians and
[16:26] Speaker 1: businessmen too.
[16:28] Speaker 3: By President, who I had never talked to in my life,
[16:32] Speaker 3: come out on the dock and he said, Diane, are
[16:34] Speaker 3: you trying to start a mid Gilani group to roast
[16:37] Speaker 3: industry of life economic development? Called my brother, and they
[16:44] Speaker 3: told them to make me shut up and not have
[16:48] Speaker 3: this meeting. They were trying everything to shut me up
[16:51] Speaker 3: on just having a meeting.
[16:55] Speaker 1: Dane thought this was all really weird. She had assumed
[17:00] Speaker 1: the waste they were talking about in that toxic inventory
[17:04] Speaker 1: was kind of old news. It was stuff that had
[17:06] Speaker 1: been dumped back when there was a big Alcoa plant
[17:08] Speaker 1: in the area, and that was part of it. But
[17:11] Speaker 1: there was also new waste and a big industrial plant
[17:16] Speaker 1: in town that was planning a major expansion.
[17:20] Speaker 6: It was the biggest expansion in Texas history, and the
[17:24] Speaker 6: biggest in the United States in ten years. And I
[17:28] Speaker 6: mean the governor, the senators, the you name it, the
[17:35] Speaker 6: even Silbraham who was running for president. Everybody was pushing.
[17:40] Speaker 6: They were going to give promost every single thing they wanted.
[17:46] Speaker 1: Formosa, a Taiwanese petrochemical company, had been in the area
[17:50] Speaker 1: since nineteen eighty one, and now it was planning a
[17:53] Speaker 1: one point three billion dollar expansion.
[18:00] Speaker 6: Someone had in the mail sent me a letter and
[18:05] Speaker 6: in the letter was just these type simple words that,
[18:12] Speaker 6: miss Wilson, do you know this? And in it was
[18:16] Speaker 6: the uh it was you know it was a newspaper
[18:20] Speaker 6: clipping in the back. You know, it's on the back
[18:23] Speaker 6: pages of a newspaper and it had UH Promosa's uh
[18:28] Speaker 6: public notice for Promosa's air permits and UH and I'm like, hell,
[18:33] Speaker 6: this is something I can do for the first meeting
[18:36] Speaker 6: of this little group.
[18:38] Speaker 1: Diane's been fighting the company ever since, mostly with the
[18:41] Speaker 1: help of whistleblowers who worked at the foremosta plant.
[18:46] Speaker 6: There's no unions, there's no safety, and you will get
[18:50] Speaker 6: fired if you open your mouth. And they did not
[18:53] Speaker 6: trust uh TCQ, the state agency. They didn't trust EPA,
[18:59] Speaker 6: and they didn't definitely did not trust OSHA. They thought
[19:03] Speaker 6: that was nothing but a way to get them fired,
[19:05] Speaker 6: to tell a lot of anything. And so who was
[19:08] Speaker 6: on the bottom of the list. It was me, And
[19:11] Speaker 6: so they came to me, and that were I really
[19:17] Speaker 6: got the information.
[19:19] Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety three, when Formosa expanded, it bought five
[19:24] Speaker 1: hundred residents out of their homes and took over the
[19:27] Speaker 1: town's school.
[19:29] Speaker 6: Formosa's has got all their houses, the school shut down,
[19:33] Speaker 6: there's no school. Formosa is using the school for a
[19:37] Speaker 6: training center now, so it's for Mosa's town.
[19:41] Speaker 1: But over a decade, Diane kept building her case often
[19:45] Speaker 1: meeting with Formosa workers out of town because they were
[19:48] Speaker 1: worried about getting fired or retaliation of some kind. They
[19:52] Speaker 1: told her about Formosa cutting corners, dumping chemicals and plastic
[19:56] Speaker 1: pellets into the ocean, burning off toxic chemicals through their smokestacks,
[20:01] Speaker 1: and generally not implementing appropriate safety measures. Diane spent three
[20:07] Speaker 1: years collecting plastic pellets that Formosa had dumped into the
[20:11] Speaker 1: bees and waterways around its Port Comfort facility.
[20:15] Speaker 6: I would get into kayak and go up and down
[20:18] Speaker 6: all skin of their outfalls, and sometimes that would take
[20:20] Speaker 6: me like five or six syres. I was all day long,
[20:24] Speaker 6: going up and down that singing kayak and taking all
[20:27] Speaker 6: these pictures.
[20:28] Speaker 1: At the time when she was going out in her
[20:31] Speaker 1: kayak all day, Diane was in her late sixties, and
[20:35] Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen she took Formosa to court.
[20:42] Speaker 8: Just down the Gulf coast from Houston lies an enormous
[20:45] Speaker 8: plastics plant, one of the nation's biggest. It's been a
[20:48] Speaker 8: driving force in the local economy, and now it's expanding
[20:51] Speaker 8: with promises of new jobs and tax revenue. But a
[20:55] Speaker 8: handful of coastal residents are suing the plant, claiming it's
[20:58] Speaker 8: polluted the waters in their red for years.
[21:02] Speaker 1: After fighting the company for decades, in twenty nineteen, Diane
[21:06] Speaker 1: had a big win.
[21:08] Speaker 7: Last year, Formosa agreed to pay fifty million dollars to
[21:12] Speaker 7: settle a lawsuit in which it agreed to zero discharge
[21:15] Speaker 7: of pellets. A federal judge called Formosa a serial offender.
[21:20] Speaker 1: It was the largest settlement granted in a citizen lawsuit
[21:24] Speaker 1: in US history.
[21:26] Speaker 6: And we got fifty million dollars for environmental projects, and
[21:30] Speaker 6: we put twenty million into a sustainable fishery co op
[21:37] Speaker 6: for the local fishermont.
[21:39] Speaker 1: But Diane isn't retiring her kayak just yet. Her group
[21:44] Speaker 1: is staying on top of Formosa to make sure it
[21:47] Speaker 1: complies with the court ruling. And she's been talking to
[21:51] Speaker 1: activists down the coast a bit in Louisiana. They're trying
[21:55] Speaker 1: to prevent Formosa from building a plant there. She's hoping
[21:59] Speaker 1: that which he's learned over the past thirty years might
[22:02] Speaker 1: help them do the one thing she couldn't.
[22:06] Speaker 6: My only regret, my only regret is that I did
[22:11] Speaker 6: not try hard enough to keep them out. Is they
[22:16] Speaker 6: need to try everything to keep them up. They do
[22:20] Speaker 6: not want Formosa in there.
[22:29] Speaker 1: We'll bring you that story next time next week on Drilled.
[22:36] Speaker 2: It will be too much hottick in the air just
[22:38] Speaker 2: to bring it. We will not live.
[22:40] Speaker 9: That's where I'm fighting for my life and the life
[22:43] Speaker 9: of my community.
[22:44] Speaker 1: It's the single largest proposed source that we've been tracking
[22:48] Speaker 1: of greenhouse gas emissions in the country.
[22:50] Speaker 11: Certainly, I don't think there's any way you can divorce
[22:53] Speaker 11: what's happening now in terms of the sighting of these
[22:57] Speaker 11: facilities and who's burying the biggest gardens from the history
[23:00] Speaker 11: of slavery and that in that area.
[23:02] Speaker 6: It's all.
[23:03] Speaker 11: There's a straight line connecting it all.
[23:31] Speaker 1: Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network.
[23:36] Speaker 1: The show is reported, written, and hosted by me Amy Westervelt.
[23:40] Speaker 1: Our producer this season is Juliana Bradley. Our editor is
[23:44] Speaker 1: Julia Ritchie. Our theme song this season is Death Song
[23:48] Speaker 1: by be Beamon. Additional music for the season composed by
[23:52] Speaker 1: Elliott Peltzman. Her artwork for the season is done by
[23:56] Speaker 1: Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James at the
[24:00] Speaker 1: First Amendment Project. You can find additional reporting and photos
[24:05] Speaker 1: for this season on our Twitter feed at we are
[24:08] Speaker 1: Drilled or online at drillednews dot com. If you're a
[24:13] Speaker 1: fan of the show, please consider supporting us in two ways. One,
[24:18] Speaker 1: if you want to spend some money and get some
[24:20] Speaker 1: extra bonus content at early episodes, check out our Patreon
[24:24] Speaker 1: at patreon dot com slash Drilled. You can also support
[24:28] Speaker 1: us by giving us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts.
[24:32] Speaker 1: It really helps us find new listeners and combat the
[24:36] Speaker 1: army of climate denier trolls that are constantly trying to
[24:39] Speaker 1: tank our ratings. Thanks for doing that and we'll see
[24:43] Speaker 1: you next week.

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