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00:00:30.000Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Antonia Juhasz,
00:00:41.840a leading energy analyst, author, and investigative journalist specializing in oil.
00:00:47.240The United States is now a player with Russia and Saudi Arabia in determining how oil shapes
00:00:57.040the global economy by being able to now be a country that controls a huge spigot of oil and
00:01:05.180natural gas. And that has been to the detriment of tribal sovereignty, public health, the environment,
00:01:11.900the climate. An award-winning writer, Antonia's articles appear in Rolling Stone, Harper's
00:01:22.200Magazine, Newsweek, The Atlantic, CNN.com, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, The Advocate, Pacific
00:01:30.280Standard Magazine, and many more. Antonia is the author of three books, including Black
00:01:35.640Tide, The Tyranny of Oil, and The Bush Agenda. Welcome, Antonia. It's such a great honor
00:01:43.160to be in conversation with you today. Welcome to For the Wild.
00:01:46.920Thanks so much for having me. It's great to speak with you.
00:01:49.220Hmm, wonderful. Well, to jump right in, I'm hoping we can bring a bit of context to our conversation around the landscape of oil production and the energy economy, specifically in the U.S.
00:02:02.960Now, currently, the U.S. is producing more oil and natural gas than any time in its history, and we are, in fact, the largest producer of oil and natural gas combined.
00:02:13.320Now, there's a lot of information and historical analysis to unpack within this statistic alone, but to begin, I'm wondering if you could give us a sense of the scope and scale of our national fossil fuel sector and perhaps offer a historical point of reference.
00:02:31.000What does oil production look like today in the U.S., and how has this been shaped by the fracking boom?
00:02:36.880Well, I guess the first thing I'll just say is to add to my introduction that I am currently a Ted Scripps Fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
00:02:50.560And that's a one-year fellowship that brings working journalists to the university to do their research, to audit classes, and to focus on a special project.
00:03:02.880And so the advantage of having that fellowship is that I'm sitting here in Colorado and able to speak from within a state that has really been transformed in the last 10 years because of the fracking boom.
00:03:20.960And my writing on the industry, I can go back all the way to the beginning in the 1860s
00:03:28.260of oil production, which started in the United States and Pennsylvania, and then continued
00:03:33.380That's really the topic of my second book, which is entitled The Tyranny of Oil.
00:03:37.700But I don't think we need quite that much history.
00:03:40.500I think the most important summary that I would say is to really think of oil production
00:03:46.640not just in the United States, which is one of the places where it began and took hold,
00:03:51.300but globally as a really fairly new phenomenon. We've only been doing mass production of oil
00:03:59.680and natural gas for about 150 years. The natural seepage of oil out of the earth or out of the
00:04:07.780bottom of the ocean, which it has naturally done for thousands and thousands and thousands of years,
00:04:13.040is something that humans have made use of for thousands of years and using it for things like
00:04:19.960sealants on canoes or as a health remedy. And that was really, I would say, humans coexisting
00:04:28.120with oil and natural gas, which are naturally occurring phenomena. Of course, they're not
00:04:35.260renewable resources, but they are natural resources. Humans coexisting with those
00:04:39.720resources for thousands and thousands of years. It's really only in the last 150 that we turned
00:04:46.600these resources, including coal, into mass-produced items, and then in a very, very short time span
00:04:54.480into resources that are threatening our existence on the planet. But the United States is one of
00:05:01.100the places where those operations really began and took root. And we saw ups and downs in
00:05:08.960production throughout U.S. history with really great impacts on our domestic economy, our foreign
00:05:15.780policy, and we can talk at length about that. But I will just sort of jump ahead to the current
00:05:21.920situation or the current history, which as you had suggested in your introduction has really
00:05:27.860been brought about by fracking, and that's what's happening here in Colorado. So fracking is a
00:05:34.480technique, a mode of drilling for oil and natural gas that is a technique that's been around for a
00:05:42.220very long time. But what happened around 2005 during the Bush administration was a massive
00:05:52.740deregulation and an opening up of new areas to fracking and the addition of an additional
00:06:02.420technique, which is horizontal drilling, which is you go down into an area, whereas oil has
00:06:09.200traditionally existed in the earth in essentially, though not exactly, pools of oil, kind of like a
00:06:15.560reservoir of oil under the ground. The difference with fracking for oil is that the oil is instead
00:06:21.880found buried within a shale bed or the natural gas is in a shale bed, a rock bed under the earth,
00:06:29.480and that the producers need to break that rock, fracture it in order to release the hydrocarbons
00:06:39.000and then to get them back above ground without making the earth collapse.
00:06:44.960And the process of fracturing that rock, opening up a space to release the oil and natural gas,
00:06:52.920bring it above ground is a process that's very water and chemical intensive,
00:06:57.060very machine intensive, much more intensive than traditional drilling. That's called fracking.
00:07:02.480And then this other piece of technology, horizontal drilling, is really what changed
00:07:07.220the entire face of drilling in the United States, which is being able to go down and then out into
00:07:13.080this rock bed for a distance of miles with the pipe running miles underground to open up the
00:07:20.740oil and natural gas and get it out of the ground. And that process, along with the deregulation
00:07:27.400put in place by the Bush administration, just transformed production across the United States.
00:07:33.280So not only was there this new technology, there was this extreme willingness to make sacrifices
00:07:39.020to the environment, to public health, to worker safety, in order to really move aggressively
00:07:44.680to expand the use of this technology across the United States. And that just sent the United
00:07:51.480States into a whole nother realm of production that started in the Bush administration,
00:07:57.180continued throughout administrations, really hitting its high speed in the Trump administration
00:08:04.780to the point today where, you know, I think most people across the United States, in many states
00:08:10.760across the United States, many more than previously, now know what it feels like to live near oil and
00:08:17.920gas operations, whereas that used to be something that was experienced in other countries, and then
00:08:23.240the oil and natural gas was sent here, or in a handful of states. So Texas, Alaska, where I used
00:08:30.780to live, California, these are major oil producing states. Now that list goes on and on and on and on
00:08:37.980of states that are major oil and natural gas producers and communities that are experiencing
00:08:44.000what it means to live near those productions. And now, just in the, actually in the last week,
00:08:49.520in the middle of the coronavirus epidemic, in the middle of COVID-19, the United States reached
00:08:55.960its highest weekly oil production in history, oil and natural gas production in history,
00:09:01.220because that production just keeps on going and keeps moving forward to the place that we're in
00:09:08.240now where we are. The United States is now with the Soviet Union and Russia, the three nations
00:09:16.000that determine the price of oil, the amount of oil and natural gas that's produced, which I'll
00:09:23.520take a breath and let you ask another question, but that has really taken us also into this place
00:09:27.700where we are right now in the midst of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, where our economy
00:09:34.480is also, the global economy is teetering because not only of the many problems associated with the
00:09:40.980epidemic, but also mass overproduction, a glut of production of oil in particular, which has led
00:09:47.340the price of oil to crash, which is also causing the global economy to crash. And I think that
00:09:53.520brings us to where we are with the scale and scope of oil production in the United States today.
00:09:57.700Wow. This is completely fascinating in an extremely disturbing way. All of these details
00:10:06.720that you've shared with us, and I know that there must be so many more. I do have a list
00:10:12.540of questions to ask you, but I do feel that it's important to share a bit more about this current
00:10:18.540moment we're in with COVID-19, with this economic crash that we are sliding into right now. So if
00:10:26.200you wouldn't mind just sharing a bit more of what you started to just touch on just a few moments
00:10:31.080ago, I think it would be really important for us to understand this connection more of the oil and
00:10:37.920gas production, COVID-19, and the economic downfall. Sure. I think that what's so terrifyingly
00:10:45.620fascinating right now is how similar our economic circumstances are to where they were in 2008,
00:10:52.200which was, of course, a massive global financial collapse. And the financial collapse is most
00:10:58.880often most immediately attributed to the mortgage crisis, the mortgage bubble, and banks like Lehman
00:11:06.260Marcus, excuse me, Lehman Brothers, I knew what I was saying, didn't sound right to me. Excuse me,
00:11:11.380that was Lehman Brothers crashing, which it certainly was a cause of the financial crisis.
00:11:15.680but those conditions were preceded by the price of oil skyrocketing to $150 a barrel,
00:11:24.260the highest amount in modern history. That price of oil was too much for consuming countries to
00:11:31.900afford. So they basically, you know, every country that is dependent on purchasing oil suddenly
00:11:37.740had to redirect all of this money to the purchase of oil and away from other places. And that was
00:11:44.540also happening within the United States with purchasers of oil having to redirect money
00:11:51.280out of other investments and other places that they were holding money and into the purchase of
00:11:56.160oil. That rush out of money from other places created a market vacuum where oil was draining
00:12:05.360out of other places. And one of the places it was draining out of was propping up the mortgage
00:12:12.580bubble, the housing bubble, and this sort of fake economy that had been created that was propping
00:12:17.960up this bubble. And when that bubble then burst, it took the banks, the mortgage lending industry
00:12:24.820with it. And those combined forces created the global economic collapse. And that level of the
00:12:32.740economy just being hardwired to oil is as true now as it was then. But what we started to experience
00:12:40.260several weeks ago is the opposite. So what happened several weeks ago was the oil industry
00:12:46.700has already been pumping out just way too much oil. The world is trying aggressively to move
00:12:53.120away from fossil fuels. We have policies put in place at local levels, at state levels, at federal
00:12:59.320levels, internationally, all with this goal of decarbonizing our economy in order to, for many
00:13:06.740reasons, including to halt the impacts of the climate crisis. And that attempt to move away
00:13:12.460from fossil fuels and oil in particular, at the same time as you've got economies that are just
00:13:19.780pumping out more and more of it, the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, is already leading
00:13:25.280to an oil glut, just too much of this product. Also, because there's been this movement among
00:13:31.000activists, among social movements to try and focus on, you know, how is this industry being
00:13:36.360continued to be supported. And one of the main ways is through banks lending money to oil
00:13:42.840companies, big and small, to sort of prop them up. Activists have been targeting that lending and
00:13:48.300have said, we don't want banks that are investing in fossil fuels. We want you to stop doing that
00:13:52.220investing. And so banks and hedge funds have been, many of them, certainly not all, moving away from
00:13:57.460fossil fuels. And that all created this very delicate situation where when the members of
00:14:04.640the organization Petroleum Exporting Countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and Russia, met several
00:14:10.080weeks ago to figure out what to do about what was clear to be a fall in demand for oil in light of
00:14:18.000the COVID-19 crisis. There was a break between Russia and Saudi Arabia with both countries saying,
00:14:26.220okay, the market's going to fall even further for oil. We already have a falling oil demand,
00:14:32.940But our economies are dependent on this product. So if we're going to keep making as much money as we need to from oil, and oil is worth less, we're going to have to produce even more of it to get the same return. And they were each trying to undercut each other's markets and to try and undercut U.S. production.
00:14:52.980And they said, we're going to produce even more, and we're going to produce it cheaper, and we're going to try and steal each other's markets. And that threat of increased production, at the same time as falling demand, led the price of oil to crash, and it continues to fall, fall and fall and fall and fall.
00:15:10.680So now we have the opposite of 2008 when you had this incredibly expensive oil that was really hard for consumers to purchase. Now we have the opposite, incredibly low oil prices that is extremely difficult for any country that is reliant on producing oil, which is countries all over the world for their income.
00:15:31.120now they're struggling. And that struggle has meant that they are also, now they don't have
00:15:38.960enough money to put into other things because they are not getting in income. And so that is
00:15:43.820also creating more of a hole in the economy where there's less money to buy other products and less
00:15:50.760money circulating. And that's also now contributing to this overall global collapse. And the end
00:15:58.680result of that story should be we need to learn a lesson, which is this hardwiring ourselves to
00:16:06.160this incredibly volatile, incredibly problematic resource isn't working out. It's only going to be
00:16:13.900more volatile. The world is only going to be more volatile moving forward. It was certainly predicted
00:16:18.240long ago that with the worsening climate crisis, pandemics were likely to increase and that
00:16:24.860obviously a continuous increase in crises, fires, floods, storms, droughts are our future. And so
00:16:32.420hardwiring ourselves to this incredibly volatile resource is just proving to be exceptionally
00:16:38.320difficult as a model. And that's why so many people are putting forward that the solution
00:16:43.380to this current oil crisis isn't to double down further on oil or fossil fuels, but rather to
00:16:54.580really aggressively put in place the transition to renewables and to potentially use this crisis
00:17:01.340as an opportunity to do so. And that's not certainly something that's being reflected
00:17:07.460among President Trump or Putin or Mohammed bin Salman, but it's certainly being advocated by
00:17:14.480their members of each of their governments and certainly of their populace as well.
00:17:19.640Wow, Antonia, you have just totally blown my mind with what you have been sharing. And thank you so much for speaking to the recent negotiations among the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. That is definitely something that was on my mind.
00:17:37.400And also just how you spoke to the unstable foundation of debt upon which the oil and gas industry rests and the way the banks are all intertwined and the price is going down. And it's just honestly so important for us to understand this. And you have such an incredible way of really clearly explaining some extremely complicated global relationships in your response. So thank you so much for that.
00:18:05.200Now, as we wrap our minds around the implications of the rampant rise of oil production, like you've been mentioning, which has more than doubled over the past decade, it feels important to center the people and places where development has descended and speak to the exploitation that comes hand in hand with this kind of boom and bust industry.
00:18:25.140You know, I'm thinking of the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico and the Appalachian Basin across Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.
00:18:34.300And then, of course, there's the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota that many of us know about.
00:18:39.400So as someone who has been reporting on the ground for years, I'm wondering if you could illustrate what one of these oil and gas fields actually looks like.
00:18:49.180And broadly speaking, how does fracking change a place, whether that be in regards to local politics, the social landscape, economics, or ecological transformation?
00:19:01.080Sure. I think maybe I'll just continue to stay in place where I'm at, which is Colorado, which is also where I'm from Colorado.
00:19:10.140I grew up here, but I haven't lived here for the last 30 years as I've lived across the country and been reporting across the country and around the world.
00:19:18.620But coming back here 30 years later after Colorado has seen a tenfold increase in its
00:19:47.980It had always been an agricultural community really driven by the agriculture sector, which has now been just is getting increasingly squeezed out by oil production.
00:20:00.840And one of the things that's happening here, which is somewhat unique, it's something that
00:20:08.000has been happening in Los Angeles for decades, which is residential drilling, which is oil
00:20:13.240production taking place right next to, in the middle of residential communities.
00:20:18.920What's different from Los Angeles, because that is the old oil derrick form of production,
00:20:25.420where you've got a reservoir, you've got a derrick that just has been pumping for a very
00:20:28.920long time, which certainly creates health hazards and environmental hazards. But what's different
00:20:34.620here is that it's fracking operations that are happening near schools in residential neighborhoods.
00:20:41.560So one really important example, I went out to Greeley in Weld County to interview a woman named
00:20:47.700Patricia Nelson, and she lives about a block and a half from a almost entirely Hispanic school,
00:20:55.780Bella Romero, which is where many of her nieces and nephews attend school, that school now has a
00:21:04.360massive fracking operation taking place just beyond the playground. And it was a fracking0.98
00:21:09.180operation that had originally been planned near a different school, which is a predominantly white
00:21:14.720school in a predominantly white neighborhood. That community protested, and they relocated
00:21:20.300to this predominantly low-income Hispanic neighborhood and school. And that production0.98
00:21:27.080has been releasing illegal quantities of benzene, which is a cancer-causing chemical
00:21:34.900byproduct of production. It has been threatening the health and safety of the community there,
00:21:41.720and they have been trying to get it stopped unsuccessfully as a result of these benzene
00:21:47.140spikes as a result of people and children living in the neighborhood and going to the school who
00:21:52.420have been experiencing nosebleeds, nausea, headaches, as there's been increasing health
00:21:59.420studies done in the state confirming findings that have been done, which is that exposure
00:22:04.460to oil and gas production is well documented to increase the likelihood of cancers, but also for
00:22:14.460women to have a deleterious effect on being able to maintain a pregnancy and then have a healthy
00:22:21.820pregnancy to term and then also associated with potential developmental disorders for the child0.87
00:22:29.200and just a whole host of well-documented human health impacts. And those human health impacts
00:22:36.700associated with oil production, with fracking, they almost all get worse the closer you live
00:22:44.640or work or attend school to those operations. So to see these operations increasingly moving
00:22:51.500into where people live, where they go to school, where they spend all day, means that the already
00:22:58.880well-documented human health impacts that are being reported across the country are only even
00:23:04.440more intensified here. And what's also anticipated is that this model that's happening in Colorado,
00:23:12.360this residential drilling, is expected to expand to other areas. So whereas one will typically
00:23:21.400often see oil production and fracking often taking place in more rural areas further away
00:23:28.620from communities, this new wave of residential drilling is extremely problematic and is only
00:23:35.520likely to intensify the human health impacts and the environmental impacts that are well documented
00:23:41.300elsewhere. I mean, I think other places where we've seen this are locations where fracking has
00:23:46.080gone on for longer periods of time with less oversight. So Ohio is a good example. Pennsylvania
00:23:53.200is another example. And there have been cancer clusters identified as being associated with
00:24:00.700the production that's taking place in those areas. And I think communities, for as long as
00:24:07.260there's been fracking, for as long as there's been oil production since the 1860s, at the founding
00:24:11.360of oil production in Pennsylvania in 1860s, there were mass protests against the production taking
00:24:15.840place and for health and safety of workers and for those communities. There have been communities
00:24:21.080that have been trying to stop these operations.
00:24:24.460And what's mostly happened over the last decade
00:24:26.920is greater education, greater research
00:24:30.460that has also expanded the number of people
00:26:41.300It's just so important for us to wrap our minds around this, as so many of us, like you were
00:26:54.360saying, are living in places where there is oil extraction happening in our own neighborhoods.
00:27:01.220And yeah, it's just, well, now Antonia, I'd like to focus on the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota
00:27:10.120where you wrote a 15-month investigative piece in Pacific Standard magazine called
00:27:15.240Death of the Dakota Access back in 2018. Now, as told through the parallel stories of two
00:27:21.900pipeline construction workers, Nicholas Jancic and Troy Dolan, you conclude that, quote,
00:27:28.080building oil and natural gas pipelines is one of the deadliest jobs in America.
00:27:33.320So I'm wondering if you could speak to the crux of what makes the oil and natural gas industry
00:27:38.300so fatal to workers, particularly in places like North Dakota? And within your answer,
00:27:44.140perhaps you could share some of your most striking findings from your investigation
00:27:48.060in the heart of American oil country. Sure. So what I was doing with this
00:27:52.800investigation and its death on the Dakota Access, and it was published in Pacific Standard Magazine
00:27:59.960in 2018. So there had been a great deal of focus on how dangerous oil and gas extraction work
00:28:08.220is for workers who produce oil and gas, who get it out of the ground. And that has been consistently
00:28:14.560finding that producing oil and gas is one of the deadliest jobs in the United States, at times
00:28:20.940having a fatality rate seven and a half times the national average, and that that has been a focus
00:28:27.100of concern and research, but that there hadn't been a similar focus to pipeline construction
00:28:33.260and what it means to be a pipeline worker. I had been reporting from the water protector
00:28:39.560efforts to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline for some time and reporting on those
00:28:47.120efforts by, I mean, just to sort of backtrack a little bit because it reflects back on the
00:28:51.760conversation we were having before. North Dakota is a state that has really been at the heart of
00:28:57.360the fracking boom and saw, like Colorado, as I was describing, but even more so, just a huge
00:29:04.220dramatic increase in oil production, in particular, coming from fracking, and that a great deal of that
00:29:10.000production was taking place on Native American lands and Native American territory. And those
00:29:16.640communities that had already been working against those oil and gas operations that already existed0.85
00:29:23.120in primarily oil in that state, those Native American communities, very quickly when the
00:29:28.200proposal for the Dakota Access Pipeline was put forward were rejecting having the pipeline on
00:29:34.280their territory because they were well aware of the risks associated having experienced a tremendous
00:29:41.080amount of oil spills, all sorts of flaring and other human health impacts of the fracking
00:29:47.500operations that already took place where they live, the experience of the economic ups and downs that
00:29:54.000came with the oil production, and not wanting to see the risks associated with pipeline construction
00:29:59.340come where they live. And similar to the story that I described with the Bella Romero School
00:30:03.220here in Colorado, the Dakota Access Pipeline was originally supposed to go on a path that took it
00:30:10.820in a largely white area of North Dakota, and then when that area protested, it was redirected onto
00:30:18.960near the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's land, and that construction got underway under fierce
00:30:25.580resistance. But while that construction was taking place, I also wanted to know, in addition to
00:30:31.260reporting on the opposition of where the pipeline was going to be situated in the communities that
00:30:36.380lived there and would be impacted by if there was failure to that construction, the people whose job
00:30:41.780it was to create the pipeline as well. So I did this investigation on pipeline worker safety,
00:30:46.980and what I found was that though it had not been well reported, there were two deaths of pipeline
00:30:55.140construction workers during the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Nicholas Janisich
00:31:00.080and Troy Dolan. They died at opposite ends of the pipeline doing different methods of construction.
00:31:06.500And then starting from there, I started looking at how safe or dangerous is pipeline construction
00:31:12.800in general. And I found that while the Bureau of Labor Statistics produces fatality rates
00:31:18.280for oil and gas extraction, like it does for many other sectors of the economy,
00:31:23.600it had never produced a fatality rate for oil and pipeline construction. So I had to use their
00:31:29.180methodology, to follow that methodology and adhere to their methodology to determine the
00:31:34.120fatality statistic myself, which I did. And what I found was that, unfortunately, oil and gas
00:31:39.600pipeline construction workers, similarly to extraction workers, have among the highest
00:31:44.640fatality rates for any job in the country. There has been, and this was intensified during the
00:31:49.520Trump administration, a extreme lack of regulation over the safety of workers who do oil and gas work
00:31:57.500across the board. And one of the main reasons for that is that they work within an industry that is
00:32:02.560extremely powerful politically, and they have historically been almost entirely non-unionized.
00:32:07.800So they have not had a strong union to protect them, and they have had a very strong worker to
00:32:12.760try to have as few regulations over them as possible. And that means that you have a great
00:32:18.940deal of dangerous work being done under dangerous conditions. And I would say that those parts of the
00:32:26.600job that are unionized, which, for example, the Dakota Access Pipeline was done by union labor,
00:32:33.780I did find that union jobs overall have a much lower fatality rate than those that aren't
00:32:39.940unionized. But overall, because this job sector has very, very, very low unionization,
00:32:45.880it has an incredibly high fatality and injury rate. So it's dangerous hard work
00:32:52.000that's being done under conditions that do not provide the appropriate level of regulatory
00:32:58.360oversight or protection for their workers. It's also a very transitory set of workers.
00:33:03.960They're often, increasingly, it is a undocumented labor pool, which means that there are workers
00:33:11.660who are not willing to speak up when they're put into, or not able to speak up when they're put
00:33:16.740into extremely dangerous working conditions for fear of retaliation against their own status
00:33:21.880and that of their family. And so this combination just creates extremely, extremely dangerous
00:33:27.900working conditions. And then when you add to those factors, oil and natural gas are, of course,
00:33:33.500volatile products. They are dangerous to work with. They make the work so much more dangerous.
00:33:39.920That adds to having this higher fatality rate. And building pipelines is similar to construction
00:33:45.880work, which also has a very, very high fatality and injury rate. And so it all goes to
00:33:51.780this sort of deeply problematic working environment where workers are put into dangerous situations
00:33:59.560without appropriate protections made all the worse by the fact that you're working with
00:34:05.800extremely volatile resources. Yeah. Well, within this period of untethered expansion of oil,
00:34:12.560natural gas, and coal production, I'd like to turn our attention to the current administration,
00:34:18.300which marks a key shift within US energy policy away from energy independence to energy dominance.
00:34:26.700So I'm wondering if you could give us more specific information on what has been unleashed
00:34:31.980by the Trump administration and some of the most important legislative or policy changes that you've
00:34:38.020seen over the past four years. And perhaps as a second part to that question, I want to say that
00:34:44.160for years the Oil Change International has proclaimed, we must demand a separation of
00:34:49.660oil and state. So with this in mind, as we move closer to November elections,
00:34:54.920I'm sure our listeners would be curious to hear what considerations to hold close
00:34:58.640as they head to the polls to vote. Sure. And I think maybe starting with the second part of
00:35:03.540your question, what's been really transformative about this entire election cycle is this focus
00:35:09.360on the separation of oil and state, which has been adopted by people across the country.
00:35:15.340And very early on, there was a movement to remove fossil fuel money from the electoral process.
00:35:23.380And in just an absolutely unprecedented turn of events through that organizing,
00:35:29.520through hard work and organizing by advocacy organizations, activists, people on the ground,
00:35:33.960concerned people, every major Democratic candidate for president, with a very small list of
00:35:42.420exceptions, but every candidate who I think is well known to the public, accepted, agreed to a
00:35:49.040pledge not to accept fossil fuel money in their campaigns. And that has absolutely never happened
00:35:57.400before. And that was definitely a result of the awareness of the public that it was just
00:36:02.540increasingly difficult to have an impact on the fossil fuel industry when it continued to exercise
00:36:09.120such sway over politicians. And so the willingness to take the fossil fuel pledge was incredibly
00:36:17.520unique to see so many candidates being willing to do that. And then beyond that, to have candidates
00:36:25.220like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren state that part of their platform was ending fracking
00:36:31.700And not just usually bans on oil production in the United States have tended to be bans that do not act retroactively.
00:36:40.460So, for example, California implemented a ban on offshore oil drilling as a result of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.
00:36:49.180But any operations that were already in place before then stayed, which is why there is still drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara, because it was grandfathered in.
00:36:57.380But these calls for fracking bans are calling for not only a halt to permitting for any new fracking, but then moving aggressively retroactively to undo existing operations as well.
00:37:08.900Again, sort of unprecedented. But many candidates, including Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, not only introduced Ann Sanders and Warren, also introduced really unprecedented climate crisis platforms and environmental justice platforms.
00:37:27.380and platforms that include policies for just transition. And that, again, just sort of
00:37:32.100unprecedented across the board, the level of detail on environmental justice, I would say,
00:37:36.700in particular, and just transition, which is a somewhat fairly new concept, also embraced within
00:37:42.800these platforms. And I think that's just so different from what has come before. But then
00:37:48.180compared to the Trump administration, and sort of starting back with the question that you asked,
00:37:52.760the Trump administration has obviously gone in the opposite approach. So the Trump administration
00:37:58.440introduced a new idea into the American lexicon on oil and gas, which it had been for decades.
00:38:06.300American presidents had declared, whether they meant it or not, that they wanted to make America
00:38:11.400energy independent. So declare our independence from reliance on other sources of oil. And like
00:38:19.280I said, some meant it, some didn't, but that was their stated position. Trump came in and his
00:38:25.400administration declared that the United States would not only seek to be independent, but also
00:38:31.220seek global energy dominance, to exert American power by being a massive oil and gas producer,
00:38:42.360and to join the ranks of Russia and Saudi Arabia as a nation that wields its power in all the
00:38:48.520traditional ways that it has already done so through its role as being massive oil and gas
00:38:54.820producer. And to achieve that, the Trump administration just moved aggressively on
00:39:01.500a deregulatory process. So within just the first six months in office, through executive orders
00:39:09.020and rule changes, the Trump administration essentially froze the regulatory process
00:39:14.260with nearly 300 federal regulations specifically related to energy production and environmental
00:39:19.880protection affecting public health, worker safety, tribal sovereignty, and the climate
00:39:25.840were rescinded, withdrawn, or otherwise stalled. And that is just across the board, eliminating
00:39:32.680rules that would protect each of those sectors. And then also just aggressively expanding the
00:39:41.460amount of public lands that are available to oil and gas drilling. So the Bureau of Land Management
00:39:47.680changed its oil and gas leasing policy to limit public comment and environmental reviews to speed
00:39:54.080up permitting and to expand leasing. And the result was six times the amount of public land
00:39:59.460was made available to oil and gas drilling than had been the case just two years earlier. And the
00:40:05.600amount of oil and natural gas wells now on lands administered by the Department of Interior
00:40:11.800increased by 85 percent in one year. So this onslaught of new production taking place on
00:40:18.460public lands and on private lands, as we were already discussing with Colorado and North Dakota,
00:40:24.120has just outpaced the ability of state regulators, federal regulators, to keep up with the amount of
00:40:32.320production that's happening to even implement the rules that are still left on the books.
00:40:38.140And so that has resulted in the Trump administration succeeding in its stated goal.
00:40:46.280The United States is now a player with Russia and Saudi Arabia in determining how oil shapes
00:40:55.520the global economy by being able to now be a country that controls a huge spigot of oil and
00:41:03.680natural gas. And that has been to the detriment of tribal sovereignty, public health, the environment,
00:41:10.380the climate, just the ability to enjoy the natural environment. You know, that's certainly something
00:41:16.520I experienced here in Colorado with the way that the state has been transformed, a state that
00:41:20.700loves its environment and loves being in it, that has also been transformed. And that is true
00:41:26.560across states across the country. And so that has only been accelerated. And it seems like
00:41:32.700we'll know more when this interview airs. But right now, we're right in the middle
00:41:36.460of the discussion over the $2 trillion stimulus package in the wake of COVID-19. And it seems
00:41:44.880clear that while there are many, many important provisions within the stimulus that will help
00:41:50.700workers that are directed towards tribal communities that will help average families.
00:41:55.900There's also a push among the industry to continue with deregulation, so to use the
00:42:01.740COVID-19 crisis as a reason to say and to argue, which they are arguing, that they should
00:42:07.240have even less enforcement of health and safety regulations right now because they need to
00:42:12.800just keep producing, and that a large, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars worth of the
00:42:18.980stimulus package will go towards propping up the failing industry. So I guess one of the things I
00:42:24.980didn't say was that even though there was all this production taking place across the United States,
00:42:29.180U.S. fracking companies in particular, the small and medium-sized ones, have been losing money for
00:42:34.240decades. They are about $200 billion in debt in the United States alone, and that's 200 with a B.
00:42:40.580They have losing money, but they've been being propped up by the banks. And now the banks,
00:42:44.800as I said earlier, are rethinking that approach because of tremendous amount of activism. And now
00:42:49.900the federal government may step in and provide that support to an industry that in any sort of
00:42:57.740traditional market economy would have been allowed to fail because it's not making money. Or in an
00:43:04.520economy that is trying to transition through a just transition to a green economy would have been
00:43:08.880allowed to fail because the transition can only happen if those companies aren't operating at the
00:43:14.140same scale that they currently are. And so the Trump administration and the GOP Congress is
00:43:18.800certainly trying to put forward this model of how do we use the stimulus to continue to deregulate
00:43:26.700the industry and to continue to prop up fossil fuels. At the same time, there is a very, very
00:43:32.200strong movement trying to do the opposite, to implement a green stimulus package, to try to
00:43:37.800continue to move forward on a just transition, a green transition, and to use that as a way to say
00:43:43.260how do we envision a healthier economy moving forward, not just recreating the same problems
00:43:50.000that have gotten us to where we are. And so I think as we look to the election in November,
00:43:54.540there's obviously two very different visions of the future that have been put forward
00:43:59.860by candidates running for president on the Democratic side versus the model that's being
00:44:05.480put forward by the Trump administration. And we'll see how, you know, all of this plays out in light
00:44:10.640of having to respond immediately to the horrifying and terrible crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.0.99
00:44:18.220Hopefully, when this interview airs, things will be looking up from where they are right
00:44:23.620now while we're conducting the interview.
00:44:26.180Wow, Antonia, thank you for all of that.
00:44:29.180And it's so important for all of our listeners to understand what you're speaking to with,
00:44:35.600just to understand it all, but to really start to dig deeper because these policies and
00:44:43.520deregulations that are being put into place right now, and of course, the things have already been
00:44:48.300put into place by the Trump administration, but right now there's so much at stake. While crisis
00:44:53.280is upon us, it's a time where the government can really make a lot of moves. And just following
00:44:59.920this thread of Trump's legacy. In January 2018, the Trump administration announced plans to open
00:45:07.480up more than 90% of all federal waters to offshore oil and gas leasing, and later issued an executive
00:45:13.900order that undid protections put in place by the Obama administration in the aftermath of the deep
00:45:19.600water horizon explosion. In March of last year, a US district court judge blocked plans to reopen
00:45:26.460vast portions of Alaska's Arctic waters to drilling. However, there still remains significant
00:45:32.120uncertainty about how the Interior Department will proceed with its five-year offshore oil
00:45:37.700and gas leasing plan. So speaking from your experience reporting on the Exxon Valdez and
00:45:43.260BP Deepwater Horizon spills, what are the most important measures to safeguard as we move into
00:45:49.040these uncertain political times? What is at stake in the billion-acre-plus, or in the billion-plus
00:45:55.820acres off the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic coast? One of the things that happened when the Trump
00:46:01.580administration put forward its five-year drilling plan that called for opening up essentially all
00:46:06.760federal waters, there were a few exceptions to offshore oil drilling. And the exceptions are
00:46:11.120always right off the coast of Florida because it's too politically sensitive. And there were
00:46:15.680parts of Alaska, limited parts of Alaska, that would have been protected as well. It led to a
00:46:21.220huge backlash. So governors, even Republican governors, even conservative governors of states
00:46:27.540where there wasn't offshore oil drilling did not want to see offshore oil drilling come to their
00:46:33.040shores. Communities that live that are dependent off of the water all across the country, fisher
00:46:39.800communities, communities that this is their source of livelihood, but also subsistence,
00:46:45.460were opposed to offshore oil drilling coming where they live. Economies that were dependent
00:46:50.280on tourism were opposed to it. Economies that are dependent on people going out into boats and
00:46:55.360enjoying the water were opposed to it. And there was a huge backlash, so much so that the Trump
00:47:00.340Interior Department really backtracked off of this initial plan. But as you say, it's still the
00:47:06.140intention of the Trump administration, and it's still on the books, to move forward with a plan
00:47:11.560that would start leasing in essentially all waters off the United States. Now, again, this is a place
00:47:17.700where there is just an extreme difference on the part of candidates running for Democratic office.
00:47:22.340I'm not sure the extent of what Joe Biden has proposed. I know that he has called for an end to
00:47:30.980the money that goes to the fossil fuel industry, the tax breaks and the various subsidies that the
00:47:37.200industry gets. I know that he has called for some new regulation. I'm not sure of his position
00:47:43.240on leasing, I do know that Sanders and Warren had both called for no new leasing at all for
00:47:51.480new oil and gas operations in offshore waters anywhere in the United States, in federal offshore
00:47:56.060waters, and no new leasing for oil, gas, or coal on federal land. And so that's obviously
00:48:01.820a diametric difference between the Trump administration and at least Sanders and Warren.
00:48:08.260I would imagine that it is certainly less than the Trump administration's because during the Obama administration, there certainly had not been this type of an expansive increase in offshore oil drilling.
00:48:21.860The Obama administration definitely expanded drilling in the places where it already exists,
00:48:48.260And as you said, the Trump administration then lifted those new protections that were put in place to try and stop another Deepwater Horizon-sized disaster from happening again, the largest offshore drilling oil spill in U.S. history.
00:48:59.800You know, where we are right now is if there's a second term for the Trump administration and the economy is still able to do anything in light of the coronavirus, my guess is that the Trump administration would be deeply emboldened in a second term to move forward on everything that the Trump administration was not able to fully embrace in the first term.
00:49:19.260And that things like expanded offshore oil drilling, the things that really separate Trump from the Democrats, are things that I would imagine the Trump administration feeling deeply emboldened to move forward on.
00:49:31.960So while there was a temerity to move forward on offshore drilling in the first term, I would certainly see that as a potential area of expansion in a second term.
00:49:42.940And again, just a place where the differences are stark, but also there aren't protections.
00:49:48.480So there used to be moratoriums on offshore drilling in the Pacific.
00:49:52.800There used to be moratoriums on offshore drilling in the Atlantic.
00:49:55.700Those were lifted during the Bush administration.
00:49:59.540And I think many people still think they exist, but they don't.
00:50:02.860The only thing that has stopped new drilling in the Pacific, drilling in the Atlantic,
00:50:08.680more drilling in Alaska, and even greater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, is the decision
00:50:14.400of the federal government to offer leases or not in those waters.
00:50:18.480The Obama administration did not offer leases in the Pacific or the Atlantic, and in the Arctic, the Trump administration wants to offer leases there, and it can.
00:50:28.020In most of those waters, there isn't anything stopping them except for the willingness to do so.
00:50:32.200And so that's where a different administration could make a really dramatic difference in whether not only do we continue to see this expansion of drilling across the land, but new and expanded drilling offshore as well.
00:52:11.420I want to speak to one of your most recent pieces for Rolling Stone you write on Louisiana's Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch along the banks of the Mississippi River, where industry leaders like ExxonMobil, Coke, and Shell operate about 150 fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities.
00:52:31.380In this piece, you note that much of the new infrastructure pushing into the St. James Parish is dedicated to plastics, 99% of which is made from chemicals derived from oil and natural gas.
00:52:44.580I was equally stunned to read that the International Energy Agency predicts that in 2050, 50% of the growth in oil demand will be related to plastics production, overtaking oil demand for passenger cars.
00:52:58.680So why is the oil oligarchy pushing plastics?
00:53:02.640And does this issue raise the need to address both ends of production and consumption, say, around single-use plastics, for instance?
00:53:10.300So this investigation, as you had said, for Rolling Stone took me into St. James Parish, Louisiana, which is the heart of what's already known as Cancer Alley in Louisiana.
00:53:21.080It's where there's 150 petrochemical complexes already operate in a predominantly African-American
00:53:32.380And as the push to get off of oil and fossil fuels has really taken shape and has really
00:53:40.140been advocated, as I had mentioned earlier, at local, state, federal, international levels,
00:53:44.600the oil and gas industry is trying to save itself by saying, well, we'll keep producing
00:53:50.040oil and natural gas, but if it's not going to be consumed as much for energy or for automobiles,
00:53:55.280then we'll produce it to have it turned into the feedstocks that go into plastics.
00:54:00.080And that has been a movement by the industry to try and save itself by seeing an expansion
00:54:05.200of plastics production and plastics consumption. And the places where these facilities, and these
00:54:12.400are massive facilities that convert the oil and natural gas into the feedstocks for plastics. So
00:54:17.980they are like refineries. They require an enormous amount of energy themselves to operate. They
00:54:23.720release an enormous amount of CO2. They are being located in the same places where the oil and gas
00:54:31.120facilities have always been located, and that's in low-income communities of color, and that is
00:54:37.280happening as well here. So we're seeing these new facilities being located in places like St. James
00:54:44.460Parish. And what I was reporting on was a new facility that's being proposed, the Formosa plant,
00:54:51.220which is in its contribution to CO2 emissions is the equivalent of three medium-sized coal plants,
00:54:59.220is being proposed right in the middle of this community. And the good news in the reporting
00:55:06.540that I was providing was that there's also a local movement. I focused on one 67-year-old
00:55:13.760former special education teacher, Sharon Levine, who's led a local effort to try to stop the
00:55:22.300construction of this plant and to implement what she wants to see as a moratorium on any new
00:55:27.520plants in St. James. And she was motivated to organize because the high school where she had
00:55:33.640worked was sold to a chemical company and the high school was converted into the chemical
00:55:39.700company's offices and she and the students were shipped off to another location across the water
00:55:46.020and she finally stopped doing her teaching retired so that she could focus full-time on trying to
00:55:52.600stop this new onslaught of new operations coming into St. James Parish and the link to what we
00:55:59.140were talking about before with the Dakota Access Pipeline is that the Dakota Access Pipeline
00:56:03.100continues on. It connects to another pipeline, which is called the ECHO pipeline, which then
00:56:08.880connects to the BioBridge pipeline, which ends in St. James Parish. So the oil and natural gas
00:56:15.080that's being produced in North Dakota finds its way to St. James Parish, Louisiana, among other
00:56:21.580locations from which it is converted there into these feedstocks for plastics. And Sharon Levine
00:56:29.600and her organizing. Her family had been in St. James for generations. Just outside her house
00:56:35.020is a plaque to the founders of St. James Parish. It's an area that was founded by former slaves.
00:56:42.080It was founded to be a place where they could be free and to focus on their own independence and
00:56:49.200has a very strong sense of community built into that independence and built around sugarcane
00:56:55.400production. And this Formosa plant is being planned for to take over a massive sugarcane
00:57:02.600field that would be replaced with the petrochemical facility. And she very much sees the organizing
00:57:09.400there tied to the question of production. So the oil is coming from somewhere. It's coming
00:57:14.980from North Dakota. It's getting to St. James Parish somehow. It's getting there through a
00:57:19.820pipeline. Once it's in St. James Parish, it's being converted into another product, which is
00:57:24.880plastics and to look at that whole chain and say, can we unravel that whole chain? And that's where,
00:57:32.860and to look at the people all along the way, and that's what her organizing has been involved in
00:57:36.920and others in her community has, other members of her community traveled to North Dakota, for
00:57:41.200example, to meet with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to talk about what it means to be where
00:57:46.040the pipeline is being constructed and what it means to live where the oil is being produced
00:57:50.280and then what it means to be at the end of the pipeline and to work together and that this was
00:57:56.080very much a part of the idea of keep it in the ground policies that say it's not just enough
00:58:03.900to look at for example ending emissions from oil and natural gas so a lot of policy just looks at
00:58:10.100how do we cut emissions so that would mean less oil that goes into cars less coal that goes into
00:58:15.140energy plants, the emissions that come out of the product, but instead to look at the whole
00:58:20.660chain of the product and to say, what we really need to do is just focus on policies that say,
00:58:26.880we're not going to produce it anymore. If we don't produce oil and natural gas and coal anymore,
00:58:30.800then we won't need to transport it. Then we won't be converting it into something else.
00:58:34.720Then we won't be harming communities and the environment and the public all along the way.
00:58:39.600Some of that reporting was looking just at St. James Parish, but that's part of the context
00:58:43.460to answer your question on sort of how it fits into this larger keep it in the ground movement,
00:58:49.420really building steam and influence across the world. Thank you, Antonia. Now, in closing,
00:58:57.340this year, Rebecca Solnit penned a letter to a young activist on the first day of the new decade
00:59:02.420writing, quote, I have seen change that was unimaginable until it happened, and then became
00:59:09.240so ordinary seeming, a part of everyday life that people forgot that there was a struggle,
00:59:14.900forgot there was a transformation, forgot how we got here, forgot that we are living
00:59:20.100in the once unimaginable. I believe that there are many unimaginables in this moment that
00:59:25.700will become, must become ordinary, including the end of the era of fossil fuel, end quote.
00:59:32.780Now, though written a few months ago, I think this piece speaks so beautifully to the moment
00:59:37.780we're in as so much of what seems set in stone, static, and unchanging has once again been rendered
00:59:44.980dynamic and movable from rent freezes to economic disruption to lowering CO2 levels.
00:59:51.740So I know you're in the middle of writing a book on this very topic. So as we close this
00:59:55.820conversation, I'd like to invite you to share any reflections on the end of the fossil fuel era
01:00:01.360and flipping the switch on the unimaginable. Well, that was a lovely quote from Rebecca.
01:00:06.940Thank you for sharing that. You know, I think that maybe the way to answer that is to say I am in a state where there is enormous oil production taking place here. But there was in 2018, a push by local communities, organizers to get put in place elected officials that would better reflect their views on oil and gas production here.
01:00:33.240And they got a new Democratic governor, Jared Polis, a new state legislature that is now
01:00:39.720Democratic controlled. And those two bodies have put forward probably what is the most radical
01:00:48.360new oil and gas law in any state implemented in decades. And it's reorienting the entire focus
01:00:56.020of the oil and gas agency here from one who's tasked with promoting the production of oil and
01:01:02.440gas to one that is tasked with protecting public health and the environment. And it is putting in
01:01:10.340place rules that will likely make it extremely difficult, potentially, to expand oil and gas
01:01:18.700production here and make it possible for local communities to essentially ban new production
01:01:24.900where they live. And that ability to move from producer to sort of protector is something that
01:01:34.120would have been unthinkable even a couple years ago. I think there are so many movements taking
01:01:39.860place simultaneously for climate justice, for environmental justice, for economic justice,
01:01:45.000for social justice, that see shifting the just transition to a new green economy as paramount,
01:01:52.520that that is already seeing really significant change. And I guess, you know, I would add to
01:01:58.760this, and I did look this up, I pulled it up on my computer, looking at the records of the different
01:02:03.640Democratic candidates that are running for president. Joe Biden also, with Kamala Harris,
01:02:10.240with Elizabeth Warren, with Bernie Sanders, all called for no new leasing of oil and natural gas
01:02:17.880in public waters offshore and no new leasing of oil and gas on public lands. And that includes
01:02:25.960Biden. Again, that just reflects how much change has happened and what the potential is moving
01:02:33.800forward. Well, this is an episode that I know I'm going to re-listen to many times because it was so
01:02:40.620dense with information that we all really need to understand because it impacts us so deeply.
01:02:46.700there's so many facets to this all. And Antonio, I could have spent hours in this interview with
01:02:53.340you asking you so many more questions because your knowledge is vast, but the way that you're
01:02:59.120able to explain this very complex web is so clear. And I so appreciate the years and years you have
01:03:07.520taken to be with people on the front lines, to understand the policies and to be able to bring
01:03:14.500it to the public. So thank you for your dedication. It's been amazing to talk to you today.
01:03:20.000Well, thank you. Thank you so much for your excellent questions and for listening. I really
01:03:24.740appreciate it. This is the time of physical distance, but social interaction is so important.
01:03:31.320And it was a pleasure to talk and to share my thoughts. So thank you very much.
01:03:38.920Thanks for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast. I'm audio producer Andrew
01:03:44.320stores. The music you heard today was from Marty O'Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra.
01:03:50.500I'd like to thank our host and founder, Ayanna Young, as well as the rest of our podcast