S7, Ep3 | High School

American Enterprise [00:00:13] My name is William Shatner in this film, I play a successful American farmer, Eric Pearson. There are many opinions about America's rapid growth. Some say the character of our people caused it. Some say our gift for organization. Eric Pearson believes there is one main reason the land in this program. He tries to prove that the ground we stand on inspired, even dictated America's pattern of growth.

Amy Westervelt [00:00:47] Welcome to high school. Meet your teacher, William Shatner. This is from that series we mentioned in episode one. It's called American Enterprise and it was commissioned by Phillips Petroleum in the 1970s. They got William Shatner to host the whole thing. And in each of five vignettes, he plays a different character, each with a different take on why the American economy grew the way it did.

Dharna Noor [00:01:15] So right off the bat, unchecked economic growth is positioned as a good thing. There's no questioning that, and the series was created for high school civics and economics classes to help teach American teens about how the American economy was shaped and how it's supposed to work.

Amy Westervelt [00:01:32] That's right. It was distributed to schools and community groups through a company called Modern Talking Pictures. Their distribution plan for the series had it reaching 12 million people a year. Dharna, let's take a listen to the one liberal character that Shatner plays in this series.

American Enterprise [00:01:51] My name is William Shatner. In this film, I play Tom Novak, a community college professor whose field is ethnic studies Tom is a third generation American and the first member of his family to graduate from college. He has some strong ideas about what or rather who made America happen for him. Our economic growth is rooted in the special character of the American people. Palace Island, America's immigration gateway.

Dharna Noor [00:02:25] God, I love it. What so, so immigrants make America great, but only because their hard work grows the American economy, right? Got it. Got it. And you'll notice that so far there's been no mention of petroleum. Later references to it do show up here and there. But but mostly this series is actually focused on these two broader ideas. The first one is that capitalism is great. And the second one is that nature is a resource that's basically to be used for economic benefit only.

Amy Westervelt [00:02:56] That totally sums it up. And that's the focus of a lot of oil funded educational materials. Again, this idea goes way back to way before anyone was talking about climate change. American industrialists were really invested in pushing a particular approach to nature, really from the early days of America's founding. Melissa Aronczyk, a media studies professor at Rutgers University, has spent a ton of time digging into how this very particular approach to nature came about in America.

Melissa Aronczyk [00:03:30] So essentially, what if we want to look at the beginning of a 20th century national awareness about the need to protect the natural environment? We have to look at the naturalist John Muir and the forester Gifford Pinchot. And we especially have to look at how they interacted because each of them came to stand for very different idea of what nature and forests and the environment meant in the United States.

Dharna Noor [00:04:00] So, OK, Melissa mentioned John Muir, who I think most of us have probably heard of, but Gifford Pinchot, maybe not so much. He was the country's first Forester, the very first head of the U.S. Forestry Service. And while Muir really pushed this idea of conservation and nature for nature's sake, like this pristine nature idea that the fossil fuel industry has been trying to pin on environmentalists ever since then, Pinchot viewed it as a resource. He viewed nature as a resource or more specifically, as an economic resource.

Melissa Aronczyk [00:04:31] For Gifford Pinchot, natural resources were just that: resources. You know, it was lumber that Americans needed for development. It was water that may be needed for for serving cities that didn't have enough natural water resources. And there was an economic benefit to protecting forests, but you had to protect them for the service of American enterprise and the American economy.

Amy Westervelt [00:04:57] And we all know who won out in the debate between Muir and Pinchot. Muir's name may be remembered, but it's Pinchot's ideas about nature that underpin the American approach to the environment. This, of course, leaves out the approach of the many nations of people who were already living on this land before the colonizers showed up.

Melissa Aronczyk [00:05:17] But it's really important to just mention that neither John Muir nor Gifford Pinchot's visions included the indigenous people who were living on this land long before either of them came along, and that entire story of what the indigenous peoples on the land did with nature, how they viewed nature, their relationship with nature— that was completely ignored in this American storiy.

Dharna Noor [00:05:42] Yeah, and it's wild. I mean, so many people, I think, are just realizing now that maybe indigenous approaches to environmental management actually hold some wisdom. At any rate, this turn toward nature as an economic resource happened in the late eighteen hundreds, and Pinchot actually pushed the idea through textbooks way back then, too.

Melissa Aronczyk [00:06:01] He was very aware of the value of public support for his vision of forestry and to use every means at his disposal to accomplish that. He he wrote textbooks that he expected would be taught from kindergarten on up about forestry, and indeed they were. There were thousands of copies of his book sold. He created what we would today call press events PR events, sometimes with Teddy Roosevelt, where he would be sure to invite all of the news media of the time to cover the event when he appeared to announce a new policy or in front of an important natural resource. And he also made very close behind the scenes connections with lumber operators and others who would then, of course, end up supporting Pinchot whenever he wanted a new policy to be put forward.

Amy Westervelt [00:07:01] So, yeah, starting in the late eighteen hundreds, this idea is already being pushed in schools. Then the oil industry gets in on the education game in the 1920s and really continually pushes that idea from then. Until now, beginning in the 1950s, they start to lean on the free enterprise story, more and more

Dharna Noor [00:07:23] so by the time the public really starts talking about global warming in the 1980s and 1990s, the groundwork to limit the conversation had basically already been laid for decades. There's this very clear idea in Americans' minds about how you can and can't address environmental problems.

Amy Westervelt [00:07:40] Yep, and for high school kids, the industry's focus is all things economy, from stuff like the American Enterprise Series that show kids how the economy works to STEM programs that highlight all the job opportunities in the energy industry. That's our focus today.

Dharna Noor [00:08:04] I'm Dharna Nora from Earther

Amy Westervelt [00:08:05] and I'm Amy Westervelt. In this series, The ABCs of Big Oil, we're digging into the fossil fuel industry's involvement in shaping how Americans think about the economy and policy and how those things intersect with environmental issues.

Dharna Noor [00:08:21] And last time we looked at how the industry has used comic books and coloring books and cartoon characters to start shaping the minds of little kids in elementary school. But today we're headed to high school, where Big Oil's efforts get a little more sophisticated.

William Van Doren [00:08:37] Certainly, we get marketed to a lot. I get emails pretty frequently from different companies trying to either sell us like textbooks, textbook licensing, supplemental like online resources. There's tons of that all the time.

Amy Westervelt [00:08:53] This is William Van Doren. He's a high school science and math teacher in Oakland, California. He works at a private school. But he says that just like a lot of public school teachers, he's often on the lookout for supplemental materials and maybe more to the point educational publishers are constantly trying to market stuff to him.

[00:09:14] So if you saw something from Discovery Education, what would that say to you? Like, what does that brand kind of signify to you?

William Van Doren [00:09:24] I would want to take a look at it, but yeah, I wouldn't be too suspicious. I mean, ideally, like no matter where it's from, you kind of screen it before you turn it loose on your students. I wouldn't be particularly suspicious about it, but I would want to look closely at it just to see what it's actually about.

Amy Westervelt [00:09:40] So this one that we were looking at recently is Discovery Education STEM Careers Portal, and they offer all kinds of stuff for like high school guidance counselors, but also for teachers to do like a science fair or like a career fair around STEM. And then they have some activities and things that are around particularly encouraging women in STEM and people of color and stuff. All of these kinds of things. And then you go to the partner page and it's funded by like Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute and, you know, a handful of other sort of oil and gas companies.

William Van Doren [00:10:21] Well, that's that's really interesting. I would not have guessed that or been suspicious of that. Wow. It's like back door propaganda.

Dharna Noor [00:10:33] And you were asking him about this new program from Discovery Education called the STEM Careers Coalition. And if you go to their home page, it kind of looks like any other part of the Discovery universe. It's well designed. It seems super legit, and it says connecting stem from K through careers. But then if you go to the About US page and you click on partners and then you scroll down a little bit, you'll find a lot of oil and gas, folks. There's eight. Yes, the power and energy distribution company, there's Chevron, there's at the American Petroleum Institute, of course. And then under content partners, you find this philanthropy initiative called if then philanthropy is. And if you dug around a little bit on them like I did, you'll find that they're connected to this oil heiress in Dallas, Texas. Her name is Lyda Hill.

Amy Westervelt [00:11:22] Yeah, that's right. And then if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page where the association partners are listed, they're described as trusted advisers and subject matter experts. And there you'll find the Manufacturing Institute. Manufacturing Institute is the education partner of the National Association of Manufacturers, a manufacturing trade group that was key to orchestrating climate denial campaigns throughout the 90s and 2000s.

Dharna Noor [00:11:51] And this doesn't actually seem to be unusual for discovery education at all. Like if you go to the main discovery education site and look for curricula related to the environment. One of the two main options that pop up is called  Dig into Mining, and it's funded by Freeport-McMoRan, which is one of the largest mining companies in the world. Here's a snippet from the virtual field trip they provide there,.

Discovery Mining Lesson [00:12:14] Hi, I'm Lynn Landy. I am a geologist and a reclamation specialist. Reclamation is the process of restoring the land that has been disturbed by mining at a mine. Large amounts of material is moved every day, but only a small percent of that material is copper bearing. Therefore, we have to understand how to store the rest of that material. That material is stored in piles that we call stockpiles or tailing dams. When they are filled to capacity, we can reclaim them. The goals of reclamation are threefold. We want stability, we want to manage the water, and we want to create a self-sustaining ecosystem. We bring together a group of engineers, geotechnical engineers, civil engineers and the kinds of scientists that work on reclamation or environmental scientist. UST biologist geologists, soil scientists do this work for us. First, we reshape these large facilities and that helps reduce erosion, and then we add water drainage systems. This will allow us to take the precipitation or storm water off the facility, reducing infiltration. Then we deposit cover material and we spread that all over these facilities.

Amy Westervelt [00:13:29] So in this video, this woman who works on reclamation with Freeport-McMoRan keeps saying the word facility is, but she's actually talking about is land and by disturbed she means turned into a giant open pit. Mine reclamation is where they put all the dirt and rocks back on that land and try to engineer it to approximate nature. There's zero discussion here of the impact that copper mining has on water or soil. It's just, Hey, we take the copper out. It's in a bunch of stuff you use and then we put the Earth back together again. No problem.

Dharna Noor [00:14:05] Yeah, god that whole video is wild. And It's also just wild how similar it is to that chocolate chip cookie experiment that Kert Davies told us about in episode two. But I want to pause here and dig a little bit more into that STEM Careers Coalition because there's actually this section of the discovery education site called Social Impact, and it lists that STEM project as one of the three areas where Discovery says it's having a social effect and all of them have corporate sponsors. Here's one of the videos that you'll find on the STEM Careers Coalition site.

Discovery STEM Careers video [00:14:38] One of the things I really love is every day there's a new challenge, and I find myself learning constantly or on the edge of technology. We're able to come up with new ways of solving problems and and Chevron backs those initiatives, and we're able to to use technology to help us succeed. I'm Jessica Holly Drilled, engineer with Chevron.

Amy Westervelt [00:15:01] At one point, this Chevron drilling engineer describes flying out to an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in this weirdly glamorous way, like the way you would hear the Kardashians talk about going to a concert or something.

Discovery STEM Careers video [00:15:15] Our locations are well sites are about 200 miles off the coast of Louisiana, and so we'll take helicopters from the shore of Louisiana 200 miles out, and we'll actually land a little helipad on pretty much what looks like a cruise ship in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

Dharna Noor [00:15:33] Not sure I've ever heard an offshore oil platform described as being remotely like a cruise ship before.

Amy Westervelt [00:15:38] Yeah, I have to say I was pretty surprised at just how much corporate sponsored content discovery education has on offer, not just from oil companies, but just, you know, across the board. There are so many examples of like, you know, Procter and Gamble is There, and Campbell Soup and all of these different companies. But then I thought about it more and I was like, Well, my husband is kind of a discovery TV addict, and I feel like every time I walk by him watching a show on there, it's either about like some kind of mining or like treasure hunting. There's like a lot of weird stuff on there, you know. Or it's about nature but in this way, where nature is this thing over there for us to admire sometimes. But you found kind of a weird corporate connection between discoveries TV content recently too, right?

Dharna Noor [00:16:32] Yeah, I did. It was a pretty different discovery project than than the education stuff, it was for a new TV show that they have called Six Degrees, which is hosted by Mike Rowe like Mike Rowe, the reality TV host best known for hosting Dirty Jobs. So the whole conceit of this new show, Six Degrees, is basically like tying things that are seemingly unrelated together. So like in the first episode, Mike Rowe connects the history of Tinder, like the dating app to at the invention of the Horseshoe.

Melissa Aronczyk [00:17:08] But when the dust settles, you will see the undeniable, incontrovertible truth of exactly how much force you can find your soulmate.

Dharna Noor [00:17:18] But the show also connects everything to the fossil fuel industry. Is surprise surprise. Like, like in that first episode, Mike says this inventor who created the precursor to wi fi, used money that her boyfriend made in the oil fields to fund her work. Every episode of this Mike Rowe show is sponsored by the oil and gas industry, specifically the American Petroleum Institute and Distribution Contractors Association, which is like a lobbying group for a fossil fuel pipeline contractors. Mike says that this is who's funding the show himself at the end of every single episode.

Six Degrees, Mike Rowe [00:17:54] Six Degrees is sponsored by the oil and natural gas industry. Why? Because oil and natural gas can access everything,

Dharna Noor [00:18:02] he says it in every single episode. And Every episode has something like and the crazy thing is like, sometimes it's just, you know, Six Degrees is sponsored by the oil and gas industry because we need oil and gas for everything, whatever. But other times, like in this episode, he actually goes back through the story and is like, here's why the existence of Tinder is also connected to the oil industry. Because this random inventor who invented a precursor to WiFi, her boyfriend made a whole bunch of money in the oil fields. And so we would have no internet if it weren't for oil and gas. Like, you know, we need oil and gas for everything to run, and we need the money from oil and gas for everything to run, it's really wild.

Amy Westervelt [00:18:44] It is wild, because the whole conceit of the show is very much a thing that the industry likes to push a lot too, which is we are the center of everything. You cannot live without us.

Dharna Noor [00:18:54] Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Amy Westervelt [00:18:57] This feels like a good moment to note that we did reach out to discovery to ask them about their various corporate partnerships, specifically with respect to these education initiatives. No one has gotten back to us yet, but we're still very interested in talking to them and we're still trying to reach them. So if you have any information on Discovery Education's relationships with its various corporate partners. Hit us up at tips at Gizmodo.com. Or if you want to submit something anonymously, you can do that through Drilled SecureDrop link, which will stick in the show notes.

Dharna Noor [00:19:31] Yes, please do. And Discovery Education is kind of known as a major player in schools worldwide. My mom was a teacher for like twenty eight years and she is definitely used the materials. Yeah, and on their website, they claim to serve approximately four point five million educators and forty five million students worldwide. The resources are accessed in over 140 countries, just wild.

Amy Westervelt [00:19:57] It's incredible. Yeah, and that is a lot of opportunities for companies to shape people's ideas about the world, how it works and how it should work. And discovery doesn't just focus on science and tech. They offer curricula in social studies, too. They're obviously not the only educational publisher out there or the only educational company with corporate partners, but they're really, really big one. I asked that teacher we heard from earlier on William Van Doren about what he thought about this stuff and whether he thought it would be an effective way for companies to message, or whether, you know, high school students are too shrewd and too cool to fall for some of this stuff.

William Van Doren [00:20:41] If you can reach the youth, if you can reach him in school, like if it's in school, it lends this credibility to it and isn't, I'd be asking them, you know, I think if there's a speaker in the classroom, the kids are generally going to think it's pretty incredible. I mean, you know, teenagers can be suspicious on some level, but I think fundamentally they trusted the teacher. Who knows what they're talking about, has some expertize and authority. I mean, if I were a propagandist, I'd be wanting to get into classrooms. That's major.

Dharna Noor [00:21:17] It is major. And yet people working in the fossil fuel industry still really push this narrative that they're at a disadvantage in schools like they say that kids are being brainwashed by leftist teachers who hate the oil and gas industry. We obtained this audio from the recent National Association of Petroleum Engineers expo, where several industry leaders were actually complaining about just that.

Wayne Christian Texas RRC [00:21:42] Our kids and grandkids have been taught by a bunch of Vietnam draft dodging tenured professors about how terrible our country is and how terrible our oil and gas is.

[00:21:52] This is Wayne Christian from the Texas Railroad Commission, which is the state agency overseeing oil and gas pipelines and coal, not rail, in Texas. It's kind of little known outside of, I think, energy and climate circles, but it wields a lot of power.

Wayne Christian Texas RRC [00:22:10] And in this day and time, folks, it's time we get on our big boy and girl britches and stand up and get the facts out for what's good of oil and gas in the state of Texas in America, period.

Dharna Noor [00:22:24] Yeah, it's really just remarkable how similar this whole narrative is to one of the big messages in that industry presentation that we talked about in episode one, this idea that kids are not learning enough about oil and gas in school. So the industry needs to close that education gap.

Amy Westervelt [00:22:42] Yeah, exactly. It's very much talked about as, oh, people are just worried about environmental issues because they don't know how awesome oil and gas is or how much they need it, or how or how much we're actually doing about environmental issues. Here's Stephanie Reid, VP of marketing at Pioneer Natural Resources, a natural gas company, also talking at that expo,

Stephanie Reid, Pioneer [00:23:06] and I love hearing that there are even some high schools in and around the Permian Basin that are offering oil and Gas 101 courses, and it's incredible. And I look back and I'm like, Where was all of this when I was a kid? I agree. I think it can. You can really drive that change in the in the narrative that that other students are hearing about the industry. And I love that. I love that there's a huge push just to give people exposure. So I think that's fantastic.

Dharna Noor [00:23:40] This whole thing of like publishing these ideas through really reputable educational publishers and pushing content or ideas that just generally make space for the industry, or talk about this idea of tradeoffs between the environment and the economy, or how the practical thing is to always put the economy first. All of these ideas are really subtle and and really smart, and they clearly work even on suspicious tunes.

Amy Westervelt [00:24:06] Yeah, yeah. I mean, if there's one thing I've learned from reporting on oil companies for 20 years, it's that they generally don't invest money in things that don't pay dividends. You know, like they're not they're not going to keep doing something for decades if it's not working. And we've been hearing for a while that the industry is worried about a shrinking talent pipeline. So on top of, you know, obviously wanting to shift people's ideas about how the industry works and its role in society and all of those things, they're worried about this very practical issue of not having enough workers going into oil companies. Fewer and fewer young people see it as a good industry to go into. The American Petroleum Institute's announcement about the STEM Careers Coalition that they're doing with Discovery really actually frames that whole project as an API initiative around training future workers. It reads " to mark National STEM Day API and a group of partners are launching the STEM Careers Coalition that focuses on science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the K through 12 grades with an emphasis on equity and access."

Dharna Noor [00:25:18] And then it gets even clearer with this quote from API's President Mike Summers. Later in the release, he says "investing in STEM education and introducing young people to innovative careers in the natural gas and oil industry is a critical step toward tackling the world's greatest energy challenges and creating a better tomorrow as an industry that supports more than 10 million American jobs. We're committed to building the workforce of the future and preparing the next generation of leaders with the skills they need to succeed."

Amy Westervelt [00:25:54] Yeah, it's a it's a good double message there. We're going to train and attract young people. But also don't forget how many jobs we provide. Don't forget that you

Dharna Noor [00:26:05] don't forget that you need us, you need us. That seems to be the main focus in high school, really reminding people over and over and over again that the economy is dependent on fossil fuels.

Amy Westervelt [00:26:15] That's right, and reminding people what kind of economy we're supposed to have as Americans. That whole free enterprise equals freedom equals America. Thing only ramps up when you get to the university programs. I mean, it really kicks into high gear there, and that's where we're going to head next time.

Dharna Noor [00:26:35] It's gonna be a rager.

[00:26:50] Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast network. This series is a collaboration with Earther, Gizmodo's climate and justice site. My co-host and co reporter for the series is Darna Noor. Our editors are Julia Richey for Drilled and Brian Khan for Earther. Our producer is Juliana Bradley, Mixing and mastering by Peter Duff. Our fact checker is Trevor Gowan. Music is by Martin Weissenberg. Our artwork was created by Matthew Flemming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the 1st Amendment Project. You can find corresponding stories, videos and documents for this series on further dot com. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.