Deepwater Horizon - Choosing Profits over the Planet | 5

0:11From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal.

0:33In April of 2010, an explosion ripped through the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers were killed, and over the next 87 days, more than 100 million gallons of oil poured into the sea. The scale of the disaster was staggering. Millions of marine animals died, fishermen lost their livelihoods, and coastal communities struggled with the fallout. But given British Petroleum's history of cost-cutting and deflecting blame, the disaster was predictable, perhaps even inevitable. Yet its executives emerged largely unscathed. Today, offshore drilling continues, and oil companies remain enormously profitable.

1:12And all around the world, stories of corruption, cover-ups, and violence continue to unfold on the front lines of the climate crisis. My guest today is Zach Goldbaum. He's the host of a new wondery podcast, Lawless Planet. This show investigates crimes against our environment, from the BP oil spill to renewable energy fraud to activists murdered for protesting development. Our conversation is next.

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3:18Zach Goldbaum, welcome to American Scandal. Thank you so much for having me. I'm such a fan of the show. I'm so happy my first appearance as a guest is not because I was involved in some sort of awful scandal. Well, aren't you involved in some sort of awful scandal? You are reporting on your podcast, Lawless Planet, perhaps the biggest scandals of them all. And you've done something interesting by framing these environmental crimes as true crime. Talk about your initial concept for this show. How did you come up with it? Yeah, that's right. We sort of use true crime as a Trojan horse to talk about, you know, big environmental and climate issues.

3:54But I come from the doc world and the TV world. And, you know, I'm a journalist as well. But I was working on a doc series for Comedy Central of all places. And I was doing an episode about environmental activism. And we had gone down to Louisiana to this place called the Atchafalaya Basin, where kind of the tail end of the Dakota Access Pipeline was being built. It was something called the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. and I met this incredible activist named Cherie Foytland. And she actually connects back to the Deepwater story. Her husband at the time was an oil rig worker and Deepwater was what drove her to become an activist.

4:29And so Cherie was leading this group of protesters who were fighting the construction of this pipeline in the swamps of Louisiana. They were chaining themselves to pipeline infrastructure. They were putting their bodies on the line. Some of them called themselves kayaktivists because they would kayak out into the swamp in the middle of the night to prevent construction of the pipeline. Other ones I spoke to called themselves pipeline jumpers. They were moving from pipeline to pipeline to try to stop the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. And I kind of came up with the show because I thought we were on the cusp of seeing a resurgence of that sort of activism, that sort of direct action, sabotage.

5:09That at its heart was still the story I wanted to tell was the sort of human story of the climate crisis. The climate crisis is really abstract. So I think people have a really difficult time kind of wrapping their head around it. And I think the best way for people to connect with it is by the crisis having a human face. So understanding who the victims are, understanding who's fighting back, and really trying to connect with the human story at the center of the crisis. But you have a bit of a problem here if the victims can be identified as individuals. Oftentimes, the villains are very much not individuals.

5:42That's true. I mean, I think that we have a really hard time as a society looking at corporate crime as crime at all. And I think oftentimes when we look at victims, like you said, they're individual people. And when we look at the villains in the story, they're large companies. And I think that's a failure of some of the storytelling around the climate crisis. For example, in the deep water story that we're talking about today, I went to look back at some of the early news articles about the spill, and people would call it the Gulf oil spill. You know, we wouldn't be naming the perpetrator. We wouldn't be naming BP.

6:19Obviously, at some point, Tony Hayward, the CEO, you know, started to come to the fore in the storytelling and the reporting. But we often describe these events as accidents and not choices made by people. And I think it's a broader problem in our culture. It's not strictly a journalism or a media or storytelling problem. I mean, we have a really hard time seeing corporate crime or white-collar crime as a crime, but white-collar crime may be less visible, but that doesn't mean they don't cause harm. I mean, you look at the financial crisis, you know, not a single top Wall Street executive went to jail, but those are the people that perpetrated that crime.

6:57And the same is true of environmental crime. So I think it's important to name the villains in the story and name the bad guys and put a face to them just as much as it is to put a face to the victims. So in a sense, you're trying to remind us that corporations are people. Now you've cornered me here, but they are. They are people. And I don't think that corporations should have, you know, legal personhood. But if they do, they should be held to the same standard that people are held to. And in the BP disaster, there were two, you know, mid-level employees that ended up being prosecuted. but the people who are really at the heart of it were not.

7:32And so we should start looking at corporate crime and environmental crime as something that is carried out by people. So returning to the formation of your show, the germ of the idea, when you came up with the concept, were there certain stories that you had to tell, you had in mind that you wanted to cover? Absolutely. I mean, I think because the story and the show rather was born out of this experience I had watching climate activism. A lot of the early stories that I wanted to tell were about activists. It has never been more dangerous to be an environmental activist in the world. And there were a lot of stories that I was really interested in telling in the Amazon in Brazil where activists were being killed.

8:12One of our first stories was the murder of Chico Mendez, who was a rubber tapper in the Amazon who was killed by ranchers. And that story has repeated itself so many times since that happened in 1988. I mean, most recently, Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed in the Amazon. And so those stories were really interesting to me. And also stories about the limits of activism and the way we look at activism. So another story we told early on in the season was the story of these two young women, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, who decided to sabotage pipeline infrastructure along the Dakota Access pipeline.

8:48And the lengths that both the government and the fossil fuel company, Energy Transfer Partners, went to investigate these two young women is really shocking. I mean, it reminds me of the green scare in the 90s and 2000s, where the FBI said that environmentalists are the biggest domestic terror threat in the United States. And this was happening right before 9-11, by the way, so it shows you where the focus was. But these two young women, they were sabotaging pipeline infrastructure. No one was injured. No one was hurt. They did, I think, set fire to a digger and use a blowtorch on the pipeline itself.

9:24The company hired this organization, this security firm, TigerSwan, and they used post-9-11 counterterrorism tactics to surveil and monitor these young women and the people that they worked with. And ultimately, they were treated like terrorists. They got terrorism charges when they were ultimately sentenced. And there's a larger conversation that we had about the efficacy of what they did and what whether it was right or wrong. But the way that they were treated and the way that climate protests is being criminalized and penalized was a real early interest in the show. And I thought that sort of nexus of, you know, activism and crime was really interesting and something that we really wanted to explore early on.

10:02It seems like we're setting up a bit of a dichotomy in the way that different ecological criminals are being treated or viewed by the law. On one hand, we have these pipeline activists who are pursued as if they were 9-11 bombers, right? But on the other hand, we have the corporate executives that seem to get off without even the slightest slap on the hand. How have you investigated this divide? Well, you know, it's funny. People love to talk about, you know, trickle-down economics, like the money's going to, you know, go from the top to the bottom. But when it comes to crime prevention, it's like, ah, it'll trickle up.

10:37Like at some point, if we get these people down here, at some point, corporate executives will start doing the right thing. And that obviously never happens. But how we've investigated it is, you know, in each of these episodes, we try to name names and we try to really get into the details of what these people did and draw a real line between their actions and the crimes that we're talking about. And so what I mean by that is like, I think oftentimes we tell these stories, like, again, it's about how we cover these stories in the press oftentimes. It's like East Palestine, the train derailment just happened.

11:12It was a tragic accident. The destruction of the rainforest has just been happening at pace, and it's just something that happens. But the truth is they are choices made by people. And I think in each of our stories, we really try to, you know, draw that clear connection between the actions of executives and the managers of these projects and the victims. And so, you know, sometimes that comes across super clearly. Like we tell a story about a woman, Berta Cáceres, who's a Honduran environmental defender who was killed essentially on orders of the project she was protesting, which was a hydroelectric dam in Honduras on the Guelcarque River.

11:57and, you know, through investigations, it became clear that that crime was ordered by the top executives from the company building, the dam. And then other times, like in the case of BP and the lead up to the Deepwater Horizon, you have to start looking into the history and really realizing, well, these steps are how we got here. And each of these smaller incidents that led to this larger devastating incident, it starts to paint a picture of a crime. And it's like any crime storytelling, You want to start kind of tracing those clues and acting like a little bit of a detective. Now, it's likely not surprising to anyone that the oil industry shows up again and again in your series.

12:35But I'd like to hear from you, what is it about the petrochemical industry in particular that makes them such a perpetrator? There's this Steve Cole book called Private Empires. And I think that phrase really just epitomizes and embodies what the problem is. I mean, oil companies and fossil fuel giants are so powerful that they've been given free reign to do whatever they want. I mean, in the second quarter of 2022, Saudi Aramco made$48 billion, which is supposedly the largest quarterly profit ever posted by a company in global financial history. If you just think about what power that gives a fossil fuel company, it makes sense that they would then skirt rules and regulations and think that they can do whatever they want.

13:22And what that has ended up meaning is that fossil fuel companies, there are instances where they're essentially authoring legislation that impacts what they do. You know, it's a feast or famine industry, so it attracts gamblers and risk is rewarded and mistakes get a slap on the wrist. We told a story about Shell in Nigeria. They worked so closely with the authoritarian regime there that they were essentially calling the shots. And what that ended up leading to was nine activists, the Ogoni Nine, were executed in the early 90s for essentially for standing up to shell, but they were framed for a murder that they didn't commit.

14:00It's that sort of power. When you become a private empire, you are given free reign to commit crimes when there is no individual accountability. And when the punishment is essentially a write-off, there's really no reason for these fossil fuel giants to not engage in lawlessness and lawless behavior. But as long as we're empowering them to continue to act like this, these crimes will continue to happen.

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16:31Now, your show, Lawless Planet, recently came out with its own two-part series on Deepwater Horizon. And as we've explored, it was a huge disaster. Most people have some sort of memory of it. I certainly do, this daily race to try and seal the well. But once they did, it seemed like the event was over. And even in our series, in our coverage, I personally felt that there needed to be more telling of the story, but there just wasn't. Do you feel like it's something we fully reckoned with? I don't. I had the same experience with Deepwater and the BP spill that you're describing, where it became more than an environmental disaster.

17:09It became a cultural moment. I mean, I remember the spill cam. You know, it was in the bottom corner of every TV screen, and this just gusher of oil for days on end. I remember, you know, the late night jokes and the constant coverage and just the devastating aftermath. And at some point, we just were like, case closed. And obviously for the people in the Gulf, that wasn't true and the people closest to the story, that wasn't true. But what we wanted to do in our story and in covering it, we wanted to both tell the story of the disaster, but we also wanted to look at the lead up to it. And in doing so, we realized how inevitable this seemed in retrospect.

17:50But to answer your question in terms of like, have we reckoned with it? I think the answer is no, because a lot of the same behaviors that BP was exhibiting in the lead up to the disaster are happening right now. And not to spook you, but just to give you a couple examples, just in 2018, BP, or it was rather a BP subsidiary was dumping illegal toxic waste in Patagonia. And BP also dumped illegal industrial waste into protected areas north of Scotland. Before the deep water disaster, BP was cutting costs and laying off workers. And right now, BP is in the midst of a massive cost-cutting operation.

18:26They're laying off thousands. I think they're trying to do 15 % of their workforce by the end of the year, and they're looking for other ways to trim the fat. And the lead up to the BP disaster was part of a trend within BP to drill in riskier and riskier places, to go for oil where people hadn't tapped before. And right now, BP is, again, currently asking the federal government to approve a new rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which would be its first in the Gulf since deep water. So I think that another disaster is inevitable unless we curb that sort of behavior. One person you talked to for your series was Scott West, an EPA investigator, and he called BP a serial environmental criminal.

19:03Tell us about Scott and whether his assessment you think is correct. Yeah, Scott is Scott's an amazing character. So to pull back for a moment, the EPA has this criminal investigation division. They're like eco-cops. They carry a badge and a gun. And because the EP's logo is a flower, the former director of the CID, the criminal investigation division, we interviewed him for another episode, and he said they like to call themselves the power behind the flower. So you've got these like, you know, gruff cops who also really love the environment. Scott just embodies that mission. He was a special agent in charge of the EPA Criminal Investigation Division in Seattle.

19:41And what he ultimately uncovers is a lot of risky behavior. A lot of whistleblowers were coming forward and telling him that there was going to be a problem at BP's operations in Alaska, in the North Slope, which is the, you know, basically the northernmost point of Alaska. And, you know, at the time, they were led by a man named John Brown, otherwise known as Lord John Brown of Mattingly. But he's a really interesting character. He's not like the swaggering Texas oil man that you kind of think of. Brown's not a climate denier, which I think is also really interesting. Even back then, he was, you know, publicly recognizing the link between the oil industry and climate change in the early aughts.

20:15And he caught a lot of flack for it, and he oversaw this total rebrand of the company. They're no longer called British Petroleum under his watch. They're now called Beyond Petroleum. So they're like, we're an energy company, we're moving past oil. But the truth was it was all kind of a mask for what they were really doing, which was looking for more oil in riskier places, including in Alaska's North Slope. And they even were lobbying to drill in this beautiful, untapped wilderness of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. They didn't end up drilling there, but they were lobbying to do so. And these are places with caribou and polar bears and all manner of birds and some of the last great untouched frontiers in America.

20:52And as Scott West starts looking into their operations in Alaska and whistleblowers start coming forward, he starts hearing that their operations are a mess, that there's no maintenance, that the pipeline is in disrepair, and basically getting the sense that a disaster was inevitable. And it started to confirm some of Scott West's worst fears about the company. I'd love to know what perhaps some of the more egregious things Scott uncovered as part of his investigation were. What stuck out to you? Sure. I mean, there's a process for cleaning these pipelines and for maintaining these pipelines called pigging.

21:31It's like pipeline integrity gauge, I think is what it's called. And, you know, that's supposed to happen every couple of years. And BP had basically never done it. Maybe they did it 14 years earlier in Alaska. And there was one anecdote that Wes told us that workers were told not to have keys on their pants because if a piece of metal bumped the pipeline, it could rupture the pipe. It was that fragile. The pipe was that fragile. So people were coming forward and telling him that something really bad was happening. And as Scott West is looking into BP's behavior in the North Slope of Alaska, a different disaster happened in Texas City, Texas, where BP operated an oil refinery.

22:10And so what was uncovered in that investigation was that as early as 2002, three years earlier, the plant was known to be in disrepair. There had been a report commissioned, an internal study that suggested there were serious issues and that a major incident was essentially imminent. The plant needed urgent repairs, but BP was much more concerned with the plant's profitability. And so in March 2005, the inevitable ended up happening. This piece of aging equipment, which is called a blowdown drum, which is sort of like, it's basically a big cistern that catches gas and other debris from the refining process, it wasn't working.

22:46And so instead of catching that gas, the gas is just seeping into the air, unbeknownst to all the workers at the refinery. And so March 23rd, 2005, this blowdown drum is failing and nobody at the refinery knows. And all it takes is a worker to start a truck nearby that backfires and the entire refinery just explodes. And it's devastating. I mean, the whole town shakes. It's like an earthquake. And 15 people at the plant are killed. And those weren't the first deaths that took place at that refinery in Texas City. In the decade before the disaster, BP had reported more fatalities nationwide than any other US refining company.

23:28You know, I think there were seven additional workers that died at BP refineries, four in Texas City. There was an electrocution. Someone was crushed by a backhoe, someone was hit by a train. You know, it's staggering. I mean, the death toll at this plant alone should have sent multiple executives to prison, in my opinion. But that's, of course, not what happens. And so these things are just adding up. And Scott is watching this happen as he investigates what's happening in Alaska. And so in 2006, a year after the Texas refinery fire, Scott's worst fears about what would happen in Alaska are realized.

24:03So there's a huge oil spill, but because the ground up there is frozen solid, the oil, it's just not as much of a crisis as the BP deepwater spill in the Gulf, but it's still pretty damaging. And now Scott, in 2006, has kind of all the information he needs to pursue BP criminally. And unfortunately, that's not what happens. He said to you, talking about his investigation of BP, that if I'd been allowed to pursue the case without interference, nobody would know the name Deepwater Horizon today. What was the interference? At the time, BP was charged with four criminal complaints. So they were pursuing felonies in Texas City.