If you haven't listened to the climate podcast Drilled, you might want to, given today's headlines. A "Heat Dome" in the Northwest. Raging forest fires in California and Oregon. Fresh water supplies at historically low levels due to a prolonged drought in the West. In Miami, a rising sea level makes "sunny day flooding" a frequent occurrence.
Louisiana is sinking. Parts of Hawaii are rising.
Drilled, which sustainability site TreeHugger recently called "The Best Climate Podcast," returns this Friday with its sixth season, "The Bridge to Nowhere," exploring the rise of the natural gas industry.
In
the first part, "Pipelines to Plastic," host Amy Westervelt uses her
original reporting and research to dig deep into the connection between
the fracking boom and the plastics boom. Using documents and information
never before made public, she explores the fracking-to-plastics
pipeline through the lens of Taiwanese petrochemical company Formosa,
and how it found a new home in Texas and Louisiana - plus a whole lot of
local resistance too. Stories include:
- Formosa, a
Taiwanese petrochemical company, can't get the permits it needs to
expand in its home country. Its environmental record is too notoriously
bad. So it searches the globe for somewhere with weaker
regulations...and finds it in the American South.
- A
pipeline from the Eagle Ford Shale to the Formosa Plastic Facility in
Texas provides the perfect metaphor for the way the fracking boom led to
a plastics boom
- Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimp
boat captain, fights Formosa in Texas for decades before winning the
largest settlement in a civil environmental suit ever in the U.S., $50
million to go toward remediation and monitoring.
- Now Formosa has its eyes on building out a new complex, just down the Gulf Coast in Louisiana. Sharon Lavigne has organized her community in St. James Parish to fight Formosa's proposal, and Diane Wilson is hoping they'll be able to do what she never could: stop Formosa from building in the first place.
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank You for your input and feedback. If you requested a response, we will do so as soon as possible.