Deepwater Horizon - Choosing Profits over the Planet | 5

Journalist Zach Goldbaum has reported from the frontlines of the climate crisis, uncovering corruption, cover-ups, and corporate crimes that shape our world. As host of Lawless Planet, he investigates how environmental disasters are too often treated as accidents rather than crimes, and why corporations escape real accountability. He joins Lindsay to discuss the hidden stories behind cases like Deepwater Horizon, the rise of climate activism, and how the oil industry’s unchecked power threatens people and the planet. Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletter Listen to American Scandal on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season. Unlock exclusive early access by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting wondery.com/links/american-scandal/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lindsay Graham?

  Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 0:21Lindsay Graham?

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

• 0:44Lindsay Graham?

  In 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 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. And all around the world, stories of corruption, cover-ups, and violence continue to unfold on the front lines of the climate crisis.

• 1:29Lindsay Graham?

  My guest today is Zach Goldbound. 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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• 3:02Lindsay Graham?

  Zach Goldbaum, welcome to American Scandal.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm such a fan of the show. I'm happy my first appearance as a guest is not because I was involved in some sort of awful scandal.

• 3:13Lindsay Graham?

  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?

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. We sort of use true crime as a Trojan horse to talk about, you know, big environmental and climate issues. But I come from the doc world and the TV world. And, um, 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 Ochafalaya 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 Sheree Foitland and she actually connects back to the deep water story. Her husband at the time was a was an oil rig worker and and deep water was what drove her to become an activist. And so Sheree was leading this

• 4:15Speaker 03

  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 kayak activists 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 a show because I thought we were on the cusp of seeing a resurgence of that sort of activism, that sort of direct action sabotage. That at its heart was still the story I wanted to tell was the sort of human story of the climate crisis. The climate

• 4:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:17Lindsay Graham?

  But you have a bit of a problem here if the victims can be identified as as individuals. Oftentimes, the villains are very much not individuals.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  That'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 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. Obviously, at some point, Tony Hayward, the CEO, you know, started to come to the fore and in the storytelling and the reporting.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  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. And, and 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.

• 6:52Lindsay Graham?

  So in a sense, you're trying to remind us that corporations are people.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  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 were really at the heart of it were not. And so we should start looking at corporate crime and environmental crime as something that is carried out by people.

• 7:23Lindsay Graham?

  So returning to the, 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?

• 7:33Speaker 03

  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, that I was really interested in telling in the Amazon in Brazil where activists were being killed. One of our first stories was the murder of Chico Mendes, 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, Don 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

• 8:17Speaker 03

  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 Resnitchek and Ruby Montoya, who decided to sabotage pipeline infrastructure along the Dakota Access Pipeline. And 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.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  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. The company hired this organization, this security firm, Tiger Swan, 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 whether it was right or wrong. But the way that they were treated and the way that climate protest is being criminalized and penalized was a real early interest in the show. And I thought that sort of nexus of activism and crime was really interesting and something that we really wanted to explore early on.

• 9:45Lindsay Graham?

  It 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?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it's funny, people love to talk about trickle down economics, like the money's gonna go from the top to the bottom. But when it comes to crime prevention, it's like, ah, it'll trickle up. Like, 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. It was a tragic accident.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  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 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 Casseres, 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 Guadalquivir.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  And, 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.

• 12:14Lindsay Graham?

  Now, it's likely not surprising to anyone that the oil industry shows up again and again in your series. But I'd like to hear from you, what is it about the petrochemical industry in particular that makes them such a perpetrator?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  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 rein 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. And what that has ended up meaning is that fossil fuel companies,

• 13:10Speaker 03

  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, 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. It's that sort of power, when you become a private empire, you are given free rein to commit crimes when there is no individual accountability

• 13:55Speaker 03

  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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• 15:20Lindsay Graham?

  In the summer of 1881, US Army Lieutenant Adolphus Greeley and 24 other men embarked on an ambitious scientific mission to the northernmost reaches of the Arctic. But despite several triumphs of discovery, the men would soon face tragedy. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, after Adolphus Greeley and his men arrive at their destination more than 1,000 miles above the Arctic Circle, they get to work collecting scientific data and exploring the frigid landscape. But when resupply ships fail to reach them two summers in a row, they're forced to set

• 16:03Lindsay Graham?

  out on a desperate search for rescue, and not all of them will make it home. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American History Tellers: Greeley Arctic Expedition early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 16:29Lindsay Graham?

  Now, 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 reckon with?

• 16:58Speaker 03

  I don't. I had the same experience with deep water and the BP spill that you're describing, where it became more than an environmental disaster. It 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

• 17:40Speaker 03

  to look at the lead up to it. And in doing so, we realized how inevitable this seemed in retrospect. But in terms, 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 of examples, just in 2018, BP, you know, or it was rather a BP subsidiary, was dumping illegal toxic waste in Patagonia. And BP also dumped, you know, 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. They're laying off thousands. I think they're

• 18:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:54Lindsay Graham?

  One person you talked to for your series was Scott West, an EPA investigator, and he called BP a serial environmental criminal. Tell us about Scott and whether his assessment you think is correct.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  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 EPA'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. And 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

• 19:46Speaker 03

  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. And he caught a lot of flak 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

• 20:29Speaker 03

  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. And 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.

• 21:13Lindsay Graham?

  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?

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Sure. I mean, there's a process for cleaning these pipelines and for maintaining these pipelines called PIGGING. It'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

• 22:06Speaker 03

  an oil refinery. And 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'd 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. And so instead of catching that gas, the gas is

• 22:47Speaker 03

  just seeping into the air unbeknownst to all the workers at the refinery. And so March 23, 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. You know, I think there were seven additional workers that died at BP refineries, four in Texas city.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  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. So 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

• 24:17Speaker 03

  kind of all the information he needs to pursue BP criminally. And unfortunately, that's not what happens.

• 24:27Lindsay Graham?

  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?

• 24:38Speaker 03

  At the time, BP was charged with four criminal complaints. They were pursuing felonies in Texas city. There was a misdemeanor Clean Water Act in Alaska because the oil from that Alaska pipeline rupture had seeped into a lake. There's the illegal dumping charge that was from the 90s. And then there was an entire propane price fixing scandal that I won't even get into. So they're facing a series of pretty serious charges. And this is more than any other oil company at the time, and Scott is committed to assigning personal blame. And it's a little unclear about what happens next, but Scott is called to Alaska and essentially told by his superiors that they're going to settle with BP for all of these things.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  And so instead of there being any individual accountability, BP is basically able to pay these things out, which is exactly what they want. They were very pleased with this outcome. They wanted this case to be closed quickly. I think this The timing was extremely suspicious. It was right before some quarterly earnings report, so they could say like, look, all this stuff is behind us and we're turning a new leaf. And why it happened is still a little unclear. You know, Scott claims that the order came from on high, that a deputy attorney general in Bush's DOJ wanted this case closed. And to me, that's not out of the realm of possibility. It's a very oil and gas friendly administration. It was also very possible that the EPA simply did not

• 26:01Speaker 03

  want to expend the resources fighting these cases for years and years, you know, sifting through 62 million pages of documents. And so ultimately, there was pressure to end it. I think there's also kind of a bigger part of the story and just like the way we don't really want to, we don't want to piss off oil companies, you know. So after the Alaska spill happened, BP was forced to shut down like half of their North Slope operations, right? So they have to inspect and replace this long stretch of pipeline. That decision was costing the state of Alaska $3 million a day. So lawmakers also didn't like that the pipeline was shut down. And granted, that there wasn't a direct one to one with

• 26:43Speaker 03

  the investigation, but, but there is this kind of larger ecosystem where the, you know, the government wants to see these operations continue and the government doesn't want to be seen as getting in the way of private enterprise. So ultimately, the case is shut down and BP pleads out to these charges and they settle. And Scott, his belief that the Deepwater Horizon disaster would not have happened had this case not been shut down is based on the fact that he thinks that individual accountability could have a chilling effect. You know, if a CEO knows that someone could come for their neck, that may make them rethink some of the decision making.

• 27:24Lindsay Graham?

  Well, speaking about individual accountability, or just accountability in general, let's turn our attention to the culpability of the government. Not only is the Department of Justice closing a case that perhaps they should have pursued, but the industry is supposedly a regulated one.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, this is the thing, you know, there's a real cozy relationship between fossil fuel companies and the government. And these oil companies, truthfully, are the backbone of the economy. They provide energy, they fuel our military. The number one institutional emitter of greenhouse gases and the number one user of oil and petroleum products is the US military. And so, you know, the government sees these oil companies as a critical part of our national security, as a critical part of our economy. And so, you know, there simply isn't the pressure to do more. I mean, the government gives out drilling licenses. It is up to the government to decide whether or not these companies have permission to drill where they drill.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  And they, more often than not, get permission. And so, we have a real responsibility. If we want to curb emissions, if we want to meet any reasonable climate goal that would prevent catastrophic warming that we're already barreling towards, we can't have any new fossil fuel infrastructure. And yet, the government continues to do it. And governments around the world continue to allow for massive fossil fuel projects. And so, yeah, I think a lot of blame is owed to the government for encouraging the type of behavior that we see in BP. And had Scott been able to pursue this case without the government that he worked for getting involved and preventing him from pursuing it, we might have had a very different outcome in the Gulf.

• 29:13Speaker 06

  Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia spent her life exposing powerful people. Then, in 2017, she was killed in a car bombing. I'm Stephen Gray, and for the past nine years, I've been trying to find out who wanted her dead. That search took me to Malta through secret companies, organized crime, and eventually to one of the island's richest and most powerful men. Now, after years of waiting, his trial has finally happened. But when the verdict came in, the case took a turn that almost no one had expected. In a brand new update to the multi-award winning podcast, Who Killed Daphne? I'm returning to Malta to find out how we got there and where the search for the truth goes next.

• 29:54Speaker 06

  Listen to the new episode of Who Killed Daphne wherever you get your podcasts and you can hear the full six-part investigation from the beginning, ad-free with Audible. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app and by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 30:13Speaker 07

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• 30:50Lindsay Graham?

  Given that your show makes the case that environmental destruction should be treated like a crime, I'm curious if Deepwater Horizon were prosecuted that way, what charges would you bring and who would be on trial?

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, I'm not a lawyer, but I think ultimately executives like Tony Hayward and even John Brown should have stood trial for some of these incidents. John Brown was deposed in the aftermath of the Texas City disaster and, you know, 15 people lost their lives and nothing happened to him. And he oversaw a 25% cost-cutting campaign within BP. And that is what directly led to that disaster. And so I think charges have to be brought against the people that make those decisions. You know, the buck should stop with the leaders of these companies. It shouldn't have just been a financial settlement. Tony Hayward came in. Tony Hayward was the CEO during the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  And Tony Hayward was brought in to fix a lot of these problems. And ultimately, what he did was a cosmetic fix. And the cost-cutting and risky behavior continued.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  There has to be a cost imposed on the people that are at the helm of these companies. And unless that happens, these sorts of disasters will continue to happen and the the cost will be imposed on us.

• 32:11Lindsay Graham?

  We've been focusing on the oil industry and BP in particular, for obvious reasons. But I want to remind everyone that renewable energy and related industries have their own problems, too, and you've been covering some of it.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, to be clear, if we have any chance to avoid the worst effects of catastrophic climate change, we have no choice but to transition to renewable energy. That is, it has to be done. There cannot be any new fossil fuel extraction. But the truth is that renewable energy depends on electrification, which depends on mining things like lithium and cobalt. That's not good for the natural world. It's not good for natural resources. And so some of the stories that we've looked at are about renewable energy as well and some of the pitfalls of the clean energy transition, because it has to happen. And so we have to talk about how to do it right. And so, you know, we're working on a story now about cobalt extraction in the Congo.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Cobalt, which is critically important to the clean energy transition, has allowed companies like Microsoft and Apple to become some of the world's most valuable companies, some of the most valuable companies in human history. And those companies are built on the backs of some of the worst labor practices happening in modern times. I mean, people are mining cobalt in the Congo under terrible circumstances. And so if we're not also addressing the system of extraction and the system that has built this fossil fuel economy, and if we're just sort of moving the same exact system from the fossil fuel economy over to the green economy, we're going to run into a lot of the same problems. Now, they're not going to be as devastating for the atmosphere.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  They're not going to warm the planet at the same pace, but they will poison rivers. They will kill the people who are forced to mine these minerals. They will destroy ecosystems. I mean, just recently, Trump approved a 211-mile Ambler Road project through Gates of the Arctic National Park, I think is what it's called. And and that's to win this AI arms race. And so we have to think about a better system. But ultimately, we have, I don't see any other choice but to make that transition.

• 34:20Lindsay Graham?

  I'm wondering, finally, how has working on Lawless Planet impacted the way you view climate change and our ability to fight it?

• 34:27Speaker 03

  I think I'm less pessimistic than I was. I'm not in the streets in the way these activists are in the streets, and I'm not putting my body on the line in the way they are. And the people that have the most to lose and the people that have invested the most in this fight seem to me to be, surprisingly, the most optimistic. I think the climate movement at large has been unsuccessful. I mean, we are where we're at. I think a lot of people in the movement would not disagree with that notion, and yet a lot of those people keep at it, and they are continuing to find new ways to fight a problem that we have no choice but to fight. And so I think I came into this show feeling really pessimistic and really hopeless.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Every time I talk to people who have spent their lives in this fight, who have endured a lot and who have sacrificed a lot and who have had a really, you know, the toll has been high for these people, they still find reasons to be hopeful, and I think that's really, really encouraging. And so I think, as bleak as things may seem sometimes, I think that's worth remembering.

• 35:31Lindsay Graham?

  Well, Zach, congratulations on the show, and thank you so much for talking with me on American Scandal.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 35:39Lindsay Graham?

  That was my conversation with journalist and producer Zach Goldbound. His new podcast, Lawless Planet, including a two-part series about Deepwater Horizon, is out now. From Wondery, this is the fifth and final episode of our series On the Deepwater Horizon for American Scandal. In our next series, in 1993, three eight-year-old boys were brutally murdered in the Arkansas town of West Memphis. As the local police struggled to solve the crime, rumors spread that the killings were the work of a satanic cult. Suspicion landed on three local teenagers. There was no real evidence linking them to the murders, but that would not protect them. Railroaded by the police and condemned by the public before they even set foot in a

• 36:23Lindsay Graham?

  courtroom, the West Memphis Three would face a decades-long fight to prove their innocence and win their freedom.

• 36:33Lindsay Graham?

  American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.

• 37:07Lindsay Graham?

  American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship. Audio editing and sound design by Gabriel Ghul. Music by Throm. This episode was produced by John Reed. Managing producer Emily Burke. Development by Stephanie Jens. Senior producer Andy Beckerman. Executive producers are William Simpson for Airship and Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louie for Wondery.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  Ghosts aren't real. At least, that's what journalist Tristan Redmond always believed. Sure, odd things happen in his childhood bedroom, but ultimately, he shrugged them off. Until he discovered that he wasn't alone, that everyone who lived thereafter him also had bizarre experiences they couldn't explain. And it gets even weirder. It just so happens that his wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door. Is this ghost somehow connected to her murder? He decides to go where no son-in-law should, digging up a cold case and asking questions that nobody wants answered. Like, could his wife's great-grandfather have gotten away with the perfect crime? This is a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming

• 38:18Speaker 05

  coincidence, and the things that come back to haunt us. For the best bingeable series like Ghost Story, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.