Petra chemicals has become a kind of mantra for the oil industry that thank goodness for

petra chemicals because you know that's where all the growth lies.

A few years ago I started to see an explosion in disposable plastic.

A restaurant, a naked school, it was everywhere and this was even before the pandemic brought more

and more of it into our lives. It seemed weird and it reminded me of what had happened with climate

change. We're a big environmental problem really seemed like it was being addressed like people

were turning their attention to solving it and then suddenly everything shifted. I wanted to know

what had happened and when I looked into it I found fracking. With the fracking of gas, a lot of

ethane and propane and they're considerably cheaper as a feedstock than oil and you know all these

companies had the bright idea well let's turn this ethane into plastic and then we can undercut our

competitors and we can make very high super profits and basically was the idea.

That was infuriating because I had also just discovered that fracking on top of creating a whole

bunch of environmental problems, radioactive waste, polluted water had never even been profitable.

That's something that I think has actually been emblematic of the shale industry as a whole

that it's an industry that's been phenomenally successful at producing oil and gas but it's

been terrible at producing cash. Now it was fueling a plastics boom bringing a whole new host of

environmental problems. There's a big build out going on in the Gulf Coast as well as in Appalachia

so using gas liquids from fracked gas and turning those into plastics in these giant industrial cities

really. The school shut down, there's no school, promoter is using the school for training center

now so it's promoter's town. My community was suffering, people were getting sick, my classmates,

I've had several classmates die of rare cancers. We had no big health issues until the

industry started to come in. But the fossil fuel industry is still pushing quote-unquote natural gas

...