After a chaotic 24 hours, this bill passed the house in under a minute with a chorus of

voice votes supporting the $2 trillion historic rescue.

It's Friday, March 27, 2020, and the United States Congress has just passed the largest

stimulus bill in its history.

It keeps being reported as a quote-unquote $2 trillion stimulus bill, which sounds like

a lot of money, but a fairly meaningless amount will go to taxpayers.

The big winners here are corporations and big industry.

Oil execs have got to be clicking their damn heels right now.

We're going to explain why in this episode.

In season three, we traced the creation of big oils, big propaganda machine, and now we

have a perfect example of why they spent so much effort, and money, and years building

it.

Only an industry that has convinced both political leaders and the public that it is an essential

part of the economy, national security, and really what it means to be American could

get away with what big oil is doing right now.

Welcome back to Drilled.

I'm Amy Westerville.

There are three key things to know about what was happening with the oil and gas industry

long before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

First, shale gas companies, also known as fracking companies, had racked up tens of billions

of dollars of debt, and those loans are all coming due soon.

Somewhere between 2020 and 2027.

...