Called powering the midwest. We knew in the 90s that renewables were ready, that Energy Efficiency was ready and we needed to make a transition. So, a couple of years ago, we had been working on fracking at food and waiter watch at as the First National group to call for a ban on fracking, and i started looking at some of the statistics about how far we had come with Renewables Since the mid1990s when i worked on this project. And it was stunning. As of 2015, only five percent of our electricity is generated from solar and wind energy. We need to do so much better and, yet, here in a state like massachusetts, where youre not really suffering from fracking, but you are suffering from all of the infrastructure to really promote fracking and allow it to expand. So, i decided to write this book because you really need to know where youve been to know where youre going, and i wanted to see how wed ended up with this mon knoppizeed oil and gas industry that has so much power over our democracy and over the future. So i started in at the turn of the century, and i want to talk about that history. I want to know how familiar people are with fracture fracking. Maybe shy start by talking about the impact and why we care that theres so much oil and gas drilling and fracking across the country. Come on in. Theres plenty of room. So, fracking is a science fictionlike process that uses large amounts of water, toxic chemicals and very fine sand. Its injected deep underbackground in a well and then over multiple stages, the fracking takes place. The wells are drilled about a mile, up to two miles, into the ground, and then a horizontal tunnel is drilled, again it could be as much as a mile or two miles. Then this toxic mixture of sand chemicals and water is injected under very, very high pressure, in multiple stages, to fracture the rock, usually shale, and to release the oil and gas. And although were talking a lot about fracking being for natural gas, since 2012, 80 of fracking has been for oil. So, what is this doing in the community where the fracking is taking place . These are called sacrifice zones. There have been 140,000 wells fracked in the last about ten years, and today 17 Million People live within a mile of a well, and theres a lot of infrastructure to support fracking and the drilling and fracking for oil and gas. Were talking about thousands of miles of pipelines, compressor stations and processing facilities. Now, compressor stations, the fracking and drilling itself, the process and facilities, all of these have a lot of impact. They let a lot of chemicals, things like benzene, meth anyone, in the air, that make the People Living near the facilities sick. Since 2013 there have been 62 studies written about the health impact. 94 of those studies show adverse effects and Health Impacts in living near where fracking is taking place or the compressor or processing facilities. Now, lets talk about the water. Fracking uses 50 times more water on average than conventional drilling. So were talking for one well, anywhere from 1. 7 million gallons to 13 million gallons in a state like texas. Lots and lots of water is used, and fracking, of course, is going on in some of the driest places in the nation, places like texas, that have been having a drought. California. And in a state like colorado, frackers are actually competing with farmers for water in auctions and having a real impact. Now, when youre using injection to send all of this water and chemicals and sand deep underground, a lot of it comes back to the surface. Right . And its bringing not just those fracking chemicals and we know that although the companies dont have to disclose exactly what the chemicals are, we know that there are over 400 chemicals that are used, many of them carcinogenic or with other health effects. Now, a lot of that water comes back up out of the wells, on average each day about 10. 5 bill gallons of water. Thats a lot of wastewater. And it has to be dealt with. One of the ways its defendant with is by injecting it deep underground. Its called deepwell inesque, and we know that has it own impacts. Right . Earthquakes this isnt something i just made up for the book. This is something that the joggologyic service and a lot of authorities have now confirmed. Fracking wastes water injected deep underground causes earthquakes and in a state like oklahoma its been really shocking. Before fracking started, there were one or two serious earthquakes over 3. 0 magnitude. Today there are as many as 5,400 earthquakes thats a recent figure actually that are picked up on with seismic equipment. Huge number of earthquakes. And this is happening in multiple states. Ohio, arkansas. There are lot of other impacts but you can see that this is something, if you live in a community where fracking is taking place, youre probably concerned about it. Your family members may be sick. Having rashes, nose bleeds, and even more serious impacts. Thats why theres a big movement that has sprung up in these communities against fracking, and drilling. Which all touch on in a minute. But now i want to turn more to the story about how we ended up with an extreme Energy Practice like fracking taking place. Why were continuing to use fossil fuels even when our Global Climate is threatened. And as i was saying earlier, that story does begin at the turn of the 21st under when jd rockefeller, who you probably learned about in a history class, had rolled up the oil and gas industry, controlled 90 of it, used a lot of ruthless and unethical practices to drive other companies out of business ask to really control a resource that was very important at the time, originally it was used for kerosene, which people depend on for lighting their houses. Now, around the turn of the center, some other companies formed. Texaco and gulf were formed around oil found in texas, and in europe, there were two other companies. Ill call all these companies by their modern names because with the mergers and acquisitions through history, theyve gone through dozens of changes. So were talking about very Important Companies that have done a lot of lobbying and have a big impact where we are today. So the european candidate are shell and bp, the u. S. Companies were formed after Rockefellers Standard Oil was broken up, and as you remember from history, that Teddy Roosevelt challenged the oil industry under rockefeller and there was a proceeding and they ended up breaking up standard oil, rockefellers company, into about 30 companies. Now, thats usually the end of the story. But actually that should be the beginning of the story because standard oil wasnt really broken up. Standard oil got to write its own plan, and each of those 30 companies with exxon getting half the value, rockefeller maintained an interest in each one ask the three rockefeller companies were exxon, chevron, and mobile. We know exxon and mobile eventually were merged and actually texaco and gulf also merged into chevron. So, were actually talking about four companies today, but for most a good chunk of the 20 them century there were seven companies that were really almost dictating Public Policy, and the American Companies had a huge impact on our tax policies, they research that was actually done for oil and gas industry, the whole system of energy that we actually use today. And this got very dramatic in 1928, the kind beginning of the oil and gas industry drilling in the middle east. Youll remember that the middle east was created at the breakup of the otto man empire by france and britain, and the oil industry was already there and interested in the resources. So, in 1928, when oil was found in iraq, the big Oil Companies, the seven theyre called the Seven Sisters named after a greek mythological story before atlas daughters who fought amongst themselves but if there was ever an attack on one of them, they all gathered around and protected her. So they were nicknamed the Seven Sisters and thats kind of how they behaved. So, when this oil was found in iraq, there was a lot of overproduction. So, the Seven Sisters got together in one of their cab balls, drew a red line around the middle east, made an agreement amongst themselves they would only go in and drill for oil as jointly. Never go in alone. This was so they could watch one another. And that they would actually limit production, fix prices, and break basic antitrust lauds. After this agreement was made the three largest of the Seven Sisters, exon, bp, and shell, netted a cass until scotland and decided on a set of principles for how they would actually accomplish this pricefixing and moving Forward Together to break basic antitrust and monopoly laws we have in this country, and they met periodically after that. Meanwhile they were having a big effect on the rules that were being written and the laws that were being decided on prior to world war ii and then after world war ii. But let me step back a minute and talk about the Utility Industry a little bit because today we have this cabal of the oil and gas industry, the big electric and gas utilities, and actually the banks, which ill get to in a little bit. But in well, the oil industry was rolling up and really dictating the rules around oil and gas drilling and discovery. There was man named samuel insol dooring the same in electric utility and gas Utility Industry. He did something that is similar to what happened with the Housing Market in 20082009. He actually owned had an ownership in about 5,000 gas and electric utilities in 30 states, but there was a Holding Company structure, we would call its Multinational Corporation today and the Parent Company kind of milked the utilities, charging them big rates and fees for services. Meanwhile, he had investment companies, a number of them, and he sold the stock over and over and over again to these different utilities and this all contributed to the crash of the great depression. Now, talking about this because it actually has a big impact on policy today. So when roosevelt came into office, there was a lot of activity around trying to curtail what the oil and gas industry was doing, what the electric Utility Industry was doing, and then what the Financial Services industry at the time was doing. There were a couple of laws passed that i want to talk about because when they were repealed, it really allowed fracking and the oil and gas industry to blossom and created the giant utilities. So the first one was kind of an arcane law that you may never have herd of before but it actually regulated electric and gas utilities, said they had to focus on their main business, that they couldnt gamble with ratepair money and needed to have contiguous Service Operations and it really dictated the structure of the industry, keeping it from getting too big to fail. So that was one law, called the public utility Holding Company act of 1935, but you dont really need to know that. But they werent able to get natural gas included. In fact that law that i just talked about was probably the most controversial law in the early years of the roosevelt administration. There were 600 lobbyists in washington, lobbying against it, large sums of money were spent, and it passed by one vote, and they managed to keep natural gas out of it. So, three years later they came back and they were actually able to pass another law regulating the Natural Gas Industry because a lot of consumers had been really ripped off and there were urban cities that were angry and organizing to try to do something about consumers not having access to affordable natural gas, which was very important for heating and for Electricity Generation in some places. So, this law did something important. It regulated the price of natural gas and it gave the authority to a governmental body called the federal policy commission, and they used the cost of what it actually what the oil and gas industry had to pay to do to get the resource out of the ground, and then a profit that they added to it, which was between 5. 6 and 6. 5 over a 40year period. Pretty good for the times. So, this was called costbased regulation. Well, the Natural Gas Industry despised this. They also the electric industry despised the other law i talked about. This natural gas act also regulated pipelines. So you just couldnt go around and build pipelines and get them to approve it. There was actually a process to see if the pipelines were necessary. People could be involved in the process. It was lot more democratic. Well, then there was a big debate for the next really to the 1970s, and in the book i talk bat number of characters who played a big role in this. Some of them are really villainous. Many of them are big characters. One that comes to mind is bill kerr, who was first a governor of oklahoma and then a senator elected in 1948. Big belly, the white suit, big tengallon hat on. Have some pictures of him. He is actually the great nephew of Aubrey Mcclendon. For any of you who fold this industry he just died mysteriously. He was a big fracker at chesapeake and driven out of the company for bad behavior. So this is a relative, of Aubrey Mcclendon but actually every year, kerr introduced legislation for the oil and gas industry to do away with the natural gas act. Every year for the next well, until he died in 1963 from a heart attack while in office. There were other characters like john j. Mccloy, a favorite villain. He worked for the rock fell evers chase bank and someone we worked as an adviser for nine president s. He is part of that government that exists that is not elect we dont have time to go into, but he was the antitrust harvard claimed antitrust lawyer who time and time again stepped in to get the oil and gas industry exempted from antitrust laws. A lot of timed they were just sneaking behind the scenes to do this. It matters. This has been a debate since the beginning of our country. Remember, Thomas Jefferson wanted to have a part of the bill of rights, the right to be free of monopolies, and he didnt care about the price of gas or price of food. What he cared about what the political power that you get when you are such a Large Company that youre bigger than most countries, and thats what happened to the oil and gas industry. So big that really especially after world war ii, they could just dictate Public Policy and laws, and remember that the amount of oil consumed, drilled for and consumed after world war ii, doubled and part of that was used for plastics and also the industry was able to make sure that it was used for lots and lots of other things, other sources of energy might have been developed but they really were able to dictate a lot of how our tax dollars were used. So, i want to now fastforward because we dont have that much time, and i want to talk about what happened when these important laws were under attack and repealed. And i guess the story really begins well start at with the nixon administration. There were a lot of people in the oil and gas industry, very concerned about the environmental laws that were beginning to be passed and the movement, student movement, the real changes in society, the oil and gas industry were concerned about the environmental piece of this, but youll remember there was the warren court extending rights to people, categories of people, who hadnt enjoyed those rights before. There was the movement against the war. There was kind of a youth uprising. There were a lot of both conservative industries, conservative social interests and then a lot of corporate interests that didnt like to see how the country was changing. They helped elect richard nixon, and they also after Richmond Nixon was elected, he promoted some of the people who would weaken our democracy, people like lewis powell, who went on to be a Supreme Court judge, you may remember him. A Supreme Court judge that wrote the first opinion saying that corporations have the right the same rights to participate in elections as people. He also wrote a very important memo and if you arent familiar with it, google it. Its called the pehl memo. Some call it the paul powell map fest to. He was a very savvy man. He wrote out a plan for how corporations could take back the democracy and it was a longterm plan around how the most important institutions were actually going against corporate interests. He talked about the media. The university, all of the major institutions were actually helping to support this rewriting of the rules in the u. S. , including the environmental laws. So, this memo laid out a longterm plan for how to undo this, and lewis powell helped raise a lot of money to help make this holiday, include money from the koch family, the melonned, a lot of the very conservative economic interests in this country, and they need fact weaken our democracy and our political system by creating this. Now i talk about this in relation to the oil and gas industry because they were key to this. And when president carter came along, there was a lot of pressure on him, and in fact, democrats started receiving corporate money at this time as well because the Campaign Finance laws began to change. So, one of the things he did youll remember there was an oil problem because opec was angry about u. S. The u. S. foreign policy, and so there were long lines for gasoline and when carter came into office, one of the things he said he was going to do was have a ne