American Scandal - Deepwater Horizon - Choosing Profits over the Planet | 5

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

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/wonderynewsletterListen 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.

Want to get more from American Scandal? Subscribe to Wondry Plus for early access to new episodes, add free listening, and exclusive content you can't find anywhere else. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal. 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. 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. 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. Hey, Ontario. Come on down to BetMGM Casino and see what our new exclusive the Price's Right Fortune Pick has to offer. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show only at BetMGM. Check out how we've reimagined three of the show's iconic games like Plinko, Clifhanger, and The Big Wheel into fun casino game features. Don't forget

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Tis the season to save money. And the best way to save is signing up for Racketon. With Racketon, you can make your list and save on it twice. Shop for holiday deals at your favorite stores like Adidas, Best Buy, and Sephora, and then get cash back on top of the sale price. That's Savings on Savings. You can check off everyone on your list, including yourself. Join for free today. Just go to racketon.ca, download the app, or install the browser extension. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Zach Goldbaum, welcome to American Scandal. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm such a fan of the show. I'm so I'll be my first appearance as a guest is not because I was involved in some sort of awful scandal. 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. True crime. Talk about your initial concept for this show. How did you come up with it? 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, 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 Achafalaya 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 in incredible activist named Sherey Foytland. And she actually connects back to the Deepwater story.

Her husband at the time was an oil rig worker. And Deepwater was what drove her to become an activist. And so Shari was leading this 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 kayakivists 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 the 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 crisis, the Climate 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. But you have a bit of a problem here. If the victims can be identified as individuals, oftentimes the villains are very much not individuals.

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 some of the storytelling around the climate crisis. For example, in the Deepwater 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 four and in the storytelling and the reporting. 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 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.

So in a sense, you're trying to remind us that corporations are people. 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. So returning to the formation of your show, the germ of the idea, when you came up with a concept, were there certain stories that you had to tell you had in mind that you wanted to cover? 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 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 Mendez, 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, Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed in the Amazon. And so those stories really interesting to me. And also stories about the limits of 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 Resnichick 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. No one was injured. No one was hurt. They did, I think, sent 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 protests is being criminalized and penalized was a real early interest in the show. And I thought that sort of nexus of, you know, activism and crime was really interesting in something that we really wanted to explore early on. It seems like we're setting up a bit of a dichotomy in the way that 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? Well, you know, it's funny. People love to talk about, you know, trickle-down economics, like the money's going to, you know, 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. 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, you know, 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 Kassaris, 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 Guadarka River. 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. Now, it's frankly not surprising to anyone that the oil industry shows. goes 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?

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 reign 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, 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 that 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 reign to commit crimes when there is no individual accountability. 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. In the fall of 1620, a battered merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail across the Atlantic. It carried 102 men, women, and children, risking it all to start again in the new world. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of American history tellers. Every week, we take you through the moments that shaped America. And in our latest season, we explore the untold story of the pilgrims, one that goes far beyond the familiar tale of the first Thanksgiving.

After landing at Cape Cod, the Pilgrims forged an unlikely alliance with the Wapinog people who helped the pilgrim survive the most brutal winter they'd ever known, laying the foundation for a powerful national myth. But behind that story lies another, one of conflict, betrayal, and brutal violence against the very people who helped the Pilgrim survive. Follow American History Tellers on the Wondry app,

or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American History Tellers the Mayflower early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. I'm Raza Jafri, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Morton Storm, the spy who lived inside Al-Qaeda. Unfulfilled with his life in a notorious Danish biker gang, Morton Storm is lost. One afternoon he stumbles into a library looking for answers. He finds them in the form of a book about Islam. The towering ginger-haired Dane doesn't know it yet, but That moment will hurl him into a world of radicalism

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Follow the spy who on the Wondery app, or wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can binge the full season of the spy who lived inside al-Qaeda, early and ad-free with Wondery Plus. 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 need to be more telling of the story, but there just wasn't. Do you feel like it's something we fully reckoned with? 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, who 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 to look at the lead-up to it. And in doing so, we realized how inevitable this in retrospect.

But in terms of, 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 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 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 Deepwater. So I think that another disaster is inevitable unless we curb that sort of behavior. One person you talked to you 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. 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 EP'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 a problem at BP's operations in Alaska, in the North Slope, which is 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 flack 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 looking for more oil and

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. I'd love to know what perhaps some of the more egregious things got uncovered as part of his investigation were. What stuck out to you? 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 West 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 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 had 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 cister and that catches gas and other debris from the refining process, it wasn't working. And so instead of catching that gas, the gas is 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 U.S. refining company. You know, I think there were seven additional workers that died at BP refineries. Four in Texas City. 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 deep water spill in the Gulf, but it's still pretty damaging. And now Scott, in 2006, has kind of all the information he needs to pursue BP criminally. And unfortunately, that's not what happens.

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? At the time, BP was charged with four criminal complaints. So 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 a 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. 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 was, 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 and 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 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 the investigation, but there is this kind of larger ecosystem where 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.

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. 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 U.S. 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. 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. How hard is it to kill a planet? Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene. Are we really safe? Is our water safe? You destroyed our time. And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents. There is no accident. This was 100% preventable. They're the result of choices by people. Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime. These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet. Stories of scams, murders, and cover. That are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Okay, Carrie, you're ready? Quick, quick, quick. List three gifts you'd never give a cowboy. Lacey Bobby Sox, a diamond bracelet. a gift certificate to Sephora. Oh my God, that's outrageous, Carrie. Oh, wait, we're recording a commercial right now. We've got to tell them why we're doing this.

Oh, yeah, sorry, pod listeners. Okay, so we're five besties who've been friends for five million years, and we love games, so of course we made our own. It's called Quick, Quick, Quick, you just pick a card and have your partner give three answers to an outrageous question. It's fast, fun, fantastic, and a bunch of other funny adjectives. Anyone can play. Your mom, your dad, your kitten, your kids, your auntie gna, and even your butcher.

And you know it's incredible, there are no wrong answers. Just open your brain and say what's in it, just quickly. And you're not going to believe this. Well, you might once you start playing, it's as much fun to watch as it is to play, seriously. So get up and go grab your copy now at Target and Amazon. Quick, quick, quick. It's the fastest way to have fun. Given that your show makes the case that environment,

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? 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 percent 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. 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. 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 cost will be imposed on us. 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 covering some of it.

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. That'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. Cobalt, which is critically important to the clean energy transition, this 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. 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 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. I'm wondering, finally, how has working on lawless planet impacted the way you view climate change and our ability to fight it? 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. 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. Well, Zach, congratulations. on the show, and thank you so much for talking with me on American Scandal. Thank you so much for having me. That was my conversation with journalist and producer Zach Goldbaum. 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 made. 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 courtroom, the West Memphis three would face a decades-long fight to prove their innocence and win their freedom. American Scandal, you can unlock exclusive seasons on Wondry Plus. Binge new seasons first and listen completely ad-free when you join Wondry Plus in the Wondry

app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a survey at Wondry.com slash survey. American Scandal is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship, audio editing and sound design by Gabriel Gould, music by Thrum. 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 Louis for Wondery.