Links Between Fossil Fuel Companies and Police Groups

By Siona Ahuja ’24

Staff Writer

A new wave of investigations by the watchdog network LittleSis has revealed that major fossil fuel corporations are responsible for funding police groups in several cities. Corporate giants like Chevron and Exelon are official sponsors for police foundations — entities that provide grants to local police departments and innovate policing through new technology. The funds provided add to the 20-45 percent of municipal discretionary funding that already exists, ranging from $160 million to $5 billion annually.

Chevron is a corporate sponsor for the New Orleans Police Department and also has a position on the board of the Houston Police Foundation. The energy provider Exelon is a notable backer of police foundations in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington.

Wall Street firms that are the top financiers of fossil fuels are also inextricably linked to police foundations. JPMorgan, Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs have all collectively donated millions of dollars to the police.

Since police foundations are nonprofit bodies and the money is raised through galas or benefits, the gargantuan donations they receive often avoid public scrutiny. Reports from the New York Police Foundation state that it raised roughly $5.5 million from its 2019 annual benefit, the deep-pocketed donors including Goldman Sachs and Blackrock, among others. 

Companies which thrive only through extraction and exploitation are openly weaponizing the police and garnering their support in order to protect their interests in the face of community opposition and environmentalists. Oil and gas companies are disproportionately located in minority communities, which contributes to environmental racism. These areas are often overly policed with little surveillance, creating a dangerous intersection of environmental destruction and racism. 

Demographically, Black, brown and low income communities are disproportionately exposed to toxic wastes and pollutants released by petrochemical facilities, smelters, refineries and waste incinerators. Fatemeh Shafiei, director of Environmental Studies at Spelman College, has found evidence to confirm the adverse effects of living in proximity to such facilities. 

Joanne Kilgour, director of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Sierra Club, told Pittsburgh’s radio station WESA that drilling for oil is primarily done in low-income neighborhoods because residents cannot afford the legal counsel paramount to combating drilling plans. Kilgour also called these neighborhoods the “front lines” of environmental justice.

For the smooth operation of their industries and to eliminate opponents, oil and gas companies have joined hands in support of conservative legislation that seeks to criminalize pipeline protests. Since 2017, several bills have been put forward in at least 18 U.S. states. Texas, the largest oil producing state (4,637,000 barrels produced every day), recently passed a pipeline protest law that came into effect on Sept. 1, 2019. According to this, an activist having “intent to damage or destroy” a pipeline facility or even trespass a “critical infrastructure” can face a third-degree felony charge, equivalent to that of attempted murder. Similarly, any organization having similar intentions is liable to be fined up to $500,000. 

Enraged activists are pushing for action plans to stop this environmental racism as individuals and in groups. They believe that, to change this situation, a change in white supremacacist ideals in both policing and pollution is required. “The road to solving the climate crisis includes addressing connected predatory systems,” Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, the North America director of the collective 350.org, told the Guardian. Stop The Money Pipeline, a collective of over 130 climate, Indigenous and social justice organizations was launched in January 2020. Their recent campaigns target Wall Street and the fossil fuel corporate giants backed by them, and their demands ring of only one message: to halt investment in climate destruction and racial injustice.  

Shining a Light on the Plastic Industry

By Abby Wester ’22

Staff Writer

Plastic is both a central part of our society and a suffocating pollutant to the earth. Almost anything we buy comes wrapped in plastic, we bag our food in plastic and we wear variations of plastic. Not only does plastic end up littering our oceans and neighborhoods, but over 99 percent of it is made from chemicals derived from harmful fossil fuels. By 2015, over 8.3 billion tons of plastic had been produced, roughly equivalent to the weight of one billion elephants or 80 million blue whales. While this commodity has widespread use, there is little public knowledge about where our plastic goes when we toss it. 

We have all been taught the environmentalist slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This slogan is often accompanied by the calming implication that by throwing your plastic water bottle in a recycling bin, you are helping save Mother Earth. However, in 2014, at the peak of annual recycling in the U.S., only 9.5 percent of plastic was actually recycled. Recent investigations by NPR and the PBS series “Frontline” reported that America’s largest oil and gas companies have known all along that recycling plastic would never be a viable alternative to dumping it in landfills. NPR and “Frontline” detailed that, in a 1974 speech, an unnamed industry insider wrote, “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis.” 

While big oil and gas executives learned of the improbability of recycling on a large scale, commercials still aired across the country that, according to NPR, carried the message of “Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.” These commercials were paid for by the same oil and gas companies that knew the industry was doomed to fail, such as Exxon, Chevron, Dow and DuPont. 

For a while, the U.S. was able to hide its growing plastic problem and ineffective recycling programs by dumping plastic waste in other countries, primarily China. But in 2017, China announced a national policy called National Sword to halt the import of recyclable waste from other countries. The U.S. was then forced to reckon with its own plastic addiction. According to The Intercept, after the implementation of National Sword, the U.S. started burning “six times the amount of plastic it’s recycling,” which, in turn, emits toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, including black carbon, which contributes to climate change.  

Other countries, such as Kenya, have implemented groundbreaking plastic bans, looking to limit the polluter. However, the U.S. oil and gas companies have tried to sully these efforts as well. According to a New York Times report, U.S. fossil fuel companies are attempting to lobby Kenya to reverse its plastic ban and continue importing foreign plastic waste. The battle is now between environmentalists in Kenya, the U.S. and abroad and the fossil fuel lobbyists who are backed by the hundred billion dollar industry.

While it is important to limit personal plastic use and continue to recycle plastics when possible, the issue of plastics extends beyond that. The towering oil and gas industry has held environmentalism hostage for decades with the goal of producing plastic, profits and waste.