The Blob

Big Oil, Plastic Pollution, and Donald Trump

In 1958, Paramount Pictures distributed a movie called The Blob. A carnivorous “amoeboidal alien” crashes to earth, feasts on human flesh, and grows larger and more ferocious until it’s the size of a building. The Blob belongs to a Cold War science fiction movie genre inspired by fear and paranoia about the scary science behind the apocalyptic mushroom cloud newly haunting humanity. Those were the years when secret military inventions flying above ground in New Mexico were taken for aliens.

Movie-makers in the ‘50s didn’t think audiences liked bad endings, but the Blob was never definitively defeated. In an eerily prescient final scene, the heroes manage to freeze the Blob and transport it to the Arctic Ocean, where it would remain harmless “as long as the Arctic stays cold.” Cue the thought bubbles: Haha! Of course, it would stay cold, silly!

I thought about The Blob recently, after headlines about studies finding microplastics in human testicles - at three times the rate in dog testicles. (The choice of dogs as control is a mystery, but apparently men would be better off eating dog food and licking water out of a metal bowl?)

Moviegoers of the 1950s can be forgiven for not understanding that a product like Tupperware, introduced in 1946, was the real alien invasion to fear.

There’s no question today that we are being slowly devoured by our very own Blob. A 2019 Canadian study estimated that humans consume between 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year depending on age and sex. Microplastics have already been found in human blood, lungs, and placentas, and are believed to accumulate in many organs. The long-term effect is still uncertain, but suffice to say, the opposite of salubrious. Studies have already shown the substance induces dementia in mice and destroys a protective protein in our brains.

Microplastics come in two forms: primary, factory-made, the building blocks of everything from water bottles to car parts, and secondary, formed by the degradation of those plastic products. Besides invading human bodies, oceans and other bodies of water are irrevocably polluted with them.

One would think that with all that we know now, we would have moved past the era depicted satirically in The Graduate, when the best possible investment move was, as a middle-aged man tells the young Benjamin Braddock, “One word: Plastics.”

A few years ago, I was dispatched by Norwegian public television (NRK) to interview citizens and authorities in a region of western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Eastern Ohio, where multinational oil and gas interests including ultra-green Norway were extracting natural gas from the great shale shelf that lies beneath much of the eastern US.

En route to the fracking lands, we passed a behemoth industrial operation, glowing with chrome lights and spewing vapor, just north of Pittsburgh, along the Ohio River. This was the 368-acre “cracker” plant, a Shell Global operation that churns out millions of tons of plastic feedstock annually. The plant takes ethane, a liquid hydrocarbon separated from the locally fracked natural gas, and heats it to extremely high temperatures, “cracking” the molecular bonds holding it together to form ethylene and polyethylene pellets called nurdles.

Nurdles are the plastic feedstock sold and melted down to make toys, car parts, water bottles and all the other plastic crap we use, and discard. Unfortunately, the little nurdles frequently escape into the environment before they are even made into products. According to the environmental activist group 5Gyres, some 230,000 tons of nurdles are lost to the environment each year, and constitute the second largest source of ocean microplastic pollution, after tire dust, by weight. Beaches are strewn with them.

The Shell cracker plant was constructed starting in 2016, to great fanfare, Pennsylvania authorities having lured it with tax breaks and lauding the arrival of a few hundred new jobs. But the plant has turned out to be a bad neighbor. It commenced operations in 2022, but within a year, Shell was fined $10 million for air quality violations, after already exceeding within six months its 12-month emission limits for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and hazardous air pollutants. 

For the fracking documentary, I interviewed a dozen residents with harrowing stories about accidents and spills and fish kills and overnight arrivals of machinery and 24-seven jet engine level noise and chrome lights and men ripping up and devastating formerly bucolic farm fields. Only when going through my notes and recordings later did I realize that almost everyone I spoke to had cried at some point. (The subsequent documentary, when it aired on Norway’s NRK, prompted Parliamentary hearings on Norway’s involvement and the state oil company is now out of the fracking business in the area.)

Among the people I interviewed was a local resident Jill Hunkler. She had built her dream home in one of the gorgeous green hollows common on this edge of the Appalachians. But Hunkler was in the process of giving up her property and moving because a nearby frack-related operation was polluting her water and the air in the valley was near unbreathable. She has since become an anti-frack activist and testifies at global conferences on reducing plastic production.

On the same trip, I met a journalist, Justin Nobel, who has since written a book on how frack wastewater, which is trucked all over public roads in the frack regions and sometimes disposed of in old mine shafts, contains levels of radiation orders of magnitude beyond what is allowed at nuclear power plants.

Hunkler, Nobel, and the people who live in fracked areas, or who are neighbors to gargantuan nurdle plants like Shell’s, are on the front lines of what is, for the rest of us, an invisible and slow-moving menace.

A Blob.

A 60-nation coalition, including the EU and Japan, want to end plastic pollution by 2040. Plastic and petrochemical-producing countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran and China have opposed mentioning plastic production limits in any treaty, as has the trade group Global Partners for Plastics Circularity representing major petrochemical producers including members of the American Chemistry Council and Plastics Europe.

Meanwhile, oil producers are ramping up plastic production in the US. Thirty more gas-to-plastic plants are planned from the Ohio River to the Gulf, including the world’s largest, a joint enterprise between Saudi Arabia and Exxon on the Mississippi, according to the Center for Biodiversity.

Readers of the Freakshow will not be surprised to learn that gas-to-plastic producers love Donald Trump. They like him so much that in 2019, the workers at Shell’s ethane cracker/nurdle factory outside Pittsburgh were forced to attend one of his rallies or forfeit some of their pay.

And Trump likes them back. At Mar a Lago recently, where female guests have a notoriously cozy relationship with plastic, Trump offered oil and gas producers a “deal” - cough up a billion bucks in campaign donations and he’d open up drilling, increase gas exports, cut their taxes and stop supporting renewables and electric cars. The “deal” which Congressional Democrats say they will investigate, is a pretty good one. Trump could save the industry as much as $110 billion (yes, billion, with a B) in tax breaks if he is elected. According to Lukas Ross, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Action, which conducted the analysis, that’s the value of special fossil fuel industry tax loopholes that Biden wants to close.

When Trump visited the Pennsylvania cracker plant in 2019 to speak before a roomful of workers, some of whom had been coerced into attending, he told reporters he was not worried about producing more plastics in the U.S. The befoulment of our land, the encroachment of The Blob, even microplastics invading American testes, are not high on his priority list. "Plastics are fine," he said. The real problem, he added, is what's "floating across the ocean from other places, including China."