Beth Gardner

And I followed it back to the source.

I went to Washington County, Pennsylvania.

It is one of, if not the most heavily fracked counties in Pennsylvania, which is a major fracking state.

And if you look at the scientific research, you see that living near fracking wells is linked to all kinds of illnesses, including a lot of evidence showing higher rates of cancers in children who live within a mile or so of a fracking well.

And I visited the Bauer Bjornsson family, whose children have all suffered a variety of health problems.

And they've watched the landscape around them be changed by fracking.

There are fires, sometimes from pipelines and waste ponds.

There's problems with contaminated water.

There are pipelines everywhere.

There's issues of explosions.

And the impacts are so much more widespread than you might imagine when you look at that

plastic bottle in your hand, right?

First of all, plastic is made from oil and gas derivatives.

And the very process of turning those derivatives into plastic is a very, very

heat and pressure-intensive process.

It's conducted in these giant petrochemical plants that are massively energy-hungry, and their emissions are enormous.

But it's also that plastic is subsidizing and making more profitable the continuation of oil and gas drilling.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's helping to prop up this, you know, very catastrophic business model.

Well, the further you go up the food chain of governmental sort of entities, the heavier the lobbyist and corporate presence tends to be, the more pressure there is from that side on the lawmakers.