The chemical industry is a sitting target for plaintiff’s lawyers and for people who want to sue you for nothing or for minor infractions. When we had a flare at our petrochemical plant in Odessa, Texas, in 1998, we set up a clinic for people who might have been injured or suffered health problems as a result. No one ever showed up to be examined there or in the local hospitals. [There was] a massive PR effort by a plaintiff’s lawyer who did this again at another one of our plants. We eventually paid $1 million as a nuisance thing. The lawyers gave everyone a small portion, kept 40 percent and moved on to the next chemical plant. 

We are in a very dangerous, difficult industry, with a great capacity for explosions and fires. Yet the other side of the coin is that virtually everything we see, feel or touch anywhere, whether it’s carpeting, shoes or cosmetics, is made up of plastics or petrochemicals. So at what point do you say let’s do away with these products and go back to living in caves?

We have cut our emissions in Texas by 88 percent in the last four years, which is something Texaco never did. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and criticize until somebody wants to open a box of Tide and do laundry or someone wants a Diet Coke.

Although you have long been a Republican supporter, you wrote to the Senate Energy Committee in 2003 arguing that businesses and consumers “are being fraudulently ripped off by big oil companies and futures traders at the New York Mercantile Exchange who establish prices for natural gas . . . .”

If the price of corn and wheat changes two or three cents a day, they stop trading. In the case of oil or natural gas, they have no limits. It’s a free-for-all that has nothing to do with supply and demand, and everything to do with speculation that does not exist in other commodities or agricultural products. I do believe that there is a great inequity between those who produce oil and other industries that utilize those products. There has to be some responsibility on the part of government at some point to step in and say we have to bring balance out of chaos.

OPEC has become extremely wealthy. You have to ask yourself, is this free enterprise? Of course it’s not free enterprise. OPEC is controlled by a cartel. There is no free market out there. It’s completely manipulated. If the government is ever willing to stay out and let market forces work, OPEC will cease to exist and the big oil companies will have other things to do than count their profits.