Here’s something different, courtesy of our buddy Moon Griffon – whose new podcast property we’re mostly sharing over at RVIVR, as his podcast (as opposed to his radio show) usually discusses national issues rather than state ones.

But today’s effort belongs here at The Hayride, because in today’s podcast Moon is talking to Greg Bowser, the president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, about the vital role chemical plants play in our economy.

It’s a little bit shocking, isn’t it? You aren’t supposed to hear that a chemical plant is a good thing. Instead what you heare is that they pollute the environment, that they cause global warming, that they’re powered by and process terrible fossil fuels and that they’re owned and run by greedy and corrupt despoilers.

All of which is gibberish. Chemical plants in America are cleaner than anywhere else, and they’re subject to the most onerous and expensive regulation imaginable. Most of them emit virtually nothing other than water vapor and carbon dioxide.

Which, of course, by itself is too much for the idiots in the environmental crowd (whose funding is and has always been questionable, as it’s our suspicion, not without reason, that it’s foreign in origin and thus intended to indirectly promote market share for dirtier Third World chemical plants). That’s the stupid global warming argument.

What’s funny about this is all of the enviros who want to picket outside of BASF or Dow Chemical tend to be decked out in polyester or “fleece” gear, which gets manufactured at chemical plants like the ones they’re protesting. Like we said, they’re idiots.

And of course the new thing is “environmental racism,” which is a fraud cooked up by some unscrupulous trial lawyers and Democrat activists. The theory behind that is that chemical plants are all located near neighborhoods which are poor and black rather than rich and white ones.

Which isn’t really true, by the way. In Burnside in Ascension Parish, for example, the ritzy Pelican Point golf community where former governor Edwin Edwards lived just before he died, there are at least three chemical plants within a couple of miles from that neighborhood.

But to the extent it is, there’s an excellent set of reasons why this happened.

First, a lot of the poor black people who live next to chemical plants chose to live there. Why? Because the land is cheaper around a chemical plant. Imagine that.

So it’s environmental racism that a chemical plant is supposedly poisoning the poor black people who bought houses next to that plant.

The other piece to this is that when the chemical plants were sited, they bought land that was strategic – as in, along the Mississippi or near road and rail outlets (and there’s a railroad running right along the river on both sides) – but also where it could be had in large volume at a reasonable price.

Who had that land? Plantation owners, that’s who. And when the plantation was a going concern, even after the Civil War when there was no more slavery, the farmhands and sharecroppers who worked the land lived around it. They weren’t exactly bused in every day. But when BASF or Shell or whoever came in to build a chemical plant, they bought out the landowners and built their facility.

And the farmhands and sharecroppers? A good many of them got jobs at the plant and made a hell of a lot more money than they ever would have cutting cane or picking cotton.

Between the corporate types who run those chemical plants, who aren’t exactly our favorite people either, and their leftist tormentors, we’ll side with the suits every time. We wish they’d side with their friends on the Right a little more than they do, but we can work on that.

Anyway, here’s the podcast episode with Moon and Bowser. It’s well worth a watch.