Damages

Greenpeace, which was only tangentially involved in the Standing Rock protests, has been slapped with a $666 million bill for damages...despite the fact that the Dakota Access Pipeline was built, and has been making Energy Transfer millions of dollars for years. How did we get here? Cody Hall, an Indigenous water protector who was a key figure during the Standing Rock protests and was initially al...

This season on Drilled, an Indigenous nation fighting for its water, an international environmental movement finding its voice, and an industry attempting to crush its political opposition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists compiles in one place all the documentary evidence on the role of fossil fuel companies in obstructing climate policy. We walk through the latest, and get an update on climate cases in the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In November, a Dutch court ruled in Shell's favor on an appeal in a big international climate case. It got loads of headlines around the world, but it wasn't quite the win for Shell that a lot of media coverage has made it out to be. Although it walked back some things, the court reaffirmed a key component of the original ruling: that Shell is legally required to reduce its global emissions. Learn...

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts vs. EPA that when the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, climate science was “in its infancy,” implying that government officials could never have intended for the legislation to cover the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2022, SCOTUS doubled down on that idea, ruling in West Virginia v EPA that since the Clean Air Act didn't...

In 2017, El Salvador became the first country in the world to pass an outright ban on mining. It was an effort to protect the country's water, and its people. Now, self-proclaimed "coolest dictator in the world" Nayib Bukele wants to bring mining back to boost the economy, which took a major hit thanks to his embrace of Bitcoin as the national currency in 2021. The activists who helped pass the ba...

Public Citizen has been working with various prosecutors to explore the idea of using criminal law to hold oil companies accountable for climate change. In the wake of recent Supreme Court rulings, it seems smarter than ever to explore the remedies offered by criminal law, but is it really viable? The group's senior climate policy counsel, Aaron Regunburg, joins us to discuss. Learn more about you...

The backlash against ESG is continuing, with a string of lawsuits aimed at shutting down shareholder activism. We don't often talk about shareholder activism in the vein of protecting protest, but it's absolutely part of the story. Andrew Behar, CEO of shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, joins us to explain what's going on, and why anyone who cares about basic rights needs to be tuning into the...

Lots of news lately on stories we've been following, so in today's episode: an update! The landmark Carbon Majors report has been updated with some surprising new data, and the European Court of Human Rights has sent down an historic ruling that will shape how EU legislators look at energy and climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shell announced in late 2023 that it would be shutting down all of its onshore activities in Nigeria and concentrating its efforts offshore. It leaves behind poisoned water, multiple political and economic crises, and a country that is measurably worse off today than when its oil industry began. Meanwhile the government continues to target environmental activists. Learn more about your ad choices....

The U.S. government's definition of what constitutes an "ecoterrorist" has long driven backlash against environmental activists and in recent years that definition has only broadened. Investigative reporter and Drilled senior editor Alleen Brown dug into this recently and found that the Department of Homeland Security had been warning officials in Atlanta about the threat posed by "Defend the Atla...

In June 2022, Michel Forst became the first UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders. In that role he has spent the past year visiting various countries and speaking out about the increasingly onerous laws and aggressive tactics being used against climate protestors. Today he released a statement on the UK, saying he is "extremely worried" about "the increasingly severe crackdowns on envir...

About a decade after UK courts made history with the first "climate necessity" ruling in history, the UK government has passed new laws that not only restrict what protesters can do, but also how protesters are allowed to defend themselves in court. Some judges don't apply the new laws so strictly, but others have held people in contempt for just trying to explain themselves. In some courtrooms, t...

While protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation garnered international news coverage, at the southern end of the pipeline, cops moonlighting as pipeline security were suppressing free speech with impunity. In this episode, reporter Karen Savage tells us what happened at Bayou Bridge, and what lessons the story holds for the climate movement and for a...

In December 2023, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers closed the comment period on its draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,172-mile pipeline that’s been pumping 500,000 barrels of oil per day since May 2017. The pipeline runs from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to southern Illinois, crossing the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Over the past six years, ever...

As we resume our season focused on the global criminalization of climate protest, reporter Martha Troian brings us to Canada, where the Wet'suwet'en people have been fighting for years against a gas pipeline they never authorized on their territory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Globally, climate activism has shifted over the past few years. It’s more constant now and includes more direct action than ever before. Some of that action has critics, including climate scientists and climate advocates, clutching their pearls and worrying that protest will turn the public away from the urgent need to act on the climate crisis. But social science researchers who study structural...

From Ecuador to North Dakota, British Columbia to New Zealand, the backlash against Indigenous-led environmental protest is always particularly harsh, infused with colonialist entitlement to land, water, and other resources. Historian Nick Estes walks us through what that looks like in the U.S., and the great team behind the documentary The Territory brings us a recent example from Brazil. Check o...

In April 2023, Joanna Oltman Smith walked into the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. with fellow activist Tim Martin, and smeared water-soluble kids' finger paint on the glass display case containing a Degas statue called "Little Dancer." The two read off a statement about the importance of protecting actual, living children as well as we do sculptures of them. Smith and Martin figured they wou...

Welcome to Outrage + Optimism, where they examine issues at the forefront of the climate crisis, interview change-makers, and transform anger into productive dialogue for building a sustainable future. In this episode, the hosts discuss the slow progress made at the negotiations in Bonn and how the perceived lack of direction has led many in the climate community to feel anxious about how successf...

A new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) looks at the details of Guyana's planned "Gas to Energy" project and finds mostly benefits for ExxonMobil and more debt for Guyana. Read the full report here: https://ieefa.org/articles/guyana-gas-energy-project-unnecessary-and-financially-unsustainable Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're bringing you this crossover episode from our sister podcast, Inherited, because there's a way in which the constant vilification of protestors and criminalization of their actions has effectively distracted a lot of people from the reason they're out in the streets or in museums or at sporting events in the first place: the climate crisis is already having a devastating impact on communities...

It’s no coincidence that the backlash against climate protest looks the same from country to country. Not only is industry sharing tactics across borders, but also the Atlas Network—a global network of nearly 600 libertarian think tanks—has been swapping strategies and rhetoric for decades. This episode features reporting from Amy Westervelt, Lyndal Rowlands, and Julianna Merullo from Drilled, and...

President Biden made his first trip to Vietnam as President this week, with the intention of "upgrading" diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. Not on the agenda? The country's move to use trumped-up tax evasion charges to suppress civil society groups, including five climate activists that have been imprisoned using this tactic since 2021. Read The 88 Project's report on this practice...

Since the 2019 passage of the "Dangerous Attachment Devices" bill in response to anti-coal protests in Queensland, Australia's states have moved quickly to follow suit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices