Damages

When she was just 22, Disha Ravi, co-founder of Fridays for Future in India, had police show up at her home, borrow a pen and paper to write an arrest warrant on the spot, and bundle her onto a plane to fly across the country to a city she'd never been to. Here she explains what happened, how it's still impacting her two years later, and why she'll never let it stop her activism or force her out o...

There's a lot of discourse happening about free speech in the context of "cancel culture" these days, but precious little coverage of the push all over the world to criminalize protest...particularly environmental and climate protest. We'll be digging into this trend in detail over the next several months, but first a look at what prompted extractive industries to start agitating for governments t...

In more than 30 climate cases making their way through U.S. courts today, oil companies are using an argument they've been laying the legal groundwork for since the 1970s: that since everything they've ever said about climate change was in the interest of shaping policy or blocking regulation, it's protected speech, even if it was misleading. In this episode we take a look at how those cases are p...

Worried that all their work creating Mobil's personality and a multi-pronged issue advertising campaign to go with it would go to waste if the TV networks deemed it all "propaganda" Herb and his boss looked to the courts for protection. In this episode we follow the "corporate free speech" movement through the courts, where it got a big assist from tobacco lobbyist-turned-Supreme Court justice Lew...

In the 1970s, Mobil Oil had invented the advertorial and was aggressively pursuing an entirely new type of marketing, branding the company as a person with a unique personality and opinions that deserved to be heard. When public backlash threatened to undermine their approach, they launched a campaign that would change the course of U.S. history. Transcript Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

In the Season 3 premiere of Inherited, host Shaylyn Martos introduces us to storyteller Camara Aaron, who shares a personal story of family loss, structural resilience, and survival in an era of climate change.  Camara, now 25, was only a child when she visited her grandmother’s unique house on the island of Dominica, in the West Indies. But when Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean in 2017, h...

In the 1970s, Mobil Oil had invented the advertorial and was aggressively pursuing an entirely new type of marketing, branding the company as a person with a unique personality and opinions that deserved to be heard. When public backlash threatened to undermine their approach, they launched a campaign that would change the course of U.S. history. Transcript Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

On the heels of several legal wins for grassroots organizers in Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," ExxonMobil, Chevron and other petrochemical giants are increasingly organizing against grassroots environmental justice activism in Louisiana. Industry is particularly targeting organizations and activists involved in the Beyond Petrochemicals campaign, which Michael Bloomberg recently infused with a large...

”Governing power is the goal and the point.” Daniel Squadron is the co-founder and Executive Director of The States Project and also a former New York State senator. We discuss what it takes to win legislative majorities in state houses and why this is the essential ingredient to making change.  State legislatures are the most important force in this country. When parties win legislative majoritie...

The day after our season finale last week, we got some incredible news from Guyana: the High Court ruled against the oil company and the government in the big insurance case Melinda Janki filed. KWe caught up with Janki shortly after the verdict was released for this conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the last episode of our "Light, Sweet Crude" season we look at what's next for Guyana, and for other Global South countries grappling with poverty and climate change at the same time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening in Guyana isn't just happening there. All over the globe, oil companies are racing to tap as many of the remaining fossil fuel reserves as they can. This week, we're joined by Rolling Stone reporter Jeff Goodell for a story about what the global oil rush looks like in another part of the world: Namibia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we first started reporting this story, people unfamiliar with it would suggest talking to local environmental groups. Surely they would have something to say about a massive new polluting industry springing up in the country! But every group we could find operating in Guyana had taken money from Exxon or one of its partners. Several have made promotional videos praising the project. They argu...

The tension between addressing global poverty and acting on the climate crisis is one the fossil fuel industry, and those who carry water for it, have been increasingly leaning on in recent years. We asked Dr. Narasimha Rao to join us this week to get into the details of that conversation, where there are and aren't tradeoffs, and what his Decent Living Energy Project at Yale can tell us about how...

Melinda Janki has filed seven separate cases aimed at blocking oil drilling in Guyana, but only one of them explicitly names climate change as a problem the project is guaranteed to exacerbate. It’s a constitutional case that invokes Guyana’s constitutional right to a healthy environment—an amendment Janki herself helped to write. Plaintiffs Dr. Troy Thomas and Quedad DeFreitas argue that the gove...

One person in Guyana knows both the inner workings of oil companies and the intricacies of Guyanese environmental law better than most. Melinda Janki grew up in Guyana, but went to school at Oxford and then worked as in-house counsel for oil giant BP before returning home. Decades ago she started to help strengthen the country’s environmental laws. In 2020 she started filing suits against the gove...

After a year’s worth of pressure from local press and civil society groups, the Guyanese government released its contract with ExxonMobil to the public in December 2017. The IMF calls it an unfair deal for Guyana. Some local leaders start calling on government officials to try to renegotiate the contract, but others say that’s a fool’s errand and the only place to fight the contract is in court. L...

Five years ago, Kiana Wilburg was a new reporter when ExxonMobil executives and Guyanese government officials announced they had found oil 40 miles offshore. Wilburg and her newsroom had to quickly learn about the industry and this company that was suddenly so influential in their country and were left with just one question: exactly what kind of a deal had the country signed onto? Visit https://b...

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science shows exactly how accurate oil company scientists' climate models were back in the 1970s and 80s. Alongside this special re-broadcast of Season 1 of Drilled, all about the origins of climate denial, we speak with the study's lead author Geoffrey Supran about its importance. In this final episode, a look at what it might take to finally act on climat...

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science shows exactly how accurate oil company scientists' climate models were back in the 1970s and 80s. Alongside this special re-broadcast of Season 1 of Drilled, all about the origins of climate denial, we speak with the study's lead author Geoffrey Supran about its importance. In this episode, a look at how successful the fossil fuel industry's decades...

On paper, the small South American country of Guyana is the fastest-growing economy in the world, thanks to its oil boom. The country started shipping barrels of oil in 2019. Hotels are popping up all over its capital city. Historic homes are being turned into condos for visiting oil execs. But average citizens say they aren’t benefiting from the boom like they thought they would. And one lawyer i...

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science shows that not only did Exxon scientists suspect climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels was a growing problem that would lead to crisis if nothing changed, but they were terrifyingly accurate in their modeling and predictions. Alongside this special re-broadcast of Season 1 of Drilled, all about the origins of climate denial, we speak...

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science shows that not only did Exxon scientists suspect climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels was a growing problem that would lead to crisis if nothing changed, but they were terrifyingly accurate in their modeling and predictions. Alongside this special re-broadcast of Season 1 of Drilled, all about the origins of climate denial, we speak...

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science shows that not only did Exxon scientists suspect climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels was a growing problem that would lead to crisis if nothing changed, but they were terrifyingly accurate in their modeling and predictions. Alongside this special re-broadcast of Season 1 of Drilled, all about the origins of climate denial and Exxon'...

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science shows that not only did Exxon scientists suspect climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels was a growing problem that would lead to crisis if nothing changed, but they were terrifyingly accurate in their modeling and predictions. Alongside this special re-broadcast of Season 1 of Drilled, all about the origins of climate denial and Exxon'...