Drilled

Climate activists warn about the future—but for many communities, climate loss is already routine. Mo Isu from Inherited looks at the cycle of loss and rebuilding in the rural Niger Delta region of Nigeria as the country weathers extreme seasonal flooding. After meeting a flood survivor in his hometown of Lagos, Mo travels twelve hours to Lokoja—the town where Nigeria’s largest r...

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

Since Queensland passed the "Dangerous Attachment Devices" law in 2019 in response to anti-coal protests, Australian states have rapidly adopted similar measures targeting climate activism.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At just 22 years old, climate activist Disha Ravi—co-founder of Fridays for Future India —was arrested, flown across the country, and jailed for her activism. She joins us to explain the night the police showed up at her home, how it's still impacting her two years later, and why she refuses to let it stop her activism or force her out of India. An extended version of this interview wi...

There's a lot of discourse happening about free speech in the context of "cancel culture", but precious little coverage of the global push to criminalize protest, particularly environmental and climate protest. We examine how extractive industries began agitating governments to crack down on protest, what tactics they use, and why they've been effective.   See omnystudio.com/listener for priv...

Media Matters senior researcher Evlondo Cooper breaks down how the media has covered climate activism, shaping mainstream perception and helping the fossil fuel industry in its quest to criminalize climate protest. Additional resources: National news' scant coverage of climate protests largely overlooked the scientific urgency driving controversial climate actions   See omnystudio.com/listene...

Around the world, environmental protesters are facing escalating repression—from harsh laws with life-altering prison sentences to fines to protesters arreseted near "critical infrastructure" to violent attacks. Corporations are suing protestors and NGOs, comparing protest to organized crime. Governments are growing increasingly comfortable branding environmental protestors as “domesti...

In more than 30 climate cases making their way through United States 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. We explore how those cases are playing out and...

Mobil Oil worried that its advertorial campaigns positioning Mobil as a personality in and of itself might be labeled "propaganda" by TV networks and deemed unfit to run. In response, Herb Schmertz, VP of Public Affairs for Mobil Oil, looked to the courts for protection. The "corporate free speech" movement moved through the courts, getting a big assist from tobacco lobbyist-turned-Supreme Court J...

In the 1970s, Mobil Oil invented the advertorial and was aggressively pursuing an entirely new type of marketing, branding the company as a person itself with a unique personality and opinions that demanded attention. When public backlash threatened to undermine their approach, they launched a campaign that would change the course of United States culture, policy, advertising, and history. See omn...

Louisiana's "Cancer Alley"—a stretch along the Mississippi River where petrochemical plants have created some of the worst air and water pollution America—has become a battleground. ExxonMobil, Chevron and other petrochemical giants are increasingly organizing against grassroots environmental justice activism in Louisiana that are part of the Beyond Petrochemicals campaign. The compani...

Ever since the Securities and Exchange Commission announced its intention to make Environmental Social and Governance metrics actually meaningful to investors, polluting industries have suddenly turned on ESG. Now that fight has a legal strategy, being carried out by the Republican Attorneys General Association. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jake Bittle's book The Great Displacement looks at how extreme weather events are likely to drive Americans to move from one part of the country (or their state) to another. He talks through the complex web of factors that drive migration, and how policies might be changed to ease the burden on people and communities. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Electrification offers an opportunity to rethink how we use energy and how we get around. Researcher Thea Riofrancos wants to see the United States seize that opportunity and set the country on a path to a better, more equitable future. Subscribe to our newsletter!   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. We caught up with Janki shortly after the verdict was released for this conversation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Will Guyana become the fossil fuel industry's newest profit center or can it chart a different path? 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.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What's happening in Guyana isn't an isolated case. It's part of a global oil rush, as oil companies race to tap as many remaining fossil fuel reserves as they can. Rolling Stone reporter Jeff Goodell discusses his story about what the global oil rush looks like in another part of the world: Namibia. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When we started reporting on Guyana's oil boom, we reached out to local environmental groups to hear their concerns about this new polluting industry. But we discovered something unsettling: every environmental organization we could find had taken money from ExxonMobil or its partners. Several have even made promotional videos praising the project. They argue that oil money is no dirtier than any...

The tension between addressing global poverty and acting on the climate crisis is one the fossil fuel industry has been stoking 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 to solve both global crises at once. See omnystudio...

Melina Janki has filed seven separate legal cases aimed at blocking oil drilling in Guyana, but only one explicitly names climate change as a problem the project is guaranteed to exacerbate. It's a constitutional challenge invoking Guyana's constitutional right to a healthy environment, an amendment Janki herself helped write. Plaintiffs Dr. Troy Thomas and Quedad DeFreitas argue that the governme...

One person in Guyana understands both the inner workings of Big Oil and the intracacies of Guyanese governmental law better than almost anyone. Melinda Janki was raised in Guyana, but went to Oxford University and then worked as in-house counsel for oil giant BP before making her way back to Guyana. She returned home with a mission to help strengthen the country's environmental laws. In 2018, she...

After a year of pressure from local press and civil groups, the Guyanese government finally released its oil contract with ExxonMobil to the public. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) calls it an unfair deal for Guyana. Some local leaders implore the government to renegotiate the contract, but others say that's a fool's errand and fighting the contract should be done in court. Additional resour...

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 rapdly learn about the oil industry and this suddenly influential company that was now in their country. They were left with one question: what kind of a deal had their country signed onto? Visit https://brilli...

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...

In this special sneak preview of our next season, we hear from Melinda Janki, a lawyer who's fighting to keep her home country of Guyana from becoming one of the world's largest carbon bombs. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.