Drilled: Displaced

Drilled's Australia reporter Royce Kurmelovs gives us the scoop on COP: why the "electrification" campaign is failing, Turkiye's oil announcement on the sidelines, and the rightwing journalists trying to "gotcha" European ministers for drinking free coffee.

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The most serious pollution problem the world faces may just be the corporate contamination of our information systems. In Drilled founder Amy Westervelt’s new book, Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy, she reveals how a handful of ideologues, propagandists, and corporate consultants reshaped knowledge production systems using think tanks, courtrooms, universities, and social media. DeSmog investigations editor Matthew Green interviews Amy about the book, followed by a conversation between Drilled senior editor Alleen Brown and Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of the nonprofit NDN Collective. Nick describes how he an...

One in eight people are projected to be displaced by climate change by 2050, and for many the time has already come. In this three-part series, Nina Lakhani takes us to three communities in Latin America grappling with climate displacement in different ways.

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The 31st annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP31) kicks off in Türkiye in a couple weeks. Drilled climate reporters — and COP veterans — Nina Lakhani, Amy Westervelt, and Royce Kurmelovs download everything you need to know as the talks commence. Plus, Nina interviews climate activist Harjeet Singh about what the climate movement will be fighting for in Türkiye.

Reading list from today’s show:

1. “What the Pre-COP in the Pacific Tells Us About What to Expect at COP31,” by Royce Kurmelovs for Drilled.

2. "Oil majors reap bumper profits as Mideast war...

Climate journalists Amy Westervelt, Nina Lakhani and Alleen Brown share whether they loved or hated the polarizing, big budget, box office flop, Digger. Plus a discussion on the role of pop culture in confronting the climate crisis and some of the team's favorite socially conscious music and movies. In the second half of the episode, Ugandan environmental journalist Diana Taremwa-Karakire talks about what it's like covering the controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline or EACOP.

Watch list from today's show:

1. Digger (2026), director Alejandro Iñárritu's big huge climate movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb...

Most proposals to keep fossil fuels in the ground rely on taking new minerals out of the ground — especially lithium, a major component in the batteries powering electric vehicles. In Thea Riofrancos' book, Extraction, she visits the communities most impacted by lithium mining, explores the mineral's politics and history, and proposes a pathway toward harm reduction.

Reading list from today’s show:

1. Thea Riofrancos' book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism 

2. Amy Westervelt's new book, Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy 

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Tech billionaires have increasing influence over all aspects of our lives, and it's not by accident. Amy Westervelt and Gil Durán both recently published books examining the ideas and individuals driving the phenomenon. They discuss what it has to do with the climate crisis and the deterioration of democracy.

Reading list from today’s show:

1. Gil Durán's new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy 

2. Amy Westervelt's new book, Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy

3. Lithu...

Amy Westervelt, Nina Lakhani and Alleen Brown chat about Standing Rock 10 years later, Global Witness's latest report on assassinations of land defenders, and why Palestinians in Gaza are land defenders, too. Meanwhile, Afro-Indigenous Garífuna leaders in Honduras have set up an occupation in front of the country's Supreme Court, in defense of their land rights. Nina interviews Karen Spring, coordinator of the the Honduras Solidarity Network, about what this has to do with Trump and the TV show Survivor.

Reading list from today’s show:

1. The Propagandist, Drilled's narrative podcast series on propaganda aimed aga...

Drilled global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani interviews Elisa Morgera, the UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change about Morgera’s latest report on the fundamental shortcomings of credit markets. Posed as a solution to the climate crisis, carbon credit markets have for years failed to deliver, while violating the human rights of the people most impacted by the climate crisis. Meanwhile, states have developed carbon tunnel-vision, fixating on schemes to reduce carbon emissions, while avoiding the root cause of the issue: fossil fuels. Lakhani and Morgera discuss all that and more.

Reading list from today’s show:
 ...

Today we're sharing an episode of OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising. The story of Occupy Wall Street — how it exploded, how it collapsed, and why its lessons may matter more now than ever before — from the voices of activists who camped out in New York City for two months.

If you like what you hear, find OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising wherever you listen to podcasts.

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In this week's episode Alleen Brown speaks with Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of The Sunrise Movement about being infiltrated by the feds, why fighting authoritarianism is a climate fight, and more. 

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This week we’re sharing a special episode from our friends at the Real Organic Podcast, the Anthem-award-winning “Best Sustainability, Environment & Climate Podcast” produced by the Real Organic Project. Recently named one of the "best climate podcasts" by Earth.org, the Real Organic Podcast uncovers the forces reshaping organic farming today. Hosted by Linley Dixon and Dave Chapman, each episode features deep conversations with farmers, scientists, chefs, and journalists fighting to keep the organic movement truly organic. Like today’s special episode, featuring Drilled’s own Amy Westervelt, for a conversation about the hidden systems and greenwashing campaigns that have shape...

Amy Westervelt, Nina Lakhani and Alleen Brown on the world on fire, how the media is covering the climate crisis, what's happening with the industry as a whole, and how it all relates to rising authoritarianism. The Spill is our new weekly show to bring you news, rants, and interviews in between narrative seasons.

Reading list from today's show:

Alleen could only put together a story like this because she's stayed on the beat for a decade, building relationships and hunting for documents. At the 10-year anniversary of the Standing Rock movement, she gives us a look at why it's important for democracy for journalists to go deeper than breaking news. Speaking of which...Buy Amy's book! https://geni.us/broughttoyouby

For a look at the primary documents underpinning this series, head to https://drilled.media/.This mini-series was reported in partnership with High Country News, and a print feature accompanying it is available on their...

The pipeline has been built, the protest camps disbanded, but the fight isn't over. As pipeline opponents set up a new camp in Iowa, the Tiger Swan propagandists follow them, this time with the help of an undercover infiltrator. A WhatsApp chat reveals the private spies' machinations.

For a look at the primary documents underpinning this episode, head to https://drilled.media/.This mini-series was reported in partnership with High Country News, and a print feature accompanying it is available on their website: https://www.hcn.org/

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As protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline began to grow in North Dakota, a new seemingly grassroots Facebook page emerged. In this episode we meet the hired gun behind it, Robert Rice, who was working for the pipeline company's private security company, Tiger Swan.

For a look at the primary documents underpinning this episode, head to the Drilled site. This mini-series was reported in partnership with High Country News, and a print feature accompanying it is available on their website. 

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10 years ago, rural North Dakota became the hub of one of the largest Indigenous-led protests in decades, and one of the largest climate protests ever in U.S. history: Standing Rock. What started as a protest against a pipeline turned into a political flashpoint thanks to social media. The pipeline company's private security contractors exploited the moment, using propaganda to fan the flames of long-simmering divisions in the community and amplify the voices of groups that were pro-pipeline or anti-protestor.

A decade later, the community is still divided and the tactics used at Standing Rock have been...

The climate crisis is escalating. We have to decarbonize our economy, but we’re moving too slowly. So, what’s the backup plan?

This season of “How We Survive” is about engineering nature: large-scale interventions that could be our last hope. We’ll explore technology that could alter our weather patterns, transform our planet, and possibly save us all from the worst outcomes of the climate crisis. Or lead to catastrophic, unintended consequences. In this episode, Amy explores one of the wildest climate interventions to date: de-extinction. She takes a tour of Colossal Labs, the $10 billion Dallas startup be...

Scene on Radio is a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast that dares to ask big, hard questions about who we are—really—and how we got this way. Their new season, The News, asks: what’s really wrong with the news? Some have called the news media the oxygen of a functioning democracy. But if that’s true, America’s lungs are in rough shape. Most Americans say they don’t trust the media. The business model for local journalism has all but collapsed. And we all know about the barrage of misinformation that flows from our splintered mediascape. You can’t separate the...

Hosted and reported by Indigenous author Rebecca Nagle (with production by Critical Frequency!) and featuring leading Native historians, First America shares the true story of how the United States came to be, and how our current political moment was 250 years in the making. 

We’ve all been told the American Revolution was fought over taxation and representation. But that's not what the Declaration of Independence says. According to our founders, in their own words, what they were most upset about was Native Americans. How did we all miss that? Rebecca sits down with historian Ned Blackhawk (Western Sho...

Treating climate solutions like an infinite money cheat might not be a great way to actually solve the problem, though it's sure to make plenty of "green" entrepreneurs rich. It makes sense that businessmen would stay focused on profits, but why do climate advocates keep supporting these ideas?

This season is a collaboration with the Intercept Brasil. You can get the show in Portuguese on their feed as well, and companion stories at: https://www.intercept.com.br/

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With the sustainable aviation fuel industry set to explode, carbon capture has thrown the corn ethanol industry a lifeline...but what does another corn ethanol boom mean for everyone else?

This season is a collaboration with the Intercept Brasil. You can get the show in Portuguese on their feed as well, and companion stories at: https://www.intercept.com.br/

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Industrial agriculture has wrapped itself in a green cloak in Mato Grosso, promising jobs, money and endless opportunities, all in the name of "sustainability." But the good times are only happening for a select few. Local residents are dealing with extreme weather, lack of access to fresh food, and a pesticide overload that has increased the risk of birth defects and lowered lifespans. Meanwhile, Bruce and the guys have now ventured into new territory: the Amazon.

This season is a collaboration with the Intercept Brasil. You can get the show in Portuguese on their feed as well...

Bruce's Brazilian business partners run the state of Mato Grosso and the town the company is headquartered in. So while he fights endless pushback to his pipeline project in Iowa, business in Brazil is booming. This season is a collaboration with the Intercept Brasil.

You can get the show in Portuguese on their feed as well, and companion stories at: https://www.intercept.com.br/

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Bruce's venture in Brazil isn't the first time he tried to go global. What an earlier attempt tells us about him, his business, and what's ahead for both Iowa and "the Brazilian Midwest."

This season is a collaboration with the Intercept Brasil. You can get the show in Portuguese on their feed as well, and companion stories at: https://www.intercept.com.br/

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As his American company Summit Carbon Solutions struggles with backlash to a carbon capture pipeline linking corn ethanol plants across the Midwest, Bruce Rastetter is not slowing down. Instead, he’s celebrating some big wins for his Brazilian company, FS Fueling Sustainability, from new ethanol-friendly climate policy to government funding for their carbon capture project.

Pushkin+ subscribers can hear episodes early and ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Drilled show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

Additional resources:

The link between corn ethanol and deforestation

Peer-reviewed research on the cl...

For decades we’ve heard that “the markets” will solve the climate crisis. On Drilled: Carbon Cowboys, we put that theory to the test, following Bruce Rastetter, a corn ethanol kingpin-turned-carbon entrepreneur from Iowa to Brazil, and asking the big questions: Are these “climate solutions” actually reducing emissions? Is CO2 increasing or decreasing as carbon becomes a commodity? Or is green colonialism just as extractive as the regular sort?

Drilled: Carbon Cowboys begins on May 12th. Pushkin+ subscribers can hear episodes early and ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Drilled show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus. <...

The U.S. invasions of Venezuela and Iran are more of the same imperialism in service of oil majors. As the climate crisis makes its presence more urgently felt, fossil fascism dictates a doubling-down on extraction and colonialism, and the vilification of those who oppose or stand in the way of that plan.

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Repression of protest has ramped up in the U.S., but everything that's happening now began with the backlash to the Standing Rock protest back in 2016. In today's episode we look at the connections between fossil fascism, petromasculinity, and protest.

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Lots of people are talking about the similarities between Iraq and Iran, but in this episode we place the two in the context of another war—World War I—and the historical arc of fossil fascism.

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What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to the liking of the billionaire class? A way to replace needy human workers with machines?

Perhaps it’s all of that—and more. In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues in Silicon Valley are pur...

This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the hired hit that took Berta Cáceres’s life and robbed both the Honduran and global environmental movements of a uniquely effective leader. Cáceres was targeted by a dam company, with an assist from the police, military, government officials and international banks because of her effective organizing on behalf of her people, the Lenca. Nina Lakhani literally wrote the book on Cáceres’s killing, and in this episode she walks us through what happened then, what’s happening now, the role the U.S. played in all of it, and what...

Last June, journalist Mario Guevara was arrested while covering an anti-ICE protest in Georgia, transferred to ICE detention, and locked up by the federal government for more than 100 days. But Mario is not the kind of ICE-criticizing reporter you might be picturing. He was a Trump-supporting, Republican-identifying, law-and-order-sympathizing immigration hawk, who knew ICE well and had covered them favorably for years. Why did the Trump administration still go after him? In this special two-part series from Question Everything, Brian Reed looks into. Mario Guevara. This is part one. Find part two, and more from Question Everything, wherever you get po...

Fernanda Hopenhaym, member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights walks Drilled senior global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani through the many legal pitfalls companies getting involved in the United States seizure of the Venezuelan oil industry might be facing.

Check out the longer story on our website.

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It's easy to feel like climate "doesn't matter" as the United States descends into fascism, as if climate and democracy are somehow separate issues. Researcher Oscar Berglund and Amy Westervelt connect the dots between the global backlash to climate protest and the broader repression we're seeing in supposedly democratic countries around the world.

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In More and More and More, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz shows that the human history of energy is one of accumulation, not substitution. Here, he talks to reporter Adam Lowenstein about how the "energy transition" frame got so entrenched, why clean-energy innovation is not the same thing as decarbonization, how the fossil fuel industry helped launder pipe dreams of dysfunctional technologies into mainstream climate “solutions”, and much more (and more and more).

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When activists Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya take drastic measures to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, they have no idea that a shadowy private security contractor called TigerSwan has them in its sights. 

Special thanks to:

Alleen Brown and The Intercept (https://theintercept.com/2018/12/30/tigerswan-infiltrator-dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock/)

You Strike A Match by Julia Shipley (https://grist.org/protest/dakota-access-pipeline-activists-property-destruction/)

Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/)

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Wildfires are becoming more intense, frequent, and destructive as the climate heats up. Drilled reporter Royce Kurmelovs and Canadian author John Vallaint, author of Fire Weather, discuss the climate-fire nexus.

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In this bonus episode of The Black Thread, we examine a single legal case that distilles the Norwegian paradox perfectly: the planned electrification of the Melkøya gas processing plant. It's a key conflict site where Norway's net zero transformation clashes with its fossil fuel industry, Indigenous rights, youth climate activism, worker safety, and even criticism from the United Nation.

Additional resources:
Communicating Climate Change

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Despite growing repression worldwide, climate activists continue to stick it to obstructionists and drive change. In this season's finale, Jennie Stephens (University of Ireland Maynooth) and Sharon Yadin (University of Haifa) share the effective strategies that activists can use to push back against the forces that block climate action.

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