Drilled
Episodes
Big Oil's Multi-Billion-Dollar Blind Spot
18 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A new report from Carbon Tracker finds that not only have oil and gas companies not been budgeting for plugging and abandoning wells, they've been gro...
Yes, It's Still Time to Talk About Climate (from Hot Take)
14 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, some climate activists have been saying "now's not the time to talk about climate." In this episode we br...
Naomi Klein and How the Shock Doctrine Applies to America Right Now
07 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine focused on what she calls "disaster capitalism," the sort of corporate feeding frenzy that happens in the wake o...
What Shell Knew: A Surprising Report from The Netherlands Finds that Shell Was Directly Funding Climate Denial in the 1990s
29 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Reporters Alexander Beunder and Jilles Mast have been combing through 150+ boxes of documents from the personal archive of one of the Netherlands' top...
No, Climate Action Will Not Be "Just Like Quarantine Only Worse" — Why Letting Go of the Climate Narrative Never Works, a Special Bonus Ep f
22 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, The New York Times ran a story on the GOP's favorite new climate narrative: If you think quarantine is bad, just wait til the Dems impose c...
The Climate Deniers Have Lost Their King, and Still They Soldier On
19 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In April 2020, Fred Singer, longtime king of the climate deniers, died at the age of 95. In this episode, investigative reporter Dan Zegart, author of...
The U.S. Government Has Been Rubber-Stamping New Oil and Gas Projects—This Lawsuit Hopes to Change That
09 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A lawsuit filed against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) over a small project in Massachusetts could have big implications. It aims to ...
Old and Wrong: Leah Stokes on the Many Flaws of Michael Moore's Planet of The Humans
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Political scientist and environmental policy expert Leah Stokes joins us to discuss the many things the new film Planet of the Humans gets wrong about...
Earth Day in Louisiana: A Petro-state Fights Back
22 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and the week of the 10-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater oil spill, we head to Louisiana to talk petrochemical...
Computer-Aided Destruction: Art, Autodesk, and What Accountability Looks Like for the Tech Industry
22 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
French artist Joanie Lemercier has been a thorn in Autodesk's side for more than a year now, since he first pointed out that the California software c...
How Big Oil Is Using the Pandemic to Push More Plastic
16 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In a new report, the Center for International Environmental Law looks at the way oil, gas and petrochemical companies are leveraging the pandemic to p...
In Colorado, Seniors Held Hostage by Fracking
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Because of their proximity to oil and gas operations, residents of Broomfield, Colorado were at risk of exposure to flowback-driven air pollution duri...
New Research Shows Fossil Fuels Are Not As Essential As The Industry Would Like You to Believe
07 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Julia Steinberger, professor of social ecology and ecological economics at the University of Leeds, has published some really interesting research...
Amid the Pandemic Free-for-All, Unlit Flares at Texas Shale Refineries Are Dumping "Unimaginable" Amounts of Methane into the Atmosphere
03 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Field investigator Sharon Wilson has spotted a troubling increase in methane emissions from refineries in the Permian Basin, in Texas. Things went fro...
Reporter Justin Mikulka on Why ExxonMobil and Chevron Are the Biggest Opponents to a Shale Gas Bailout
01 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil and Chevron have been amongst the biggest opponents to bailouts for shale gas companies as part of the co...
There Will Be Fraud: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Turned into Christmas for Big Oil
28 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The oil and gas industry was headed for broke long before COVID-19. Now the Trump administration wants to use the pandemic to put it on life support, ...
Special Episode—Hot Take: Seeing Climate Through Coronavirus Glasses with David Wallace-Wells
25 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Drilled will be back with bonus episodes soon. In the meantime, check out one of our other climate podcasts, Hot Take. In this episode, hosts Mary Ann...
S3, Ep 9: Jay Rosen and Nicholas Johnson on What the Media Can Do About Disinformation
29 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This season we've traced the creation of Big Oil's big propaganda machine. In this episode, the season finale, we look at what can be done about it no...
S3, Ep 8: Meet the Harrisons
28 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
E. Bruce and Patricia Harrison launched the E. Bruce Harrison Company in 1973 and ran it until 1996, working for a mix of chemical companies, oil & ga...
S3, Ep 7: John Hill and the Tobacco-Oil-Plastic Triangle
27 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
John Hill, founder of Hill & Knowlton, was an Ivy Lee devotee who worked for Standard Oil in the 1930s, strategized against labor movements and the Ne...
S3, Ep 6: Manipulating the Masses and Predicting the Future—Edward Bernays and W. Howard Chase
25 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term "public relations" when propaganda started to become a negative term. His specialty was using ...
We Interrupt This Podcast for New Research + Emily Atkin and Guardian CEO Anna Bateson on Banning Fossil Fuel Ads
18 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We'll be back with more Mad Men tales next week, we promise! While we're out chasing leads, listen to this great interview from Emily Atkin with The G...
S3, Ep 5: Oil Slick, Part 2—False Equivalence and Free Speech
11 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In part two of our episode on former Mobil VP Herb Schmertz, we dig into how Schmertz's approach bred false equivalence, and why he pushed so hard for...
S3, Ep 4: Oil Slick, Part 1—The Rise of the Corporate Persona
04 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Mobil Oil's longtime PR guy Herb Schmertz really started to aggressively manipulate the media. He introduced so many new bells and whistles to Big Oil...
S3, Ep 3: Psychological Warfare, Astroturfing, and Another Tobacco-Oil Connection
28 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Edelman learned the tools of his trade combating Nazi propaganda in WWII, then came home and put his psychological warfare training to work for...
S3, Ep 2: The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle
21 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ivy Lee worked with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers for the rest of his life, helping to establish the American Petroleum Institute in 1919, and wor...
S3, Ep 1: The Father of Public Relations
21 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this season we're tackling Big Oil's big propaganda machine—its origins, the spin masters who created it, and why it's been so effective. It all ...
S3: The Mad Men of Climate Denial
05 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Big Oil gave Hitler propaganda tips decades ago and their PR machine has only grown from there. This season we dig into the history of fossil fuel pro...
Youth Climate Suits and Inter-generational Injustice
28 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the Juliana vs. The United States case, a group of young people sued the government for incentivizing increased fossil fuel dependence, thereby rob...
Recap: ExxonMobil's New York Fraud Trial
08 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
New York's fraud trial against ExxonMobil closed November 7th. Reporter Emily Gertz and Union of Concerned Scientist's Kathy Mulvey watched it closely...
Fake Reporters and #FakeNews: How Fossil Fuel Companies Hide Behind Energy Blogs
03 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A look at how those fossil fuel-backed deception campaigns are continuing today, behind a couple layers of energy industry organizations, alliances, a...
Big Oil Is Ramping Up PR Spend and Oil Production
15 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Two new reports highlight that, since the Paris Agreement in 2016, the fossil fuel industry has ramped up both oil production and greenwashing. Plus:...
S2E6: Facing Extinction
20 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As the crabbers' 2018-2019 season comes to an abrupt close, they prepare for a year that could see the fishery close altogether. Meanwhile the oil ind...
S2E5 David vs. Goliath
13 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As the first industry to sue Big Oil, the West Coast crab fishery is likely to meet an even tougher fight than the states, counties, and cities trying...
S2E4 Taking Big Oil to Court
06 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As the crabbers' lawsuit against the world's 30 largest fossil fuel producers is filed, we take a look at the evidence, and what exactly sent crabbers...
S2E3: Two Lawsuits at Once, Both Driven by Climate Change
29 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Now facing annual closures due to climate change, crabbers learn some new information that spurs them to become the first industry to sue Big Oil. S...
S2E2: A Late Season and a Shaky Future
22 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As the 2015 delay wears on, and holiday markets come and go, crabbers are getting desperate. Some are forced out of business, others worry that this i...
S2E1: A Crisis, a Cover-Up, and a Community on the Front Lines of Climate Change
22 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 2015, West Coast crab fishermen were shut down by climate change. Atmospheric changes had warmed waters and upended everything from the food chain ...
Coming Soon: Hot Water, a New Drilled Series
03 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 2015 a warm water "blob," the result of both warming oceans and shifting wind patterns, wreaked havoc on West Coast fishing towns. Three years into...
Big Oil's New Story: The First Amendment Covers Climate Denial
05 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In a batch of aggressive countersuits, Exxon is accusing the counties, cities, and states of conspiring to quash its First Amendment rights to politic...
Winning the War
09 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Fossil fuel industry influence campaigns ensured that we lost a critical 30 years not taking action on climate change. But all is not lost. The techno...
Campaigns So Successful They've Landed in Court
02 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The fossil fuel industry's decades-long information war was so successful that even though oil companies themselves began publicly accepting climate s...
The First Step to Influencing Policy: Setting Research Agendas
25 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If you unravel climate policy back to its origins, eventually you get to academic research. Although oil companies dramatically reduced their own scie...
Aggressive Think Tanks, Shouty Pundits, and a New Religious Argument
18 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
To make media manipulation and lobbying truly effective, oil companies and their public relations firms also had to shift the culture, influencing eve...
Weaponizing False Equivalence
11 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As climate disinformation campaigns ramped up in the 1990s, oil companies and their PR firms exploited weaknesses in the U.S. media system and propped...
The Turn
04 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As the price of oil dipped in the early 1980s, management changed at most oil companies and the industry as a whole became more concerned with preserv...
The Bell Labs of Energy
29 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Exxon wanted to be the Bell Labs of energy. It hired brilliant scientists who conducted cutting-edge research on everyth...
Exploiting Scientists' Kryptonite: Certainty
28 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In addition to using journalists' views on their own objectivity against them, oil companies exploited various weaknesses in science, namely scientist...
Drilled: A True Crime Podcast about Climate Change
28 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Launching November 14th, Drilled is a limited series investigative true-crime podcast about the crime of the century: the creation of climate denial. ...