Photo: Uncle Pabai Pabai and Uncle Paul Kabai on their way into court with their lawyers. Photo by Bella Laifoo, courtesy Granta Fund.

They were two decisions, from two separate courts issued both a week and a world apart. One, 

 filed in 2021 by a First Nations community in the Torres Strait, alleged the Australian government had failed to meaningfully address climate change. The other, 

an advisory opinion from the highest court in the world

 that began as a campaign in 2019 by law students from the University of South Pacific, sought to get the International Court of Justice to advise on the obligations of governments to address climate change under international law – and succeeded 

in giving the Paris Climate Agreement teeth

Many had hoped the first, referred to as 

would make Australian legal history. It was brought by two lead applicants, Uncle Pabai Pabai and Uncle Paul Kabai, on behalf of an Indigenous people who live in Zenadth Kes – the Indigenous name for the islands of the Torres Strait and the people who live there. These islands number about 200 and lie between Australia and its northern neighbour, Papua New Guinea, though only about a dozen are inhabited. The area has been on the frontline of both fossil fuel extraction and the impacts of climate change. Over the last few decades rising sea levels, storm surges and extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change have been making inhabited areas unliveable. Seawater has invaded food producing areas, vegetation has started to die and sites of cultural significance are slowly being eroded and inundated. Residents of the islands report king tides sweeping through gravesites, forcing them to dive to rescue the remains of their ancestors.

Where climate cases have taken aim at fossil fuel companies and their industry associations, 

took aim directly at the Australian government. The case, based in negligence, claimed that the Australian government owed residents of the Torres Strait a duty of care and had breached this duty by failing to take meaningful action to address climate change. It was not the first to make this case – a group of young people had 

 in 2020 but had their initial success overturned on appeal in a case that has become known as the 

decision. This time around, it was thought the Torres Strait Islanders had better odds. A treaty Australia had signed when it took possession of the Torres Strait Islands made it easier to establish a duty of care, and the scientific evidence on the reality of climate change was overwhelming.

Justice Wigney, a single judge of the federal court, shot down the application. Wigney was explicit in his ruling that climate change represented “an existential threat to the whole of humanity”, was already having an effect on the Torres Strait and the way of life for those who lived there, and that the Australian government had paid “scant regard” to the science when setting its emissions reduction targets. It was impossible for him not to. In evidence, public servant Kelly Pearce had told the court during hearings in Melbourne about her time leading a taskforce to advise the Australian government on options for emissions reduction targets in anticipation of negotiations in Paris that ultimately led to the Paris Climate Agreement. Pearce told the court that the taskforce did not consider the impacts of climate change on the Torres Strait, or any other community, beyond broadly acknowledging there would be some form of impact from extreme weather events.

Despite this very real recognition of harm and negligent activity by the Australian government, Wigney ruled that his hands were bound by precedent. Australian courts have so far maintained a policy of treating climate change as a political issue best resolved by democratically elected parliaments, not courts – even as Wigney appeared to hint that it would be up to a higher court to change this policy.

“That will remain the case unless and until the law in Australia changes, either by the incremental development or expansion of the common law by appellate courts or by the enactment of legislation,” Wigney said.

“The only real avenue available to those in the position of the applicants and other Torres Strait Islanders, involves public advocacy and protest and ultimately recourse via the ballot box.”

The Torres Strait Islanders won on the facts but lost on the law – the inverse of 

. There, a Peruvian farmer on the other side of the world sued Germany energy giant RWE in nuisance for climate harms resulting from their historical emissions. In that matter, the court ruled that German companies were liable in German law for their historical emissions, but dismissed the matter on the basis that the harms alleged had yet to be suffered – even if they are inevitable. None of these technical distinctions mattered to the people of the Torres Strait. Speaking outside of court, they expressed their shock at how a court could recognize they are losing their home and culture and yet do nothing.

“My heart is broken for my family and my community. Love has driven us on this journey for the last five years, love for our families and communities. That love will keep driving us,” Uncle Pabai Pabai said.

Uncle Paul Kabai said: “I thought that the decision would be in our favour, and I’m in shock. This pain isn’t just for me, it’s for all people Indigenous and non-Indigenous who have been affected by climate change. What do any of us say to our families now?”

In its own statement released afterward, the Australian government said it was “carefully considering the judgement” and that it was working to “turn around a decade of denial and delay on climate, embedding serious climate targets in law and making the changes necessary to achieve them.”

“Australia is now producing record renewable electricity, and energy emissions are lower than when we took office. We’re on track to achieve our ambitious but achievable targets of 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030,” the statement said.

The community’s legal team is expected to appeal the decision.

Dr Liz Hicks, a lecturer at the Melbourne Law School, says the decision in 

is significant for the way it exposes a crisis of legitimacy in the Australian courts. In trying not to interfere with democratic processes on climate change, courts have increasingly refused to act on climate change at a time when political processes have been failing to respond to the crisis, forcing vulnerable people to seek help in the courts.

“I think what we’re doing here or what courts are struggling with here is having to trade off two crises of legitimacy,” Dr Hicks says. “The short term one is this risk or idea that the court may develop the law in a way that goes into that political space. But there is the longer-term problem of a crisis of legitimacy if the law has nothing to say about accountability for the major source of harm to people’s lives in society, that the law also recognizes is occurring.”

The contrast between the decisions of Australian courts and the ICJ advisory opinion by the world’s highest court is stark. As the residents of the Torres Strait have been battered by climate change, so have Pacific Nations. In one now famous video, Tuvalu’s former foreign minister Simon Kofe gave a speech via video link to COP26 in Glasgow while standing knee-deep in seawater to illustrate the threat posed by rising sea levels. In November 2023, signed a migration deal that would gradually allow its citizens to relocate to the Australian mainland to escape rising oceans, while keeping their citizenship. There are similar stories across the Pacific, which has prompted civil society groups and governments to make 

climate accountability and climate action

 a central issue even as their nearest neighbours have prioritised fossil fuel extraction over their safety. New Zealand, for instance, recently confirmed it was 

 to reboot gas exploration, and Australia today vies with Qatar and the US for top position as the world’s largest LNG exporter, while the Port of Newcastle remains the world’s largest coal export port. At present the country has given approvals to several massive new gas projects, including critical approvals 

needed for Woodside’s $16.5bn Scarborough gas field

 off the northern Western Australian coast and Santos’ $5.6bn Barossa 

gas development off the coast of the Northern Territory

These dynamics were clear as the ICJ began public hearings at The Hague. What began as a campaign by the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change for the ICJ to rule once and for all on the legal right to a healthy environment, as well as governments’ responsibility to act on climate change, was given momentum when it was endorsed by several pacific governments, including Fiji, Tuvalu and Kiribati, and represented by Vanuatu. Together they sought to have the ICJ clarify the obligations of states to tackle climate change – a push endorsed with a unanimous vote by the UN General Assembly.

Vanuatu’s climate minister, Ralph Regenvanu, opened hearings at the ICJ where he told the court “I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity”. He would ultimately be proven right. Australia, for its part, had supported the push for the ICJ to hear the matter and was among the first countries to make submissions where it directly contradicted the arguments put forward by Vanuatu and other Pacific countries. Alongside major polluters including the US and the UK, Australia argued the Paris Agreement was the world’s mechanism for dealing with climate change and there was no obligation in international law to go beyond what it required. When Judge Yuji Iwasawa delivered the ICJ’s advisory opinion on Thursday, the unanimous decision of the court sided with the Pacific when it explicitly rejected the idea that minimum compliance with the Paris Climate Agreement was enough.

“Failure of the state to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from greenhouse gas emissions including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licenses, or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies – may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that state,” he said.

In its opinion, the ICJ outlined how governments—including those that are not signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement—have an obligation to address climate change that includes properly regulating private actors, that inaction amounts to a human rights violation, and that governments that fail to act face liability under international law for these breaches.

Outside, Regenvanu spoke at a press conference on the court steps where he said the decision was a “very important course correction at this time” that found “climate science is at the heart of climate law and the compass for climate justice”. He also flagged potential future litigation against polluting countries like Australia.

“Today’s ruling is a landmark moment, and it’s confirmed what we vulnerable nations have been saying and have known for so long: that states do have legal obligations to act on climate change,” he said. “And these obligations are grounded in international law, they’re grounded in human rights law and they’re grounded in the duty to protect the environment, which we heard the court refer to so much.”

“And these aren’t aspirational ideas as someone would have it. The advisory opinion has clarified the legal consequences for states which fail to discharge these obligations.”

It did not take long for the ramifications for countries like Australia to be recognised. Bill Hare, a climate scientist and CEO of Climate Analytics, said the ruling placed responsibility on governments to “regulate private activity within their jurisdictions and they have a responsibility to all other states for the consequences of actions taken, and this together means that countries have an obligation to limit, reduce and ultimately eliminate fossil fuel production.”

“The ICJ points to potential for serious legal consequences under customary international law if countries do not put forward targets aligned to 1.5°C. Importantly, these obligations also apply to countries whether or not they are Parties to the Paris Agreement,” he said.

An advisory opinion of the ICJ may not be binding in Australian law, but Retta Berryman, senior specialist lawyer at Environmental Justice Australia said it will be influential by setting “a new legal standard for climate justice” and will likely be factored into upcoming negotiations for COP30 in Brazil. Isabelle Reineke, Executive director of the Grata Fund and the litigation funder in

 said the ICJ opinion “officially marks the end of an era of states ducking and weaving legal responsibility for climate harm” and that it “seriously calls into question the legality of Australia’s current and past policy setting under international law, including its past and ongoing approval of fossil fuel projects.”

“It makes crystal clear that so long as the Australian Government’s efforts to protect the world’s climate system falls short of stabilising global heating at 1.5 degrees, it could be liable to litigation from other countries,” she said.

In its own statement, the Australian government said it “will now carefully consider the court’s opinion”.

Australia is no stranger to litigation over its environmental and climate harms. In 1993, Nauru won $135m in an 

 for environmental pollution caused by phosphate mining on the island. More recently, the UN Human Rights Committee found in 2019 that Australia had 

 following a separate complaint by Torres Strait Islanders. As the decision was non-binding, however, it was ignored. With the ICJ opinion, Australia’s fossil fuel production looks more like a liability than an asset – a ruling that Dr Liz Hicks says shows how recent Australian court decisions such as 

are  out of step with the rest of the world.

“The approach of the Australian courts so far [on climate] looks increasingly awkward and at odds with the path many courts elsewhere in the world are taking on climate accountability and how law organises climate politics,” she says. “We look like we’re saying that the particular circumstances of our law and our tradition mean we have to follow a path different from anyone else – even if it produces absurd consequences in the law and the law’s capacity to regulate harm across society.”

“The law has always adapted to the problems that are put in front of it. If it doesn’t, then it breaks. But it’s always taken a critical mass of demands from across society before that happens. The pressure for change is building.”

Australia’s Courts Say Climate Change Is a Political Problem. The ICJ Just Made it a Legal Issue.

 [00:00:00] It might be hard to remember at this point, but think back to just after the election, this is what a lot of the news sounded like:

 Did an election that was supposed to revolve around women's issues, actually come down to the plight of men, young men?

 The headline was that men and especially young men swung big for Trump.

His campaign even consulted Baron Trump for tips on which podcasts he should go on, which young male influencers he should court. And with the help of money from Big Oil and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, it worked. Not because Trump went on those podcasts per se, but because he tapped into the ethos of those guys and made himself a candidate for aggrieved young men.

 I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelk boys, Aidan Ross. Um, uh, uh, Theo Vaughn, Bussin' with the Boys. And last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

 In practically the same breath, Trump promised to roll [00:01:00] back the rights of women and trans people, conduct mass deportation of immigrants, gut the EPA, and get rid of anything that looks like climate policy.

At this point, you might be wondering why we're talking about the Manosphere on Drilled, a climate podcast. The answer is simple: the longstanding and ever increasing overlap between male grievance culture and climate denial and delay.

In this four part mini series, we're gonna explore how gender and environmental issues have intersected throughout history, what the fossil fuel industry has done over the past century to feminize caring about climate change, and what on earth we might be able to do about it.

I am Amy Westervelt and to guide us through much of that story, I'm very happy to introduce my co-host for this season, the great Daniel Penny. Daniel's been writing and thinking about these issues for a lot longer than I have in GQ, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and on his own podcast on this subject, Non-Toxic.

 Thanks, Amy. So excited to be doing this show together. There are a lot of ways masculinity and climate are tied up in our culture and politics, and we'll be diving into a few of them, but I think you're right that the most obvious place to start is the so-called manosphere. This is the right- coded online world of dudes like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Steven Crowder, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Dan Monina, Theo Vaughn, Jake and Logan, Paul Liver King, Andrew Huberman, Bennel Boys, flagrant, and many others.[00:03:00]

 Okay, so I've heard of some of these guys, but that is a long ass list. And honestly, some of these names sound like they've been made up. I don't, I don't buy it.

 It's impossible to keep up with all of them. And because we live in such a fractured media ecosystem, you're not gonna hear about many of these guys unless you are actively seeking them out. Or you've got a man in your life who's a big fan. Which... I feel bad for you if you do. Some of these guys are explicitly anti-feminist, but most are just entertainers who like to talk about typical men's hobbies, sports, martial arts, cars, science and tech, sex and dating, with a bit of right wing climate denial mixed in.

 If you're a male in a society with that ethos, you're associated with rapaciousness and depo on the natural front, [00:04:00] and then oppression and atrocity on the social front. It's like, well then if you're the least bit conscientious because this sort of accusation hurts conscientious young men the most, then the best you can do is, well, let's say castrate yourself.

 This climate change narrative? This is a really goofy thing that people on the left are talking. This is because of climate change. This is, climate change causes fire. It's just LA! It, it's not climate change.

 Climate change is real. But it's not the most serious environmental problem in the world.

It's not the end of the world. And we need to be telling kids the truth.

 If you don't recognize those voices, that was Canadian psychologist turned podcaster Jordan Peterson; failed comedian turned MMA announcer turned podcaster Joe Rogan; and a relatively new entrant to the Manosphere: Breakthrough Institute co-founder turned [00:05:00] Twitter files thread guy, self-proclaimed journalist and newsletter star... somehow not yet a podcaster, Michael Shellenberger. We included him here because he's a super obvious example of why we're even talking about the manosphere on Drilled in the first place. Shellenberger is like horseshoe theory come to life, and his journey from environmental PR guy to climate skeptic to dipping a toe in the misogyny and anti-trans universe illustrates just how porous the lion between these two worlds is.

 And there are plenty of other dudes like them popping up all the time. The podcaster, Dan Bongino, is actually deputy director of the FBI. So I guess there's always hope that podcasting will land me a powerful government job.

 I still cannot get over that. Um, that like someone from this list is working a pretty high level government job.

 For these guys, masculinity and climate are linked in a larger reactionary project. They wanna return [00:06:00] the world to some imaginary golden age when energy was cheap and men were in charge. And their message is resonating, not just with the out of work blue collar guys pundits were so obsessed with after Trump's victory in 2016, those guys in the diner remember them? But with younger educated men, Black men, Latino men, and plenty of others.

According to exit polling in 2024, Trump won one fifth of Black men and nearly half of Latino men. It might be strange to quote Andrew Breitbart, but, I agree with him when he said "politics is downstream from culture." For the past decade, these dubiously credentialed, but very influential men have shaped the conversation, not just around masculinity, but around climate too. Sometimes in the same breath.

 Yeah, that is the piece that feels pretty new to me and also like something that has been pretty [00:07:00] strategic and intentional and in a pretty smart way. This masculine sort of reactionary politics has been around for a long time, but it's been adapted really easily to tap into some real issues facing young men today-- inflation, wage stagnation-- and pin those issues on feminists and climate activists.

 Peterson and Rogan don't always talk about climate, but they're doing so more and more these days, just like fitness instructors and guys who give business advice on TikTok have been slowly blending political talking points into their podcasts, Peterson and Rogan have been incorporating fossil fuel talking points into their shows.

 Meanwhile, Shellenberger has long been a so-called reformed environmentalist raising an eyebrow at climate action, but he's only recently come around to what I've been calling "the gentleman grift."

So you know, the relationship between climate [00:08:00] deniers and gender warriors goes both ways. Here's a clip of Shellenberger talking at a recent conference for a new, fun little group created by Peterson called The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It brings a lot of the Manosphere folks together with climate skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and Vivek Ramaswamy, hardcore Brexit folks like Nigel Farage, far-right politicians from the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada, "gender-critical" anti-trans activists, and of course a sprinkling of trad wives.

 The moralizing men, the woke men are actually weak men. Manly men are an improvement. Without any morality or a sense of concern or empathy, they become an Andrew Tate. We can strive for something better-- to be gentleman. Gentlemen are men that have the power of violence and aggression, but they would never use it to take [00:09:00] advantage of the weak and the vulnerable.

Instead, they would use it to build a civilized society.

 Andrew Tate is a useful foil for the gentleman battalion of the Manosphere army. They can always point to Tate --an alleged sex trafficker and Ponzi schemer --and say, we're not misogynists. We're not like that guy. While still spreading their regressive ideas about gender and their reactionary social views and complacency about climate change. Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, enemy of all things woke, had this to say when the Tate brothers landed in his state to fight a recent case.

 Um, no. Florida is not a place, uh, where, where, where you're welcome. Uh, with that, with those, that that type of conduct, and I don't know how it came to this,

 These guys go on each other's shows to grow their audiences and reinforce one another's message... [00:10:00] or to just get paid. Because there's a lot of fossil fuel money sloshing around the manosphere, too.

Just sticking with podcasts, nine out of the 10 with the largest followings across platforms were right-leaning with a total following of more than 197 million.

All but one of them hosted by men, the leading conservative cable news channel. Fox gets around 3 million viewers during prime time to understand exactly how the pieces of this puzzle fit together. I sat down with Kayla Gogarty author of a new report from Media Matters.

 What our findings underscore is that the rights has a disproportionate reach to a wide variety of audiences. We looked at about 320 top online shows that, uh, either have a right leaning or left-leaning ideological bent. And what we found was that a lot of these shows are not outright saying that they're ideological. [00:11:00] And yet when you dig into the content of the shows, you start to see how some of these right wing talking points are seeping into their conversations.

And so these audiences are not going to these shows for politics and news, and yet they're starting to hear it during these conversations amid celebrity interviews and other comedians that you know you might like and wanna listen to, and now you're hearing some of these right-wing talking points.

During the election specifically, you know, we saw Trump appear on several of these large podcasts, Joe Rogan, for instance, Full Send, and that's why some people have kind of dubbed it "the podcast election."

 Boys. I know a lot of you guys were. Thinking like me, you're seeing what's happening in this country. Everything's just getting really, really weird. You got men playing in women's sports, the border's wide open. This election might be the most important election in US History ...

 They're not going there for news and politics. [00:12:00] They're going there to hear from their favorite comedians. They're going there to hang out with the bros, basically. And so they go on different shows and they kind of have this comradery and that makes these, their listeners kind of feel like in the club, you know?

 But how did these dudes who just love martial arts and comedy before become mouthpieces for misogyny and climate denial?

 So there are really a few different species of these dudes.

 Some of these guys started as legacy media conservative darlings, like former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has endorsed the idea that wind turbines kill whales and that sunning your scrotum increases sperm quality. And then you've got guys like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, or Dennis Prager of the conservative edutainment company, Prager U and Ben Shapiro, who started The Daily Wire-- which hosts Jordan Peterson's show, by the way.

These guys represent the next generation of right wing [00:13:00] voices with deep connections to fossil fuel donors like the Texas fracking billionaire is Ferris and Dan Wilkes.

Amy, I know you're very familiar with the Wilkes Brothers.

 Yes, there's been a few really great pieces of reporting on these guys over the years. Um, the one I always think of is this, this article that Geoff Dembicki wrote for Vice News a while ago where he talked about how the Wilkes Brothers, have really tied this into kind of evangelical Christianity as well. So, for example, at his church, Dan Wilkes requires women to quote, "keep silence", and has told his congregates that climate change is God's will. Here's a quote from a 2013 sermon he delivered, just to give you a flavor. He said "if He wants the polar caps to remain in place, then He will leave them there."

 And conservatives have been doing this for a long time, building networks of talent to [00:14:00] get out their message. Here's Kayla

 Conservatives and conservative donors, they put money into building these networks, and they have been doing that for years. We saw them dominate, you know, right wing talk radio, for instance, back in the, the nineties and early two thousands, you know, the Rush Limbaughs and the, the Glen Beck.

They, they really dominated that space. Then you saw them move into cable and that, you know, now you see Fox started to really dominate that space. We saw that with social media as well, and now we're really seeing that with the online media ecosystem. So these, they kind of are thinking about the big picture and trying to build out this infrastructure and have been doing that for years.

 Okay, so there's an obvious reason why donors like the Wilkes Brothers would be investing money to boost the careers of climate denying anti-feminist podcasters. But then there are the dudes like Joe Rogan, or the guys from Flagrant who didn't always have an opinion on climate change, or their opinion seems [00:15:00] to shift all the time.

 Sometimes in the case of Rogan. He was having guests like David Wallace Wells, the climate columnist for the New York Times, and author of the book, the Uninhabitable Earth, which is all about what unchecked climate change will look like in a few years. So Rogan has really shifted in recent years, as has his audience.

And part of this shift may be algorithmic. We've all heard about the way YouTube and TikTok can radicalize their viewers by showing them increasingly extreme content just to keep them watching. So Kayla's team at Media Matters actually did an experiment about how this works using clips from the top five podcasts on TikTok, which include a lot of our guys.

 And the algorithm is really good at kind of leading you down these, these rabbit holes. We actually just just published this study within the last few days. We used a, a TikTok, [00:16:00] a new TikTok account, and we followed five of the leading podcasters. And so we followed a, a page, um, that had full sense content, for instance, that had Joe Rogan's content, for instance.

 The other third type that got mentioned on mission was reptilian. They don't want to talk about the reptilian. At all. Was there any sort of an explanation? Did anybody give you of why they don't wanna talk about it? We wanted to see what following some of these good kind of podcasters and seeing this content.

 Once you're starting to see that content, we wanted to see. See where tiktoks for you page would lead you. We found that the algorithm started leading us down to conspiracy theories and toxic masculinity videos, and by toxic, toxic masculinity videos, they were often framed as motivational.

 What's your dream? My father asked Grinding until my bank account looks like a phone book.

 They had clips of like expensive watches and boats and cars and planes and [00:17:00] you know, very kind of Andrew Tate esque I would say, where he's talking about like, you know, getting rich.

 I real, I decided to get rich, rich. Step one is I try, decided to be very logical about it.

Chess player, right? So I was like, I want money. What is money?

 Using even some of his voiceovers. So some of the sounds would use his voice, um, and, and would talk about, you know, coaching men about their girlfriends. Um, in one instance we saw, uh, a video say, uh, tell her that you're going to quit your job because you wanna chase your dreams and run your own business.

 Wow, that is wild. And how many people are starting with these podcasts and then winding up watching these clips?

 So it's hard to say exactly because these clips are broken up in so many different ways and distributed around the internet. But Kayla, you know, could say more people are tuning into podcasts and online shows, for instance, then they are tuning into cable [00:18:00] news.

 Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that Non-Toxic or Drilled are included in those top podcasts, but you know, we're trying. And, uh, Kayla also had some interesting data to back her up, which was that according to Nielsen streaming viewership, it's 43% of Americans versus 24% who watch cable or broadcast news.

And Pew had a study that, uh, majority of Americans, 54%. Get most of their news online.

 Um, another Pew study from the previous year in 2023 found that 87% of people who hear the news on podcasts said they expect it to be mostly accurate, and 31% said that they even trust the news they hear from podcasts more than traditional news.

 That is terrible because unlike us, most podcasts do not fact check... like at all. I mean, Joe Rogan is [00:19:00] sort of famously anti fact checking. Um, okay. So we know that people in general are getting their news from podcasts and trusting it more than they should, and we know that more men are getting surprise political talking points when they tune into manosphere podcasts.

But is that actually translating to the voting booth, especially on climate? Do we know how differently men and women actually view the climate crisis and how that is turning up in their votes?

 So about seven in 10 Americans believe in climate change and think humans are contributing to the warming of the atmosphere. But there's a gap between men and women, and it's pretty large, especially when you drill down by age or party. If you're listening to this podcast and you're a man, you probably care about climate change. And if you're not a man, you probably know men who care about climate change. But I'm sorry to say that Drilled and Non-Toxic listeners are not [00:20:00] representative of the average American male.

 Well, we do see differences between men and women when it comes to climate change.

 This is Alec Tyson, associate Director of Research at Pew Research Center.

 Women tend to be more concerned about the issue and more willing to either take action or see themselves as playing a role in addressing the issue.

 Wow. That is really fascinating, and I'm honestly kind of surprised that this is still the case. I know that from stuff that I've worked on before, that pollsters working for the fossil fuel industry figured this out a long time ago, like in the nineties, and really leaned into it. I did not realize it was still working quite so well.

 Right. It is interesting how much that gender gap is still very present today and it may actually be getting wider. Alec studies public views on science and technology, and he's been looking at the particular differences between men and women when it comes to whether climate change is happening and how important it is that [00:21:00] we deal with it.

 72% of women view it as a very or moderately big problem. That share's 56% among men. So a sizable share of both groups. But a 16 point gap here where women are expressing more concern about the importance or urgency of the issue here.

 And for the men who don't believe in climate change or who don't think it's salient, how does that lack of interest in climate or lack of belief in, in the climate crisis track with other political beliefs or political identities?

 So just among men, men who lean or identify with the Republican party, just 29% view climate change as a a salient problem. Let's talk about men who lean or identify with the Democratic party. 90% view climate change as, as a highly salient problem. That's a a 61 point gap within men.

We're talking about men, we're staying within gender here, but this partisan difference between Republican men and Democratic men is enormous.[00:22:00]

 So there's a 16 point gap, 16 point gap that really, that does kind of blow my mind between American men and women. But then there's also this huge divide among men on the importance or even the reality of climate change depending on their political party affiliation.

 So it turns out that climate denial doesn't just correlate with being a man, but with a particular type of man. Men who care about the idea of traditional masculinity are way more likely to be climate deniers. Here's Alec on that.

 We have great colleagues who did a survey on men in masculinity and they share who describe themselves as as highly masculine or very masculine.

They tend to be older men and more politically conservative men. So I, I looked at that same group and we looked at some climate attitudes and descriptively, absolutely there's a difference that older, more politically conservative men are both more likely to view themselves as highly [00:23:00] masculine and more likely to be skeptical about human contributions to, to climate change. And also less concerned about the issue generally.

 Hearing your conversation with Alec, I was actually reminded of something we did on Drilled all the way back in season one. It was a story about a group of fossil fuel executives who wanted to change the narrative about climate change and discovered something very interesting about how masculinity relates to climate change messaging.

 Okay, so the group was called ICE, not Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the new bad ICE but the Information Council for the Environment. This is early 1991. The summer of 1988, just a couple years before, had seen Jim Hansen's testimony before Congress that climate change was now visible.

We had a burning planet on the cover of Time Magazine. A little bit after this, the Rio Earth Summit is coming in 1992. So climate change is on everyone's mind, and there's growing consensus [00:24:00] that governments need to do something about it.

 I'm guessing the fossil fuel industry didn't like that.

 It was a nationwide heat wave. Um, remember it specifically because it ruined the vacation we were gonna have on the Eastern shore, on the Chesapeake Bay. All the, the well waters all went dry, right?

 This is Fred Palmer, a coal lobbyist who worked on the ICE campaign, talking to Guardian reporter Graham Redfern.

 Jim Hansen, who, who never was muzzled in any circumstances by anybody. Uh, came in front of that subcommittee and announced this was the leading edge, catastrophic global warming with his loaded dice and hit the internet and domestic international the next morning. And we've been arguing about it ever since.

Well, you know, at the time I don't think people really understood the import of it. Hmm. But I did understand the import of it, and I engaged immediately, but ICE was not my idea. The PR program was [00:25:00] not my idea. I've always been about education, but I did bring professionals in and we did it.

 Palmer says he eventually got disillusioned with ICE and decided to focus more on science and education, but what exactly did he mean when he said we did it? What did ICE do?

 So ICE was part of a really successful campaign. They figured out specific audiences to target with climate denial talking points, and it really moved the needle from the majority of Americans accepting the science and being concerned to more or less the mess we have now. Here's Kurt Davies, a longtime Greenpeace researcher who's now at the Center for Climate Integrity, telling us all about their campaign back on season one of Drilled.

 Data indicates 89% say they have heard of global warming. 82% claim some familiarity with global warming. 80% [00:26:00] claim the problem is somewhat serious, while 45% claim it is very serious and 39% back federal legislation without any quantification of cost, and only 22% of those consider themselves green consumers.

 So this thing that he's talking about is really important. It's. Again, 1991, governments are starting to get behind the idea of not just national policy, but actually global agreements to tackle emissions. And it's not just environmentalists who know and care about this, it's breaking through.

Transcription

Manosphere figures like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson aren’t just telling men how to treat their girlfriends or train for MMA fights; they’re also blasting their listeners with climate denial talking points. Which isn’t a coincidence. The fossil fuel industry has known since at least the 1990s that certain types of men are more susceptible to climate disinformation than other segments of the public. We take a look at how climate denial has seeped into the manosphere, how those messages are shaping men’s views of the climate crisis, and how the results are playing out at the ballot box.

Carbon Bros is a collaboration between Drilled Media and Non-Toxic, written and co-hosted by Amy Westervelt and Daniel Penny. For more of Daniel’s analysis on this subject, check out his 

Carbon Bros, Ep 1: The Testosterone Pipeline

Information Pollution

The Real Free Speech Threat

Carbon Bros

SLAPP’d

In 2019, Cynthia Houniuhi, a young Indigenous woman from the Solomon Islands and president of Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, spearheaded an effort to do something plenty of legal experts and climate thought leaders said was impossible: get the highest court in the world—the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—to issue a ruling requiring countries to do something about climate change. Six years later, that effort has resulted in the most consequential climate ruling in history.

In 2023, the United Nations General Assembly formally requested an advisory opinion from the ICJ, with 

96 states and 11 international organizations

 participating in public hearings in 2024. Last week, the 

 that countries are responsible for protecting their citizens and local environments from climate change, and to do so they are also responsible for regulating the actions of polluting companies under their jurisdictions. The ruling, co-authored by the court’s 15 justices, was unanimous. Upon its publication, Judge Yuji Iwasawa said, "The human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is essential for the enjoyment of other human rights."

Tom Sparks, an international climate lawyer and director of the nonprofit Just Access, noted the importance of a unanimous decision. “As any regular court watcher can tell you, that’s far from usual. It gives the opinion a very significant weight,” he said.

The court ruled that the Paris Agreement not only creates procedural obligations to prepare and submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), another term for climate action plans, but also that states have obligations in how they formulate their plans. Sparks noted that “highest possible ambition” and “progression” are now legal requirements and once states submit their plans, they are legally obligated to pursue their best efforts to actually meet the promises they made. “Progression” refers to countries' obligations under the Paris Agreement to continuously update and enhance ambition in their NDCs submitted every five years.

And if states fail to take action to protect the climate system from greenhouse gas emissions, the court established a pathway for reparations by stating that such failure may constitute “an internationally wrongful act.” Additionally, the court said that any state (and not just injured states) could invoke another state’s responsibility for failure to take appropriate climate action.

Another noteworthy ruling was that states that are not party to climate treaties like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement are nevertheless obligated to meet their share of climate action under customary international law. This means that the United States is legally obligated to cut emissions and provide climate finance even if Republican leadership withdraws from climate treaties.

The court also said it considers 1.5°C to be “the primary temperature goal for limiting the global average temperature increase under the Paris Agreement.” This is a more complicated statement than it might appear to be. On the one hand, the ruling could lay the groundwork for holding governments accountable for ensuring that the world 

 which most leading climate scientists agree is impossible given the delay.

Dr. Alaa Al Khourdajie, Research Fellow at Imperial College London and an IPCC lead author said "By identifying 1.5°C as the primary temperature goal, the Court has strengthened its importance despite the inevitable overshoot, thereby strengthening the potential legal obligation to return to 1.5°C after exceedance.” Dr Alaa was 

 that assisted the ICJ in understanding key findings from IPCC reports about impacts of climate change. Crucially, he added, this anchors climate finance and loss and damage mechanisms to the 1.5°C target more strongly than ever before. "In my view, this is important as it counters potential arguments that such financing becomes redundant once overshoot appears inevitable or that returning to 1.5°C is merely a burden for future generations."

On the other hand, some climate lawyers are concerned that it codifies a target that is not nearly ambitious enough. “I can’t think of another legal situation where a lawyer would go into court and ask for a political compromise instead of what their client actually needs,” Julia Olson, lead counsel for Our Children’s Trust said. In this case, the ideal target would be no additional warming. “As a lawyer, you always ask for as much as possible, knowing that you’re probably going to get a compromise. You don’t start with the compromise! And the fact that this is continuously getting baked into precedent and codified makes it increasingly difficult to change.”

Nevertheless, the ICJ ruling provides teeth to climate agreements. It could impact multiple cases currently underway, make commitments made under the Paris Climate Agreement legally binding, and finally provide citizens and governments with a tool to deal with the very industry-friendly Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system. In fact, Judge Cleveland noted in 

 that states’ climate obligations must inform interpretations of international investment law. This is significant considering that so far, about 

 were decided in favor of fossil fuel investors.

Trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties have historically included clauses that require governments to submit to arbitration proceedings should a corporation file an investor-state dispute claim against them. These claims have frequently been used by extractive industries to punish governments for passing environmental or human rights legislation, creating a chilling effect particularly on Global South countries where governments worry that even if they win, such proceedings could drain national coffers.

Global North countries are not immune either, though. When the U.S. government canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, after years of grassroots organizing and protest against it, Canadian pipeline company TransCanada filed a $15 billion claim against the U.S. That claim was ultimately unsuccessful, but that was a relatively unusual outcome; arbitration panels often rule in favor of corporations bringing disputes.

To date there has been little governments can do to blunt the impact of this system; even when they withdraw from treaties that require it, they are subject to it for several years. The government of Ecuador had withdrawn from treaties binding it to arbitration for seven years before Chevron was able to invoke one of them to file a dispute against the country for allowing what Chevron deemed to be a fraudulent legal case to proceed against it. Chevron won that dispute and Ecuador is still on the hook to pay the multinational oil giant more than $1 billion in compensation. The ICJ ruling gives states powerful legal protections against such claims, providing a legal framework for balancing investor protections with the imperative to protect citizens from climate change; if they are legally obligated to act on climate change, laws they pass to reduce emissions or limit permits to extractive industry are suddenly cast in a different light.

Climate litigators and campaigners all over the globe have indicated that the ICJ ruling will not only have an impact on cases already underway, but is also likely to spur new cases. "Today’s decision shows that Switzerland is fighting a losing battle with its opposition against the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in the 

 case,” Georg Klingler, Coordinator for the 

, often referred to as the “Swiss grannies case,” for Greenpeace Switzerland. “This decision will energize new campaigns that build people’s power and strengthen the growing wave of climate litigation."

Changmin Choi, Attorney at Plan 1.5 and Counsel for the 

, explained that last year, the Korean Constitutional Court demanded that South Korea must set a national emissions reduction target in line with scientific facts and international standards. “This Advisory Opinion from the world’s highest court will strengthen the implementation of last year's decision, aligning South Korea’s 2035 national climate plan and its long-term reduction pathway with its fair share,” he said.

“All actors, including large multinational companies are affected by ICJ 's opinion,” Jérémie Suissa, General Delegate at Notre Affaire à Tous, the legal team behind 

, said. “The legal risks will now increase significantly in every country in the event of continued climate inaction.”

“The Court has confirmed—and I hope once and for all—that there is a human right to a clean, safe, healthy, and sustainable environment,” Sparks, from Just Access, added. “That's going to really spur litigation on climate change at other levels, and so mobilize the power of domestic and regional courts even more.”

The elephant in the room here is the United States, which is tearing down any apparatus that had previously been built to deal with climate change, including the move this week to revoke the Environmental Protect Agency’s endangerment finding around greenhouse gas emissions. But, as they themselves have repeatedly reminded us, U.S. oil companies are not American companies, they are global: if their home country will not hold them accountable, the many countries in which they operate around the world might. And the ICJ opinion gives a tool to those seeking to hold the world’s largest polluter to date accountable, too, even after it has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.

While the ruling is historic and will have meaningful implications in courts around the world, Sparks noted that the justices still left a few issues unaddressed. “It’s not a perfect judgment. The Court should have examined further the historical responsibility of the major emitters, and should have more clearly established whether or not those States are legally liable for their emissions prior to the UNFCCC  [in 1992] and, if so, how far back. And I would have liked to see a more direct treatment of fossil fuels. But two out of three isn't bad!”

Landmark Ruling Gives Paris Climate Agreement Teeth

Photo: For years, New Zealand has been a global leader on climate and conservation, with bold moves like securing 

 for Te Urewara national park, pictured here. The current government is working overtime to turn the country into a heavy polluter instead. Photo by Krzysztof Golik, under 

When New Zealand confirmed in late June that it would abandon a commitment to phase out oil, gas and coal there was no public announcement. The country of 5.2m people in the Pacific had been a founding member of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA) when the international group was launched in 2021 at the Glasgow climate conference. Representatives of the New Zealand government stood alongside those from European nations such as Spain, France and Denmark, and the country’s Pacific neighbors, Samoa, Tuvalu and Vanuatu to announce they would work towards a managed phaseout of oil, gas and coal in pursuit of a just transition away from fossil fuels. It was part of a broader, global push to deal with the root cause of climate change, and, for New Zealand, a decision that reinforced its clean, green image.

Two weeks ago, when the country confirmed it was exiting the Alliance, New Zealand said it was done. Normally, a decision of this magnitude would merit, at a minimum, some sort of public statement, but when it

 it took reporters to chase up climate minister Simon Watts to confirm.

At issue was a commitment by the recently elected New Zealand government to lift a 2018 ban on offshore gas exploration and restart fossil fuel production in the country. The right-wing coalition government – composed of three parties, the conservative National Party, and its junior partners, the libertarian ACT Party and nationalist New Zealand First – pledged to lift the ban during the 2023 election campaign that brought it to power. In the year since, Watts waved off concerns that the country would be forced to leave BOGA if it allowed gas exploration to restart,

 in 2024 that he had received departmental advice that there was no issue.

“It is our expectation that we will remain an associate member,” he said.

New Zealand has long prided itself on its clean, green image and remaining an associate member of the group was one way to cling to this reputation despite a shifting reality. Watt’s statements, however, were misleading. In response to New Zealand making its decision known, BOGA issued a statement making clear it had warned the government soon after it came to power that any repeal of the ban would trigger their exit.

“Considering this, and amid ongoing efforts to pass the legislation and establish an investment fund for domestic gas exploration, the Government of New Zealand has confirmed that it will withdraw from BOGA,”

Watts, for his part, insisted New Zealand was still serious about its climate targets but said the decision was justified. “Natural gas,” he said, “will play an important role” in the country’s “transition towards lower emissions fuels” – common talking points favored by oil and gas industry figures.

The decision may not be as consequential as Brexit, as predictable as Donald Trump pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement for the second time, or as absurd as the oil-rich Canadian province of Alberta pushing to secede from Canada to join the US, but it is emblematic of the extent to which the country’s new leadership is working to rewire New Zealand in a way that frustrates climate action, and complicates global efforts to build momentum for change.

Since coming to power, Deputy NZ Greens leader and climate change spokesperson, Chlöe Swarbrick says New Zealand’s new government has de-funded at least 35 climate initiatives as it has prioritized the interests of a small group of business leaders, fossil fuel producers in particular, ahead of the public.

“It’s a shredder,” Swarbrick says. “They’ve put climate policy through a shredder.”

Among the bigger programs to get the axe were an emergency response fund for extreme weather events and natural disasters, a clean investment fund to help encourage renewables, and measures to support the uptake of electric vehicles and associated EV infrastructure programs. These have been replaced with a battery of proposals that would help smooth the way for new gas and coal investments, including legislation

 such as coal mines in a way that bypasses environmental regulation and community consultation, breaking up the Department of Conservation, adding coal to a list of “critical minerals” and

 that would force banks to provide services to fossil fuel companies to end an effective, decades-long divestment campaign by 350Aotearoa. Some in the government have even

 floated the idea of abolishing local councils

, after some local authorities near new resource developments such as the proposed coal mine the Denniston Plateau, near Westport in the South Island have expressed opposition.

Australia’s Courts Say Climate Change Is a Political Problem. The ICJ Just Made it a Legal Issue.

Landmark Ruling Gives Paris Climate Agreement Teeth

“Ideological Sludge”: How New Zealand Is Quiet Quitting Climate Action

A Q&A with media scholar Hanna E. Morris on her new book, ‘Apocalyptic Authoritarianism’

SLAPP’d: An Indigenous Nation Fights for Its Water

Information Pollution

The Real Free Speech Threat

Carbon Bros

SLAPP’d

Carbon Bros, Ep 1: The Testosterone Pipeline

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

Australia’s Courts Say Climate Change Is a Political Problem. The ICJ Just Made it a Legal Issue.

Landmark Ruling Gives Paris Climate Agreement Teeth

“Ideological Sludge”: How New Zealand Is Quiet Quitting Climate Action

A Q&A with media scholar Hanna E. Morris on her new book, ‘Apocalyptic Authoritarianism’

SLAPP’d: An Indigenous Nation Fights for Its Water

Information Pollution

The Real Free Speech Threat

Carbon Bros

SLAPP’d

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Carbon Bros, Ep 1: The Testosterone Pipeline

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

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