How Big Oil Created Corporate Free Speech, and Why It Matters Today

Judge Grants Restraining Order Against Minnesota County Sheriff in Line 3 Fight

Indigenous Water Protectors, Allies Protesting Line 3 First Ever To Be Cited under Obscure County Ordinance in Minnesota

Another Line 3 Battleground—Free Speech

How Canada Uses ‘Redwashing’ To Crack Down On Indigenous Pipeline Protesters

The Media’s Role in Criminalizing Protest

Australia’s State-by-State Approach to Criminalizing Climate Protest

Meet the Shadowy Network Vilifying Climate Protestors Around the World

Karen Savage

Anna Pujol-Mazzini

Lyndal Rowlands

Amy Westervelt

Rishika Pardikar

Fredrick Mugira

Martha Troian

Geoff Dembicki

Alleen Brown

Around the world, climate and other environmental protestors are being harassed, attacked, and arrested at an increasing rate. Laws are being passed that levy life-altering prison sentences and fines on protestors arrested near anything deemed “critical infrastructure,” which is defined so broadly it’s hard to find a public space that 

 be near it anymore. Corporations are suing protestors and NGOs, comparing protest to organized crime. Governments are growing increasingly comfortable branding environmental protestors as “domestic terrorists” or instruments of “foreign influence,” and going after the nonprofit status of environmental nonprofits. And so far the media is largely participating in the rhetorical “othering” of protestors, opting in most cases to focus on the disruption that protest causes rather than the change it seeks, and to marginalize activists. In this print and audio series we’ll take an in-depth look at how climate protest has evolved in recent years, where this backlash is coming from, how it’s grown so quickly, and what it feels like to be someone who’s concerned enough about the future of humanity to join a protest, only to find themselves facing police violence and several years in jail.

We’ve worked with reporters on almost every continent to cover this trend from as many angles as possible and trace how particular tactics and ideas have spread across borders. The result is more than two dozen print and audio stories that we’ll be releasing over the next several months. The stellar team behind this project includes: 

Alleen Brown is an independent investigative journalist. Her reporting on state and corporate repression of Indigenous-led Dakota Access Pipeline opponents at Standing Rock has been cited in civil rights cases, reports submitted to international human rights bodies, and more than a dozen books. Her investigation mapping over 6,500 prisons against heat, wildfire, and flood risk has provided foundational information for organizers and policymakers defining what climate change will mean for mass incarceration. She has reported extensively on the intersections between environmental crises and racism, poverty, immigration, violence against women, and criminalization. She was previously a staff reporter at The Intercept and has written for Grist, The Guardian, Inside Climate News, The Appeal and other publications. Alleen is from St. Paul, Minnesota, and lives in New York.

Fredrick Mugira is a Ugandan multiple award-winning water and climate change journalist, media trainer and development communication specialist with over 10 years of wide-ranging experience. He has reported from various countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and USA. Fredrick has won various continental and national journalism awards including: the prestigious CNN/Multichoice African Journalist award; the UN Development Journalism Award; the 2018 and 2015 Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP) fellowships. He was also shortlisted for the Energy/Water journalism Lifetime Achievement award at the Africa Utility awards 2018. He heads Water Journalists Africa, a network of over 700 journalists in 50 African countries who report on water. He cofounded InfoNile, a geojournalism platform mapping data on water issues in the Nile River basin with journalism stories to promote transboundary peace. 

Anna Pujol-Mazzini is an investigative journalist, podcast producer and fact-checker. She is a former international correspondent for Reuters, AFP and The Daily Telegraph and she specialises in gender, LGBTQIA+ rights and the environment.
Her work has been published by The Washington Post, Reuters, TIME Magazine, National Geographic, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, among others.

Martha Troian is an award-winning independent journalist and writer. Specializing in investigative journalism, she has worked for and contributed to media outlets across North America for close to 15 years, often writing about Indigenous politics, justice, crime, data deficits, and environmental and human rights issues. She was the McLaughlin Centre Science Journalism fellow with the William Southam Journalism Fellowship at Massey College, University of Toronto for 2019-2020. Previously she was a participant of the Investigative Journalism Intensive Program at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Currently, she is working as a producer with the Institute for Investigative Journalism probing water contamination and Indigenous communities. She is proudly from Lac Seul First Nation and Wabauskang First Nation in northwestern Ontario, and a mother to her young son.

Geoff Dembicki is an award-winning journalist and author from Alberta, Canada, currently based in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to VICE, DeSmog, The Tyee and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy and The Guardian. He’s the author of Are We Screwed? How a New Generation is Fighting to Survive Climate Change, which was published internationally by Bloomsbury USA in 2017, and The Petroleum Papers, published by Greystone Books in 2022.

Karen Savage is an investigative journalist who has covered environmental justice communities extensively and has been reporting on resistance to pipeline construction in Louisiana since 2015. Her work has appeared in Undark Magazine, The Appeal, Project Earth, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Bridge the Gulf, Youth Today, Truthout and City Limits. Karen is an alum of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she teaches environmental reporting.

Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo, Reporter, Nigeria 

Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo is an award-winning environmental journalist and the recipient of several journalism awards including the UNEP Young Environmental Journalist 2012, 2019 Green Accord Environmental Award, Italy and UNFCCC CDM-African Radio Contest 2011. She created, produced and presented the most popular environmental show on Nigerian TV, Green Angle on TVC News. I have hosted the BBC World Service's Environmental Radio Programme, Local Warming. Ugochi comes from a community ravaged by erosion - a key factor that inspired her passion to pursue environmental journalism. I am a fellow of the Lancaster University Environment Center – Recirculate Programme. From erosions, flooding and desertification in Nigeria, oil pollution in Ogoniland of 
the Niger Delta, depleting Africa's last rain forests to frozen lapland, Finland, she has visited rugged terrains to share underreported environmental stories. She currently works as a freelance journalist covering environmental issues across Africa and Europe, and co-hosts Djoliba - a multi language African radio show on RadioX Basel, Switzerland. 

Lyndal Rowlands is a freelance journalist. Her audio journalism can be found on 

First Eat with Nakkiah Lui: an Audible Original

The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, SBS

where she was a UN Correspondent. Lyndal’s work has been recognised with a UN Correspondents Association prize for climate journalism, a UN Foundation Press Fellowship and a UnionDocs Pod-Pod residency. She’s a member of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, The Science Journalist Association of Australia and the Society of Environmental Journalists. She was born in a valley full of brown coal mines and her favourite sound is a magpie warbling.

Rishika Pardikar is an Indian environmental journalist tracking science, law and policy. Her areas of expertise are climate change and biodiversity, both nationally within India and internationally with a keen focus on negotiations under UNFCCC and UNCBD. Her work has appeared in The Lever/ Jacobin, Foreign Policy, science magazines like AGU's Eos, China Dialogue and Indian media like The Hindu and The Wire. She lives in Bangalore.

Wudan is an award-winning narrative journalist, podcast producer, fact-checker, and entrepreneur. She writes about contrarian characters, unlikely connections, creative solutions, slow-moving crises — or any combination of the above. Her work appears in 

The Atlantic, The California Sunday Magazine, The Guardian, High Country News, Longreads, MIT Technology Review, National Geographic, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The New York Times, 

S10 Real Free Speech Threat Documents

S5, Ep3 | The Trial

S2, Ep3 | An Update on the Big U.S. Youth Climate Case

S9, Ep3 | The Next Citizens United Will Be a Climate Case

S3, Ep14 | Climate Behind Bars

S10, Ep4: In Vietnam, Tax Evasion Charges Help Lock Up Climate Activists

S10, Ep3: In Australia, a State-by-State Approach to Criminalizing Protest

S10, Ep2 | Disha Ravi on Becoming the “Radical” Face of Protest in India at 22

S10, Ep1 | The Corporate Push to Criminalize Speech

The Real Free Speech Threat

The Supreme Court Strategy to Take Us Back to Pre-New Deal America

The Supreme Court’s Obscure Procedural Ruling in Baltimore’s Climate Case, Explained

Sackett, West Virginia and the Judicial Strategy to Gut the EPA

New Climate Case Names Enablers: API, Western States Petroleum Association, Koch Industries, and McKinsey

Why Climate Litigation Matters

Montana Kids Just Won Their Landmark Climate Lawsuit. Here’s Why. 

Supreme Negligence

False Friends of the Court, with Senator Whitehouse

SCOTUS Says No to Exxon, Now the Corporate Free Speech Fight Begins

California For The Win

Dana Drugmand

In the U.S., the response to climate litigation is often “who cares when this Supreme Court is ultimately going to knock it back anyway?” And the answer is simple: discovery. Discovery is a term that describes the fact-finding phase of civil litigation. During the discovery phase, lawyers can access primary documents, depose current and former employees and executives, and generally get a whole bunch of information they couldn’t previously access. 

The oil companies have been fighting like hell to avoid this phase because it will undoubtedly produce ten more “Exxon Knew” series, if not more. It will provide evidence for all the other cases, too, not just in the U.S. but globally, where the industry doesn’t have Supreme Court justices ready to do their bidding. It’s true that it’s entirely possible that any climate case that gets to the U.S. Supreme Court will result in a pro-oil ruling. But not before massively increasing the risk of accountability for these companies along the way. Even the U.S. government might be forced to finally act if the public, armed with mountains of evidence that politicians have colluded with fossil fuel executives to sell their future, demands it.

And it’s important to remember that climate litigation does not begin or end with the U.S., nor does accountability for U.S. oil companies. It’s entirely possible that documents unearthed via litigation in one country can be used to hold a company accountable in one of the other 100 countries in which it operates. 

Given the importance of climate litigation today, and the fact that in its 2022 mitigation report the IPCC included litigation as a key mitigation tool for the first time ever, we keep tabs on these cases, both on the website and via multiple podcasts. 

Litigation Documents

S8, Ep9 | A Verdict

S5, Ep6 | A Verdict And a New Charge

S2, Ep 6 | False Friends of the Court

S2, Ep1 | Ecocide

S2, Ep4 | Taking Big Oil to Court

S1, Ep7 | Campaigns So Successful They’ve Landed In Court

S3, Ep11 | Supremely F*&cked

Climate Cases

Blood of the Devil

“Like a War on the Environment” —Texaco’s 30 Years in Ecuador

Secret Tribunals and Hand-Picked Arbiters—A Little-known System Undermines Environmental Regulation

S5, Ep10 | The Kill Step

S5, Ep9 | The Judge

S5, Ep8 | Damages

S5, Ep7 | The Linchpin

S5, Ep5 | The Big Guns

S5, Ep4 | The Secret Tribunal

S5, Ep2 | The Colonizers

S5, Ep1 | Lockdown

La Lucha En La Jungla

Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

Petroganda: The Original Narrative—Energy Security

Leaked BP Docs Show: Protest Works. That's Why It's Important to Protect It.

The Reason Covid-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Returning to Its Favorite Story

Is Big Oil Turning on Big Auto?

Petroganda: The World's Greatest Neighbor

Petroganda: We're Part of the Solution

Petroganda: We Make Your Life Work

Petroganda: The Economy vs. The Environment

Disinformation Techniques: A Glossary

Three Congressional Hearings on Climate Disinfo Bring New Industry Documents to Light

This Is Not the First Time Climate Has Been Part of the "Culture War”

Fossil Fuel Industry Ads: You Can’t Live If Living Is Without Us

The fossil fuel industry was one of the first major users of PR in the U.S. and it continues to spend more than most other industries. PR firms don’t just handle media placements and advertising for fossil fuel clients, they help craft strategies. As one publicist put it to me recently, “it wasn’t the oil companies that invented greenwashing, it was PR firms.” Despite the billions of dollars it’s spent on PR over the years, the industry and its favorite firms are not exactly innovative. They come back to the same five key narratives over and over again, leaning on whichever plays best at any particular point in time: 

 - From fueling wars to preserving national security, the industry loves to highlight it’s role in keeping America safe…even when it’s profiting from wars that it has also helped to manufacture. 

- Keeping nature separate from humans and reminding us over and over again that economic growth is more important than conservation has helped the industry stave off regulation for decades. 

 - From keeping the lights on to providing the building blocks for life-saving medical devices, smart phones, cosmetics and fast fashion, the industry loves to remind consumers that they need it. 

 - Nothing keeps regulation away like voluntary solutions that make it seem like the industry is really trying. 

 - Just in case people still aren’t thrilled about dirty air, dirty water, and climate change, the industry makes sure to fund museums, sports, aquariums, and schools, which serves the dual purpose of cleaning up its image and making communities feel dependent on the industry and thus less likely to criticize it.

E. Bruce Harrison Documents

John Hill Documents

Newsom Documents

Schmertz Documents

S9, Ep2 | A Legal Strategy

S3, Ep9 | Jay Rosen and Nicholas Johnson on What the Media Can Do About Disinformation

S3, Ep7 | John Hill and the Tobacco-Oil-Plastic Triangle

S3, Ep8 | Meet The Harrisons

S9, Ep1 | The Panic

S3, Ep6 | Manipulating the Masses and Predicting the Future—Edward Bernays and W. Howard Chase

S3, Ep5 | Oil Slick, Part 2—False Equivalence and Free Speech

S3, Ep4 | Oil Slick, Part 1—The Rise of the Corporate Persona

S3, Ep3 | Psychological Warfare, Astroturfing, and Another Tobacco-Oil Connection

S3, Ep2 | The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle

S3, Ep1 | The Father of Public Relations

Petroganda

A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or 

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

Drilled

Drilled S10: The Real Free Speech Threat

Drilled S9: Herb

Drilled S8: Light, Sweet Crude

Drilled S7: The ABCs of Big Oil, with Earther

Drilled S6: The Bridge to Nowhere

Drilled S5: La Lucha En La Jungla

Drilled S4: There Will Be Fraud

Drilled S3: The Mad Men of Big Oil

Drilled S2: Hot Water

Drilled S1: The Origins of Climate Denial

Law & Order meets the climate crisis as we dig into the stories behind the hundreds of climate cases around the globe. Listen here or 

Damages

Damages S3

Damages S2

Damages S1

In Rigged, we rummage through the bag of tricks used by PR to shape the world you live in. Over the last century, these tricks have rigged the media, the government… society, really...with sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes profoundly serious effects on our democracy. This is a podcast about that war for hearts and minds right here on US soil.

Listen to episodes and access transcripts here, or 

A podcast about the way the PR industry helps corporations shape the world.

Rigged

Rigged Season 1

Hot Take is a holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it. Hosted by real-life friends Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt—an essayist and a journalist— Hot Take offers a unique perspective on the issue of climate change. With a breath of fresh humanity and humor, conversation moves swiftly from cackling about the bad week an oil company had, to speaking seriously and passionately about the unequal distribution of climate impacts and our own experiences of climate grief. And then washing it down with a round of dad jokes! Every week, we’ll connect you with the latest climate news and with the journalists and storytellers trying to make sense of this complex issue to help you see the world through climate-colored glasses. We ended production on Hot Take at the end of 2022, but you can still access episodes here, or 

A holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it.

The Real Free Speech Threat

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

Climate Cases

La Lucha En La Jungla

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petroganda

Investigating the Obstacles to Action on Climate Change.

The Real Free Speech Threat

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

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Climate Cases

La Lucha En La Jungla

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petroganda

Investigating the Obstacles to Action on Climate Change.