Kusmunda open cast mine owned by South Eastern Coalfields Limited (SECL), a subsidiary of Coal India Limited. Photo credit: Rishika Pardikar

At the confluence of three open cast coal mines in central India—Gevra, Kusmunda and Dipka—the landscape seems like a whole other planet. From above, the mined land looks like terrace farming. Below, the ground is black and workers move around in huge trucks amid coal dust all day.

 coal mines and each produce about 50 million tonnes of coal every year. Overall, India produces about 

Coal meets about 55% of India’s energy needs and is important for energy security. Unlike the U.S. and some European countries, India does not have adequate oil and gas reserves to provide baseload power. And imported oil and gas are expensive. So, the country relies on coal to meet the growing energy demands of 1.4 billion people even while 

Many coal districts also have a significant Adivasi

Hindi for “first peoples”—population. Given that a lot of forested lands that are now coal mines were once home to these communities, it’s just as important that an energy transition recognizes historical land and forest rights of these communities as it is to do right by coal workers.

Then there’s the Adani group, with coal mining operations across India and also other countries like Australia and Indonesia. Its chairman and founder, Gautam Adani, is a close friend of prime minister Narendra Modi and the second wealthiest man in Asia. Over time, the group has grown as the largest private developer of coal not just in India but also the world. And with this growth, came opacity in operations, crony capitalist favors and police action against protesting Adivasi communities.

In this context, the challenges of planning a socially and economically just transition away from coal are clear. 

 visited the country’s coal belt to fully understand that task.

At present, while discussions about a ‘just transition’ are happening at the national and academic level, there is nothing tangible about an energy transition on the ground across coal-heavy districts like Korba and Sarguja in Chhattisgarh where industry talk is still fixated on “MTPA” (million tonnes per annum) to quantify the benefits of ever-increasing coal production.

‘Coal is everywhere. Today they will mine here, tomorrow there’

Gevra, Kusmunda and Dipka mines are owned by South Eastern Coalfields Limited (SECL), a subsidiary of the state-owned enterprise Coal India Limited. All three mines are located in the district of Korba in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

 to India’s annual coal production. Other states in the coal belt are spread across central and eastern India in Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal.

The mining sector across minerals like iron ore, coal, limestone and bauxite is a major contributor to Chhattisgarh’s economy where coal alone 

 to the economy. Coal also supports millions of people in direct employment at mines and thermal power plants and indirect employment like transportation, maintenance and other associated activities. Heavy industries like steel and cement and brick kilns are also big consumers of coal in the state.

While travelling from one coal district to another in February 2025, we saw posters for local body elections underway in the state of Chhattisgarh. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party of the prime minister, swept these polls.

Manifestos of contesting candidates included promises of ensuring appropriate compensation for lands taken over by coal mining and also employment.

“Coal is everywhere but we get nothing from it. Only 20% [of the local population] get permanent employment. And there’s no land for rehabilitation [post displacement for coal mining] because coal is everywhere. Today they will mine here, tomorrow there,” said Manjeet Yadav, a resident of Bhathora village.

 and even stopped coal mining activities by SECL at Gevra mine seeking adequate compensation for their land and employment.

“Land acquisition is the toughest task,” Partha Mukherjee, general manager (mining) for SECL’s Kusmunda project told 

The first step for any newly proposed coal mine is an announcement by the Government of India that it intends to acquire the land under the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act. “From the time of declaration under the Act to actual possession of the land is a very long process. Resettlement and rehabilitation and providing employment is very challenging,” Mukherjee adds.

Private mines to nationalization and back again

Industrial coal mining in India traces its roots to British colonialists who needed it to fuel steam-powered ships and railways. After independence in 1947, coal mines moved to private hands. Then, in the early 1970s, the coal sector was nationalized.

From then to now, a majority of coal in India has been produced by the state-owned enterprise Coal India Limited. Today, Coal India Limited produces about 80% of the country’s coal. However, private coal mining operations have slowly expanded since 

 in the 1990s, spurred by loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and associated reforms.

 was amended to allow private businesses to mine coal for use in their own power plants or cement or iron and steel production. The private sector could not sell the coal it mined. But captive use was allowed and in part necessitated by the inability of Coal India Limited to meet coal demand across the country, especially by power plants. Over the years, the government also subcontracted activities like removing overburden (layers of soil and rock that lie above the coal seam) and extracting and transporting coal to private businesses.

In 2020, the Modi government opened the coal sector as a whole to commercial coal mining. The move was, at least in part, aimed at undoing a Supreme Court ruling that shook the entire Indian coal sector just a few years earlier.  In 2014, the Supreme Court declared the allocation of nearly 200 coal blocks in the 1990s and early 2000s as illegal and arbitrary, effectively reneging on the previous 20 years of coal block allocations to the private sector. Modi’s move to open the sector to commercial enterprise was a way to address private sector concerns over the ruling.

“Essentially, the government said look, the Supreme Court may have made this decision but we still think private coal mining is a good thing,” Rohit Chandra, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi explained. “So, we will find a way to auction coal blocks without restricting its end use [like the Coal (Nationalisation) Act previously prescribed]. And private companies can mine and sell the coal in the market to end users.”

The Modi government also introduced the ‘mine developer and operator’ (MDO) model for the coal sector. Under this model, state-owned enterprises like Coal India Limited continue to own the coal mines while the development of the mine, including land acquisition processes and actually running the mining operations, are handed over to private entities. The aim behind the MDO model was 

"streamlining operations, enhancing productivity and reducing mining costs"

Questions remain, however, about the extent of actual productivity and efficiency in private mining operations given that competitiveness is attributable in large parts to labor arbitrage. Private businesses engage workers through informal arrangements where pay rates can be less than half of those provided by Coal India Limited. Private businesses also do not have other labor responsibilities like overtime wages and pensions. On the other hand, employees of Coal India Limited are unionized and have far greater bargaining power than those in the private coal mining sector.

“There are issues with low wages and non-provision of medical, education and housing facilities [with the MDO model]. Today, Coal India [Limited] provides all of this,” said R C Mishra, general secretary for Chhattisgarh of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC). INTUC has a membership of about 30 million workers across the country.

 published in February 2025 in the journal WIREs Climate Change, titled ‘India’s Coal Conundrum:  Decarbonisation Amidst a Developmental Legacy’ throws light on Coal India Limited’s approach to development, or developmentalism. As has been the case in many other coal-producing countries, including the U.S. and Australia, coal “company towns” have been central to Coal India Limited’s approach.

“For many coal-adjacent towns like Dhanbad, Asansol, Chandrapur, Korba and Bokaro, coal companies played a material role in developing some basic public goods and institutions in the areas; until the early 2000s the best schools, dispensaries and hospitals in these areas were often run by coal companies,” the paper reads. “Even today, over 1 million people live in [Coal India Limited] housing, and a similar number of people benefit from [Coal India Limited] providing water to villages for both residential use and irrigation. Given the absence of state capacity in much of India's hinterlands, [Coal India Limited]'s developmental role becomes an important feature of regional polycentricity as multiple actors take partial responsibility for local development.”

However, the paper also notes that such benefits were largely “enclave developmentalism” and “highly politically mediated” benefits that rarely reached poorer sections of the society like landless labourers and marginalised communities like the Adivasis.

On the MDO model, Partha Mukherjeee, the general manager (mining) of Kusmunda too had questions. “Private entities have lesser cost of production with contracted labor.  For us [SECL], salaries of permanent employees and daily wages are a very high cost. How can we compete with them?” he asked. He added that the MDO model for coal operation is still in its early stages and how it works out in the long term remains to be seen.

. Other private businesses that have bagged MDO deals include Thriveni Sainik Mining Private Limited, which the state-owned power generation company National Thermal Power Corporation relies upon.

Journalistic investigations have revealed how the Modi government 

In another case where a coal mine was allotted to the state electricity generation company of the western Indian state of Rajasthan, the MDO model again 

favoured Adani at the cost of the state exchequer

. Such allocations also raise serious questions about whether coal - increasingly in the hands of private players and under the  pressures of crony capitalism - can offer energy security for the people of the country.

“The whole point of allocating coal blocks to state-owned power generation companies is that it reduces the cost of coal and the cost of electricity. And there is assured supply. But what we see today is that the state is buying its own coal at a higher price from Adani,” said Sudiep Shrivastava, a lawyer based in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh who has challenged the MDO model in the Supreme Court of India.

D K Soni, the petitioner in the MDO case before the Supreme Court which Shrivastava is arguing, said the MDO model has allowed Adani to mark good quality coal as reject quality and sell it privately at a high cost, while selling low quality coal to the state government of Rajasthan. Soni is a lawyer and a Right to Information (RTI) activist based in Ambikapur, Chhattisgarh. The RTI Act is India’s equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act.

“All political parties need money and they favor big businesses like Adani. But the BJP has surrendered fully to Adani,” Soni said. BJP, the party of prime minister Narendra Modi, has been in power nationally since 2014, and is in power in the state of Chhattisgarh as well.

Further, Soni added that India is not planning its coal mining operations properly. “We need to first use areas which are already being mined [for coal] before opening new forests,” he said. “Some of the forests in Chhattisgarh are centuries old. We cannot plant such forests today. Bears used to live very close to our cities but now we don’t see them. These forests also had a lot of medicinal plants which were used by villagers.”

“This is PEKB. And this is Parsa,” said Muneshwar Porte, stretching one arm and then the other, in two different directions. Both pointed to coal mines operated by the Adani group in Hasdeo Arand forests, in the district of Sarguja in Chhattisgarh. The region is home to the Gond community, an Adivasi

Porte too belongs to the Gond community. They are animistic and tree-worship is a dominant part of their spiritual beliefs. The two coal mines were built on previously forested lands that the Gond community considers sacred.

PEKB stands for ‘Parsa East and Kente Basan,’ a coal block spread over 27 square kilometers where operations began in 2013. And Parsa, which is still under development, is 12.5 square kilometers. PEKB has the capacity to produce 15 million tonnes of coal per year and Parsa about 5 million tonnes.

On 30th March, prime minister Narendra Modi visited the state of Chhattisgarh. He laid the foundation stone for inaugurating new thermal power plants and 

 about how his government has provided houses to Chhattisgarh’s poor, and to Adivasi populations in particular.

Within two days of Modi’s visit, tree-felling for the second phase of the PEKB mining project began. The Gond community has consistently opposed such mining operations on their lands because they consider the trees sacred and forest produce provides them nutrition and livelihoods.

Sunita Porte, another member of the Gond community recollects how, when they were protesting against the felling of trees for Parsa coal mine in October 2024, Chhattisgarh police opened fire on them and beat them with batons without regard to the presence of children. “Some of us had taken our children along. But the police did not care who they were hitting,” she said. Several people were seriously injured in this incident.

Additionally, the police lodged legal complaints, locally called First Information Report (FIR), against ten community members, including Muneshwar Porte and Sunita Porte, accusing them of endangering the lives of police forces. 

 has seen copies of the FIR. It states that 70-80 villagers, armed with sticks and slingshots, had gathered in protest of tree-felling and aimed to “obstruct government work with intention to kill.”

High-handedness by both government authorities and coal companies is not an uncommon occurrence in these areas. The community tells us about past instances where local journalists were harassed and data on their phones were deleted by “dalaals” (brokers or middlemen in Hindi) contracted by the Adani group. These agents offer a variety of services to the companies that hire them, including negotiations with local communities for land acquisition.

 against Adani’s coal operations in other coal belt states like Jharkhand too.

A renewed push for underground coal mining

 underground coal mining with an aim to increase the country’s underground coal production capacity threefold to 100 million tonnes by 2030. But the move raises concerns about worker safety.

On 20th February, two days before our planned visit to the town of Chirmiri in Chhattisgarh we heard about the death of a worker in an underground mine in the same area. We met local journalists who told us no one knows how many people actually die in underground coal mines because the management hides it.

Deaths in underground mines invite investigations by the Directorate General Of Mines Safety which is a regulatory agency under the Indian labor ministry. The journalists say management-level employees of underground coal mines never let word about deaths leak out to the larger public to avoid scrutiny and closure of the mine.

Accidents are less common in underground mines that do not use blasting technology and instead use a machine called a ‘continuous miner’ to excavate. On the condition of anonymity, a medical staffer at a hospital run by SECL told us that roof collapse is the major reason for deaths and serious injuries and that blasting technologies often lead to such accidents.

Worker death and injury is not a unique feature of underground mines; workers in open cast mines are prone to injuries and deaths in other situations like truck accidents. Fatal accidents are not uncommon along coal transportation routes outside the coal mines either. We came across a small board displayed by the roadside that highlights nine cases of accident-caused deaths in the last three years within that particular stretch of 500 meters, and advised caution.

These risks to health and life are in addition to those posed by exposure to high levels of air pollution.

 published in the journal Atmospheric Pollution Research found high concentrations of particulate pollution and also sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and heavy metals in an assessment of air quality in a coal field in Jharkhand. More recently, 

 by the National Foundation for India (NFI) showed widespread respiratory and skin diseases across six districts in India’s coal belt where coal mining is a major occupation. NFI is a non-profit organization that works on a host of social justice issues across India.

An energy transition away from coal could mean a safer and healthier livelihood for such workers. But those benefits come alongside serious economic risks that need to be addressed. Over 

 are dependent on coal in India today across activities like mining, transport, power generation and sectors like iron, steel and brick-making. Most of these workers are also engaged informally and, given so, the energy transition presents an added layer of precarity for many of them.

On scale and skills, the clean energy sector cannot absorb all coal workers. Additionally, there are regional disparities. Coal, and therefore coal jobs, are concentrated in central and eastern India while solar and wind power, including manufacturing capacity, is concentrated in western and southern India.

 referenced earlier makes a prescient observation: “There is no pareto optimal coal transition; there will inevitably be millions of losers from the decline of the coal industry, and the ideal goal is to foster a parallel developmentalism which can at least partially compensate some losers and provide enough political cover so that the political and bureaucratic classes see this as a desirable pathway. So far much of this basic confidence-building and convincing stakeholders is yet to be done.”

In India’s Coal Belt, a Window into the Challenges Facing Energy Transition

 [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Damages, the Law Focused podcast from Drilled. We have a new season coming June 3rd, all about the energy transfer versus Greenpeace case and the Countersuit in Europe where Greenpeace has invoked the eus anti SLAPP statute to sue energy transfer for harassment. It is a complicated and fascinating story and I cannot wait for you to hear it. In the meantime, I wanted to bring you an update on climate cases in the us, especially given some of the recent efforts by the Trump administration to quash some of them. To help me out with that, I've got Kathy Mulvey with the Union of Concern Scientists here today.

Kathy is the accountability campaign director at UCS, which just released a report called Decades of Deception that pulls together in one place, all the primary documents out there showing what the fossil fuel [00:01:00] industry knew about climate change, when it knew it, and what they did with that information.

You might think you already know this story, I thought I did, but I learned a few things and I hope you will too.

 I've read the report super interesting and I have a bunch of questions for you, but I wanna start with the question I expect to get from people, which is okay, what's new? What's new that we didn't already know in this report? What do you wanna point people to on that front?

 Yeah, so what's new is really that, we've put these documents together in a coherent narrative. So, you know, these are primary sources about what major fossil fuel corporations knew when about the harms that their products would cause to climate [00:02:00] and our society and what they did in spite of what they knew.

So, you know, it's the physical and natural science basis both how the companies were aware of and even conducting some of that internally. Also the basis of climate attribution science as that field has been developing. It's also the historical track of disinformation over the decades from the outright climate science denial to how that has become greenwashing, distraction, delay and even efforts to intimidate climate advocates. So, you know, one part of the story that is still developing relates to a hacking scheme that targeted some staff members [00:03:00] at my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and several other public interest organizations working to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their role in climate change.

 Yeah. , I'm gonna ask you about more details about that whole unfolding story in a minute too, because it's fascinating. But first , I'm curious about, well, to your point just a minute ago as I was reading this, I was like, actually I think this is the first I've seen of a report that does combine all of these things in one place. And then am wondering about the timing, what drove the desire to release this now?

 You know, I've been working with the Union of Concerned Scientists now for almost 10 years, and one of the first projects that I undertook, actually the first project I undertook was the 2015 Climate Deception dossiers in collaboration with my former colleague Seth [00:04:00] Schulman who had years before that authored the publication Smoke Mirrors and Hot Air that shows how the fossil fuel industry has employed many of the same strategies and tactics, even some of the same front groups and scientists as the tobacco industry. And so, there are a few factors here. The advances in US climate accountability litigation against major fossil fuel corporations over climate deception and damages. And, much of that really relies on evidence of disinformation and deception campaigns and many of the documents that are referenced here in the report. And now of course the threat that the Trump administration and a fossil fuel friendly [00:05:00] congress pose to efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable and to the advances , the hard fought advances to bend the global warming emissions curve down and accelerate the the clean energy transition really mean that the, the timing is important. We need this evidence to be easily accessible and the story to be told in a way that people, policymakers, litigators, shareholders, and investors can really access it.

 Yeah. Okay. I know this is a big question and we could probably spend an hour talking just about this, but I'm hoping you can give folks a little bit of a summary of where we're at right now with the threats from Trump you know, which states have been sued to try to stop these cases or super polluter laws from going [00:06:00] forward.

And to the extent that we know so far, what has the result of that been? Have there been, you know, cases thrown out? How is the litigation responding to this, this attempt to really quash these cases?

 Yeah. So, we know that during his campaign Trump both expressed opposition to efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry liable for climate change and also sought to, raise a billion dollars from the fossil fuel industry.

And we've seen the fossil fuel industry have access to the Trump administration and Congress. And there have been multiple moves and one relates to the state level efforts to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable.

So, president Trump issued an executive order that attacked [00:07:00] states rights to hold fossil fuel companies accountable through legislation and. Litigation you know, among other efforts that states are pursuing for environmental justice. That was one part of that.

And we have already seen the Department of Justice take. Action by suing preemptively, actually Hawaii and Michigan before they filed climate accountability litigation. And, you know, Hawaii went ahead and filed its lawsuits, so was not intimidated by that action. The administration also sued vermont and New York State over their climate Superfund laws that is laws designed to make fossil fuel polluters pay for their role in climate harms. And so, that's one way that we are already seeing this administration take [00:08:00] action.

We know these cases are advancing in state courts around the country where they were filed. And as you've covered, you know, the fossil fuel industry has sought for up to eight years in, in some of the cases to, to use procedural maneuvers to keep them from getting into the courtroom and being heard on their merits. And this kind of effort through a friendly administration to throw a wrench in the advance of those cases really indicates what a threat that litigation poses to the fossil fuel industry.

So that's one big part of of how we've seen the Trump administration taking the side of the fossil fuel industry. And, I should say the backdrop to all of this is that all of us are experiencing climate impacts in our day-to-day lives, right?

And we're increasingly aware of the [00:09:00] preventable harms that have been worsened by this industry's deception campaign. So, you know, another thing to talk specifically about in terms of the interventions on the side of the fossil fuel industry is the Securities and Exchange Commission last year issued a final rule on on corporate climate disclosure. And this was, after many years, and it was significantly watered down from what it could have been, but it would compel publicly traded companies to assess and report on how climate change will affect their bottom lines and by extension investors and the public. And part of the story that that we're telling in decades of deceit is how industry groups that are heavily influenced by the fossil fuel industry [00:10:00] like the US Chamber of Commerce have, sought to, to water down that rule and then sued to block its implementation.

And the Securities Exchange Commission under Trump has indicated that it won't defend those rules. So that vital information for shareholders and investors to have is now not on getting access to that information through the SEC is not on the timeline that it could have been.

 I wanna ask you too about how this all kind of fits into the global context because, you know, these are global companies. This evidence is potentially useful outside of the country as well. Do you have any thoughts on whether these companies that are getting a huge helping hand by the US government could end up being held accountable somewhere else?

 Yeah, that's a really good point that, the companies that we're looking at in this report, [00:11:00] so ExxonMobil, Shell in particular but they, the members of the American Petroleum Institute are global in scope. And so, , the evidence of the deliberate campaign of disinformation, dating back as far as 50 years, and, in terms of the renowned scientists, Dr. Edward Teller briefing executives at an American Petroleum Institute event in 1959. You know, and then, and then looking forward to the early 1980s I mean this is a really critical point where major fossil fuel companies had really amassed a remarkably detailed understanding of the potentially catastrophic effects of their products for people on the planet.

And it's worth noting that according to , the data set of the. Carbon [00:12:00] majors that's hosted by Influence Map 122. Oil, gas, coal and cement companies are responsible for 75% of all industrial carbon dioxide emissions since 1981. So, you know, in terms of the consequences of the deception and disinformation and delayed action in the US and globally those kinds of numbers are enormously significant.

 Okay. I wanna have you walk us through this hacking story.

There've been a couple of bits of reporting on this that have come out as we learn more. But if you could just sort of summarize it for people, what happened here and what do we know so far?

 Yeah. So, this information has been coming into the [00:13:00] public. Into the public domain for a few years now. Right? So we know that between 2015 and 2018 hackers attempted to infiltrate the email accounts of. Key staff members at the Union of Concerned Scientists and several other nonprofits.

And, through a report published by the Citizen Lab in 2020, we learned about that spear phishing campaign. And actually one person has pleaded guilty in connection with that campaign, right? A Israeli. Private investigator named Abam Azari and the US Government's sentencing memo for him in 2023 said that published articles about documents that were stolen and [00:14:00] and leaked through the hack really appeared to be designed to undermine the integrity of work by State Attorneys General to hold ExxonMobil accountable and also to attack the, the credibility of some of the individual targets of the hacking scheme. So, that information has been out there for a little bit of of time. Just this year new evidence has come to light through US government filings and and through further investigative journalism. And those court documents related to an attempt to extradite Amit for who's another accused mill middleman in this operation. They, this suggests that the US government has evidence that the criminal scheme was indirectly paid for [00:15:00] by ExxonMobil.

And that one of ExxonMobil's then lobbying firms the Washington DC based DCI group provided a list of targets to a middleman linked to the hackers and allegedly sent the fruits of the hacking to the oil and gas company. So, you know, this is the this is unprecedented, I think, in terms of fossil fuel accountability.

I know from work on the tobacco industry decades ago that the tobacco companies conducted surveillance and sought to infiltrate. Not only public health and public interest organizations, but the World Health Organization, its itself. So, the latest development was at the end of April, the UK court did order the extradition or agreed with the, the [00:16:00] order to extradite it for lit to the us. He does have the possibility of appeal and, we expect that he may, you may seek to appeal that decision but these revelations and the latest step in the process have really been an important step toward accountability and toward getting to the bottom of this hacking scheme.

You know, who hired and paid for these hackers.

 I worked on a story recently where we were looking at. How chemical companies do this too. I feel like it's become really common, this whole like, corporate surveillance thing, right? For me, I've looked at it so often that on this most recent story, it was the other reporter that I was working with and I were kind of like, eh, but , is this even new because this they all do this and like whatever.

And then we kind of caught ourselves and we're like, no, no, it's still [00:17:00] actually really genuinely messed up that companies do this. And I think that really, most people don't realize that they do it. In, in this particular case, we found a database that this company was keeping on, people, they considered to be their enemies, which included academic researchers, journalists, activists a whole bunch of different people.

And they had really scary details like details of someone's divorce and details of an illness and someone's family and things like that, that are really, really genuinely creepy. And you know, if, if companies have the budget to be hiring israeli surveillance organizations

 to do this kind of thing. The sort of information they can get to and the way that that can be weaponized is really, really scary.

 Yeah. It, it, it really is. Right? And so for, you know, for staff at, at nonprofit organizations who are doing the work to carry out their public interest missions [00:18:00] for an organization like us who, we're working with scientists who are doing the, the natural and social science work to compare the science and the scientific understanding inside the corporations with what was what was happening with the intergovernmental panel on climate change at the same time. For example, for people doing this work for the benefit of society to be attacked, to have their motivations misrepresented to be falsely accused of, of conspiring could have a, a chilling effect on, on work that really urgently needs to be done in a world where we're, we're dealing with the impacts of a climate crisis every day.

So it is, it is incredibly significant. And yeah, although pictures of this puzzle had been out there [00:19:00] for some time. I mean, ExxonMobil once had a, a website that was called understanding the Exxon Knew controversy that featured some of the stolen materials. To, for the first time have public court evidence that links ExxonMobil and one of its then lobbying firms to the, the hacking conspiracy is is significant.

I should say that both ExxonMobil and DCI group deny any involvement in the hacking scheme and have maintained that they had nothing to do with it.

 That's very interesting. Is there a universe in which , in one of these cases, either in the US or maybe outside the US that stuff could be compelled?

 I, I think it's definitely worth. Calling for it. I think especially because, what we've understood [00:20:00] again from the filings and this related investigative journalism is that, the DC based lobbying group, and I quote, "acted on behalf of one of the world's largest oil and gas corporations centered in Irving, Texas in relation to ongoing climate change litigation being brought against it."

So the time that this hacking operation began, ExxonMobil was headquartered in Irving, Texas. They've since moved their headquarters to Houston. And this is just, this is so significant because this is 10 years ago before there was, as investigations by State Attorneys General we're just getting started, right?

And so if that is indeed a motivation behind a hacking scheme [00:21:00] then what we see are climate accountability, litigation claims that are, , are now advancing that really focus on the deception and disinformation. As the center of consumer protection and alleged fraud complaints. And then you know, ExxonMobil actually using. Information that was obtained through a hacking operation and pub, and made public through a hacking operation to perpetuate and expand the disinformation right. By misrepresenting what the accountability work is about. So it is, connected to very much the efforts to hold the fossil fuel corporations accountable through litigation and legal action.

 It's such a weird and creepy story and look like irrespective of your thoughts on [00:22:00] climate and oil companies the idea that it's just been normalized for corporations to do intensive surveillance on citizens.

Is pretty scary and gross, and I don't think most people think it's good, you know?

 I don't think so either. That's another thing that's interesting about this, right? Is that I mean this hacking operation was, was massive, right? There were 128 targets provided that were related to the work to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change. But there was a whole range of other targets and it's really a criminal hacking operation without any, any political or scientific dimensions to it. And so that's where it was.

It was especially interesting. One might say [00:23:00] cynical that the, the defense memo. By for let's attorneys where they were attempting to prevent the extradition claimed that he was actually being persecuted for his political views on, on climate change.

 For having political views that were similar to ExxonMobil's.

 So interesting because part of their legal argument too, right? Is that

 like a political belief and therefore a First Amendment issue? Yeah. Wow.

 But you know, here's a guy who really if the allegations are true, he was in it for the money. He was a hacker for hire or a middleman

 right. It's not like he had some long history as a political pundit. You know what I mean?

 And the, the DC based lobbying group according to the filings, paid for lit firms, a total of $16 million between 2013 and 2018. [00:24:00] So that's a, that's a lucrative operation.

 In the past decade or so litigation has been this point of optimism for people that there's this tool that we can use, as governments continue to fail to be aggressive enough or implement these policies to reduce emissions.

Do you still feel like that's the case? Do you think that despite all these efforts to try to stop these, particular cases in the US that litigation still provides a hopeful path forward?

 Yeah, absolutely. The US cases are proceeding toward consideration on their merits. And that should be an opportunity for these state claims that are around consumer protection and and public nuisance, for example. You know, have the opportunity to [00:25:00] be.

Heard in, in court, so the, the evidence that we've compiled here in this report, documentation and primary sources that have been made public through a range of investigations by, by Congress, by investigative journalism , this evidence could be really important in informing cases that are happening in other jurisdictions and on other, other types of claims to hold the fossil fuel corporations accountable for their role in climate change. So a absolutely, there are numerous cases for, for fossil fuel accountability that are proceeding around the world.

And there, there really should be an opportunity for communities to have access to justice for the harm that we're all facing.

 That is it for this [00:26:00] week. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our new season. You can access a transcript of this episode and read all sorts of stories on our website at drilled.media You can also sign up for our Patreon there. Free members will get our weekly newsletter, and if you wanna support our work by becoming a paid subscriber, you'll get access to bonuses, like sneak peaks of upcoming episodes, Additional interviews and more. Damages is an original critical frequency production. This episode was produced by Peter Duff. Our fact checker is Shilpa Jindia. Artwork by Matt Fleming. James Wheaton of the First Amendment project is our First Amendment lawyer. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Transcription

from the Union of Concerned Scientists compiles in one place all the documentary evidence on the role of fossil fuel companies in obstructing climate policy. We walk through the latest, and get an update on climate cases in the U.S.

Damages: New Evidence and an Update on U.S. Climate Cases

Denial to Delay

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

The Real Free Speech Threat

For years, the writer and critic Malcolm Harris has been helping readers make sense of the amorphous implications of capitalism. In 

, Harris took on the history of Silicon Valley and the Big Tech-venture capitalist worldview that has now ascended to the highest levels of American power. In 

, he showed what happens to millennials following the collapse of the stories about how the world works with which they/we were raised – that work is life, life is work, and all of it is in service to perpetual economic growth.

What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis

, also aims to bring clarity to one of capitalism’s consequences – but this time for the biggest, most existential consequence of them all.

, Harris argues that despite decades of climate denial, disinformation, and delay, there are still plausible paths we can take to solve a problem that feels increasingly unsolvable. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the “we” tasked with doing the solving is the broadest possible “we”: all of humanity. 

 delivers important messages to some of humankind’s subsections – climate activists, the United States, the global working class – but one of Harris’s foundational points is that approaching this planetary crisis as anything less than a 

 crisis is a form of denial. And at this point, denial is no longer something the collective “we” can afford.

In March I spoke with Harris about the intrinsic links between fossil fuels and capitalism, how tackling climate change is a form of class conflict, and why progress on this crisis demands facing uncomfortable truths head-on – starting with the fact that it’s probably even worse than we think. That’s a painful reality to accept, Harris says, but ultimately a liberating one.

This conversation has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy.

Prefer to listen? Check out the podcast version of this interview here, or wherever you get your podcasts:

I have my own theory, but I’m curious what you see as the purpose of your book.

At first I thought, “I’m going to write about why I’m right and everyone else is wrong. I have the only explanation for how we get through the climate crisis, and when people read my brilliant explanation, they’ll have no choice but to agree with me.” And then I thought about that. That won’t happen, even if I make a spectacular argument. We live in a society, and I wasn’t going to remake that society by making an argument.

I decided the most useful thing I could do was, operating from some base of shared understanding, give a showcase of what I think are the relevant ideological paths that the left has open to it right now [to solve the climate crisis] – from the left wing of the Biden economic team all the way to insurgent communists. This book was my attempt to give the strongest presentation I could of these different paths, even if I don’t agree with everything in there.

What it felt like to me was essentially a bracing bucket of cold water. There’s no benefit to pretending that the problem is not as bad as it is, and that the crisis is not as acute and real and world-spanning as it is. There is a sense of inertia, the way that capitalism works, that all of us can get very comfortable with. What [the book] felt like to me was you repeatedly reminding people that it’s as bad as you think, probably worse, and we don’t do ourselves any favors by avoiding the discomfort of that reality.

Well, that’s just true. I’m against deluding ourselves. I’m interested to see how much people will think about it as an optimistic or pessimistic book, hopeful or hopeless. I try not to work within those boundaries. They don’t guide us in the right directions because there is hope even in the most hopeless moments, and there’s despair even in our best strategies. I think that’s a premise for the project: that there’s no point deluding ourselves. I’m not going to lie to my readers about what I understand the situation to be. The situation is pretty dire.

But people have been in dire situations for a long time. We’re not the first people to see the end of the world, and we can learn from other experiences with that. For me, it’s a forward-looking book, not a despairing book. I’m thinking about where we are [and] where you go, and to go anywhere, you have to start from where you are. You can’t imagine you’re somewhere else. That is not a path for movement.

You also write early in the book, “I’ll assume from the beginning that success is possible.”

, who says, “On the basis of the evidence before us, taking a ‘realist’ view of the human prospect, like seeing Medusa’s head, would simply turn us to stone.” We have to be realistic, even about our realism. You can look at the situation and see how bad it is and freeze. There’s a real temptation to do that, and there’s a temptation to ignore it, to just not look. I think [being] realistic about our realism is to find a middle in between those and say, the situation’s bad – and we can still move. We are not stone. We have the ability to think and we have the ability to act, and we can do both collectively.

In understanding the state of the present moment, you talk about the “oil-value-life chain.” Can you explain what that is, as a premise for where we are right now?

The concept for this book is this “oil is life” syllogism, which I awoke from a dream with. I was going to pitch a whole different book. The night before the conversation with my agent, I woke up [from] a dream with this phrase, “oil is life.”

They are in so many ways, microplastics alone.

But in another way, oil is life. We know the phrase “water is life” from the 

. And that’s true. Everyone knows that you literally can’t live without water. We know that, and that should be decisive. Everything should flow from that fundamental truth if we are operating rationally. And yet the truism that “water is life” has not shifted our politics. It has not shifted our state behavior. It hasn’t affected the path we’re on that much, except in this insurgent way. And so the question is, why? There has to be something truer, at least in our society, than “water is life.”

 is people’s lives. People’s lives are tied up very literally in the fossil fuel system. Certainly the gas that they put in the car or the polyester clothes that they put on their children, but also the dividends from the Exxon check that is going into their pension fund. People’s lives are really tied up in these systems – [beyond] their need for consumable energy that can be replaced with a solar panel.

Until we’re realistic about that, unless we acknowledge that, we can’t change it. That, to me, explains why every group, every agency, every state, every community that has tried to address this imminent crisis, this currently elapsing crisis of climate change, has found itself totally unable to do it at the scale that is necessary. Even China, which has, as a state, maybe done the most to address the exigencies of climate change at scale – it’s not there. [This lack of action] is not a reasonable reaction to what’s happening in the world. We’re not able to do that. It’s because oil makes our life – for everyone in the world, almost – that we face this block.

And you need “value” as that center term [in “oil-value-life”] to explain why it’s not just oil 

 that shapes our lives, but the fact that oil is valuable, and “value” is the structure that explains and organizes the entire social metabolism. As long as fossil fuels have value, which they do because you can use them to accomplish a whole number of things, and as long as value is the term that structures our whole world, we’re going to find ourselves unable to control our social [and] ecological situation.

One of the points that I found clarifying was the idea that our entire society is structured around the idea of value for value’s sake. Value production for value production’s sake is an inherent good. That’s the basis for this whole system we live in. As long as that’s the case and oil is valuable, then that [oil-value-life] chain will be unbroken.

We can see the implications very simply. I start with the story of going to this Shell conference where they wanted me to speak and talking to this engineer-slash-finance guy for Shell who’s explaining, “When we stop using a well because of climate pressure, we sell it to somebody else, and they’re going to use it. The oil in that well is still going to get used even though we’re complying with our climate commitments.” That oil is valuable.

If you replace 200 million gas-powered internal combustion engine vehicles in the United States with electric vehicles, those cars don’t just disappear. They’re going to be sold somewhere where they don’t have as many cars because suddenly you can get a car for way cheaper. And those cars are still going to need to be powered with gasoline that someone will find money in being able to supply. That person who’s able to sell the gasoline for that car is going to be able to live. Maybe they’re going to be able to improve their lives and the lives of the people around them and their loved ones. I’m not going to be able to convince them not to do that. You’re not going to be able to convince them not to do that. State regulations aren’t going to be able to convince them not to do that.

I compared it to the war on drugs. There’s theoretically a war between every government in the world and drug dealers, and drug dealers are winning that war and have been winning that war for decades. And it’s not because they have bigger armies or whatever. It’s because drugs are valuable, and value is the way that we find our way to life.

You organize this book around three “collective strategies,” as you call them, [that society could still take to solve climate change]. Can you give an overview?

“Marketcraft” is using the state to intervene to break the connection between fossil fuels and value by building a clean energy economy and regulating fossil fuels out of existence. It’s a term designed by the political scientist 

 that I really like. It’s a pretty broad spectrum of policies.

The second one is called “public power,” which people might understand as democratic socialism, or just socialism, which is where the state is actually doing the green transition itself. It’s loosening the connections between value and life, and between fossil fuels and value, by building a clean energy economy and providing a basic quality of life for all people, independent of their relation to the value system, such that fossil fuels can’t make the same demand on us that they make now to ruin our lives and ruin the collective life. That’s organized through organized labor developing itself in the interests of the entire society and taking control in that collective interest.

And the third one is what I call “communism,” which is breaking that connection between value and life and organizing life itself around different principles – specifically, to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities, rather than according to their ability to produce value.

We saw some of those marketcraft and public power strategies during the Biden years.

Yeah, you could point to examples, for sure. More marketcraft than public power, I think.

There is an interesting theme throughout [the book] of class conflict. You make the point that whatever you think taking on climate change is about, at its core any sort of realistic “solution” involves class conflict. Can you explain why that is? A lot of us on the left – maybe more of the progressive left, rather than the capital-L Left – are still hesitant to say “class.”

I think you have to go to the mode of production because capitalism is a mode of production. You have to look at the conditions and relations of that mode of production. We see a relation between a capitalist class and a working class. There’s a class that produces value and a class that receives that value. It’s a funny inversion because the capitalist class creates the work and the working class creates the capital. That is the basis for this production system, production for production’s sake, that organizes our entire global society and that we find ourselves unable to control.

I don’t necessarily claim that you have to abolish it in order to have a path through. That’s what I think – I’m an anti-capitalist; I think we need to abolish capitalism – but from a marketcraft perspective, you can change the way that capitalism works. I think it’s worth acknowledging that and trying to understand that perspective. Whether you have to absolutely destroy capitalist production or not [to solve the climate crisis] is a question that this book leaves open because it’s a question that’s open on the left.

But if the premise is that the oil-value-life chain is wrapped around the gate to positive futures, and we need to find some way to break it or bend it to slip through that gate, then we’re going to have to change the production mode that we have. And that is a class conflict.

One of the challenging parts of the book was the reminder that this is not as simple as, if we can provide some sort of organizing force for workers to unite around, then everyone will be naturally drawn to that and workers of the world will unite and rise up. A lot of people, and a lot of institutions of organized labor, have a lot invested in the economic and political status quo.

I don’t think it becomes easier by pretending it is easier. You run into that problem with some of the public power advocates, where we pretend if we focus on the easy solution, then it will actually become that easy. But the truth is that there are striations and conflicts within the working class.

You see that domestically and you see it internationally. We have to be really serious about that. If we pretend, “Oh, all workers in the world have the same sets of interests, and American workers are not advantaged by the exploitation of workers in Brazil in any way, shape, or form because we’re all members of the working class,” that’s true from one perspective. But it’s not the whole truth. It’s not realistic enough. So we need to map the conflicts 

 the working class in order to build the working class as a real force.

Construction workers lobbying in favor of gas-powered crypto mines is one of the examples I use. That’s in your own narrow – very narrow – interest. That isn’t in the interest of the global working class at all. We need to be serious about what the composition of the working class is and not just treat it as some self-evident abstraction.

I felt like there were a few concrete messages for “mainstream” progressives who are left of the Democratic Party but might not think of themselves as Capital-L Left.

One of them is, essentially, break up with the Democrats. I have to imagine, after the last couple of years, there’s a lot more openness among folks on the left that the Democratic Party is not the vehicle for change people might have anticipated it to be, to put it mildly.

]. His argument is that we need a United States Labor Party in order to pursue the interests of workers. I think that’s an important perspective. I’m not 100% convinced that’s true. As far as I’m concerned, the Democratic Party, and even parallel institutions like the 

 or something, are much like the United States itself. The perspective that “this is a force for historical evil in the world and we need to distance ourselves from it and there can be no progress through [it]” – I think there’s a strong argument for that perspective. It’s an argument worth hearing out and worth thinking through and sometimes conceding to.

At the same time, I think that these are internally contradictory structures. I don’t think everyone who works for the U.S. government is a butcher of Gaza, even though the U.S. government is itself. Do those contradictions within these institutions allow us to move in a positive direction? I think it’s possible. Has that perspective taken a blow in the past six months? Yeah, probably. But I think these are conversations we need to have and topics we need to think about. But what are the other ones?

[Another] one that emerged while reading the book was this idea that, as you put it, “breaking the situation into ostensibly manageable chunks” is essentially a form of [climate] denial. A lot of us realize that to some extent. If you ask us concretely [to] map out how we get from here to saving the planet in little manageable chunks, we admit pretty quickly that it can’t be done. And yet it’s such a comforting way to see the crisis as something you can just break up into small chunks and tackle sequentially.

And as something that is broadly and impersonally distributed by a collective logic that we don’t have to operate. That would be really nice because then everyone could just do their part, and it would get done, and we wouldn’t have to figure out what we’re actually doing. That’s how capitalism works. That’s not how solving our problems works. That’s 

 our problems: Everyone just goes out there, doing their little part, one day to the next, and we don’t have to try and get together and actually decide what we’re doing. Everyone can just worry about their household-size share.

That’s not going to work. It’s not working. We really do have to organize to make collective decisions. I don’t see any other way through. We need common understandings. We don’t have to necessarily come together and work in one organization; I don’t think that’s going to happen. But we need some kind of coherence to these efforts.

At one point [you say] that’s the only way to actually tackle it: at the scale of what the problem 

Yeah. And what’s the point of tackling it at another scale?

Besides making us feel better in the moment, I guess.

But it doesn’t make us feel better because we’re not stupid.

Do you think that the return to the White House and the government of MAGA types changes any of the arguments you make in the book, or shifts the priorities for some of the different strategies?

Absolutely. I think there are paths that seem more or less open, depending on what the political system looks like and who’s in control. The rise of Donald Trump is not an isolated event. This is part of a global rightward shift in reaction that is not just one of the possibilities that I lay out in the book, but one of the inevitable challenges – that there’d be a reactionary, pro-fossil fuel movement that you’re going to have to confront as part of any of these strategies. One of the reasons we need coherence between them is that we’re all vulnerable.

But also, I don’t think that any one strategy is particularly worse off under Trump. You could look at marketcraft and say, “Trump destroyed the Inflation Reduction Act. All Biden’s climate work has been destroyed with the wave of a hand, which then salts the earth for this kind of policy in the future because capital won’t commit to these kinds of investments if they know that there’s a coin flip that the next president’s going to just dismantle it all in one second.” Yeah, that’s pretty devastating for marketcraft.

But [for] public power, if he shuts down the Department of Education, then he’s able to shut down whatever public power agency that Biden should have set up. All of that would have been destroyed as well, not to mention his attack on organized labor. Communists as well. One of the major dangers of the communist strategy, as I describe it, is susceptibility to government repression. We’ve already seen a real, qualitative jump in repression from the Trump administration focused on the left in a way that people should be seriously alarmed about – in a “

So all three [strategies] are reeling. The entire left is obviously reeling. And anyone who looks at the situation and says, “Ha, this is good for me and bad for you,” I think is wrong.

 that you cite at the end: “Will fossil capital defend itself to the bitter end?” and “will it draw on the unique resources of the far right for the purpose?” Those questions are being answered quite clearly in the moment that we’re living in.

It’s pretty obvious when they put it that way. Of course they’re going to fight for their own existence, and they’re going to fight in the political sphere. Even putting aside the history of their relationship with the far right – well, they’re not going to pick the far left. They’re probably not going to pick the center at this point. The far right is their best bet [for preserving the fossil fuel economy] by a long shot. That has come to pass, and it seems obvious when we think about it.

A clear problem with the sort of climate policy by compromise that even the left liberals have been pursuing with the hope that “we’ll give capitalists enough so that this transition will be smooth enough for them that they can agree to it,” that’s not happening. That can’t be the only solution. That can’t be the only tool we have.

In India’s Coal Belt, a Window into the Challenges Facing Energy Transition

Malcolm Harris on the Radical, Liberating Possibilities of Realism

In Colombia, Chevron has a habit of buying carbon credits from projects made behind indigenous people’s backs.

Ugandan Communities Say Total’s Oil Project Is More of a Land Grab than a Development Opportunity

“Numbers in the Trillions”: Fossil Fuel Producers on Hook for Climate Harms

Denial to Delay

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

The Real Free Speech Threat

Damages: New Evidence and an Update on U.S. Climate Cases

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

In India’s Coal Belt, a Window into the Challenges Facing Energy Transition

Malcolm Harris on the Radical, Liberating Possibilities of Realism

In Colombia, Chevron has a habit of buying carbon credits from projects made behind indigenous people’s backs.

Ugandan Communities Say Total’s Oil Project Is More of a Land Grab than a Development Opportunity

“Numbers in the Trillions”: Fossil Fuel Producers on Hook for Climate Harms

Denial to Delay

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

The Real Free Speech Threat

Support our reporting,subscribe today!

Damages: New Evidence and an Update on U.S. Climate Cases

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

Support our reporting,
subscribe today!