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

Inside the Campaign That Put an Oil Boss in Charge of a Climate Summit

The Dairy Industry Is Scared, and Queen Latifah Is Here to Make It OK2Milk

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

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”

Reuters, New York Times Top List of Fossil Fuel Industry’s Favorite Media Partners

Readers for Sale: How Legacy Media Legitimizes Big Oil’s Climate Talking Points

Amy Westervelt

Molly Taft

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

Ivy Lee Documents

Newsom Documents

Schmertz Documents

Berman Documents

Bernays Documents

S1 Climate Denial Documents

Media Greenwashing

Edelman Documents

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

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

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

How Think Tanks Laid the Groundwork to Criminalize Protest

The Tomato Soup “Controversy”

Isabella Kaminski

Anna Pujol-Mazzini

Lyndal Rowlands

Rishika Pardikar

Fredrick Mugira

Martha Troian

Geoff Dembicki

Alleen Brown

Karen Savage

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

Messy Conversations: Magatte Wade, Head of Atlas Network's Center for African Prosperity

S10, Ep9: The Tomato Soup “Controversy”

S10, Ep8: In Brazil, A Tale as Old as Colonization: Why Indigenous Land Defenders Are Particularly Targeted by Extractive Industries

S10, Ep7: The Same Australian Think Tanks That Have Pushed Against Climate Policy for Years Say No to Indigenous Rights

S10, Ep6: Joanna Smith on “Conspiring Against the United States Government” with…Fingerpaint

S10, Ep5: Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protestors

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

S3, Ep14 | Climate Behind Bars

Abeer Butmeh: Living on the Front Lines of a War and the Climate Crisis, in Palestine

S5, Ep3 | The Trial

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

The Real Free Speech Threat

Revealed: UAE State Oil Company Planned Major "Green" Rebrand Ahead of COP28 Climate Summit

COP28 and the Limits of Eco Modernism

Lawrence Carter

Ben Stockton

For a long time there’s been a call amongst some climate advocates in the U.S. for the government to nationalize oil in order to manage the transition away from fossil fuels. The counter-argument is usually to point at countries like Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates, all of which have only doubled down on fossil fuel development since nationalizing their industries. With that in mind, we began in 2023 to dig into this question and get a feel for how petrostates operate, starting with the host of this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP28), the United Arab Emirates. 

Our partners on much of this first phase of petrostate reporting are the Centre for Climate Reporting in the U.K. 

Petrostate Documents

Petrostates

How Big Oil Killed Our Political Imagination

How the 'Father of Forestry' Inspired Big Oil

The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Century-Long Quest to Invade Elementary Schools

Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Infiltrated Schools

Get 'Em While They're Young

Dharna Noor

Fossil Fuel Funding In Schools

S7, Ep7 | Katie Worth on the State of Climate Education in the U.S.

S7, Ep6 | So…What Do We Do About This?

S7, Ep5 | Ben Franta on Oil on Big Campus

S7, Ep4 | We’re Going Streaking

S7, Ep3 | High School

S7, Ep2 | Elementary School

S7, Ep1 | The First Day of School

The ABCs of Big Oil

Could Guyana’s Exxon ruling scare big oil off risky exploration?

Guyana High Court: EPA and ExxonMobil Put Country At Grave Risk

How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot

Debunking the "Moral Case" for Fossil Fuels

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

Sarah Ventre

Kiana Wilburg

For decades now, the fossil fuel industry has told the same story: Oil equals development and prosperity. Access. Equality. Stability. A better quality of life. As the world’s fossil fuel companies race to tap the last of the planet’s oil reserves we have a chance to examine that promise up close, in real time.

What it looks like on the ground in countries like Guyana, Uganda, and Mozambique is a lot like what the first phase of extractive colonialism looked like a hundred years ago. Working with reporters living in these countries we are continuously investigating what this new flavor of oil colonialism looks like, starting with an in-depth, two-year reporting project in Guyana. 

Several miles off the coast of Guyana sits one of the world’s largest oil reserves. In 2015, ExxonMobil, which had held offshore drilling leases in the country for decades, announced it had found oil and would begin production as soon as possible. Government officials quickly got in line, and in 2019 the first barrels shipped from ExxonMobil Guyana. Today, Exxon projects that oil from Guyana could account for 25% of its total production in the next few years. But environmentalists and government corruption watchdogs have begun to push back on the project. Why 

 an oil industry in the midst of climate crisis? And especially in a country at great risk of climate impacts? Via a contract that will sooner put Guyana in debt than make it a rich oil state, no less?

In just a few years, Exxon has co-opted both government and civil society, buying up social license in every corner of the country. Oil executives and Guyanese officials are still telling the story that oil equals development and prosperity, and on paper Guyana is the fastest-growing economy in the world, but average citizens aren’t benefiting from the boom. Today, there are only a couple of journalists left covering the project with any sort of skepticism, and one lawyer left willing to take it on in court. 

Guyana Documents

S3, Ep4 | Constitutional Violation

S3, Ep2 | The Contract

S3, Ep1 | The Boom

S3 Bonus: A Verdict

S3, Ep3 | Unlimited Liability

S8 Update: Gas to Energy for Guyana, or Problem to Profit for Exxon?

S8, Ep9 | A Verdict

S8, Ep8 | The Turning Point

S8, Ep7 |  The Global Oil Rush

S8, Ep6 | Old-School Greenwashing

S8, Ep5 | On Global Poverty and Global Warming

S8, Ep4 | Constitutional Violation

S8, Ep3 | Unlimited Liability

S8, Ep2 | The Contract

S8, Ep1 | The Boom

S3, Ep8 | The Turning Point

S3, Ep7 | The Global Oil Rush

S3, Ep6 | Old-School Greenwashing

S3, Ep5 | On Global Poverty and Global Warming

New Oil Colonialism

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

California For The Win

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

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

S3, Ep11 | Supremely F*&cked

S5, Ep6 | A Verdict And a New Charge

S2, Ep1 | Ecocide

S2, Ep 6 | False Friends of the Court

S2, Ep4 | Taking Big Oil to Court

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

Climate Cases

Blood of the Devil

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

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

2022 IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 3: On Climate, the Public Holds Two Sticks—Activism and Litigation

2022 IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 2: The Technical Report Kinda Slaps

2022 IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 1: Debunking Demand

Here's What the IPCC Report *Actually* Said About Carbon Removal Tech

2022 IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 4: 

2022 IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 5: On Demand and Services, with Economist Joyashree Roy

Every few years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases an assessment, which consists of several reports prepared by three working groups. Working Group I focuses on the scientific evidence for climate change; Working Group II on the impacts, adaptation and vulnerabilities; and Working Group III on mitigation, what we can do about it (and what's stopping us).  The 2018 IPCC report got a LOT of media attention, more than any previous report, thanks to a combination of uncharacteristically stark warnings from climate scientists and a media cycle that wasn't quite as inundated with crises as the current one.

On April 4, 2022, the IPCC released the mitigation report for its current cycle and folks if the 2018 report was blunt, this one is absolutely screaming "do something!!!" Yet, coverage was as slim as those pre-2018 days. There are lots of mitigating circumstances, 'scuse the pun. For a start, the release of the report was pushed back thanks to the fraught approval process for the report's Summary for Policymakers, or SPM (you can read more about that 

). That meant that reporters got zero time with the actual report before we had to write about it, which was particularly problematic because some government representatives involved in the SPM process succeeded in watering it down so much it reads like the summary of an entirely different report. Plenty of reporters will only read the SPM; if they do, they'll miss the importance of this report. Then of course there's Russia's invasion of Ukraine, subsequent war crimes, and the world bracing itself for WWIII. And the endless pulse of Covid-19 vibrating underneath at all. Not to mention mass shootings, insane school boards, book banning, a looming Trump 2024 campaign, the midterms that Democrats seem destined to lose, a Supreme Court nomination process that McConnell is doing everything to derail yet again. These are deeply troubled times. So I get why the story of yet another dire warning on climate might not register for some outlets

But that's why I'm here. I'm a climate reporter. It's all I focus on, and pretty much all I think about, and I've been covering IPCC reports for 20 years so I've got a pretty good handle on them. 

IPCC & COP

Investigations

Petroganda

The Real Free Speech Threat

Petrostates

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