 Hello Welcome to Drilled I'm Amy Westervelt and this is a new segment we're doing hopefully every week in between narrative seasons called The Spill. Alleen and Nina introduce yourselves!

 Hi, I'm Nina Lakhani. I am the global climate justice reporter for Drilled and now The Spill

 and I'm Alleen Brown. I'm a senior editor at Drilled and really excited to be talking to The Spill today

 Yay! Awesome. So yeah we'll be talking amongst ourselves about current news, things that are happening in media, and then also using this as a place to interview other reporters, writers, experts all the stuff that has been a bit of a hodgepodge of the bonus episodes of Drilled, now organized into weekly episodes in your feed. Okay so, let's talk about some of the current climate news. There's been a lot of stuff happening... not necessarily a lot of news covering it. What are the things that you guys are paying attention to on the climate beat right now. [00:01:00] What's happening all around us at the moment?

 I mean, I think we're, know, this year, like every year for the last few years has shown us that we are now full force in climate breakdown. You know, this isn't something that's gonna happen. It's happening now, and it's happening at a really terrifying speed, at a scale which even, you know, the worst case scenario models were not forecasting to be happening so quickly.

You know, so, this catastrophic breaking of the glacier in the Himalayas, you know, which caused this unbelievable, I mean, like terrifying floods at the Nepal, Tibet border. Confirmed so far 1,200 dead with thousands more still missing. And I think, you know, this piece of this glacier broke off and the force at which it landed recorded at more than five on the Richter scale, on the earthquake Richter scale, you know.

And, you know, this area of the Himalayas is really poorly studied, partly 'cause it's hard to reach, but partly because, you know, the whole world hasn't taken [00:02:00] responsibility of monitoring what's happening at all of these glaciers, right? But you know, when I've been reading some of the coverage like this last week or so, you know, I mean, seventy-five percent of the, of the glaciers in the Himalaya region could all be gone by the end of this century. And we're already seeing like far more glacier lakes. The lakes are bigger, they're deeper, you know, and all of this means what? Like much more catastrophic flooding, sea level rise, all the things that we're seeing in communities around the world, you know, from Mexico to India and Bangladesh to Australia.

And so I think just the images of what's happened in, at the Nepal-Tibet border have been like horrifying, you know? And

 terrifying. Yeah. And you know, and like at the same time, you know, we're seeing record-breaking profits from the fossil fuel companies, right? And I think that we absolutely can't forget that, you know, that There is a clear line of responsibility here, right? They're sort of raking in billions of dollars, right? While we've got these catastrophic floods [00:03:00] and,

 They're negotiating like how to drill more in the Arctic while we have these catastrophic floods Yeah

 And, you know, the war in Iran is directly contributing to those profits. You know, we're seeing the affordability of gas and, and daily essentials skyrocket while the oil and gas industry is seeing, again, record profits directly tied to the same war that is changing everyday people's ability to live.

The Guardian my former employer did a really good analysis recently, and in the first three months after the illegal sort of invasion of Iran, eight of the biggest oil companies amassed profits of more than $90 billion. I mean, literally as... In three months, in three months, right?

As, so as, you know fuel prices rose spectacularly for, like, everybody, more than 90 billion in just the first three months after the you know, the Iran invasion

 Right and, and that [00:04:00] was double what they'd brought in the year before. You know, so you can see that direct relationship and, and the way that profits are just going up. And, you know, I, I think one thing that I've really no- I mean, you know, this isn't something new, but I think it's something that's just getting so much less focus in the media and, you know, in, in conversations more broadly.

But you know, these catastrophes that we're talking about, we're talking about some of the largest scale ones like in, in Nepal, but like no matter where you live, you're being impacted directly by the actions of the fossil fuel industry. You know, there's the question of affordability, but also, you know, I was visiting family in Minneapolis this, this summer, and right as I was there the Boundary Waters, this wilderness area in northern Minnesota was on fire.

You know, there were these really catastrophic fires taking place. That's an area that's like beloved by so many people in the region. People go canoe there. And it's like a water area. It's a, it's a [00:05:00] bunch of like interconnected waterways.

 and, and that was in flames because of a combination of you know past extractivism loggers going in and totally changing the ecosystem there and kind of displacing Indigenous people who had their own fire-based practices and, and ways of managing the land.

And also you know, the burning of fossil fuels.

 One of our producers Ray Pang who did the SLAPP'd season goes and does a canoe trip on the Boundary Waters every year and couldn't go this year because of the fires

 I feel like everyone I've spoken to this past few months has had like some kind of personal life impact related to climate But like I don't know The I feel like there's been this You guys have both covered climate for a long time as have I I feel like there's been this assumption for a really long time that as that happens that magically the political will to do something about it will appear And in [00:06:00] fact we're seeing a total disconnect on that front It's like it's never been more present and the fossil fuel industry and the politicians in its pocket have never been working harder to stop anyone from acting on it It's it's a a weird moment

 On a personal note, I was at home, you know, from, for all of July and August. You know, London, England famously drizzly gray skies.

 it did, yeah, I mean, yeah, the UK had five heat waves this year, like, over 35 degrees Celsius.

I'm sorry, I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit.

 Yeah, five heat waves. And for the whole of July and the first three weeks of August, it did not rain once across Wales and in most of England. I mean, so when the solar eclipse happened in London I went to a park in North London to watch it with my niece, and it was 35 degrees at 6:00, 6:00 [00:07:00] PM, but all the leaves of the park have fallen.

They're all yellow. All of the leaves are down. And so under your foot it felt like autumn, right? Because of the crackling of the leaves and the grass is all just, like, completely dead, you know? And yet it was, like, in, you're in the middle of the summer. It was like, it's really quite dystopian. And on your point, Amy, I think that, I think that c- climate catastrophe, the breakdown is now happening so fast and everywhere that people have Very quickly it's become normalized. Do you know?

 become, you know, normalized. So y- you know, yes, you have, you know, you have decent media coverage when these catastrophic floods happen, like, this glacier breaks off in the Himalayas.

But every day these things are happening. People are dying from wildfires from drought, you know, and it's just become normalized really, really quickly. And I think actually, like, heat deaths is a really good one because I think with floods and fires it's very visual, right?

You have the cameras there and, like, you can really see it. [00:08:00] you know drought and heat and the food insecurity that it causes and the deaths it causes are, they sort of just happen, right? They're hard to photograph, they're hard to visualize, you know?

But we know in Europe this year, I mean, just, you know Europe counts excess deaths, so they look at- over a period-- I would say over the last 20 years, how many people have died in a particular week, right? On average. And then when there's a heatwave, they look s- at how many people have died, and they calculate them to be excess deaths related to the heat. So these aren't deaths that, you know, a tiny number will be things from like heatstroke, for example, but the vast majority will be from you know, an exacerbation of existing conditions, whether that be a heart condition or asthma or diabetes, right? And in Europe this year, j-just in May, June and July, in half of Europe, so this is not even counting like the other half, 35,000 excess deaths were reported from heat just in June and July, right?

 was even hotter, [00:09:00] right? And so and so you're-- You know, this is-- And-- But the thing is, this is-- th-this has happened like two or three times over the last five or six years, you know? And like, The first time was meant to be the game changer, right?

This is gonna wake up everyone. There's gonna be political action. But here we are again, you know, and it's sort of... Yeah, and it's just like we're accepting the fact that tens of thousands of people, are dying before they're needed to have died, right? 'Cause every heat death is a preventable death.

Every s- Nobody needs to die of heat. You know, public health experts will tell you that, that every single one is preventable. And yeah, but we seem to have just accepted that as, "Okay, well, that's what's gonna happen now."

 And I think that's a good segue into talking about one of the... We, we wanted to talk a bit about how media is covering this moment. And,

 NPR put out a big piece recently looking at the way heat deaths are undercounted in the US. So the CDC has tracked I think an average of around 1,700 heat deaths annually.

NPR [00:10:00] partnering with Boston University looked more closely at excess deaths and found up to 9,000 deaths annually in the US that could be attributed to heat. So Nina, to your point, yeah, this is just being vastly undercounted. I know you've done a ton of reporting on this, this issue specifically.

 Yeah. I you know, when I was working for The Guardian in the US, I spent three or four consecutive summers in Arizona, specifically reporting on extreme heat in Maricopa County, where Phoenix, which is the U- US' fifth largest city and its hottest big city,

 as well as sort of some, some of the surrounding, yeah, some of the surrounding counties, you know. actually, Maricopa County is by far the, you know, it's the gold standard when it comes to in the US, and because in the US they don't count excess deaths, right? And they never have. And so you've had these like unbelievably sort of under- underreporting of excess deaths. You know, for the years I was working there, [00:11:00] sometimes the deaths that were counted in Maricopa County would, would be half of what the CDC was reporting was happening across the country, which obviously isn't true, right?

It obviously couldn- cannot be true that Yeah, they're counting it and ... But they count them in it, and I think they don't do the excess deaths in part because of the way the health system is so disjointed, right? You know, like, you know, there is no public health system, so having that access to that data and data being collected in the same way is much more difficult. But I honestly also have think there's just been a lack of will, right? I mean, there's a lot of clever scientists and public health officials in the US, right? ... I mean, it's possible, right? It's definitely possible. Yeah, and, and even in Maricopa County, which I like I say, you know, it's a gold standard, they have trained their forensic team, you know, to look for signs of possible heat contribution to a death, and they do autopsies, and they do investigations to the extent that in possible heat deaths investigators will go to a person's house and see, and they note on the autopsy form [00:12:00] then did the person have a cooling system, air conditioner?

 or no? Was it turned on? Yes or no? They will ask why not, you know. Like, was it fu- was it working or was it not working? 'Cause one of the things I've found is e- you know, even when people had air conditioners, sometimes they wouldn't have the money to run them, or they didn't have the money to fix them if they were broken, right? But even in Maricopa County, I mean, last year I did an investigation looking at hundreds and hundreds of autopsy reports from the previous two years, and, you know, there were whole number of deaths that were investigated as potential heat deaths, but then were not included. They were then included either as a death by substance misuse or a death of, of a, a unhoused person, and it made no sense.

These were people that, you know, heat had clearly contributed, and there were other people with similar cases that had made the numbers. So there was even an undercount going on in Maricopa County, right? And so, I mean, you know, it's great that NPR and BU have teamed up. My [00:13:00] instinct would be being from Europe and seeing how they, you know, it seems improbable that a country of 320 million which has n-

 yeah, which has the worst health system in, like, the, you know, the developed world would have less heat deaths than the UK.

 But at least it's a start. At least it's a start.

 Yeah wanted to just also mention that Venezuela's back in the news

 the US fucking Venezuela over is back the

 I think I have a a theory on this that like a lot of it Well we know a lot of it is Trump trying to to scramble to bring oil prices down you know as the Ir like his

 He's like Oh don't worry about it We're gonna solve the crisis with Venezuelan oil over here Which you know A is not how that works Like this idea that somehow these [00:14:00] fields are gonna produce more than they ever have and that it's all gonna be fine and it's an easy like plugandplay operation is just just not how those things work But also all kinds of nonsense going on with how he's approaching these oil fields and and who's getting what oil and how it's moving around the world in general yeah what have you guys been seeing on on that front?

 I mean to your point, this has nothing to do with affordability. Like, these oil fields if they end up producing more than they already are, it will take years. US refineries that process that kind of oil are already backed up.

 you know, this is, this is such like, it's such a, like, retro tactic to just step in.

I mean, it, it, I guess it's never stopped to some degree, but to just step in and and take oil, that's what's happening. The US government has overthrown a government and stepped in and just [00:15:00] blatantly taken the oil. At the same time, you know, the, the company that the US is working with is run by a guy who has an arrest warrant out in Switzerland, you know?

He's been investigated in the US for money laundering. But he's friends with the Trump administration, so you know, blatant corruption is at the core of all of this

 Yeah, and I think, you know, let's not forget that the illegal operation in Venezuela to abduct the sitting president happened in January, right? So way before the, the illegal invasion of the Iran war, right? And so it was always about getting access to the oil, and it was always a big grift, right?

And like you say, Alleen th- this, you know, this is, to me, I would describe it as a smash-and-grab imperial invasion, right? You know,

 Big U.S. in Latin America in the 50s vibes Yeah

 And I th- you know, so, you know, and like you're saying, the Pentagon has done a deal with a Venezuelan national who is, has [00:16:00] alleged, you know, money laundering and huge bribery scandal, and with a company that is registered in Barbados. I mean, I think when you say those words outlo- loud, you're like, "Hang on, did I actually say that," right?

You know, I mean and you know, you know, when the invasion happened in January, you know, I mean, at Drilled we did quite a lot of reporting on this, right? So that was an, it was a, it was a, an illegal invasion under every sense of the word, like all international law. you know, and we, and, and the, and the private corporations are, you know, like rubbing their hands in glee and sort of hearing the cash register go are potentially breaking the law, right?

To get involved in a deal that has you know, that is illegal, right from its roots,

 is could potentially land these corporations and their executives up in court one day, right? And I know that the Tru- Trump and and the Israeli government are busy trying to dismantle our international justice system, but these laws still exist.

They are [00:17:00] still the law, and they are breaking them, right? You know, and I mean, I think one good example is just to connect, I guess, some of what we're talking about, you know, is that there are three massive oil commodity traders globally, and one of them, Vitol, is one of two traders that has been doing this sort of backroom deal with Trump to get access to this Venezuelan oil. And it's also one of two commodity traders that a new report published in the beginning of September by Oil Change International and SOMO, which is a Dutch organization investigating multinational corporations, have found was one of two traders responsible for selling 11% of the crude oil that Israel has bought since the start of the genocide, you know.

So a company involved in trade to enable a state that has been found to be breaking international law, to be committing war crimes and has been accused of genocide, you know, is, is not okay. Like, it is not legal for them to be doing that, right?

And just because the Trump [00:18:00] administration says it is fine doesn't make it legal, and it's not, you know?

 Yeah I also actually like this of coming back to the press coverage side of things too there's a thing going on that happens every time there's discussion I think in the media around price per barrel and then price at the pump and all of this stuff that the oil companies do a really good job of holding their hands up and saying like It's not us that's driving the price up Like we don't have control over the price at the pump right But like A they have a lot of control over foreign policy domestic policy f you know subsidies all of those things But the other thing that's happening right now is like like Trump for a moment there I don't know if you guys caught this a couple weeks ago like he was complaining about the oil companies having record profits and like the price at the pump and whatever as though like he hasn't enabled all of that and they aren't his largest donors And now he's turned it to focusing on the refining companies and no one is pushing back on that [00:19:00] framing and saying like Well most of the refining companies are s are subsidiaries of the oil majors These are not like separate companies

Transcription

Amy Westervelt, Nina Lakhani and Alleen Brown on the world on fire, how the media is covering the climate crisis, what's happening with the industry as a whole, and how it all relates to rising authoritarianism. The Spill is our new weekly show to bring you news, rants, and interviews in between narrative seasons.

The Guardian on fossil fuel companies' war profiteering: https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2026/aug/04/revealed-major-oil-firms-make-93bn-profits-amid-war-and-climate-crisis

Nina's past reporting on extreme heat deaths: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/oct/09/extreme-heat-deaths-autopsy

Drilled coverage of criminal conduct in Venezuela: https://drilled.media/news/hopenhaym

Drilled reporting on the U.S.-Venezuela-Guyana triangle: https://drilled.media/news/guyana-venezuela

Alleen's new series "The Propagandist": https://drilled.media/podcasts/drilled/16/s16-ep01

Welcome to "The Spill," Our New Weekly Newscast

Drilled A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts .

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

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

Drilled

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Welcome to "The Spill," Our New Weekly Newscast

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