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Inside the industry that made climate denial work

Published Aug 10, 2023, 4:00 AM

True crime is one of the most popular genres in every form of storytelling. But can that pull be used to tell stories about the environment? This week, Akshat speaks with Amy Westervelt, a climate reporter for over twenty years, and the creator of the podcast Drilled - a true crime show about climate change. Westervelt launched it after being turned away by large production companies but found over a million listeners in the first season. 

This is the second of three episodes talking with climate storytellers on Zero. Listen to hear why and how Westervelt decided to use “true crime” as a way to talk about Big Oil, the history of climate denial, and how reporting on the climate crisis has changed for the better. 

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Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green 

Welcome to zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week oil origins and old tapes. A critical part of any good story is the antagonist, the villain. In stories about climate change, the villain can be something as abstract as human nature, the short term thinking that stops systemic changes, our love of comfort and convenience. Or the villain can be specific China, the US, or oil companies. But the problem with that is it's not always compelling to tell a story about a country or a company doing something wrong. You've got to find the people doing it. And my guest today, Amy Vesterwald, has spent a lot of time in identifying individuals who have made outsized contributions to climate change, in particular the men who founded the public relations industry and their connection to big oil.

It helps to understand that, oh, there were specific companies that hired specific people to really convince the public to think about things a certain way. It's not like impossible for us to think about things differently.

Amy has produced nine seasons of Drill, what she calls a true crime podcast about climate change. The oil industry and its lackeys appear frequently. Amy's scrutiny of the pr guys, has opened my eyes to just how long the oil industry has got to tell its story with very little interruption. This week in our Climate Storytelling series, I talked to Amy about how she researches Drilled, why she chose to style it as a true crime podcast, and how storytelling around climate has changed. If you're joining the series for the first time, I recommend going back to the feed and adding my interview with climate fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson to your list. Subscribe to make sure you get next week's episode where I talk about climate on TV with Dorothy Futenberry, an executive producer of the show Extra Relations, Amy, Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

You've been an environment journalist for a long time, and you focused on storytelling that gets reporting outside the green echo chamber. When did you see the need for this?

I almost feel like that's kind of how I got into clem reporting in the first place, because I had this weird little job that I just took to pay rent one month where I got asked to write some case studies for an engineering firm that was like updating its marketing materials. And one of the case studies that they had was they had been asked to re engineer some offshore oil platforms for Shell to make them adaptable and resilient to see level rise. And this was work that they had done in the nineties, and I thought, I'm pretty sure Shelle was not even acknowledging climate change much in the nineties, and so I looked into it and I wrote a little story about it. But that kind of got me really obsessed with how the fossil fuel industry has framed the story on climate, and I've kind of just been obsessed with it ever since. But in terms of my own work, I'd been in print for a really long time, and then I decided I wanted to learn how to do audio. I got a job at an NPR station, and I was doing various things, and I kept trying to come up with an idea for a climate podcast that could be narrative. Because this was like, you know, around the time that cereal was exploding, and everybody was like, oh, this is such an interesting format, and it was. It took me like a while to figure out what story would lend itself to that, which got me thinking about kind of storytelling and climate more generally, and just how the framing of a story can really actually help people understand the information better.

Right, And this is we are talking about Drilled, the podcast that you launched almost a decade ago and still run. And of course there is a series out this year, season eight, that focuses on Guyana Country in South America, where Exonmobil discovered oil in twenty fifteen. What made you interested in that story as a way of telling what you call Drill to be, which is true crime about the environment.

Yeah. I got a press release about a lawsuit that had been launched in Guyana that was invoking the country's constitutional right to a healthy environment, and that kind of got me first looking into it because I had not been actually following the development of an oil and gas industry there, and the format of this lawsuit was interesting to me. So that got me down a whole rabbit hole of looking into what was going on in Guyana. And then I got even more interested because Exon discovered oil in twenty fifteen, They actually started drilling in twenty seventeen and then shipped their first barrel in twenty nineteen, and was already projecting that Guyana would be responsible for around a quarter of their global volume by twenty twenty five, which is a lot. I mean that A, it's just so rapid for a country to go from no oil production at all to that level of volume, and then B that would put it even above Exon's Texas operations. And then as I started to talk to people there, I found out that Exon had very quickly moved to sort of capture various aspects of civil society. So the first investment that they made outside of oil and gas in Guyana was to become the sponsor of the cricket league and the Guyana team. They paid to get cricket games broadcast on television, and then they started hiring journalists that were working on the oil and gas beat to work for Exxon's comms department. So there were all these things that they were doing to really kind of make sure that there weren't a lot of critics of the project.

Sports washing, as it's come to be known, where gas companies but also other kinds of polluters use sponsorships of big sports is a growing phenomenon. We have a wonderful article that we linked to in the show notes about it until you spot it. You don't notice how many places it's happening.

It's so prevalent, it's just wild. Actually, I was just looking at some of the advertising data for the oil companies, and for all of them, their top five advis are always in sports related programming. So it's a big, big area for them.

Yeah, and we've also just learned that, you know, Saudi Arabia, which was trying to create its own golf championship and was fighting with the global leader, the PGA, has kind of won because the PGA has now agreed to merge with the Saudi Arabian Golf League, and so it's just one more place where this continues to grow. But anyway, coming back to the series, South America in general is a place that's difficult to report in. I mean, we know of stories where journalists have been killed, not just jailed or harmed. What was it like working in that environment, because I know you travel to Guyana to tell this.

Yeah, it's the first time in a while that I have felt a significant level of relief. On my flight out, I would say there was definitely some just some you know, intimidation, getting followed. My hotel room was broken into I had some interesting surprise run ins with police and a lot of trouble with customs agents getting out of the country, one of whom I don't know, was sort of holding onto my baggage and wouldn't give it back to me until I promised that I wouldn't write anything negative about Guyana. So that was it was interesting, but I'm mostly like the biggest thing was working with our reporter on the ground there named Keana Wilberg, who writes for one of the local papers, so really talking through risk mitigation and secure with her and having a lot of contingency plans in place in case anything became just went beyond the level of intimidation.

Did you find out who broke in?

I did not know, but it was just it was weird. It was one of those where you know, I had cash out on the on the nightstand that was left untouched. Nothing was taken. It was just my laptop was open to you know, some files related to the story. Nothing that was that big of a deal because I don't, you know, keep sensitive files on my laptop and then leave it in hotel rooms. It was clearly just sort of an intimidation kind of thing.

One of my favorite seasons off Drill is The mad Men of Climate Denial. It's about how the oil industry promoted climate denial over the past many decades, and that form of storytelling has been very much created by the oil industry going back almost a century, and you document that history in the most interesting way. What got you onto that story in the first place.

Well, actually, when I first started Drilled, the intention was for it to be like a limited run series, and you know, the first season was about the origins of climate denil the Exon news story, tracking down a bunch of Exon scientists who talked to me about the research they'd been doing for for Exon on Climate back in the seventies and eighties, all of that. And then as I got to sort of the end of researching that season, I got to thinking there just had to be more to the story. Like, the climate denial strategy is a pretty doman, straightforward strategy, and yes, it's appealing to sort of tell people that this big scary thing is actually not happening and they don't have to change. But it worked so well and so quickly to turn public sentiment away from climate action that I felt like there had to have been something that came before it, And so the more I started looking into it, the more I realized that, oh, the fossil fuel industry sort of laid down this foundation that really shaped how people thought about the industry, how people thought about the environment, how people thought about solutions to environmental problems, and the waves that those solutions could or couldn't intersect with the economy. All of these things that really kind of laid the groundwork for climate denial to work as well as it did. And I've continued to be really obsessed with the PR industry in general and the fossil fuel industry's role as one of its first clients.

And storytelling has been used very effectively by the fossil fuel companies. You know, you document that the PR industry has an idea itself was created by the oil industry, so the fact that they can wield it to that effect is not surprising, but it is still worth examining. Now, we are journalists. We deal in facts, we report on stories, we go to experts, we go to the ground, we look at what is happening. But at the end of doing all that work, we also have to then take account of what we have in front of us, and what's the best way in which we can build a story together and tell somebody who may be not interested in this subject at all, but should really know about it. And stories are the currency we use. So when you do this work and when you look at how effective the PR industry is at storytelling, what have you found in your toolkit the best counter.

It sounds strange because I work mostly in audio, but I think that the best counter is often primary documents, and I just don't think that people necessarily look at those documents when they're in print stories. So I think having an audio component is helpful. And by documents, I mean things like like, I'll give you a really concrete example. I did a story a while ago on the crab fishermen that sued the oil companies. So this was a fishing trade group that represented crab fishermen on the west coast of the US and Canada, and they had filed a lawsuit against the top thirty oil companies for their role in delaying action on climate which the industry group was arguing and it had effectively led to the impending death of their industry, and you know, caused all kinds of economic damage and whatnot. And several of the people who were named plaintiffs in that lawsuit were total climate deniers. They were like, I don't know if humans have anything to do with it, ice ages, all of the usual things. And I thought that was really interesting. I was just like, how do you sign on to a lawsuit about climate change if you don't believe the climate change? And what they told me was that they'd been shown applications for patents by all of the oil majors in the seventies and eighties for kind of all of the infrastructure that they would need to deal with climate change, so like the tankers that could navigate a melting Arctic and these offshore platforms I mentioned being re engineered for sea level rise. And so their conclusion was, it doesn't matter what's causing climate change. They knew that it was definitely happening, that it was going to be a problem, and they prepared their industry for it, and they didn't give us the opportunity to do the same. And that's just not fair. It was like a real penny drop moment for me because I thought, oh, that's a much simpler story, you know, Fairness, equal access, to information then trying to argue the finer points of the science, which, like, especially in places where there's not a real high science literacy, including the US, I would say like, I don't know how you're ever going to use that as your big selling point to people, or your you know, proof that this thing is happening.

Or willingness to engage exactly exactly. If there isn't none, then how much can you really explain the science exactly? Now this might be naval gayzy, but from one podcast host to another, why did you choose podcasts as the medium for your storytelling? What does it offer that other mediums don't.

The main thing that I always look for in stories where I'm trying to decide like is this, you know, better for print or for audio? Because I still do print stories too, is like, will people understand this information better if they can hear it from someone who was involved, or if they can hear you know, the emotion behind it. Will that help people to understand the information. And when it comes to a lot of documents, I think the answer is yes, which is strange and maybe counterintuitive. You know, you'd think it's a it's a physical print document, it's more helpful to see it. But what I found was that people really clicked into it more when they heard, you know, like a former excen researcher actually reading their own memo that they wrote to you know, the executive board about this problem of climate change, or you know, I talked to one researcher who you could really hear like a catch in his throat about how he felt seeing the industry go from being part of the research and looking for solutions to pretending that this thing didn't exist, or you know, talking to these folks in the crowd industry about what were these specific patterns that they saw that really convinced them that this was an unfair situation. There are times when hearing the emotional side of these stories can actually really help people understand them and kind of access the information easier.

Now, you relied a lot on newspapers and advertising and articles of that time for the series on Madmen of Climate Denial. How much of that was your original reporting, which was stuff sitting in the archive you had to go and find it, versus contextualizing what was sort of like boring history somebody had thought about or worked on, Yeah, but really putting it in the modern context of what this industry is doing to our understanding of the world today. Yeah.

Yeah, The Madman series was heavily my own research. It was about like eighty percent of my own and then definitely drew also from some academic works, but a lot of archival research. I went to I don't know, like four different archives, and fortunately for me, because I'm a giant library nerd and I love nothing more than like sitting by myself in an archive for weeks, but also because these PR guys loved to donate all of their files to libraries, so there's a significant amount of archival stuff out there where you really get a good understanding of their pasts and how they thought about messaging for different companies. And the big thing that I realized researching that season was that, in my opinion, I think a lot of the sort of accepted wisdom on climate denial is not quite right. So there's this really persistent story that the tobacco industry came up with this playbook and then the oil industry just copied it. And what you see in all of these guys' history that were the big kind of early fathers of PR is that they were working for oil, tobacco, and chemicals at the same time, all the time, since forever. So the reason that there's crossover between the ways that different industries kind of approach storytelling and narrative framing and disinformation, it's because they literally had the same PR guy doing it for them. For example, there's a guy named Earl Newsome who was doing PR for Standard Oil New Jersey, which is now Exon, from like nineteen twenty to nineteen sixty nine, and in several cases he's saying, Hey, Standard, I did this one thing for GM that worked really well. I think we should do it for you guys too. That's happening constantly throughout history.

Yeah, as part of our series, we are talking to a few climate fiction writers. We're imagining how the future is going to play out. But a lot of your series is focused on what happened in the past and what that tells us about today. So why do you think it's important to look back and tell those stories of the past.

I am a big believer in the idea that you can't effectively solve a problem if you don't really know where it came from, you know, And so for me, I look at a lot of the technical solutions and sort of future casting stuff. And I see a lot of holes in people's understanding of history, and I think it's really important to fill in those gaps so that as we craft solutions, they're not repeating the mistakes of the past.

After the break more from Amy about the people pushing climate denialism, how much of a challenge was it to find and be able to put that much load of a story on a particular individual, And is that the only way in which we can tell these complex stories having to have individuals be the load bearers.

It's such an interesting question because I think there's a few layers to it for me. So one is that there's a real problem and sort of the storytelling industrial complex in general, in that it's very dominated by kind of a Western narrative framework that requires a real focus on individual characters. Right, It's like the hero's journey and all of that stuff, and reality doesn't map to that, you know, And in some ways, I feel like, you know, how much of that narrative structure was actually created by these same forces that I'm looking at. So there's a part of me that really wants to reject the whole thing. But I also am sort of well, you know, I have I want people to listen, and I want to reach as many people as possible, and having specific people does help. And in the case of certain stories, like if we're talking about propaganda, there really were specific individuals who or a large percentage of the responsibility for how that industry evolved. And in some ways to me, it helps kind of feel like it's not such an overwhelming challenge to rethink some of those narratives. You know that it helps to understand that, oh, there were specific companies that hired specific people to really convince the public to think about things a certain way. It's not like impossible for us to think about things differently, So it makes it feel more achievable to actually shift it.

You.

Yeah, one of your characters is Ivy Lee, who is a PR guy you worked for John d. Rockefeller in Standard Oil Times. One lesson that we take away from him is words matter. So how much of your own storytelling changed as a result of learning about the PR industry and its roots and how much do you think about your own writing and the words you use in telling your stories?

Oh, constantly. I feel like it made me hyper aware, maybe not in a good way, because you know, it's hard to write when you're being that sort of self aware of what every single word or phrase could mean. But it also got me really thinking about is it okay for a journalist, for example, to use some of those same techniques, or to think about storytelling in the same way. I'm not sure where I shake out on that. I think I am constantly grappling with wanting a story to be compelling and informative and also wanting to break the pattern of propaganda.

Well, tell me about some of the techniques that you do admire, even if you don't end up using them.

Okay, there's one example from Edward Burneze, who was Freud's double nephew. Think on that one for a minute.

He was his double nephew, which is he was his nephew from two different sites. My goodness.

Yeah, it was like his dad was Freud's wife's brother and his mom was Freud's sister. I think something like that. So anyway, there was no incest happening, but it was still a very weird sort of situation. Edward Bernese was such a brilliant guy, really like brought Freud's thinking into advertising and pr in the US, and he worked for everyone. I mean, he worked for the API, he worked for tobacco.

That's the American Petroleum Institute.

Yeah, he kind of took over all of Ivy Lee's clients when ivy Lee died quite young, and he sort of handed his clients over to Edward Brenees. And Brenees did this thing that I think about all the time where he was contacted by a watchmaker who wanted to break the taboo against men wearing wristwatches. So at the time, it was considered feminine for men to wear wristwatch because it was like a bracelet, and you know, real men used pocket watches. So he got to thinking, Okay, how can I shift you know, the cultural norms on this, and who's considered like the most masculine of men, and he lands on soldiers, And so he goes to an expert that he knows, and he commissions a study on how many soldiers are getting killed when they light a match to look at their pocket watch, and how many lives could potentially be saved if they switched to wristwatches. Now, the whether or not the data of this study was like at all credible is anyone's guess. But he took this study to the military and convinced them to make wristwatches standard issue for the army, and within like a year, this taboo against men wearing wristwatches is gone. So stuff like that where I'm like, man, that is such an interesting way to come at that problem. Another one, he got hired by a piano company that wanted to make pianos something that you know, people would have in their homes instead of just sort of limiting their customer base to concert halls and music schools and things like that. And so Bernez went to a bunch of architectural magazines and convinced them to start putting pianos in the you know, staged living rooms and stuff that they were taking pictures of for these magazines. And you know, so it just it became, you know, in this very subtle way. It's like, oh, if you're wealthy and you have a large, impressive home, you must have a piano in it as well.

So yeah, yeah, it's sort of the belief as a you know, science student, that oh, if you just tell people the facts, yeah, no, no, if they are convincing enough, if the case is strong enough, they will surely see the light. But you know, the Army does so much climate change research and has been making such warnings about how much disruption is going to bring for so long, and what if anything, can be incorporated in the most ethical way to be able to tell stories that do break through.

One thing I do a lot is try to find sort of a narrative format that people are very familiar with. That's why, actually, you know, I did Drilled as a true crime podcast because I thought, okay, well, sometimes it help helps me have a complicated story to put it in a container that people are very familiar with. But then I also like, I also try to be really careful about making sure that everything is thoroughly reported and fact checked and put through legal review and all those things too, because I don't want to perpetuate bad practices or unethical practices. But it does help, I think, for people to be able to kind of take in the story in a format that's familiar. I mean, I would love to figure out the Bernese piano version of climate story telling it, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Now, you featured a lot of these mad men in long interviews talking about their tricks and you play tape from it in nearly every episode in that series. Why were they doing that?

Why were they talking about it out loud? Yes, this endlessly amuses me because I mean I have the same question about why would you do every single you know, memo you've ever written to a library. It'd be like you or I donating our entire email archive to a library. You know, it's like. But I think the answer is that they were mostly these were men who were very impressed with their own intelligence. Burnees like loved the fact that he could manipulate people so well. He was very very pleased with his abilities in that regard. And there's a lot of you know, doing this for the PR industry, So in many cases, these were people who were really helping to build and professionalize this industry and felt like they needed to kind of do PR for themselves as well. There's definitely, like, I think, two types of PR guys. There's like the ones that do interviews and write articles and op eds and kind of take credit for their work, but there are definitely a few that prefer to stay behind the scene and there's almost no media of them.

What's been the biggest change that you have seen in storytelling around climate issues.

Oh, that's such a good question. Probably the biggest change is the inclusion of emotion in climate storytelling. I've been a climate reporter for more than twenty years now. I would say up until maybe even five years ago, it was really frowned upon to really have any kind of emotion around the climate change issue, which I think is pretty wild when you consider that it's this big, looming existential crisis that will impact every aspect of our lives. It seems entirely appropriate to have emotions about that. But it was very you know, sort of frowned upon. And I think partly that's because of the dominance of sort of science communication. I think partly it's because the industry did such a good job of going after some of the early climate communicators and you know, sort of branding them as activists or accusing them of you know, making things up or inciting panic or any of these things. But I do feel like that has shifted considerably in the last five or so years.

Yeah, we talked about the oil industry as a effective user of storytelling, but the other spectrum is also worthy of discussion, which is the climate activist fhere. We've seen in the last few years all kinds of groups come up extinction rebellion here in the UK, but then offshoots of it just up Oil Insulate Britain that are taking some of the techniques of decades ago, which is being disruptive, which is being in your face, but also then merging it with social media, with great photography, with art, and figuring out a way to get their message across, which you know, some of it is because the society understands the urgency of the problem, so it's not just all them doing the work, but some of it is certainly the way they tell their story.

Definitely. Yeah, I think that the climate movement has gotten a lot better at storytelling in the last five ish years, mostly driven by the youth climate movement. And I know, like actually we got I got leaps some internal documents from BP in twenty twenty that were looking at like right before the pandemic, as they were kind of rebranding and they had a workshop for how they're going to reposition themselves on climate and energy transition and all these kinds of things, and it was heavily dominated by an intense fear of the youth climate movement and how effective and authentic that movement was, and how on earth they were going to be able to combat this, convince people that they're also authentic, convince people that they're genuine about being part of the solution, all those kinds of things. So I would say that, you know, not only has the movement gotten better, but also that it's more effective.

And we are of course talking about the evolution of storytelling here, but it also helps and we should acknowledge that, finally, the economic case for acting on climate is really settling in. It was always there. It's just that people in power and people with money now do see it as a way in which they can make money. And so that's allowing for more people with more money getting into the space. Right, There's been an explosion in climate journalism, yes, because newsrooms are investing in it, because newsrooms see that there is revenue to be made that would support that kind of journalists. Right.

Yeah. I will say too that on the climate narrative front, when I first had the idea for Drilled, I had been assigned story to cover some of the early climate liability cases, and I was in a court room in San Francisco. This judge had ordered a climate science tutorial and I was like, oh, this is it. Like there's the judge who was kind of eccentric, and like the oil company lawyers and the activists were there, and I thought, oh, this is this is a good framework in which to tell this story. I think it could work. And I pitched it to like every big podcast company that was doing narrative podcasts at the time, and this was like the salad days of podcasts, when everybody had big budgets and they were green lighting all kinds of shows, and every single one of them told me that there was no audience for climate narrative.

Wow.

Yeah, So I just made it on my own. It was sort of me and an audio engineer and I was doing all of the tracking at night in my car and managed to get it out and we had an incredible response to the first season. I think we got more than a million listeners. So that was another good early lesson of if you think you have a really good story, sometimes you just have to make it and put it out there.

Well, I'm glad you stuck with it, because I've certainly learned a lot from your reporting and it's just a great addition to the space, and I thank you for coming on Zero.

Thank you, thanks for having me.

This is part two of our three episode series talking with climate Storytellers. If you've not already listened to it, check out my interview with climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. Next week, you'll hear from Dorothy Funtenberry about how to tell a climate story for TV.

When people found out we were doing the show, they were excited to come on board because they're thinking about climate change and to think about and not be able to act on it feels bananas, and so to actually get to do something is really liberating.

Thank you for listening to Zero. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Send it to a friend or someone who works in pr. Get in touch at zero port at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks as always to Kira binrip I am Akshatrati. Back next week.