Speaker 1: Welcome to zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week oil origins and
Speaker 1: old tapes. A critical part of any good story is
Speaker 1: the antagonist, the villain. In stories about climate change, the
Speaker 1: villain can be something as abstract as human nature, the
Speaker 1: short term thinking that stops systemic changes, our love of
Speaker 1: comfort and convenience. Or the villain can be specific China,
Speaker 1: the US, or oil companies. But the problem with that
Speaker 1: is it's not always compelling to tell a story about
Speaker 1: a country or a company doing something wrong. You've got
Speaker 1: to find the people doing it. And my guest today,
Speaker 1: Amy Vesterwald, has spent a lot of time in identifying
Speaker 1: individuals who have made outsized contributions to climate change, in
Speaker 1: particular the men who founded the public relations industry and
Speaker 1: their connection to big oil.
Speaker 2: It helps to understand that, oh, there were specific companies
Speaker 2: that hired specific people to really convince the public to
Speaker 2: think about things a certain way. It's not like impossible
Speaker 2: for us to think about things differently.
Speaker 1: Amy has produced nine seasons of Drill, what she calls
Speaker 1: a true crime podcast about climate change. The oil industry
Speaker 1: and its lackeys appear frequently. Amy's scrutiny of the pr guys,
Speaker 1: has opened my eyes to just how long the oil
Speaker 1: industry has got to tell its story with very little interruption.
Speaker 1: This week in our Climate Storytelling series, I talked to
Speaker 1: Amy about how she researches Drilled, why she chose to
Speaker 1: style it as a true crime podcast, and how storytelling
Speaker 1: around climate has changed. If you're joining the series for
Speaker 1: the first time, I recommend going back to the feed
Speaker 1: and adding my interview with climate fiction writer Kim Stanley
Speaker 1: Robinson to your list. Subscribe to make sure you get
Speaker 1: next week's episode where I talk about climate on TV
Speaker 1: with Dorothy Futenberry, an executive producer of the show Extra Relations, Amy,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to
Speaker 2: be here.
Speaker 1: You've been an environment journalist for a long time, and
Speaker 1: you focused on storytelling that gets reporting outside the green
Speaker 1: echo chamber. When did you see the need for this?
Speaker 2: I almost feel like that's kind of how I got
Speaker 2: into clem reporting in the first place, because I had
Speaker 2: this weird little job that I just took to pay
Speaker 2: rent one month where I got asked to write some
Speaker 2: case studies for an engineering firm that was like updating
Speaker 2: its marketing materials. And one of the case studies that
Speaker 2: they had was they had been asked to re engineer
Speaker 2: some offshore oil platforms for Shell to make them adaptable
Speaker 2: and resilient to see level rise. And this was work
Speaker 2: that they had done in the nineties, and I thought,
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure Shelle was not even acknowledging climate change
Speaker 2: much in the nineties, and so I looked into it
Speaker 2: and I wrote a little story about it. But that
Speaker 2: kind of got me really obsessed with how the fossil
Speaker 2: fuel industry has framed the story on climate, and I've
Speaker 2: kind of just been obsessed with it ever since. But
Speaker 2: in terms of my own work, I'd been in print
Speaker 2: for a really long time, and then I decided I
Speaker 2: wanted to learn how to do audio. I got a
Speaker 2: job at an NPR station, and I was doing various things,
Speaker 2: and I kept trying to come up with an idea
Speaker 2: for a climate podcast that could be narrative. Because this
Speaker 2: was like, you know, around the time that cereal was exploding,
Speaker 2: and everybody was like, oh, this is such an interesting format,
Speaker 2: and it was. It took me like a while to
Speaker 2: figure out what story would lend itself to that, which
Speaker 2: got me thinking about kind of storytelling and climate more generally,
Speaker 2: and just how the framing of a story can really
Speaker 2: actually help people understand the information better.
Speaker 1: Right, And this is we are talking about Drilled, the
Speaker 1: podcast that you launched almost a decade ago and still run.
Speaker 1: And of course there is a series out this year,
Speaker 1: season eight, that focuses on Guyana Country in South America,
Speaker 1: where Exonmobil discovered oil in twenty fifteen. What made you
Speaker 1: interested in that story as a way of telling what
Speaker 1: you call Drill to be, which is true crime about
Speaker 1: the environment.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I got a press release about a lawsuit that
Speaker 2: had been launched in Guyana that was invoking the country's
Speaker 2: constitutional right to a healthy environment, and that kind of
Speaker 2: got me first looking into it because I had not
Speaker 2: been actually following the development of an oil and gas
Speaker 2: industry there, and the format of this lawsuit was interesting
Speaker 2: to me. So that got me down a whole rabbit
Speaker 2: hole of looking into what was going on in Guyana.
Speaker 2: And then I got even more interested because Exon discovered
Speaker 2: oil in twenty fifteen, They actually started drilling in twenty
Speaker 2: seventeen and then shipped their first barrel in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: and was already projecting that Guyana would be responsible for
Speaker 2: around a quarter of their global volume by twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: which is a lot. I mean that A, it's just
Speaker 2: so rapid for a country to go from no oil
Speaker 2: production at all to that level of volume, and then
Speaker 2: B that would put it even above Exon's Texas operations.
Speaker 2: And then as I started to talk to people there,
Speaker 2: I found out that Exon had very quickly moved to
Speaker 2: sort of capture various aspects of civil society. So the
Speaker 2: first investment that they made outside of oil and gas
Speaker 2: in Guyana was to become the sponsor of the cricket
Speaker 2: league and the Guyana team. They paid to get cricket
Speaker 2: games broadcast on television, and then they started hiring journalists
Speaker 2: that were working on the oil and gas beat to
Speaker 2: work for Exxon's comms department. So there were all these
Speaker 2: things that they were doing to really kind of make
Speaker 2: sure that there weren't a lot of critics of the project.
Speaker 1: Sports washing, as it's come to be known, where gas
Speaker 1: companies but also other kinds of polluters use sponsorships of
Speaker 1: big sports is a growing phenomenon. We have a wonderful
Speaker 1: article that we linked to in the show notes about
Speaker 1: it until you spot it. You don't notice how many
Speaker 1: places it's happening.
Speaker 2: It's so prevalent, it's just wild. Actually, I was just
Speaker 2: looking at some of the advertising data for the oil companies,
Speaker 2: and for all of them, their top five advis are
Speaker 2: always in sports related programming. So it's a big, big
Speaker 2: area for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we've also just learned that, you know, Saudi Arabia,
Speaker 1: which was trying to create its own golf championship and
Speaker 1: was fighting with the global leader, the PGA, has kind
Speaker 1: of won because the PGA has now agreed to merge
Speaker 1: with the Saudi Arabian Golf League, and so it's just
Speaker 1: one more place where this continues to grow. But anyway,
Speaker 1: coming back to the series, South America in general is
Speaker 1: a place that's difficult to report in. I mean, we
Speaker 1: know of stories where journalists have been killed, not just
Speaker 1: jailed or harmed. What was it like working in that environment,
Speaker 1: because I know you travel to Guyana to tell this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the first time in a while that I
Speaker 2: have felt a significant level of relief. On my flight out,
Speaker 2: I would say there was definitely some just some you know, intimidation,
Speaker 2: getting followed. My hotel room was broken into I had
Speaker 2: some interesting surprise run ins with police and a lot
Speaker 2: of trouble with customs agents getting out of the country,
Speaker 2: one of whom I don't know, was sort of holding
Speaker 2: onto my baggage and wouldn't give it back to me
Speaker 2: until I promised that I wouldn't write anything negative about Guyana.
Speaker 2: So that was it was interesting, but I'm mostly like
Speaker 2: the biggest thing was working with our reporter on the
Speaker 2: ground there named Keana Wilberg, who writes for one of
Speaker 2: the local papers, so really talking through risk mitigation and
Speaker 2: secure with her and having a lot of contingency plans
Speaker 2: in place in case anything became just went beyond the
Speaker 2: level of intimidation.
Speaker 1: Did you find out who broke in?
Speaker 2: I did not know, but it was just it was weird.
Speaker 2: It was one of those where you know, I had
Speaker 2: cash out on the on the nightstand that was left untouched.
Speaker 2: Nothing was taken. It was just my laptop was open
Speaker 2: to you know, some files related to the story. Nothing
Speaker 2: that was that big of a deal because I don't,
Speaker 2: you know, keep sensitive files on my laptop and then
Speaker 2: leave it in hotel rooms. It was clearly just sort
Speaker 2: of an intimidation kind of thing.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite seasons off Drill is The mad
Speaker 1: Men of Climate Denial. It's about how the oil industry
Speaker 1: promoted climate denial over the past many decades, and that
Speaker 1: form of storytelling has been very much created by the
Speaker 1: oil industry going back almost a century, and you document
Speaker 1: that history in the most interesting way. What got you
Speaker 1: onto that story in the first place.
Speaker 2: Well, actually, when I first started Drilled, the intention was
Speaker 2: for it to be like a limited run series, and
Speaker 2: you know, the first season was about the origins of
Speaker 2: climate denil the Exon news story, tracking down a bunch
Speaker 2: of Exon scientists who talked to me about the research
Speaker 2: they'd been doing for for Exon on Climate back in
Speaker 2: the seventies and eighties, all of that. And then as
Speaker 2: I got to sort of the end of researching that season,
Speaker 2: I got to thinking there just had to be more
Speaker 2: to the story. Like, the climate denial strategy is a
Speaker 2: pretty doman, straightforward strategy, and yes, it's appealing to sort
Speaker 2: of tell people that this big scary thing is actually
Speaker 2: not happening and they don't have to change. But it
Speaker 2: worked so well and so quickly to turn public sentiment
Speaker 2: away from climate action that I felt like there had
Speaker 2: to have been something that came before it, And so
Speaker 2: the more I started looking into it, the more I
Speaker 2: realized that, oh, the fossil fuel industry sort of laid
Speaker 2: down this foundation that really shaped how people thought about
Speaker 2: the industry, how people thought about the environment, how people
Speaker 2: thought about solutions to environmental problems, and the waves that
Speaker 2: those solutions could or couldn't intersect with the economy. All
Speaker 2: of these things that really kind of laid the groundwork
Speaker 2: for climate denial to work as well as it did.
Speaker 2: And I've continued to be really obsessed with the PR
Speaker 2: industry in general and the fossil fuel industry's role as
Speaker 2: one of its first clients.
Speaker 1: And storytelling has been used very effectively by the fossil
Speaker 1: fuel companies. You know, you document that the PR industry
Speaker 1: has an idea itself was created by the oil industry,
Speaker 1: so the fact that they can wield it to that
Speaker 1: effect is not surprising, but it is still worth examining. Now,
Speaker 1: we are journalists. We deal in facts, we report on stories,
Speaker 1: we go to experts, we go to the ground, we
Speaker 1: look at what is happening. But at the end of
Speaker 1: doing all that work, we also have to then take
Speaker 1: account of what we have in front of us, and
Speaker 1: what's the best way in which we can build a
Speaker 1: story together and tell somebody who may be not interested
Speaker 1: in this subject at all, but should really know about it.
Speaker 1: And stories are the currency we use. So when you
Speaker 1: do this work and when you look at how effective
Speaker 1: the PR industry is at storytelling, what have you found
Speaker 1: in your toolkit the best counter.
Speaker 2: It sounds strange because I work mostly in audio, but
Speaker 2: I think that the best counter is often primary documents,
Speaker 2: and I just don't think that people necessarily look at
Speaker 2: those documents when they're in print stories. So I think
Speaker 2: having an audio component is helpful. And by documents, I
Speaker 2: mean things like like, I'll give you a really concrete example.
Speaker 2: I did a story a while ago on the crab
Speaker 2: fishermen that sued the oil companies. So this was a
Speaker 2: fishing trade group that represented crab fishermen on the west
Speaker 2: coast of the US and Canada, and they had filed
Speaker 2: a lawsuit against the top thirty oil companies for their
Speaker 2: role in delaying action on climate which the industry group
Speaker 2: was arguing and it had effectively led to the impending
Speaker 2: death of their industry, and you know, caused all kinds
Speaker 2: of economic damage and whatnot. And several of the people
Speaker 2: who were named plaintiffs in that lawsuit were total climate deniers.
Speaker 2: They were like, I don't know if humans have anything
Speaker 2: to do with it, ice ages, all of the usual things.
Speaker 2: And I thought that was really interesting. I was just like,
Speaker 2: how do you sign on to a lawsuit about climate
Speaker 2: change if you don't believe the climate change? And what
Speaker 2: they told me was that they'd been shown applications for
Speaker 2: patents by all of the oil majors in the seventies
Speaker 2: and eighties for kind of all of the infrastructure that
Speaker 2: they would need to deal with climate change, so like
Speaker 2: the tankers that could navigate a melting Arctic and these
Speaker 2: offshore platforms I mentioned being re engineered for sea level rise.
Speaker 2: And so their conclusion was, it doesn't matter what's causing
Speaker 2: climate change. They knew that it was definitely happening, that
Speaker 2: it was going to be a problem, and they prepared
Speaker 2: their industry for it, and they didn't give us the
Speaker 2: opportunity to do the same. And that's just not fair.
Speaker 2: It was like a real penny drop moment for me
Speaker 2: because I thought, oh, that's a much simpler story, you know, Fairness,
Speaker 2: equal access, to information then trying to argue the finer
Speaker 2: points of the science, which, like, especially in places where
Speaker 2: there's not a real high science literacy, including the US,
Speaker 2: I would say like, I don't know how you're ever
Speaker 2: going to use that as your big selling point to people,
Speaker 2: or your you know, proof that this thing is happening.
Speaker 1: Or willingness to engage exactly exactly. If there isn't none,
Speaker 1: then how much can you really explain the science exactly?
Speaker 1: Now this might be naval gayzy, but from one podcast
Speaker 1: host to another, why did you choose podcasts as the
Speaker 1: medium for your storytelling? What does it offer that other
Speaker 1: mediums don't.
Speaker 2: The main thing that I always look for in stories
Speaker 2: where I'm trying to decide like is this, you know,
Speaker 2: better for print or for audio? Because I still do
Speaker 2: print stories too, is like, will people understand this information
Speaker 2: better if they can hear it from someone who was involved,
Speaker 2: or if they can hear you know, the emotion behind it.
Speaker 2: Will that help people to understand the information. And when
Speaker 2: it comes to a lot of documents, I think the
Speaker 2: answer is yes, which is strange and maybe counterintuitive. You know,
Speaker 2: you'd think it's a it's a physical print document, it's
Speaker 2: more helpful to see it. But what I found was
Speaker 2: that people really clicked into it more when they heard,
Speaker 2: you know, like a former excen researcher actually reading their
Speaker 2: own memo that they wrote to you know, the executive
Speaker 2: board about this problem of climate change, or you know,
Speaker 2: I talked to one researcher who you could really hear
Speaker 2: like a catch in his throat about how he felt
Speaker 2: seeing the industry go from being part of the research
Speaker 2: and looking for solutions to pretending that this thing didn't exist,
Speaker 2: or you know, talking to these folks in the crowd
Speaker 2: industry about what were these specific patterns that they saw
Speaker 2: that really convinced them that this was an unfair situation.
Speaker 2: There are times when hearing the emotional side of these
Speaker 2: stories can actually really help people understand them and kind
Speaker 2: of access the information easier.
Speaker 1: Now, you relied a lot on newspapers and advertising and
Speaker 1: articles of that time for the series on Madmen of
Speaker 1: Climate Denial. How much of that was your original reporting,
Speaker 1: which was stuff sitting in the archive you had to
Speaker 1: go and find it, versus contextualizing what was sort of
Speaker 1: like boring history somebody had thought about or worked on, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but really putting it in the modern context of what
Speaker 1: this industry is doing to our understanding of the world today. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, The Madman series was heavily my own research. It
Speaker 2: was about like eighty percent of my own and then
Speaker 2: definitely drew also from some academic works, but a lot
Speaker 2: of archival research. I went to I don't know, like
Speaker 2: four different archives, and fortunately for me, because I'm a
Speaker 2: giant library nerd and I love nothing more than like
Speaker 2: sitting by myself in an archive for weeks, but also
Speaker 2: because these PR guys loved to donate all of their
Speaker 2: files to libraries, so there's a significant amount of archival
Speaker 2: stuff out there where you really get a good understanding
Speaker 2: of their pasts and how they thought about messaging for
Speaker 2: different companies. And the big thing that I realized researching
Speaker 2: that season was that, in my opinion, I think a
Speaker 2: lot of the sort of accepted wisdom on climate denial
Speaker 2: is not quite right. So there's this really persistent story
Speaker 2: that the tobacco industry came up with this playbook and
Speaker 2: then the oil industry just copied it. And what you
Speaker 2: see in all of these guys' history that were the
Speaker 2: big kind of early fathers of PR is that they
Speaker 2: were working for oil, tobacco, and chemicals at the same time,
Speaker 2: all the time, since forever. So the reason that there's
Speaker 2: crossover between the ways that different industries kind of approach
Speaker 2: storytelling and narrative framing and disinformation, it's because they literally
Speaker 2: had the same PR guy doing it for them. For example,
Speaker 2: there's a guy named Earl Newsome who was doing PR
Speaker 2: for Standard Oil New Jersey, which is now Exon, from
Speaker 2: like nineteen twenty to nineteen sixty nine, and in several
Speaker 2: cases he's saying, Hey, Standard, I did this one thing
Speaker 2: for GM that worked really well. I think we should
Speaker 2: do it for you guys too. That's happening constantly throughout history.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as part of our series, we are talking to
Speaker 1: a few climate fiction writers. We're imagining how the future
Speaker 1: is going to play out. But a lot of your
Speaker 1: series is focused on what happened in the past and
Speaker 1: what that tells us about today. So why do you
Speaker 1: think it's important to look back and tell those stories
Speaker 1: of the past.
Speaker 2: I am a big believer in the idea that you
Speaker 2: can't effectively solve a problem if you don't really know
Speaker 2: where it came from, you know, And so for me,
Speaker 2: I look at a lot of the technical solutions and
Speaker 2: sort of future casting stuff. And I see a lot
Speaker 2: of holes in people's understanding of history, and I think
Speaker 2: it's really important to fill in those gaps so that
Speaker 2: as we craft solutions, they're not repeating the mistakes of
Speaker 2: the past.
Speaker 1: After the break more from Amy about the people pushing
Speaker 1: climate denialism, how much of a challenge was it to
Speaker 1: find and be able to put that much load of
Speaker 1: a story on a particular individual, And is that the
Speaker 1: only way in which we can tell these complex stories
Speaker 1: having to have individuals be the load bearers.
Speaker 2: It's such an interesting question because I think there's a
Speaker 2: few layers to it for me. So one is that
Speaker 2: there's a real problem and sort of the storytelling industrial
Speaker 2: complex in general, in that it's very dominated by kind
Speaker 2: of a Western narrative framework that requires a real focus
Speaker 2: on individual characters. Right, It's like the hero's journey and
Speaker 2: all of that stuff, and reality doesn't map to that,
Speaker 2: you know, And in some ways, I feel like, you know,
Speaker 2: how much of that narrative structure was actually created by
Speaker 2: these same forces that I'm looking at. So there's a
Speaker 2: part of me that really wants to reject the whole thing.
Speaker 2: But I also am sort of well, you know, I
Speaker 2: have I want people to listen, and I want to
Speaker 2: reach as many people as possible, and having specific people
Speaker 2: does help. And in the case of certain stories, like
Speaker 2: if we're talking about propaganda, there really were specific individuals
Speaker 2: who or a large percentage of the responsibility for how
Speaker 2: that industry evolved. And in some ways to me, it
Speaker 2: helps kind of feel like it's not such an overwhelming
Speaker 2: challenge to rethink some of those narratives. You know that
Speaker 2: it helps to understand that, oh, there were specific companies
Speaker 2: that hired specific people to really convince the public to
Speaker 2: think about things a certain way. It's not like impossible
Speaker 2: for us to think about things differently, So it makes
Speaker 2: it feel more achievable to actually shift it.
Speaker 3: You.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one of your characters is Ivy Lee, who is
Speaker 1: a PR guy you worked for John d. Rockefeller in
Speaker 1: Standard Oil Times. One lesson that we take away from
Speaker 1: him is words matter. So how much of your own
Speaker 1: storytelling changed as a result of learning about the PR
Speaker 1: industry and its roots and how much do you think
Speaker 1: about your own writing and the words you use in
Speaker 1: telling your stories?
Speaker 2: Oh, constantly. I feel like it made me hyper aware,
Speaker 2: maybe not in a good way, because you know, it's
Speaker 2: hard to write when you're being that sort of self
Speaker 2: aware of what every single word or phrase could mean.
Speaker 2: But it also got me really thinking about is it
Speaker 2: okay for a journalist, for example, to use some of
Speaker 2: those same techniques, or to think about storytelling in the
Speaker 2: same way. I'm not sure where I shake out on that.
Speaker 2: I think I am constantly grappling with wanting a story
Speaker 2: to be compelling and informative and also wanting to break
Speaker 2: the pattern of propaganda.
Speaker 1: Well, tell me about some of the techniques that you
Speaker 1: do admire, even if you don't end up using them.
Speaker 2: Okay, there's one example from Edward Burneze, who was Freud's
Speaker 2: double nephew. Think on that one for a minute.
Speaker 1: He was his double nephew, which is he was his
Speaker 1: nephew from two different sites. My goodness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like his dad was Freud's wife's brother
Speaker 2: and his mom was Freud's sister. I think something like that.
Speaker 2: So anyway, there was no incest happening, but it was
Speaker 2: still a very weird sort of situation. Edward Bernese was
Speaker 2: such a brilliant guy, really like brought Freud's thinking into
Speaker 2: advertising and pr in the US, and he worked for everyone.
Speaker 2: I mean, he worked for the API, he worked for tobacco.
Speaker 1: That's the American Petroleum Institute.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he kind of took over all of Ivy Lee's
Speaker 2: clients when ivy Lee died quite young, and he sort
Speaker 2: of handed his clients over to Edward Brenees. And Brenees
Speaker 2: did this thing that I think about all the time
Speaker 2: where he was contacted by a watchmaker who wanted to
Speaker 2: break the taboo against men wearing wristwatches. So at the time,
Speaker 2: it was considered feminine for men to wear wristwatch because
Speaker 2: it was like a bracelet, and you know, real men
Speaker 2: used pocket watches. So he got to thinking, Okay, how
Speaker 2: can I shift you know, the cultural norms on this,
Speaker 2: and who's considered like the most masculine of men, and
Speaker 2: he lands on soldiers, And so he goes to an
Speaker 2: expert that he knows, and he commissions a study on
Speaker 2: how many soldiers are getting killed when they light a
Speaker 2: match to look at their pocket watch, and how many
Speaker 2: lives could potentially be saved if they switched to wristwatches. Now,
Speaker 2: the whether or not the data of this study was
Speaker 2: like at all credible is anyone's guess. But he took
Speaker 2: this study to the military and convinced them to make
Speaker 2: wristwatches standard issue for the army, and within like a year,
Speaker 2: this taboo against men wearing wristwatches is gone. So stuff
Speaker 2: like that where I'm like, man, that is such an
Speaker 2: interesting way to come at that problem. Another one, he
Speaker 2: got hired by a piano company that wanted to make
Speaker 2: pianos something that you know, people would have in their
Speaker 2: homes instead of just sort of limiting their customer base
Speaker 2: to concert halls and music schools and things like that.
Speaker 2: And so Bernez went to a bunch of architectural magazines
Speaker 2: and convinced them to start putting pianos in the you know,
Speaker 2: staged living rooms and stuff that they were taking pictures
Speaker 2: of for these magazines. And you know, so it just
Speaker 2: it became, you know, in this very subtle way. It's like, oh,
Speaker 2: if you're wealthy and you have a large, impressive home,
Speaker 2: you must have a piano in it as well.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, it's sort of the belief as a
Speaker 1: you know, science student, that oh, if you just tell
Speaker 1: people the facts, yeah, no, no, if they are convincing enough,
Speaker 1: if the case is strong enough, they will surely see
Speaker 1: the light. But you know, the Army does so much
Speaker 1: climate change research and has been making such warnings about
Speaker 1: how much disruption is going to bring for so long,
Speaker 1: and what if anything, can be incorporated in the most
Speaker 1: ethical way to be able to tell stories that do
Speaker 1: break through.
Speaker 2: One thing I do a lot is try to find
Speaker 2: sort of a narrative format that people are very familiar with.
Speaker 2: That's why, actually, you know, I did Drilled as a
Speaker 2: true crime podcast because I thought, okay, well, sometimes it
Speaker 2: help helps me have a complicated story to put it
Speaker 2: in a container that people are very familiar with. But
Speaker 2: then I also like, I also try to be really
Speaker 2: careful about making sure that everything is thoroughly reported and
Speaker 2: fact checked and put through legal review and all those
Speaker 2: things too, because I don't want to perpetuate bad practices
Speaker 2: or unethical practices. But it does help, I think, for
Speaker 2: people to be able to kind of take in the
Speaker 2: story in a format that's familiar. I mean, I would
Speaker 2: love to figure out the Bernese piano version of climate
Speaker 2: story telling it, but I haven't figured it out yet.
Speaker 1: Now, you featured a lot of these mad men in
Speaker 1: long interviews talking about their tricks and you play tape
Speaker 1: from it in nearly every episode in that series. Why
Speaker 1: were they doing that?
Speaker 2: Why were they talking about it out loud? Yes, this
Speaker 2: endlessly amuses me because I mean I have the same
Speaker 2: question about why would you do every single you know,
Speaker 2: memo you've ever written to a library. It'd be like
Speaker 2: you or I donating our entire email archive to a library.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like. But I think the answer is
Speaker 2: that they were mostly these were men who were very
Speaker 2: impressed with their own intelligence. Burnees like loved the fact
Speaker 2: that he could manipulate people so well. He was very
Speaker 2: very pleased with his abilities in that regard. And there's
Speaker 2: a lot of you know, doing this for the PR industry,
Speaker 2: So in many cases, these were people who were really
Speaker 2: helping to build and professionalize this industry and felt like
Speaker 2: they needed to kind of do PR for themselves as well.
Speaker 2: There's definitely, like, I think, two types of PR guys.
Speaker 2: There's like the ones that do interviews and write articles
Speaker 2: and op eds and kind of take credit for their work,
Speaker 2: but there are definitely a few that prefer to stay
Speaker 2: behind the scene and there's almost no media of them.
Speaker 1: What's been the biggest change that you have seen in
Speaker 1: storytelling around climate issues.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's such a good question. Probably the biggest change
Speaker 2: is the inclusion of emotion in climate storytelling. I've been
Speaker 2: a climate reporter for more than twenty years now. I
Speaker 2: would say up until maybe even five years ago, it
Speaker 2: was really frowned upon to really have any kind of
Speaker 2: emotion around the climate change issue, which I think is
Speaker 2: pretty wild when you consider that it's this big, looming
Speaker 2: existential crisis that will impact every aspect of our lives.
Speaker 2: It seems entirely appropriate to have emotions about that. But
Speaker 2: it was very you know, sort of frowned upon. And
Speaker 2: I think partly that's because of the dominance of sort
Speaker 2: of science communication. I think partly it's because the industry
Speaker 2: did such a good job of going after some of
Speaker 2: the early climate communicators and you know, sort of branding
Speaker 2: them as activists or accusing them of you know, making
Speaker 2: things up or inciting panic or any of these things.
Speaker 2: But I do feel like that has shifted considerably in
Speaker 2: the last five or so years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we talked about the oil industry as a effective
Speaker 1: user of storytelling, but the other spectrum is also worthy
Speaker 1: of discussion, which is the climate activist fhere. We've seen
Speaker 1: in the last few years all kinds of groups come
Speaker 1: up extinction rebellion here in the UK, but then offshoots
Speaker 1: of it just up Oil Insulate Britain that are taking
Speaker 1: some of the techniques of decades ago, which is being disruptive,
Speaker 1: which is being in your face, but also then merging
Speaker 1: it with social media, with great photography, with art, and
Speaker 1: figuring out a way to get their message across, which
Speaker 1: you know, some of it is because the society understands
Speaker 1: the urgency of the problem, so it's not just all
Speaker 1: them doing the work, but some of it is certainly
Speaker 1: the way they tell their story.
Speaker 2: Definitely. Yeah, I think that the climate movement has gotten
Speaker 2: a lot better at storytelling in the last five ish years,
Speaker 2: mostly driven by the youth climate movement. And I know,
Speaker 2: like actually we got I got leaps some internal documents
Speaker 2: from BP in twenty twenty that were looking at like
Speaker 2: right before the pandemic, as they were kind of rebranding
Speaker 2: and they had a workshop for how they're going to
Speaker 2: reposition themselves on climate and energy transition and all these
Speaker 2: kinds of things, and it was heavily dominated by an
Speaker 2: intense fear of the youth climate movement and how effective
Speaker 2: and authentic that movement was, and how on earth they
Speaker 2: were going to be able to combat this, convince people
Speaker 2: that they're also authentic, convince people that they're genuine about
Speaker 2: being part of the solution, all those kinds of things.
Speaker 2: So I would say that, you know, not only has
Speaker 2: the movement gotten better, but also that it's more effective.
Speaker 1: And we are of course talking about the evolution of
Speaker 1: storytelling here, but it also helps and we should acknowledge that, finally,
Speaker 1: the economic case for acting on climate is really settling in.
Speaker 1: It was always there. It's just that people in power
Speaker 1: and people with money now do see it as a
Speaker 1: way in which they can make money. And so that's
Speaker 1: allowing for more people with more money getting into the space. Right,
Speaker 1: There's been an explosion in climate journalism, yes, because newsrooms
Speaker 1: are investing in it, because newsrooms see that there is
Speaker 1: revenue to be made that would support that kind of journalists. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I will say too that on the climate narrative front,
Speaker 2: when I first had the idea for Drilled, I had
Speaker 2: been assigned story to cover some of the early climate
Speaker 2: liability cases, and I was in a court room in
Speaker 2: San Francisco. This judge had ordered a climate science tutorial
Speaker 2: and I was like, oh, this is it. Like there's
Speaker 2: the judge who was kind of eccentric, and like the
Speaker 2: oil company lawyers and the activists were there, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 2: this is this is a good framework in which to
Speaker 2: tell this story. I think it could work. And I
Speaker 2: pitched it to like every big podcast company that was
Speaker 2: doing narrative podcasts at the time, and this was like
Speaker 2: the salad days of podcasts, when everybody had big budgets
Speaker 2: and they were green lighting all kinds of shows, and
Speaker 2: every single one of them told me that there was
Speaker 2: no audience for climate narrative.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I just made it on my own. It
Speaker 2: was sort of me and an audio engineer and I
Speaker 2: was doing all of the tracking at night in my
Speaker 2: car and managed to get it out and we had
Speaker 2: an incredible response to the first season. I think we
Speaker 2: got more than a million listeners. So that was another
Speaker 2: good early lesson of if you think you have a
Speaker 2: really good story, sometimes you just have to make it
Speaker 2: and put it out there.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad you stuck with it, because I've certainly
Speaker 1: learned a lot from your reporting and it's just a
Speaker 1: great addition to the space, and I thank you for
Speaker 1: coming on Zero.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: This is part two of our three episode series talking
Speaker 1: with climate Storytellers. If you've not already listened to it,
Speaker 1: check out my interview with climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.
Speaker 1: Next week, you'll hear from Dorothy Funtenberry about how to
Speaker 1: tell a climate story for TV.
Speaker 3: When people found out we were doing the show, they
Speaker 3: were excited to come on board because they're thinking about
Speaker 3: climate change and to think about and not be able
Speaker 3: to act on it feels bananas, and so to actually
Speaker 3: get to do something is really liberating.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Zero. If you liked this episode,
Speaker 1: please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on
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Speaker 1: port at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd
Speaker 1: and senior producer is Christine driscoll. Our theme music is
Speaker 1: composed by Wonderly Special Thanks as always to Kira binrip
Speaker 1: I am Akshatrati. Back next week.