Drilled

In this season we're tackling Big Oil's big propaganda machine—its origins, the spin masters who created it, and why it's been so effective. It all began more than 100 years ago with Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller and his son, a bloody miners' strike, and the very first P.R. guy, who swooped in to clean it all up.Support us: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledRead more: https://www.drillednews.com/Extra tidbits in the Heated newsletter: https://heated.world/Follow us: https://twitter.com/WeAreDrilled

As climate disinformation campaigns ramped up in the 1990s, oil companies and their PR firms exploited weaknesses in the U.S. media system and propped up "contrarian" scientists to push the narrative of scientific uncertainty and shift how journalists covered the issue. Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

A look at how those fossil fuel-backed deception campaigns are continuing today, behind a couple layers of energy industry organizations, alliances, and "news" sites. Documentation: Western Energy Alliance 990, showing global oil execs on its board: https://pdf.guidestar.org/PDF_Images/2016/840/700/2016-840700841-0e72e02b-9O.pdf More on the formation of Energy In Depth: https://www.desmogblog.com/%E2%80%98energy-depth%E2%80%99-was-created-major-oil-and-gas-companies-according-industry-memoSupport us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

In addition to using journalists' views on their own objectivity against them, oil companies exploited various weaknesses in science, namely scientists' tendency toward not prioritizing or valuing good communication skills, and their absolute refusal to be certain about anything. Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

Ivy Lee worked with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers for the rest of his life, helping to establish the American Petroleum Institute in 1919, and working for the company's various joint ventures as well, including a petrochemicals partnership with German chemical giant IG Farben. That job, later in his life, took Lee to Germany, to meet with Goebbels and Hitler and give them advice on dealing with the American press. He was under investigation by Congress for his role in Nazi propaganda at the time of his death. Lee's work creating and building the API was one of his most important contributions to fossil fuel propaganda, it's the foundation on which the next 100 years was built.Support us: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledRead more: https://www.drillednews.com/Follow us: https://twitter.com/WeAreDrilledExtra tidbits in the Heated newsletter, subscribe here: https://heated.world/

To make media manipulation and lobbying truly effective, oil companies and their public relations firms also had to shift the culture, influencing everything from civil discourse to how religious groups viewed the issue of climate change. Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

If you unravel climate policy back to its origins, eventually you get to academic research. Although oil companies dramatically reduced their own scientific research on climate in the 1990s, by the early 2000s they began funding research centers at prestigious universities throughout the country, subtly shaping the research that any eventual policy would be based upon. Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

The fossil fuel industry's decades-long information war was so successful that even though oil companies themselves began publicly accepting climate science years ago, the public remains skeptical. Fewer Americans believe in the need to act on climate today than did 30 years ago, despite insurmountable evidence. Industry campaigns were so successful they've now landed oil companies in court, facing multiple suits attempting to hold them accountable for the damages inflicted by unchecked climate change. Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

Fossil fuel industry influence campaigns ensured that we lost a critical 30 years not taking action on climate change. But all is not lost. The technology to address climate change exists, and if there's one thing history teaches us about America it's that radical social change is entirely possible here. Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

The oil and gas industry was headed for broke long before COVID-19. Now the Trump administration wants to use the pandemic to put it on life support, while the American Petroleum Institute uses it to get the industry's deregulation wishlist.Support our work: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledRead more: https://www.drillednews.com/post/will-pandemic-relief-become-a-petroleum-industry-slush-fundMore from the ARO Working Group: https://www.arowatch.org/about-arowatch/

In 2015, West Coast crab fishermen were shut down by climate change. Atmospheric changes had warmed waters and upended everything from the food chain to ocean upwelling. They didn't realize it would be their new normal, or that scientists had been telling the oil industry this would happen since the 1960s. Welcome to season 2 of Drilled: Hot Water. Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

Daniel Edelman learned the tools of his trade combatting Nazi propaganda in WWII, then came home and put his psychological warfare training to work for American industry, including tobacco and Big Oil.Support us: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledTranscript: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w1dbm5y4q1xaskl/S3Ep3_Transcript.docx?dl=0

Drilled will be back with bonus episodes soon. In the meantime, check out one of our other climate podcasts, Hot Take. In this episode, hosts Mary Annaise Heglar and Amy Westervelt talk to David Wallace Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth and deputy editor of New York magazine, about the intersection of climate change and the coronavirus pandemic.Get ad-free eps and support Drilled's reporting: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledMore reporting: https://www.drillednews.com/

Dr. Julia Steinberger, professor of social ecology and ecological economics at the University of Leeds, has published some really interesting research recently debunking some classic fossil fuel narratives around the industry's importance to society and human wellbeing. Here we dig into her latest study, which found that while fossil fuel use has certainly grown GDP, it has had no effect on life expectancy ... in other words the industry's "benefit" has accrued to relatively few humans.Study: "Your Money or Your Life?" Environmental Research Letters https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab7461/metaSupport our work:https://www.patreon.com/DrilledTranscript: https://www.drillednews.com/post/new-research-questions-societal-benefit-of-fossil-fuels

Two new reports highlight that, since the Paris Agreement in 2016, the fossil fuel industry has ramped up both oil production and greenwashing. Plus: why the heck are mainstream media outlets making Big Oil's ads for them? Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

In a new report, the Center for International Environmental Law looks at the way oil, gas and petrochemical companies are leveraging the pandemic to push policy and increase profits, and whether these efforts will ultimately be successful. Carroll Muffet, one of our S3 experts, joins to walk us through some of the key points of the report, including how the industry is using the pandemic to push more single-use plastics.Read the report: Pandemic Crisis, Systemic Decline: Why Exploiting the COVID-19 Crisis Will Not Save the Oil, Gas, and Plastics Industries Support our work: https://www.drillednews.com/support-us

Mobil Oil's longtime PR guy Herb Schmertz really started to aggressively manipulate the media. He introduced so many new bells and whistles to Big Oil's propaganda apparatus, we're going to stay with his story for two episodes. In Part 1: Corporate personhood. First Schmertz worked to humanize oil companies by creating the "corporate persona" then he fought for First Amendment rights to be extended to corporations.Support us: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledMore reporting: https://www.drillednews.comTranscripts: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gxt69wolj570ghu/AACi6NovOxbn5VryZmpCfhM1a?dl=0

In part two of our episode on former Mobil VP Herb Schmertz, we dig into how Schmertz's approach bred false equivalence, and why he pushed so hard for the extension of First Amendment rights to corporations.Support us: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledMore info: www.drillednews.comTranscript: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gxt69wolj570ghu/AACi6NovOxbn5VryZmpCfhM1a?dl=0Subscribe to our sister newsletter, Heated: https://heated.world/Check out our sister podcast, Hot Take: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hot-take/id1488414960

The American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil and Chevron have been amongst the biggest opponents to bailouts for shale gas companies as part of the coronavirus relief package. DeSmog's Justin Mikulka joins us to explain why.Support our work: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledFollow Justin's reporting: https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/27/shale-bailout-trump-oil-exxon-strategic-petroleum-reserve

Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term "public relations" when propaganda started to become a negative term. His specialty was using psychological know-how to manipulate the masses and orchestrate cultural shifts in his clients' favor (clients like Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and General Motors). A few decades later, W. Howard Chase built onto that foundation with the idea of issues management—predicting an industry's potential issues, and manipulating political, social, and cultural forces to neutralize them. Chase is responsible for one of the best-known examples of greenwashing, the so-called "crying Indian ad," which introduced the idea of "litter bugs" and individual responsibility for pollution.Support us: https://www.patreon.com/DrilledRead more: www.drillednews.comTranscript: https://www.dropbox.com/s/to0gvv8bco37xm0/S3_Ep6.docx?dl=0Subscribe to Heated: http://www.heated.world