A few weeks ago the Trump administration quietly proposed a rule that would make it harder for financial managers to investment retirement funds in environmentally or socially responsible ways. The fossil fuel industry had been calling for the rule and praised it, noting that the divestment movement has become a serious problem and reduced its access to capital. Journalist David Sirota broke that story and joins us to explain. PLUS: a sneak peek of S5.
Check out David's newsletter: https://sirota.substack.com/
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The FBI arrested Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Larry Householder, this month for racketeering, or as the state attorney general put it "bribery, that's what it was." Private utility First Energy bribed Householder and a handful of other state politicians to pass a corporate bailout that kept coal and nuclear plants open and crushed renewables. UC Santa Barbara political science professor Leah Stokes, author of the book Short Circuiting Policy, joins to tell us all about it.

Leah's book: https://www.leahstokes.com/book

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What if you were told buying a piece of land in the Mojave Desert could help you be rich one day? That was the dream developers of California City sold to thousands of people. But the reality is much different. California City – the new podcast from LA-ist Studios – chronicles the dark side of the American Dream, where those thousands of people were left with land that is nearly worthless.

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An advocacy group in The Netherlands began campaigning for a ban on fossil fuel ads, including event sponsorships, earlier this year. Campaigner Femke Sleegers joins us to explain the roots of the campaign, its goal, and the initial response to it.

More information: https://verbiedfossielereclame.nl/dutch-citizens-initiative-ban-fossil-fuel-advertising/ 

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Despite tax breaks, royalty cuts, and other COVID-related incentives, Chesapeake Energy—a pioneer in the American shale gas (fracking) industry—declared bankruptcy this week. It's the first example of what we expect to be many of the government throwing good money after bad in attempts to use COVID relief funds to shore up companies that were failing long before the pandemic hit.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

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Two big new suits, in Minnesota and D.C., were filed within 24 hours of each other and allege the same thing: that fossil fuel companies misled consumers about climate change.

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A new report from Carbon Tracker finds that not only have oil and gas companies not been budgeting for plugging and abandoning wells, they've been grossly underestimating the cost of that work, especially for fracking wells. The COVID-19 pandemic has only highlighted the problem. Report co-authors Rob Schuwerk and Greg Rogers join to talk about the size of the problem, the cost, and who will ultimately pay.
Report: https://carbontracker.org/reports/its-closing-time/
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Amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, some climate activists have been saying "now's not the time to talk about climate." In this episode we bring you an encore presentation of the latest Hot Take episode, in which Amy and Mary Annaise Heglar talk about how justice is justice; the idea that climate and racial justice are all the same thing, and can't be separated. To access the full-length episode, and weekly roundups of climate justice and accountability writing, reporting and analysis, please consider becoming a Hot Take premium subscriber: https://realhottake.substack.com/subscribe

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Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine focused on what she calls "disaster capitalism," the sort of corporate feeding frenzy that happens in the wake of major crises. It was on a research trip for that book, to post-Katrina New Orleans, that she connected her work on human rights and labor to climate. Klein shares that journey here, explains the Green New Deal, and talks about what needs to happen to spur a justice-focused transformation in the U.S.

You can find Naomi's many great books here: https://naomiklein.org/books-and-films/
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Reporters Alexander Beunder and Jilles Mast have been combing through 150+ boxes of documents from the personal archive of one of the Netherlands' top climate skeptics during the 1990s, a guy named Fritz Böttcher, and made a shocking discovery: throughout his career Böttcher received direct funding from Royal Dutch Shell. It's part of a large project called the Shell Papers at the Platform for Authentic Journalism, in the Netherlands.
Read more:
Shell Papers: https://www.ftm.nl/dutch-multinationals-funded-climate-sceptic
Shorter summary of Böttcher report: https://desmog.co.uk/2020/05/14/bottcher-shell-funding-european-climate-science-denial

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