HEATED

Can a billionaire be trusted to dismantle the system that made them wealthy? California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer understand why you might say no—but he argues he's the guy to break the mold.In our interview, we discuss whether billionaires should exist at all, Steyer’s past investments in fossil fuels, the carbon footprint of billionaire investment portfolios, his proposal to break up California’s electric utility monopolies and lower electricity prices, the dark money campaigns already targeting him, and how he’d use the California governorship to push climate action nationwide. We also talk about our shared trip to the Athabasca tar sands in 2014.

HEATED's previous coverage of billionaires:

* Bill Gates is no friend to the climate. November 2019

* Why I’m skeptical of Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion climate pledge. February 2020

* Bezos breaks his climate pledge. September 2020

* The stealth climate villains of 2020 (all billionaires). December 2020

* Climate billionaires are our modern-day Columbuses. October 2021, repub October 2023

* The climate case against Elon Musk. November 2022

* Elon Musk’s climate censorship. April 2023

* Surprise! Billionaires aren’t solving climate change. November 2023

* Nobel Prize-winning economist calls for climate tax on billionaires. April 2024

* Behind the billionaire climate tax. April 2024

* Elon Musk’s PAC is powered by coal. November 2024

* You already know Elon Musk. You need to know Harold Hamm. February 2025

* The Senate is about to destroy clean energy to give tax cuts to billionaires. June 2025

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For nearly eight years, Chase Cain covered the most existential threat to humanity for one of the country’s biggest broadcast networks. But last week, the veteran journalist resigned, citing burnout from near-constant internal fighting to get important climate stories on air. In an exclusive interview, Cain talks about the subtle ways climate coverage is suppressed at NBC—not through explicit directives, but through a thousand small cuts over time. HEATED podcast producer Tracy Wholf, a veteran of both CBS and ABC, shares similar experiences. You can follow Chase’s independent reporting journey by subscribing to his YouTube channel. You can also find him on TikTok and Instagram.

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In this new series, we’re going to investigate and explain the powerful, systemic forces driving inaction on climate change. We’re going to debunk polluter-funded propaganda; call out media complicity; and press people seeking power on what they’ll actually do about the crisis. And that’s just what we have planned for our first few episodes!

Meet our powerhouse new producer in episode one.

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Sometimes, being a climate reporter feels like being in a twisted version of Groundhog Day. Every time you think the world has finally moved beyond debating whether climate change is real or fake, you wake up to find that the day has reset—and a white guy with oil money seeking power pushed the button.

Last night, JD Vance pushed the button while thousands of Americans were suffering from one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history. At the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Donald Trump’s running mate cast doubt on the “idea” that heat-trapping pollution heats the atmosphere, calling it “weird science” that he would only accept “for the sake of argument.”

“One of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions—this idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change,” he said. “Let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science. Let’s just say that’s true.” 

Vance went on to criticize the Democratic Party’s climate policies, claiming they wouldn’t solve the hypothetical problem of climate change that Vance continually refused to acknowledge, even when pressed again by the moderator. The only environmental problems Vance would acknowledge? "Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water," he said. Fantastic. 

Meanwhile, in actual reality, climate scientists were sounding the alarm about the impact of fossil fuel development on extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene. They said current warm ocean temperatures, which rapidly turned Helene into a massive Category 4 hurricane, were made 300 times more likely by climate change. They also estimated that climate change caused 50 percent more rainfall in Georgia and the Carolinas—a shocking number given the unprecedented 40 trillion gallons of rain. 

Only a few days ago, Trump told supporters at a rally that climate change is “one of the greatest scams of all time.” Vance did not take this direct route of denial, likely because it would have seemed insensitive in the face of such destruction from Helene. He’s trying to seem like the adult in the room.

But Vance’s comments were the same old Trumpian climate denial, albeit a far more cowardly form. On a national stage, amid unprecedented extreme destruction, Vance was too afraid to tell Americans what he actually believes: That we should stay stuck in this Groundhog Day forever, and allow the window for action to run out of time.  

Many news outlets claim to be “independent.” HEATED actually is. We take no ad money, billionaire money, or foundation money—only reader subscriptions. Help climate journalism say principled and join today!

What else happened in last night’s debate?

* The moderators thankfully executed a climate fact-check. “The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the Earth’s climate is warming at an unprecedented rate,” said CBS’s Norah O’Donnell after Vance’s comments. But it’s easy to be prepared with a climate basic fact-check when you’ve been stuck reliving the same, settled debate for decades.

* Walz acknowledged that climate change is real. Don’t you love the bare minimum? The Minnesota governor said that many people know climate change is dangerous, regardless of party affiliation. “These are not folks that are Green New Deal folks,” he said. “They are farmers that have seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods back-to-back.” Walz went on to say that “Reducing our impact is absolutely critical,” and touted the job-creating aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act.

* Walz also touted the Biden administration’s expansion of fossil fuels. The Minnesota governor also doubled down on Harris’ appeal to moderate voters by promoting the Biden administration’s expansion of fossil fuels, while failing to acknowledge the role fossil fuels play in causing the climate crisis—much less the fact that experts say we need to phase them out. Under Biden, Walz noted, the U.S. is now producing more oil and gas than any country in the world; and Biden approved a record number of oil and gas leases compared to Trump. And Walz added, the U.S. is also producing more clean energy under the Biden administration, which is also true.

* Vance said that the U.S. has the cleanest economy in the world. (It doesn’t.) The U.S. emits more carbon dioxide per capita than any other country in the world, including China, and is the second-largest emitter overall (but the largest historic emitter). We also don’t have the cleanest economy, which is measured by comparing carbon emissions to GDP. According to that measurement, the U.S. emitted 0.26 kilograms per dollar of GDP in 2022, putting the country squarely in the middle of the road.

* Vance also said that Trump cares about the cleanest air and water. (He doesn’t). Vance said that both he and Trump want “the environment to be cleaner and safer.” During his term in office, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental protections, including rules governing clean air and water.

* Walz called out Trump’s proposed $1 billion deal with oil executives. Right at the end of his time, the governor pointed out that Trump met with oil executives and offered to repeal all of the Biden’s Administration’s climate policies if they donated $1 billion to his campaign. “We could be smarter than that,” said Walz. It was perhaps the understatement of the night.

Further reading:

* Trump will attend two fundraisers in oil-rich Texas today. The Guardian, October 1, 2024.

First, he will hold an invite-only lunch in the Permian Basin, the world’s most productive oilfield. Later, he’ll reportedly hold a Houston cocktail party co-hosted by Jeff Hildebrand, who runs Hilcorp Oil and has been a major donor to Trump since 2017.

Last week, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, also attended two fundraisers thrown by oil industry executives in Dallas and Fort Worth, before being forced to cancel two Georgia fundraisers due to the hurricane.

* JD Vance is one of the top recipients of oil and gas money. Now he’s shilling for their interests. Ohio Capital Journal, September 5, 2023.

J.D. Vance, the wealthy venture capitalist who moved back to Ohio to become a U.S. Senator as a reborn MAGA zealot, owes his deep-pocketed benefactors big time. Chief among them are the titans peddling fossil fuel. Vance was among the top 20 of all recipients of oil and gas donations in the 2022 campaign.

* Ohio reaps benefits from climate law JD Vance repeatedly attacks. New York Times, October 1, 2024.

Despite Vance’s critiques, residents in his state — including in the senator’s hometown, Middletown, Ohio — have been big beneficiaries of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Many local leaders and residents say they do not want to see the new investments, which are already starting to revitalize the local economy, disappear. 

Since the bill’s passage in mid-2022, companies have announced more than $7 billion in clean energy investments in Ohio, according to an analysis from E2, an environmental nonprofit organization. Only six other states have surpassed that amount, according to the analysis.

Catch of the Day: Did you guys miss Fish? He’s been out getting pizza. But he’s back now.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? Send a picture and some words to [email protected].

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Over the last year, Republicans have begun championing a new and novel environmental cause. It’s not the air; it’s not the water; it’s not the climate crisis. It’s refrigerators. Apparently they’re getting way too efficient.

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The blueprint for Trump’s second term envisions deregulating ubiquitous and carcinogenic “forever” chemicals.

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In our full interview with Stacey Abrams, we dive deeper into her personal and professional experience with climate change; details of the electrification incentives in the IRA; the potential challenges with ensuring equity in electrification; and her views on the role of fossil fuels in a net zero future. We also discuss how Abrams’s love of sci-fi influences her imagination of the future.

That full interview—both transcript and audio—is available to paid subscribers only. If you’re a free subscriber, the first part of our interview is available for you via audio at the top, and transcript at the bottom.

It is very difficult to get television news networks to tell climate change stories—especially ones that place the blame on fossil fuels. The House Oversight Committee’s ongoing investigation into Big Oil, and its role in misleading the American public about climate change, is an example.

According to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who is leading the investigation with committee Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), it’s been tough to get television news to cover this—but not because it’s not an important story. “I've been told by bookers who have me on their television shows that climate is hard to get ratings for,” he told HEATED in an extensive interview about the investigation. “They say climate is a tough thing to cover on television.”

So Khanna is vying for attention from other sources. In a 30-minute interview, we discuss the investigation’s challenges—from media coverage, to the fierce backlash from Republicans and the oil industry, as well as resistance from some Democratic colleagues. We also talk about the successes of the last year, where the investigation goes from here, and what interested citizens can do to help.

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Today’s newsletter is a collaboration with Emily Holden at Floodlight, a new non-profit news organization dedicated to investigating the corporate and ideological interests holding back climate action. ICYMI, we ran an interview with Holden about Floodlight’s launch last month.

Our article today investigates how decision-makers at major banks have conflicts of interest on climate, and what that means for the projects they back—like Line 3 in Northern Minnesota. It is also running in The Guardian.

At the top of today’s e-mail, you’ll also find a behind-the-scenes, podcast-style audio interview about this story. It starts with a discussion between Emily and I, and then ends with an interview with Giniw Collective founder Tara Houska, who’s been leading direct actions against the Line 3 pipeline.

I hope you enjoy this collaboration! Let me know what you think in the comments, and please consider supporting this 100 percent reader-funded, independent journalism with a subscription if you can.

By Emily Holden for Floodlight and Emily Atkin for Heated

U.S. banks are pledging to help fight the climate crisis alongside the Biden administration, but their boards are dominated by people with climate-related conflicts of interest, and they continue to invest deeply in fossil fuel projects.

Three out of every four board members at seven major US banks (77%) have current or past ties to 'climate-conflicted' companies or organizations—from oil and gas corporations to trade groups that lobby against reducing climate pollution, according to a first-of-its-kind review by climate influence analysts for the blog DeSmog.

One of the controversial projects those board members have chosen to back is the new Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline, currently under construction in northern Minnesota. If completed, the project would allow Canadian oil giant Enbridge to double the amount of high-polluting tar sands oil it currently transports through the region to 760,000 barrels per day.

Environmental groups estimate the new Line 3 would add 50 new coal plants’ worth of carbon emissions to the atmosphere every year for the next three to five decades. They say it is incompatible with the Biden administration’s climate and environmental goals, and they argue the project never should have been approved. They add that the Trump administration didn’t independently review the risks of building a tar sands pipeline underneath the headwaters of the Mississippi River, which flows all the way to the US Gulf Coast.

Neither Biden nor the banks funding Line 3 have acknowledged these concerns, and time is running out to halt construction. So in recent weeks, Indigenous water protectors in Minnesota have resorted to physically chaining themselves to Enbridge equipment, while activists across the country have been chaining themselves to the doors of the banks who finance the pipeline.

“There’s been a lot of complacency. People have been pursuing comfortable routes of advocacy,” said Tara Houska, whose group Giniw Collective has led several direct actions against Line 3. “I don’t think we’re going to get the answers we need comfortably.”

The financing behind Line 3

Enbridge has seven active loans relevant to Line 3, totaling $11.5bn, according to the Rainforest Action Network. In addition, banks have underwritten bonds to Enbridge totaling $5bn since the autumn of 2019, the group said.

From the U.S., Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo have made the project possible with billions of dollars in loans, although it’s impossible to tally precisely how much they have financed for the pipeline specifically. Another five large Canadian banks are also financing Enbridge, according to Ran.

Out of these nine North American banks backing Enbridge, six have recently published net-zero climate goals, pledging to align their investments with the international Paris climate agreement.

“The banks are gorging on doughnuts and then eating an apple afterwards,” said Richard Brooks, the Toronto-based climate finance director for Stand.earth. “We certainly can’t rely on banks or the private sector to lead us into climate safety and lead us toward emissions reductions. We need policy, we need regulation. We need government to act.”

DeSmog found Canadian banks have the highest percentage of directors with climate-conflicted ties: 82%. That figure was significant in the UK and elsewhere in Europe as well, at 78% and 61%, respectively.

The struggle to get banks to defund Line 3

In February, the group Stop the Money Pipeline began a campaign to demand that banks withdraw their financial support of Line 3.

But despite numerous direct actions across the country, the effort has not been nearly as successful as previous climate campaigns targeted at banks, like the campaign to end funding for drilling in the Arctic national wildlife refuge.

The progressive Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar pointed to previous environmental victories and said activists must keep fighting. “We were able to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline because activists collectively organized in large numbers to oppose it—we must use that same energy to stop this pipeline from causing irreversible damage,” she said.

Juli Kellner, an Enbridge spokesperson, argued Line 3 was a safety-driven project because it was replacing an older pipeline. She said it had received all its permits after a thorough review process.

“Shutting down existing pipelines does not erase demand. It merely forces the transport of essential energy by less efficient means such as ship, truck, and most notably rail,” Kellner said. “It is Enbridge’s responsibility to transport the energy people rely on daily by pipelines - the safest, most efficient means of transporting energy. It is also our responsibility to do what we can to address climate change. That is why we’ve set a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 and laid a credible path to achieving it, including tying compensation of our executives to our performance in this area.”

The most climate-conflicted banks: JPMorgan, Wells Fargo

Much of the U.S. economy is built on fossil fuels, and people with enough experience to be appointed to bank boards are likely to have some connection to climate-conflicted organizations. But the DeSmog analysts said the heavy representation of industry on boards shows a “lack of creativity” in recruitment and is probably why bank policies aren’t more environmentally progressive.

“Some of these banks have pledges, but it’s about ensuring that they see them through. We’re simply asking the question of: ‘With this person on the board, what’s the likelihood of them seeing them through?’” said Mat Hope, editor of DeSmog UK.

“When it comes to the consumer holding their bank card, we want to put the information out there that lets them know that these are the directors of the boards of the banks they’re banking with.”

DeSmog reviewed the careers of board directors and flagged any connections with high-polluting sectors, including fossil energy, agribusiness, steelmaking and mining. The group also relied on indexes that measure polluting companies, such as the Climate Action 100 list, which includes companies like Nestlé – which has contributed to deforestation. And they reviewed links to trade groups, lobbying firms and thinktanks that have opposed climate action.

JPMorgan Chase tops the list for directors with climate conflicts. All of its 10 directors have current or past ties to companies or organizations contributing to the climate crisis. Wells Fargo comes in second, with 12 out of 13 directors.

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Below is a written transcript of Episode 6 of the HEATED podcast, out today on all your podcast apps, or at the audio file at the top. My guest is MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi.

This is the last episode of our limited-run mini series on COVID-19 and climate change! Next week, HEATED’s publishing schedule will return back to normal. Free subscribers will get at least one email a week, and paid subscribers will get four—every morning, Monday through Thursday. I’ll make all essential COVID-19 reporting free, too.

Hope you all enjoyed the series as much I enjoyed making it. Unlike the newsletter, the podcast was a team production. So if you’ve enjoyed it, and you’d like to support the four-person band behind it, consider making a donation at our GoFundme page.

Enjoy the chat with Ali!

Emily Atkin: Thank you for doing this. Thank you for taking some time out of your day for climate change.

Ali Velshi: We should be doing it every day. So thank you for continuing to force the issue on us. I mean that in a good way, because what we tend to do in this world is jump from crisis to crisis. and it's becoming increasingly obvious that this is the one crisis that looms in the background all the time, and gets shoved out by other crises.

EA: I mean, that's my whole life. Literally the only thing I do is just poke people and tell them to pay attention to climate change.

AV: And this situation [with COVID-19] is interesting, right? It's the urgency. It's the unknown outcome. It's the suddenness. Suddenly, you're healthy, then you're not. Suddenly you know people who have died. So it's just this compressed timeline that we know nothing about that is scaring us. And with climate we just don't experience it the same way.

EA: Yeah. There's plausible deniability with climate change. You can have a loved one die from the effects of climate change and still be able to convince yourself that it wasn't that. Whereas with coronavirus, there's no denying that’s what it is.

But I want to start by having you tell listeners a little bit about your personal journey into climate reporting. We aren't seeing a lot of broadcast reporter interest in climate change. I see your interest growing. Can you just tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming someone who's interested in climate change?

AV: I have a history of being a reporter who explains complicated things to people. It came from economics but it morphed into other things. And like a lot of reporters, I read and I understood climate change from the perspective of someone who reads. I certainly always thought I was on the right side of it.

But probably five years ago, it became about the fact that this isn't going to inevitably solve itself. The idea that right-minded people all sort of probably shared my view, but our regulations are not built to actually acknowledge it, and our media is not built to actually acknowledge it. And so I started becoming more involved in understanding it.

But it was difficult. I can explain to you why the Dow dropped a thousand points today. How do I explain to you two degrees compared to pre-industrial times in a hundred years? How do I make that understandable to people on TV? Because we have a way of doing things, and they don't lend themselves to large conceptual discussion.

But then what started to happen is two things. One is the movement started to get bigger, and started to bring new people into it. It became kids teaching their parents that, “Okay, this isn't gonna change unless we're all involved in it.” And the second thing is we started to associate it with things that were urgent, that did lend themselves to television—like hurricanes, like wildfires, like flooding.

And what I found was that every time I made that connection on TV, I would get people really angry at me. They'd say, this isn't the time to talk about climate. And I started to wonder: Why not? This is the only time I have your attention. And the two things are actually connected. There's real science as to the way hurricanes form now and how they develop and why temperature makes them more intense.

Then people like you trying to force the discussion. There were books out there that spoke to me in my language. There were candidates who started to make this an actual priority. There were people who started to build policy around it. There were articles written that didn't feel the same. And it all came together and caused me to understand that this is my job. Being on the right side of the issue is fine. But the job is actually using your platform to express to people why something is important, and what role they might play in it, whether it's a policy role or whether it's an individual behavior role, and even what the competing interests are within those roles.

EA: One of the things I've seen you do is have an increased focused on the powerful forces that have driven climate denial in our society. And I see that as an opportunity for broadcast and cable news in particular to make climate change more interesting to people—to tell the story in the language of corruption, as opposed to the language of science. Is that part of your evolution? And is that indeed an easier story to tell on broadcast?

AV: It's part of my evolution in that it’s part of my evolution as a journalist. Again, probably five or six years ago, I realized that having people on TV to give you their PR-honed pitches about their business or their company is not serving my viewers interest.

I would go to award ceremonies in New York for broadcasters around the world. These were people who were under threat from their governments. They would wear bulletproof vests to just do their job. And I was thinking, yeah, I don't really do a lot of that. Like I book people through their PR agencies, and they come on my show and they tell me about stuff. We call ourselves journalists, but these people speak truth to power to the extent that they endanger their lives every single day.

Maybe I’m not endangering my life every day, but maybe I can actually start to say, “what can I give my viewers?” As a business journalist, most of your interviews are CEOs or marketing people. So you are just constantly being barraged by their hard sell. They spend millions of dollars being trained to deliver information, and you act as a conduit for that to your audience. And I sort of said, “This can't be what this is about.”

So why not hit this disinformation part of things hard? Particularly in business journalism and economic journalism, in which lot of this climate denial is rooted. We don't do enough of a job of telling people whom we interview, holding them to the fire, because we want them to come back and interview with us again.

Maybe it's my age, and how long I've been in this, but I've decided I don't need the access anymore. I don't need you to give me your interview anymore. I'm a journalist. I've actually got resources, and I've got ways in which to get to the bottom of the story. and that's how I'll do it. And if I never get a fancy interview again, or the CEO of an oil company, or a politician who wants to talk about this, that's fine. Because they've got lots of airtime. You can always hear from them.

A coal company or an oil company or anyone involved with those industries—there's no time you won't get their message. You may not know that you're getting it all the time, but you're getting it. And we have to work hard to bring the other message into mainstream media.

EA: Have you seen a change at all in how receptive people are at MSNBC to telling climate change stories on the air?

AV: So we have a climate unit now, which we never had before. It probably corresponded with around the time that we did that presidential forum that you were at in Washington at Georgetown. So it was in the fall. And climate now doesn't seem like some weird left turn to a different discussion. We now have it as part of all policy discussions, or at least most. And that helps a great deal.

You've prob…

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