One of the reasons I started this newsletter was to help change the way people think about environmental problems. In 2019, I felt like mainstream media was saturated with stories about individual consumer action, while the systemic forces driving ecological destruction and toxicity were barely scrutinized. So I made it my mission to try and shift the conversation away from what we consume, and toward who forces it down our throats. In many ways, I think that mission’s been successful. More than 140,000 of you are here, after all.

But over these last seven years, I’ve also felt like Americans have become more and more obsessed with individualism. And I get it. When everything feels out of control, one of the easiest ways to regain that control is to focus on yourself. And in a government controlled by Big Oil puppets, it can even feel like the most practical path. If no one in power is going to act, maybe your choices can ripple outward. Maybe biking to work changes infrastructure. Maybe product boycotts shift markets.

Still, I’ve found that content about individual consumer action often annoys me. I cringe when I watch or read something that treats personal purity as the goal, focusing only on what to buy, what to throw away, or how to “detox your life.” When the most visible environmental “solutions” are the ones that ask the least of the people who do the most to perpetuate the problem, it makes me want to walk into the rapidly acidifying ocean.

This is the mindset I had walking into The Plastic Detox, the new Netflix documentary about how the chemicals in modern plastics are harming our health. The film was marketed to me as a story about six couples struggling with infertility as they attempt the herculean task of removing all the plastic products from their lives. Great, I thought, another prolonged advertisement for buying more shit, except now the shit’s made out of bamboo.

In some ways, I was correct (the film did occasionally feel like a long subliminal ad for Grove Collaborative). But the documentary also didn’t pretend the plastic health crisis can be solved by simply buying things. It explicitly wove in the bigger picture—the fact that plastics are made from fossil fuels; that fossil fuel companies have spent decades embedding plastics into every part of daily life; that regulators have largely failed to keep harmful petrochemicals off the market, because they’re bought off by the fossil fuel industry; and that the industry has been misleading the public about recycling and chemical safety for decades. And it did all this while telling an urgent, compelling story about individuals making product swaps that had a transformative impact on their health.

The film’s approach helped loosen some of the armor I’ve build up to this type of content. Talking to Dr. Shanna Swan, the renowned reproductive epidemiologist whose research has demonstrated the health harms of plastic exposure, loosened it even more. When I spoke to her last week, I tried to understand why she’s so focused on helping people make product swaps when she herself acknowledges that systemic action is necessary for real change. Very matter-of-factly, she told me, individuals just don’t have time to wait for governmental action, which can take decades. The hormone-disrupting chemicals in modern plastics—phthalates and BPA—are affecting people’s health right now, contributing to infertility and developmental harms in babies.

And yes, she acknowledged: It’s completely unfair. Avoiding exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastic requires time, money, and an almost obsessive level of attention. For many people, particularly low-income and Black and brown people, this kind of “detox” is simply not on the table. But, she said, that’s the reality we’re dealing with right now.

That’s when it clicked for me. I’m not actually annoyed at people who pursue individual solutions, or at content creators who try to help people make eco-friendly or non-toxic choices. I’m annoyed that individualism has become the only path toward personal and environmental safety. I’m annoyed that the government has effectively outsourced its responsibility to protect public health, biodiversity, and the climate onto individuals. I’m annoyed that avoiding existential harm has become a lifestyle choice instead of a baseline guarantee.

I also think that’s why I get so frustrated when I watch massive influencers like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman—both of whom have interviewed Swan—talk endlessly about optimization and detoxing without ever naming the systems that made all of this necessary in the first place. It’s not that they’re wrong to talk about individual choices. It’s that, with audiences that large, they have real opportunities to connect those choices to the bigger forces shaping them, and they usually don’t. And that’s a missed opportunity, because as The Plastic Detox makes clear, it’s actually not that hard to do both things at once.

So instead of just critiquing that gap, I’m going to try to close it. Because the truth is, I’ve wanted to reduce my own personal exposure to plastic for a long time. I just didn’t think it was necessarily an important or interesting story to tell, and also, it’s difficult and annoying and expensive and I’m busy.

But now I think there’s legitimate journalistic reason to do it. So earlier this week, I ordered the very expensive pee test Dr. Swan recommended for measuring phthalates and BPA in your body. And over the next couple months, I’m going to try to “detox my life” from fossil fuel-derived plastics that harm fertility, biodiversity, and the climate. I’ll tell you about the swaps I make, how much time it takes, and how much money it costs. But I’ll also make clear, every step of the way, how absurd it is that I have to do this at all—and who made it that way.

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At the top of this post is my full interview with Dr. Shanna Swan. You can listen right there, find it on your favorite podcast app, or watch the video version below on YouTube.

Also: More than 140,000 people subscribe to HEATED, but less than 3 percent pay for a subscription. I could paywall more to try to change that, but I want this newsletter to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income level. If you value that—and want to support more work like this—please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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The plastics industry is not happy with Dr. Shanna Swan.

Swan is the epidemiologist at the center of the new Netflix documentary, The Plastic Detox, which follows six couples struggling with infertility as they try to remove all traces of plastics from their lives in an effort to conceive. As the couples replace everything from toothbrushes to cutting boards to clothing, Swan measures concentrations of “plasticizers”—that is, chemicals like phthalates and bisphenols—in their urine and sperm.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I will say that the documentary is causing quite a stir. It’s been covered everywhere from The New York Times to The Today Show to Joe Rogan’s podcast.

The documentary also does something I didn’t expect it to do: Aggressively calls out the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries for lying about the promise of recycling, and for poisoning communities living next to plastic production facilities.

Hence why the plastics industry is so mad. The American Chemistry Council has accused the filmmakers of conflict of interest because the documentary’s production company has financial ties to a billionaire who works in the metals industry.

But Swan is not a Big Metal plant. She’s a doctor who has spent the better part of four decades studying how the chemicals embedded in modern life are reshaping human reproduction. Swan’s career and background is laid out beautifully in this Financial Times profile by reporter Sarah Neville; I highly recommend it.

What I’m trying to say is: This is not a crank with a grudge against plastic bags. This is one of the most cited reproductive scientists alive—and I’m interviewing her tomorrow afternoon.

So I’d like to know: What would you like me to ask her? Particularly if you’ve watched the documentary and have questions, I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment, and I’ll ask the two most up-voted ones tomorrow. We’ll publish the interview next week.

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President Donald Trump has told Americans not to worry about the oil and gas price spikes caused by his war in Iran.

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far,” he wrote on Truth Social last month. “So when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

But Trump didn’t specify who he meant by “we.” And as time has worn on, it’s become clear that he was only talking about a very small group of people.

A bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation published Wednesday reveals that America’s top oil and gas executives have been getting rich from the war at a historic pace. In the first three months of this year, oil CEOs sold $1.4 billion worth of their own stock—the fastest pace of selling in 15 years. At a dozen companies, the selling broke all-time records.

Some notable details on the who and how much, from the Journal:

Chevron Chief Executive Mike Wirth sold some $104 million worth of shares between January and March.

ConocoPhillips’s Ryan Lance netted about $54.3 million in share sales in March alone.

Lorenzo Simonelli, CEO of oil-field services company Baker Hughes, sold about $33 million worth of stock that same month.

The sales might prove prescient: The prospect of a cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran drove oil prices and energy stocks lower Wednesday as traders anticipated at least a temporary respite for markets.

The Journal reported that many of these sales were made through prearranged trading plans, which allow executives to schedule stock sales in automatically at specific times or share prices. Details of these plans are rarely public, but the idea is that if a sale was planned weeks or months before it happened, the executive can’t be accused of selling on inside information or timing the market.

But not all of the selling was prearranged. The Journal specifically found that $17.2 million of Wirth’s March sales had no trading plan attached—meaning it was a deliberate, in-the-moment decision to sell while Chevron’s stock was riding a wartime spike. The total value of Wirth’s recent stock sales “are equivalent to roughly four times Wirth’s 2025 reported compensation of $26.8 million,” the Journal noted.

Analysts who track insider transactions flagged similar patterns across the industry. They found that oil executives were showing signs of making active choices to cash out during the war rather than simply following automatic schedules.

"Trump's Mar-a-Lago friends seem to be making a killing off of Trump's killing," said Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of climate and energy justice at Friends of the Earth—referring to Trump's infamous dinner with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago last year, where he reportedly told them he would give them everything they wanted in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations.

But this isn’t the first time a small group of extraordinarily wealthy oil CEOs used a war to make themselves richer. In the weeks after President Joe Biden said that he was “convinced” Russia would invade Ukraine in 2022, Big Oil CEOs sold almost $99 million worth of shares, according to an analysis by Friends of the Earth and BailoutWatch.

But what really makes this story remarkable is not simply that oil executives got rich from a war. It’s how perfectly legal and normal it all is, and what that legality reveals about who wins and who loses when America goes to war.

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When America goes to war, the costs are distributed broadly, onto every American who drives a car or heats a home. The benefits are distributed narrowly, flowing to a small group of men whose compensation is designed to capture exactly this kind of windfall.

And the cash windfall these oil executives make from the war won’t go primarily toward yachts and private jets (they already have those). It will go toward political campaigns and lobbying organizations dedicated to fighting climate regulation, blocking clean energy policy, and fueling authoritarianism.

This cycle is a major reason the United States has failed, for decades, to mount a serious response to climate change.

Earlier this week, I was reading through a recent survey of more than 100 oil and gas executives who were asked about their thoughts on “current issues”—namely, the Iran war. I came across one response that struck me: ”I don’t like profiting from a war,” the anonymous oil executive said. “I didn’t choose this, and it feels awful.”

It’s a remarkably honest thing to say, and yet we have no idea who said it. But one thing is for sure: it probably wasn’t Mike Wirth.

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Further reading

• Amidst oil price windfalls, U.S. oil majors continue to pay less tax at home than abroad

  A new analysis from the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition finds that the largest U.S. oil and gas companies continue to pay significantly more in taxes abroad than in the United States, even as they benefit from domestic tax breaks and subsidies. Among the findings:

  • ExxonMobil paid nine times as much tax to foreign countries as it did to the U.S. federal government, where its effective tax rate was just 2.6%

  • For Chevron, just 2% of its total global tax dollars went to the U.S. federal government

  • Companies paid more to countries like Libya, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE than to the U.S.

  • The three American super majors expect to pay an average of just 6.1% in federal tax on their domestic income from 2025, far below the official corporate 21% rate

• Oil and gas crisis from Iran war worse than 1973, ​1979 and 2022 together, says IEA. (The Guardian)

  Speaking as Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the waterway approached, Fatih Birol told ⁠Le Figaro newspaper that the impact of the Middle East conflict on the oil market was larger than the combined force of the twin shocks of the 1970s and the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
  

  The IEA executive director also warned that the countries most at risk were developing nations, ‌which ⁠would suffer from higher oil and gas prices, higher food prices and a general acceleration of inflation, while European countries, Japan and Australia would also feel an impact.

• China stands to benefit most from the war-driven energy crisis. (Washington Post)

  China dominates renewable energy supply chains, producing a vast majority of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles. Exports of these technologies were already climbing to new heights in the first two months of 2026. Now volatility in the supply of fossil fuels is set to give sales another big boost.
  

  Since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran in February, the Chinese battery maker CATL has seen its Hong Kong-listed shares jump 29.5 percent and its Shenzhen-listed shares rise 13.6 percent. The electric car giant BYD’s exports and overseas vehicle sales rose 65 percent in March year over year, according to the company’s chief executive. And Jinko Solar, one of the world’s largest solar panel manufacturers, says exports have grown since the war.

• Trump’s EPA chief Zeldin gives keynote speech at climate-denying group’s event. (The Guardian)

  Zeldin said: “What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”

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Texas-based journalist Saul Elbein believes solid waste is the most important—and most overlooked—environmental story of our lifetimes.

Yes, he argues, climate change, air pollution, and liquid waste from fracking are crucially important issues. But across Texas and Oklahoma, he says fracking companies have been spreading their potentially radioactive, PFAS-filled solid waste on farmland and near communities, largely without scrutiny, for decades.

Saul told me he sees this as a modern-day Silent Spring: a slow-moving, mostly invisible contamination story hiding in plain sight, one that will only become undeniable once until the damage is already done.

In his latest reporting for The Barbed Wire, that story comes into focus through a whistleblower named Lee Oldham. For years, Lee spread drilling waste across fields in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—waste he didn’t know was radioactive. Over time, he began to suspect something was wrong. Eventually, Lee says, his teeth began to loosen, and his jaw began to break down.

It’s a shocking claim that Saul cannot definitively prove was a result of Lee’s exposure to fracking waste. But what he can prove is that, on the very site where Lee once spread that fracking waste, developers built an elementary school where children attend class today. He says the soil has never been comprehensively tested.

In our conversation, Saul walks me through how this happens—how millions of tons of drilling waste can be legally classified as “non-hazardous,” spread across land in rapidly developing areas, buried without record, and effectively lost to history. We also talk about what we know, what we don’t, and what it would take to hold anyone accountable if those sites turn out to be unsafe.

Finally, we talk about why this might be one of the few climate-adjacent issues that could unite people across political lines.

You can listen to our interview at the top of this newsletter or on any podcast app, watch it on Youtube, or read an edited version below.

This transcript has been edited for readability. You can find a full PDF transcript, with timestamps, here.

Emily Atkin: Tell me a little bit about Lee.

Saul Elbein: Lee was an oil and gas worker in the Barnett Shale, a massive drilling region beneath the Dallas–Fort Worth area—the fourth-largest metro in the country. Around 2010–2011, he worked in waste disposal during the fracking boom.

At the time, anyone in trucking, hydraulics, or waste management suddenly found themselves working for the oil and gas industry. Lee was one of those people. He worked at what’s called a “land farm,” where solid waste from drilling operations was spread across farmland.

The waste would come in by vacuum truck, workers would unload it—often getting completely covered in it—and then spread it over fields.

EA: I didn’t even realize drilling waste gets spread on farmland at all—let alone that it could be radioactive. What is this waste?

SE: When you drill a horizontally fracked well, you generate enormous amounts of solid waste—sometimes thousands of tons. These are called “cuttings,” basically the bits of rock brought up by the drill.

The issue is that shale formations can contain toxic elements—like arsenic and uranium—that occur naturally underground.

To understand why, you have to go back about 300 million years. North Texas was once a shallow sea fed by rivers carrying minerals from ancient mountain ranges. Those minerals, including toxic elements, mixed with massive amounts of organic material from plankton and algae.

Over time, that material was compressed into oil and gas. But the toxic elements, like uranium, were compressed right along with it.

So now, millions of years later, we drill into that rock and bring all of it back up together.

EA: So we’re drilling deep into ancient rock that contains naturally occurring toxic elements, and we’re pulling that material up to the surface. And on top of that, the drilling process uses chemical lubricants, including PFAS. Is that right?

SE: Exactly. Think of it like drilling into a wall, but on a massive scale. You’re bringing up contaminated rock, and you’re mixing it with industrial chemicals used in the drilling process.

It’s a bit like that Lord of the Rings line: “The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep.” We’re unleashing things that were buried for a reason.

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EA: So Lee’s job was to take this material—radioactive cuttings mixed with PFAS—and spread it on farmland. How is that legal?

SE: It comes down to how the law defines oil and gas waste. Because of a federal exemption—often referred to as the “Bentsen amendment”—oil and gas waste is legally classified as non-hazardous. That means the EPA has limited authority over it.

In Texas, the Texas Railroad Commission regulates this waste, and their primary concern is salinity: making sure it’s not so salty that it kills crops.

So under that framework, spreading waste on farmland is considered acceptable. The idea is that organic compounds will break down and the rest will mix into the soil, possibly even acting as fertilizer.

Tracy Wholf: Radioactive corn? I’m sorry, I have to jump in—I don’t want that on my farmland.

SE: And here’s where the framing gets tricky. Industry often says: yes, it’s radioactive. But so is a banana.

Even I used to think, surely it’s not really radioactive. Because if it were, no one would allow this, right?

But we’ve known for years that oil and gas operations expose workers to radiation. There have been major payouts over it. It’s not new.

The problem is: when something becomes normalized, it stops seeming alarming—even when it should be.

EA: So how did Lee start to suspect something was dangerous?

SE: One day, he heard that metal tracks from his equipment had been rejected by a scrap yard after testing positive for radiation.

That made other moments click into place—like seeing a worker lying on a pipe and being warned to get off it if he wanted to have kids.

Lee started to realize this wasn’t isolated. He did some research and found that oil and gas operations commonly involve radiation exposure.

He asked his employer for protective equipment and medical testing. Instead, he was told he was “too smart for his own good” and reassigned.

EA: And then something happens to Lee physically. It seems there was a medical incident. Can you tell us about that?

SE: Years later, while working on a remediation site, he got a face full of dust from dried drilling waste.

Over time, his teeth began to loosen. His jaw deteriorated. His vertebrae started breaking down and fusing. By his 50s, he struggled to eat solid food, like an apple.

Now, we can’t definitively say what caused this. There hasn’t been comprehensive testing.

But we do know that radium—a decay product of uranium—is a bone-seeking carcinogen. It can accumulate in bones and emit radiation from inside the body.

So while we can’t prove causation, the mechanism is plausible and deeply concerning.

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EA: When did Lee realize this might affect more than just him?

SE: Years later, he returned to Johnson County and discovered that an elementary school had been built on the very site where he had spread drilling waste.

That school is operational today.

EA: Have they tested the soil?

SE: Not in a meaningful way. There was a Phase I environmental assessment before construction, but that’s essentially a visual inspection. It explicitly does not detect hidden contamination.

A Phase II—which involves actual soil testing—was not conducted, or at least not shared.

Now, after public pressure, the school district says it will conduct testing.

EA: Zooming out, how big is this problem?

SE: In the Dallas-Fort Worth area alone, there have been around 21,000 fracked wells. Each one produces thousands of tons of waste. That adds up to tens of millions of tons, much of it spread on land in rapidly growing suburban areas.

And in Texas, companies can legally bury waste without notifying landowners. So we’re talking about vast quantities of potentially hazardous material, spread or buried in places where people now live, work, and go to school.

EA: Has there been public outrage?

SE: Locally, yes. Parents are concerned, and the school district is now funding soil testing. But broadly, this hasn’t yet become a major national issue.

That said, I think it will. This cuts across political lines. Nobody wants toxic waste near their kids.

EA: So how are you able to verify Lee’s story? Because if I’m approaching this as a skeptical listener, I’m thinking this could just be some left-wing Democrat plant trying to destroy the oil and gas industry. He’s making this up, his jaw is fine, and you’re just eating it all up.

SE: You would not be alone in having that opinion.

But what we do know is there was a land farm there. We do know there were complaints about the stuff coming off that land farm—fumes ruining paint on people’s cars, giving them headaches—for years before that site was built.

And since I published the story, I put out a survey in the community. We know there are at least some number of parents with kids at that school whose kids have consistent complaints of headaches, nausea. One mother said her daughter is like a different kid during breaks. Another said she thought her kid was faking being sick to get out of school, and now realizes maybe it’s much worse.

And I gotta say too: Lee, having sat in his work truck and talked to him for 30 seconds, there was no question he was a former oil worker, son of Cleburne, Trump voter. He is, for better and worse, exactly what he appears to be. And I know that in part because that’s been the assessment of everybody from the oil and gas world I know who’s talked to him.

So summing that up, we have a credible witness making a credible claim about the kind of stuff everybody knew was happening everywhere, in a system where there was very little scrutiny to make sure it wasn’t happening.

And so I would say the burden of proof is on the regulators and the developers to prove that the site was safe.

TW: Is this just a Texas problem, or are these types of rules and regulations rampant across the country?

SE: So this specific flavor is a Texas and Oklahoma problem, because in Texas and Oklahoma you can spread drilling waste on farmland.

Pennsylvania has a different version of the problem. In Pennsylvania, you just dump it in landfills. And are those landfills properly lined? Who’s to say? In North Dakota, it’s a different version of the problem.

Waste is the issue, I would argue. I would say even beyond that, waste is the issue that supermajorities of Americans are opposed to, however they feel about oil and gas.

I spent a lot of time in Johnson County talking to people who are very conservative, who are very skeptical of renewables, who don’t share my views on energy policy. There’s not one of them that’s comfortable with, for example, used fracking fluid—ostensibly cleaned up—being put on crops, something that’s going to start in Texas pretty soon.

Nobody’s okay with a school being built on drilling waste if it’s toxic. Now, there will be arguments about whether it’s toxic—but if it is, nobody’s for this.

And so we have a situation where essentially the ability to dump waste, and the ability to keep that waste secret, is subsidizing fossil fuel company operations. And that’s a global problem.

EA: What does this story mean for the broader climate movement? What should people who care about climate be taking from this?

SE: Well, one thing is that climate is a waste story too. Carbon dioxide doesn’t get tracked, it doesn’t get accounted for—and in fact, the industry knocking down the endangerment finding at the EPA, that’s part of the same story. If we don’t track the carbon waste, it’s not happening, right?

But there’s also a bigger strategic and tactical lesson here, which is that very few people affirmatively want to read climate stories—barring the lovely listeners of this podcast and readers of our work. But everyone wants to read a crime story. Lots of people care about their health.

And there are huge numbers of people who may not agree with us on oil and gas policy, but who don’t think the industry should be able to dump its waste. People who are used to cleaning up after themselves, who think industry ought to do the same.

So in terms of building big, cross-partisan coalitions with people who don’t agree with us on everything but are directionally pointed the right way—we could do a lot worse than focusing on crime, health, and waste.

Before the U.S. and Israel launched their war in Iran, the national average for a gallon of gas was $2.94. One month later, gas is now averaging $3.98 a gallon—the largest one-month jump in U.S. gas prices in the last 30 years.

Setting aside the horrors of the war itself—more than 1,000 Iranians have been killed, along with more than a dozen U.S. servicemembers—the spike in gas prices is doing something climate advocates have been trying to do for decades: making people seriously consider electric vehicles.

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Search traffic for electric vehicles was up 20 percent the week following the initial attack on Iran, according to Bloomberg News, with search interest doubling for Tesla Model-Y and Chevrolet Equinox cars. By mid-March, nearly one in four car shoppers were researching electric vehicles, according to Edmunds, a car shopping research platform. That’s the highest level of EV interest recorded so far this year.

It's not hard to see why. At $4/gallon, the math on switching to an EV starts to look pretty compelling: The average American would spend nearly $2,000 a year on gas, compared to as little as $540 to charge an EV1. And it’s never been cheaper to own an EV, especially as the used car market is now flooded with pre-owned zero-emissions vehicles.

But interest and action are two very different things. Despite the surge in searches, new EV sales are actually down nearly 27 percent compared to this time last year—a hangover from the Trump administration's decision to repeal federal EV tax credits last fall. One analyst told the Boston Globe that gas would need to climb above $5 a gallon, and stay there, before most drivers seriously pull the trigger.

And there's another reason people aren't making the switch, one that's harder to fix with policy: persistent misinformation.

That's the issue we're tackling on this week's podcast. First, we debunk a couple of the most popular and persistent myths about electric vehicles—including one that half of all Americans currently believe. (ICYMI: feel free to revisit our two-part guide to EV misinformation, published back in 2024, for even more debunking).

Then, we sit down with Dr. Christian Bretter, an environmental psychologist from the University of Queensland in Australia, who doesn't just study what people believe about EVs—he studies why they believe it, and what can actually be done to change their minds.

The answer, it turns out, has less to do with facts and more to do with how you deliver them. Emily learned something about her own communication style that she did not love hearing. Listen, watch, or read the transcript below to find out what it was.

Text transcript

The transcript below is our interview with Dr. Chris Bretter. You find our full episode transcript here.

Emily Atkin: Our guest today is Dr. Chris Bretter. He’s an environmental psychologist who led a 2025 study seeking to figure out how pervasive EV myths really are, why people believe them, and most importantly, what can be done to stop them.

So you’re an environmental psychologist. What is that?

Chris Bretter: That’s a very good question. So I guess the broadest question of what I’m doing every day is asking, why do some people behave environmentally friendly, while others don’t? And how can we make those who don’t behave environmentally friendly, behave more environmentally friendly in the future?

EA: So you studied how actual human people feel or think about electric vehicles. Tell me a little bit about the questions that you were really interested in asking and why you wanted to study this.

CB: So we know electric vehicles are a big part of the transition to a sustainable society, but we also know that the adoption hasn’t been great. And we also know that there is a lot of misinformation out there, driven by several institutions that sort of spread misinformation about electric vehicles. And that might be part of the reason why the adoption has been fairly slow.

So with this work, we were just really interested in how much of this misinformation that is out there actually sticks in people’s minds. In other words, how much do people actually believe in that sort of stuff?

So we tested a range of different myths and checked how many people believe in those.

EA: Give us the quick rundown. Who did you survey? What did you ask them and what did you find?

CB: We sent out a survey in four different countries: the US, Germany, Austria, and Australia. And we asked people about the endorsement of nine myths of electric vehicles, on the standard scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

What we found is that, of all of the responses across the countries from 4,000 individuals, over a third—so 36 percent of responses—were in agreement. with myths that are demonstrably false, or at least misleading.So more than a third of people believe in things that are clearly wrong.

EA: Like what?

CB: One of the biggest myths is that electric vehicles are actually worse for the environment because of their production process. But also statements such as, “electric vehicles are more likely than petrol cars to catch fire,” which is again wrong. So, these are clearly items that are circulating in the media and that people believe, unfortunately.

EA: Wait, so more than a third of people believe that EVs are worse for the environment than gas?

CB: So that particular statement varies a bit by country, but yes—around a third of people agree with that statement that the emissions that are caused during the production process of an electric vehicle outweigh the benefit of the electric vehicle later on.

EA: Wow. How many people believe that EVs are more likely to catch fire?

CB: This was actually the most endorsed piece of misinformation. And if I’m not remembering incorrectly, it’s 50 percent, at least in each country of responses, we’re in agreement with that statement. So half of the people surveyed.

EA: Damn. Are there any other big claims that you found were pretty rampant?

CB: We measured various claims alongside the negative health effects of electric vehicles, sort of with the magnetic fields and stuff like this. And these were actually the least endorsed items, but still sort of around 20 percent of people endorsed a claim that electric vehicles lead to bad health outcomes such as cancer due to the electric magnetic fields. And that again has been sort of disproven by research and still, but still 20 percent is still a lot of people.

EA: I hadn’t even heard that one. What is that? Like the electric car battery is emanating some sort of electromagnetic field?

CB: Yeah. And it does emit electric electromagnetic fields, but they are not strong enough to cause any sort of negative health outcomes for either birds or humans. But yeah, so people actually believe that, 20 percent of people believe that electric vehicles can give cancer due to the electromagnetic fields.

EA: To birds? Did you say birds?

CB: Well, there was another statement, electric magnetic fields harm birds when you drive by on some level. So that was another statement they asked and 20 percent of people believe that as well.

EA: Why are people all of sudden pretending to care about birds? It’s like the windmills thing. All of sudden the people that never cared about birds in their whole life are like, “the windmills are killing birds!” And now the electric cars are killing birds.

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Anyway. How do people’s beliefs actually impact the reality that we’re seeing on the road? Did you get any information about how much these beliefs impact people’s buying of cars or people’s support for policy?

CB: We looked at the correlation between people’s endorsement of misinformation and their support for pro-electric vehicle policies, and also their intentions to buy an electric vehicle in the future.

There was always a negative correlation, That’ means that the more people endorse misinformation, the less they are pro-EV policies, and the less they intend to buy electric vehicles in the future.

It is important to mention that these 4,000 people were all non-EV owners. So these people didn’t have an electric vehicle at the time of the survey. However, we repeated the survey—just in the US though—with a sample of 2,000 people, where we then split the sample between people who already owned an electric vehicle and people who did not. And what we found was contrary to what we expected—namely, that there is no difference in misinformation endorsement between people who already own an electric vehicle and people who do not.

You would expect that, once you own an electric vehicle, you basically have done your research and you know the misinformation, but this is not the case. So EV owners do still believe in misinformation, in these myths.

EA: Did you get any more information about why that is?

CB: So we have to speculate on this, but one reason might be that once you own an electric vehicle and you tell your friends, “I just bought an electric vehicle,” then you might be more susceptible to discourse and misinformation. So imagine you go to a garden party, and then your friend tells you, “you know electric vehicles are much more likely to catch fire than petrol cars, did you know that?”

EA: Did you at all look into why people believe misinformation about EVs?

CB: We looked at the factors that influence people’s endorsement of misinformation. And one of the largest or the largest predictor of why people believe in misinformation is what’s called a conspiracy mentality.

This is basically the systemic mistrust of elites. So people who are more mistrusting of elites, more suspicious of what government officials are doing behind closed doors, what organizations are doing behind closed doors, tend to agree more with misinformation statements. That’s along with other factors such as political ideology, conservative political ideology and other factors.

Interestingly, education and scientific literacy didn’t play any role whatsoever. And that’s again, contrary to what many people would believe. So it’s not that these people are uneducated. It is simply that ideologies are taking over.

EA: That’s interesting. It’s not like people are stupid. It’s not like people are believing stuff because they haven’t read a book or they’re not paying attention. They’re paying attention.

What do you mean by conspiracy mindset? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

CB: A conspiracy mindset is basically the mistrust towards people and institutions of power. And basically it refers to the fact that people believe that what is told as an official story by, for example, the government or institution is not really the full truth. And that’s fueled by past experiences, as there were some conspiracy theories in the past and the last decades that were true.

So this basically mindset of distrusting elites, distrusting people in power is particularly associated with misinformation endorsement. And what makes this particularly dangerous is that this distrust has been shown in the past to be very difficult to be addressed, because you can’t just go to a person say, “look, this is conspiracy,” or “you should be more trusting of people in power,” because there are instances where people in power abuse that power as well. So it’s quite difficult actually to address that.

EA: Well, I hear you describe a conspiracy mindset and I’m like, so… me?

CB: Well this is not a binary thing, right? We are all somewhere on the spectrum of conspiracy mentality. It just depends on if you are stronger on that spectrum. So if you have a stronger conspiracy mentality, odds are you also believe to a stronger extent in misinformation about electric vehicles.

EA: So what is the best way to make all this stop? What have you found if anything can be done to lessen this?

CB: So we basically tested two interventions on how we can, if at all, reduce misinformation endorsement about electric vehicles.

What we’ve done is, we’ve taken one and half thousand people and allocated a third of them to a condition where they interacted with ChatGPT for three rounds about electric vehicles. In the second condition, we just gave them a fact sheet of the US Department of Energy, a myth busting fact sheet. And in the third condition, people just interacted with ChatGPT about sports. So that was sort of the control condition where we didn’t expect any sort of effect.

We found that both the fact sheet condition and the ChatGPT condition where people interacted with ChatGPT about electric vehicles resulted in lower endorsement of misinformation compared to the control condition—roughly 10%, if I’m not mistaken. And that stuck across a period of 10 days. So potentially, this is just obviously a preliminary study, ChatGPT or a fact sheet are quite effective in reducing endorsement of misinformation, and that lasts at least for 10 days.

EA: I’m not sure how comfortable I am that chat bots are the solution to this.

CB: Yeah, I know. But ChatGPT was actually quite good at, almost better than humans sometimes, in having empathy with people. It’s saying look, you may believe that electric vehicles are more like to catch fire, I understand where you’re coming from. But have you thought about these sources here? So it’s very empathetic and it doesn’t judge.

EA: Tell me if I’m taking too far of a leap here scientifically, but if Chat GPT has the ability to deprogram people’s brains or at least make them think differently because it tends to be empathetic, maybe the answer is more empathetic communication, not treating people as idiots for believing things that are necessarily wrong. Because your research has shown that it’s not because people are idiots.

CB: Exactly. 100 % I agree with you. Yeah. I think in general, we need to be more empathetic with people who believe misinformation. Because if you tell them that they’re basically stupid, borders come up and then you will never get to these people again.

EA: And that’s helpful for me too as a reporter because, I’ve been debunking misinformation for a long time. And sometimes it gets frustrating and I’m a little snarky lady. So sometimes when I’m debunking, I’ll have this tone about me that’s a little eye-rolly. Like, “can you believe people believe this after so long?” And it’s probably pretty off-putting.

So it’s a good reminder that the research shows that I should stop being such a bitch.

CB: That’s well put. It’s just about having empathy with people, right? And not assuming that they are stupid just because they believe in certain of these things. And remember, there’s always a small kernel of truth to it as well, right? That doesn’t mean that all of it is true, but there’s a certain element of it which is true if you look at it in isolation.

EA: Absolutely. And it also makes me think about, I have friends that believe things that I think are misinformation, specifically about vaccines, et cetera. Right? When I speak to them, I always have empathy. I am never eye-rolly. And I think maybe what your research is saying to me as a communicator is, speak to people as if you would speak to your friends. It goes a long way. Computer is doing better at that than you are.

CB: Yeah. And one of the reasons might be because you have a history with your friends, right? And you know where they’re coming from, you know what they’ve been through and these types of things.

EA: Well, this was very informative. Thank you for joining us, Chris. We’re so happy to have you.

CB: Thanks for having me.

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The war in Iran has everyone talking about the price of oil. But that number only reflects a small fraction of what oil actually costs.

While talking heads focus on oil's market price—shaped by supply disruptions, geopolitical risk, and expectations about future availability—millions are bearing the rest of the bill in ways that never show up at the pump: in the smoke and terror of war, in the heat and floods of a destabilized climate, and in the explosions and toxic fallout that come with living near oil infrastructure.

Support indy climate journalism

The flooding in Hawaii this weekend offers one of the clearest examples. Back-to-back Kona storms unleashed what Governor Josh Green called “the largest flood that we’ve had in Hawaii in 20 years,” submerging roads, destroying homes, and forcing hundreds of rescues across the islands. On the ground, officials described scenes of near-total devastation—families returning to find their homes flooded out, entire communities cut off, and more than 200 people pulled from rising water.

Scientists have been warning for years that excessive fossil fuel burning will cause more catastrophic floods like this. That’s because fossil fuels release greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere, and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. That makes extreme rainfall more intense.

But these impacts never factor into the price of a barrel of oil. They’re pushed onto everyone else—through disaster cleanup, insurance losses, and taxpayer-funded relief. In Hawaii, the damage is already estimated to exceed $1 billion, with state officials asking the federal government to cover up to 90 percent of the recovery costs. Whether that aid comes through or not, the bill is being paid by the public, not the industry whose emissions made disasters like this more likely.

That’s why Hawaii is among many states trying to force a correction. Last year, the state’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against major fossil fuel companies, arguing they should help pay for the climate damage their products have caused and the public has been left to absorb.

“The State of Hawaiʻi’s lawsuit is based on well-established legal principles: Those who have contributed to a problem should help address its consequences,” Toni Schwartz, a spokesperson for the Hawaii attorney general’s office, told HEATED. As climate-fueled extreme weather places increased financial strain on Hawaii, Schwartz said, “Our office is committed to ensuring that the costs of these impacts are not placed solely on Hawaiʻi’s people.”

The Trump administration, however, is working to make sure these costs never shift away from the public. Earlier this year, the Justice Department moved to block Hawaii’s lawsuit—along with a similar case in Michigan—arguing that states should not be allowed to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for climate damage. The intervention is part of a broader effort to shield the oil and gas industry from a growing wave of litigation and state laws seeking to make polluters pay for the consequences of their emissions.

The Trump administration is also spending public money to ensure the public is trapped with whatever the cost of oil may be. This week, the Trump administration announced it would give nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money to a French oil company—not for anything the company built, but to make sure it didn't build two offshore wind farms. The deal requires the company to take that billion dollars and invest it in oil and gas instead.

Trump is trying to frame the offshore wind project stoppage as a good deal for Americans. At an energy conference in Houston on Monday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said, "The era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable and unsecure energy is officially over.” Later that day, one of America’s largest oil refineries exploded, forcing thousands of nearby residents to shelter in place and spiking gas and diesel prices nationwide.

This is what the true price of oil looks like: Hawaiians wading through their flooded homes while the state scrambles to find a billion dollars for cleanup; Texans sheltering indoors from refinery smoke while gas prices climb; Iranians and Lebanese caught in the crossfire of war; and taxpayer money being handed to oil companies to deepen our dependence on the very thing causing all the damage.

What happens to Hawaii’s lawsuit—and the dozens like it filed by cities and states across the country—may be the clearest indicator of whether any of that ever changes.

More recent costs of oil:

• The toxic fallout of US-Israeli attacks will be felt for generations. (March 17, Canary Media)

  The toxic fallout of the unprovoked, illegal US-Israeli war against Iran will haunt the region for generations. The Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEO) says the pollution produced by military strikes could have terrible long-term effects.

• Record-breaking March heatwave, intensified by climate change, continues to shatter records across the U.S. (March 24, Climate Central)

  Hundreds of high-temperature records across the western half of the United States were broken last week as an early-season heatwave, driven by human-caused climate change, brought July-like heat to millions of people. The impacts are not over — more records are expected to fall this week, March 24-27.

• Climate-fueled wildfires and dust storms drove up air pollution around the world last year. (March 24, Inside Climate News)

  A new report on global air pollution shows that the majority of the world’s population breathes unhealthy air, and climate change is making the problem worse.

• The balance that keeps climate stable is out of whack, U.N. report finds. (March 22, New York Times)

  Under a stable climate, about the same amount of energy comes in from the sun as is reflected back. Now, however, emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — have surged to their highest level in at least 800,000 years and have upset this equilibrium, the researchers found.

• $580 million in suspicious oil futures traded minutes before Trump’s Iran reversal. (March 24, Fortune)

  Roughly $580 million worth of oil futures changed hands in a single minute early Monday morning, only about 15 minutes before President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. had been engaged in “productive conversations” with Iran to end the war. Now Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is calling what he sees: treason.

Read more

• By using the phrase “lower carbon.” It sounds so nice doesn’t it! But “lower” carbon is not “low” carbon. It’s also not “no” carbon. And it’s definitely not “net zero.” It just means “lower than before.” How much lower than before? And are they really doing it? Who cares! Stop asking so many questions!
  

• By using the phrase “carbon intensity.” Oil companies often talk about lowering their “carbon intensity.” But that doesn’t mean they’re lowering their overall carbon emissions. An oil company can lower the carbon intensity of a barrel of oil, while still increasing its overall carbon footprint because it’s drilling more oil than ever before. And for the most part, that’s precisely what’s happening. This is a fancy marketing term designed to mislead.
  

• By playing up the benefits for local communities. Ads often feature "regular" people—workers, families, neighbors—to make oil companies seem like pillars of their communities. What these ads quietly leave out: the fishing communities, cancer alley residents, and others harmed by the very offshore drilling and refinery operations being celebrated. This form of lying is called “paltering,” the practice of “using statements that are technically true, but also leave out critical information in order to mislead people.”
  

• By using guilt. One ad we watched reminded us that offshore oil workers are out there on the platform every single day, including holidays, keeping your lights on while you sit at home. The implicit message: how dare you criticize us? It's emotional manipulation dressed up as a human interest story, designed to make us feel personally indebted to the oil industry rather than asking hard questions about it.
  

• By tying oil to “new” technology like AI. This is the newest trick in the playbook, and it’s an attempt to position old, dirty fossil fuel infrastructure as new, clean, cutting-edge innovation. But the pitch doesn't hold up. We don’t need fossil fuels to power AI. And renewables are already cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable than the fossil-fuel-derived alternatives the industry keeps proposing.

And more! We’ll also be releasing some fun bonus content tomorrow. Make sure you’re a paid subscriber to get it!

Text transcript

(Full PDF transcript)

Emily Atkin
Welcome back to Heated. Today we’re gonna watch some fossil fuel ads.

Now you might not think you’ve seen many fossil fuel ads, but trust me, you have. They are everywhere. They’re on TV, they’re on social media, at airports, during the Super Bowl, in museums, and sometimes even in classrooms. In 2024 alone, the fossil fuel industry spent nearly $7 billion on public relations, creative, and media, according to a report from Clean Creatives.

And the funny thing is these ads are almost never trying to sell us a product like gasoline. They’re trying to sell us a story, an idea, a feeling. So what exactly are the stories and ideas that the fossil fuel industry wants stuck in our heads? And are they true?

That’s what we’re gonna suss out today. And we’re gonna do it with Nayantara Dutta, head of research at Clean Creatives.

Nayantara is joining us from Mumbai, India. Hey, girl.

Nayantara Dutta

Hey, thanks for having me.

Emily Atkin

Tell us a little bit about Clean Creatives and the work that your organization does.

Nayantara Dutta

So Clean Creatives was founded in 2020 and we are a global campaign group which works specifically in the advertising and marketing industry to help creatives and agencies cut ties with fossil fuels. There’s a long history of disinformation through fossil fuel advertising, so we encourage creatives to be on the right side of history and pledge to drop oil.

Emily Atkin

You’re here today because you’re the lead author on a new report that analyzed almost 2,000 fossil fuel ads from 2020 to 2024. That’s a ton. We covered that report exclusively in the heated newsletter a couple days ago, but.

Tell us briefly, what was it like watching all of those ads?

Nayantara Dutta

My gosh. It’s both hilarious and painful when you actually know the science behind fossil fuels because ads are intentionally lying to us about what’s actually happening.

I think that we just see new sides of deception every time. It’s like watching a toxic relationship unfold.

Emily Atkin

Oh my gosh, all right, Well, we wanna get into the nitty gritty about what you found in the report, but we figured the best way to do that is to actually watch some of the ads that we’re talking about.

My producer, Tracy, pulled a bunch of them together and she’s going to run them as we go. So Tracy, whenever you’re ready.

Tracy Wholf

Sure. So we’re going to start with a 2021 ad from, this is from Chevron called “Progress.”

[AD DIALOGUE]

Keep taking steps forward.

The future of energy is lower carbon and to get there, the world needs to reduce global emissions. At Chevron, we’re taking action, tying our executives’ pay to lowering the carbon emissions intensity of our operations. It’s tempting to see how far we’ve come, but it’s only human to know how far we have to go.

Emily Atkin

This sounds like a company that is so committed to the planet. If I knew nothing about fossil fuel companies and just about climate change at all, would be like, ‘Chevron’s in this with me.’ Do you see that lady running up the stairs? She’s just like me. She cares about her health and so does Chevron. Chevron cares about my health.

This is like very powerful messaging, I feel like.

So what are we looking at here? Like, what is Chevron trying to do with this?

Nayantara Dutta

This is from a campaign Chevron published from 2020 to 2022 called It’s Only Human. And Chevron has called itself for years since 2007, the Human Energy Company.

And it’s actually hilarious because Chevron is most famous for its human rights abuses. It has poisoned local refugee populations living close to one of its refineries. It has polluted the Amazon.

And due to the backlash towards their human rights violations, Chevron worked with an ad agency called McGarry Bowen, which is now Dentsu, since 2007 to develop this campaign which positioned them as the human energy company.

Tracy Wholf

Sorry, I just have to ask. This is obviously an ad that feels very targeted for a US audience. Do you see this messaging globally? I mean, is this being translated in languages all across the world for Chevron?

Nayantara Dutta

It is. And one thing we’ve noticed in our global research is if you look at the global south, the tone and the narrative behind advertising campaigns changes when it’s being localized. So the imagery of the cute baby and focus on poverty, focus on bringing electricity to rural communities is emphasized in the global south. We call it purpose washing. It’s one step beyond green washing because they’re aligning themselves with these CSR efforts when actually the very communities they’re helping are the ones that are also suffering as a result of their pollution.

Emily Atkin

Can we talk about some of the specific claims that they made in this ad? I wrote down a few phrases that seems like they were worth picking apart a little bit.

One of them is "Wwe believe the future of energy is lower carbon.” That’s not low carbon. That’s not no carbon. That’s not net zero. That’s, we believe the future of energy is lower carbon. Lower carbon doesn’t actually mean shit, does it?

They [also] said, okay, we’re taking action tying our executives’ pay to lowering the “carbon intensity” of our operations. But lowering your carbon intensity does not mean that you’re lowering your carbon emissions. In fact, you can lower the carbon intensity of your business’s operation while still increasing your overall carbon footprint.

It has nothing to do with how much carbon you’re actually reducing, right? It’s a metric of measuring the emissions per barrel of oil extracted. So I emit 100 metric tons of carbon per barrel of oil extracted and I lower the emissions intensity and now I emit 99 metric tons of carbon per barrel of oil extracted. But if I start extracting more oil, I have higher carbon emissions overall.

So this is a really slick marketing term that they use with the nice music, with the nice baby and the farmer and the guy running up the stairs to be like, good.

Tracy Wholf

Well, to your point, Emily, it’s them being factually accurate, right? They’re not lying to us by using this type of language, right?

Emily Atkin

Right, they’re not technically lying, but they are actively misleading you. It’s a type of telling the truth that would hold up in court, but would not hold up in a human to human relationship, which is ironic given that they’re calling themselves the Human Energy Company.

Is there anything else you want to say about this ad? Like how does this ad tie into the research that you did?

Nayantara Dutta

So this is a Chevron ad, but the same strategy was used at the same point in history by many other oil and gas majors to make them seem green, make them seem committed to change when in fact they were not doing anything from a business perspective to actually change their investment.

Tracy Wholf

And I’m curious, why was this, now, a strategy of the companies? Was it because Biden had come into office? Was it pressure from the EU? Why do you think this was a cohesive messaging strategy across the industry?

Nayantara Dutta

At that time in 2020 and 2021, when we were in the midst of COVID, a lot of companies were pressured into making net zero pledges and having something to say about sustainability. So for a company like Chevron, who has always been very invested in fossil fuels, instead of making a net zero pledge or actually making a tangible commitment to change, they used strategic language to mislead people into thinking things were changing without ever saying what that would look like.

Emily Atkin

I remember too, like, because I’ve been covering fossil fuel ads for a while, the 2020 to 2022 era was all about greenwashing. It was all about these buzzwords, lower carbon, carbon emissions, intensity, like these slick ways to make you think that these oil companies are friends to the planet when they’re actually not.

Nayantara Dutta

Yeah, if you think back to it, that’s in 2020, everyone was posting black squares on social media. Everyone wanted to indicate a commitment to a cause, but there wasn’t necessarily critical questioning about whether there was follow through.

Emily Atkin

Totally. All right, should we watch the next one?

Tracy Wholf

Yeah, so I was going say, this is a perfect segue. So we’re going to jump ahead to this next one. I think it’s from 2023. So this next ad we’re going to watch is actually Shell advertising. It’s a little bit longer. But this is going to, they posted this ad in November 2023. So again, putting us in the timeline. This is going to be the post-Russia invasion of Ukraine. And we saw that massive energy crisis as a result of that. So this is where we’re headed next. Give me one second.

[AD DIALOGUE]

Go, go, Bo-Bo. Engineering runs in my family. My father was an engineer. My brother’s an engineer. My three kids are engineers. Really something that we’re pretty proud of.

I’ve been with Shell 35 years, all in the offshore oil and gas business here in the Gulf Coast of the United States.

Off-shore in the Gulf of Mexico may seem like a distant place, but it’s actually a very big community of people from Texas to Alabama. And they’re out there 365 days a year working hard to bring stable energy to you.

Relative to projects we’ve done before, we’ve shrunk down by about 70 % inside. Less steel, less cable, less space, less power.

All of that reduces our impact on the environment, both the footprint here in the ocean and the emissions that it makes.

If you think about these people that are working essentially 50 % of their life away from home. No sir. Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving, they are out there. But we’re home enjoying lights and heat and all the things that oil and gas bring to our community.

I’ve had the opportunity to apply everything I’ve the past 35 years and power people’s lives.

Emily Atkin

Wow, that was long.

Nayantara Dutta

That was a long one.

Tracy Wholf

Yeah, that’s definitely not an ad. I mean, that is a proper package.

Nayantara Dutta

Is that a case study?

Emily Atkin

That’s like a mini documentary, right? Okay, I feel like there was so much in there. First of all, it was 30% dogs, which I recognize they’re trying to manipulate me with how many dogs because I love dogs.

Tracy Wholf

Right at the top, too, right? Bobo came out right at the start.

Emily Atkin

Well, so the beginning to me is like, this is a good guy. He’s got two dogs and they look happy. How could this guy be bad?

Tracy Wholf

But you’re right Emily, it was all about family, dogs, he helped build the community playground, he gives back to his community. This is your neighbor, this is somebody that you want to live next to, right? That’s definitely the messaging.

Emily Atkin

Right, and it’s also got the efficiency thing, the environmental thing, we have the lowest greenhouse gas intensity in the world, another that one. There’s also this level of like, we’re supporting people, right, like the people that work here. And also a level of guilt, like these people are out here working while you get to sit home and have, cook your food and drive your car while they’re out here. So it was a lot.

Tracy Wholf

Or the sacrifice, the sacrifice that they’re making for us, right?

Emily Atkin

Nayantara, what did you see?

Nayantara Dutta

Yeah, a big narrative theme in campaigns around this time were how oil and gas companies are creating jobs and in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the focus was on energy security, oil and gas majors leaned very heavily into the benefits they were providing, both in terms of ensuring national energy security, but also giving back to local communities.

This is messaging that’s been around for decades, but they really went, they emphasized it to show domestic efforts and to make people feel more secure, because in partnership with that, they were also fear mongering around energy security and telling people that supply might be limited, but we are meeting demand, we are out there every day.

I also thought it was interesting that they were emphasizing their work in the Gulf of Mexico, which is where Deepwater Horizon occurred.

Tracy Wholf

Mm-hmm. That was the first thing I thought of actually.

Emily Atkin

Yeah, when they zoomed in on that platform, was like, that platform looks familiar to me. I feel like I’ve seen that one blown up.

Does this ad fit into the broader trend of the time? Are we now moving a little bit away from environmental claims?

Nayantara Dutta

Yeah, I would say this ad reflects a bit more of the old guard rather than the new guard, but it actually shares both types of messaging because what we used to see is this family friendly, like nice guy, at this oil company who can personally attest that they’re doing good.

That was the old guard, but the new guard that is slowly creeping in that they’ve seeded here is how they are helping communities and giving back by investing in oil and gas. So that is something that oil and gas companies started to incorporate in their language in 2022 and 2023 to really emphasize that oil and gas is a solution and is the way forward when previously they were pretending still to invest in renewables.

Emily Atkin

And it’s a form of paltering, right? This is a form of lying that I’ve covered in the newsletter that oil companies love to do. It’s where they’re technically telling you the truth in a really specific sense, but that truth intentionally obscures the larger picture.

So yes, there is a truth to the fact that oil does power our homes. It does power our lives, right? And it does bring jobs and bring financial security, right? But that’s not the whole picture of offshore oil development in the Gulf.

There are a ton of communities that are harmed by offshore oil development in the Gulf. Fishing communities. Cancer Alley is harmed by the refineries in the Gulf, right? We are being given a very specific picture here of benefits, where the actual picture is far more complicated.

Nayantara Dutta

Yeah, and this actually feeds into a narrative that emerges at the time, which is about how fossil fuels are an economic necessity. And so in order to justify continued dependence on oil and gas, a tactic that these companies used in 2023 and 2024 was showing us that for energy security, for our economy, for people’s jobs, we can’t step away from oil and gas.

Tracy Wholf

Okay, well, the next ad I really want to share, I thought it would be interesting to see one of the most recent ads that Chevron has put out. And so I had spent a little time looking through their YouTube page.

And I saw this little ditty, which they just published in October of 2025. And I think it’s a really good juxtaposition between what we first watched back from 2021 to what they have just put out just a few months ago. So this is a surprise for both of you. Enjoy.

[AD DIALOGUE]

America moves on big ideas. Every leap forward in our history has needed breakthrough energy.

Now, AI is here. The next big leap.

And Chevron is working to power it. We’re aiming to develop multi-gigawatt power plants near data centers. Designed with future pathways to lower carbon intensity. AI gets the power it needs. Communities get the jobs. And the grid stays strong.

Because we need power and I today.

We build America’s next superpower.

Emily Atkin

Did that lady have a robot hand?

Tracy Wholf

Yeah, I didn’t notice that the first time I watched it. I was a little weirded out by that.

Emily Atkin

Okay, can I just say, I thought that that was actually scary. You’re building on-site oil and gas plants to put next to the huge data centers to power the AI while everyone that lives around that data center and your power plant that I guess you’re building next door. So that they can make like a generative images of like a cat drinking a cup of coffee.

Tracy Wholf

Nayantara, what did you think? Because this wasn’t an ad that you probably would have reviewed. It was very recent. I’m curious what your take was on it.

Nayantara Dutta

Yeah, this is the first time I’m seeing AI directly brought into the narrative messaging of a fossil fuel ad. So that was a new experience for me as well.

I always pay a lot of attention to the specific words they use. And there was a word like we aspire. So I just clocked that instantly because a lot of it is false promises. Just the intent to do better rather than actually doing better.

I also wrote down “lower carbon intensity.” So one that Emily had spotted that they’re still using. And also “we’re building America’s next superpower.”

So I think what I’m seeing is a continuation of the trends we have discussed. Instead of fixing what has been broken by this industry, they’re just focused on building more. So there is a continued expansion. There’s no limit to it.

And what’s actually happening behind the scenes is that investors are getting concerned about the financial and climate risks of increasing fossil fuel production when there may not be the demand for it. And so there seems to be this ignorance towards what people actually need and they’re just building more stuff regardless of who wants it.

Emily Atkin

There’s also a, really big desire from the fossil fuel company to be able to reframe itself as new, exciting technology for the future—when actually, oil and gas is old, dirty, expensive technology that leads us into wars.

They’re using the energy needed from AI to tie themselves to AI, to make them look like these things are one and the same. But they’re not. There are a ton of tech companies that have publicly committed to only powering data centers with renewables, although a lot of them are walking those promises back as well, but you know what I’m saying.

They just wanna be like, we’re part of the technical energy future, rebranding this old ass technology.

Nayantara Dutta

It also ties into a narrative that we found in our analysis from 2023 and 2024. Chevron specifically said, we are making fossil fuels cleaner. And again, this is very much along the theme of what we were talking about before with producing the carbon intensity.

Chevron has been framing climate justice as a tech and innovation challenge. So instead of actually addressing the real impacts of fossil fuels, they’re talking about their new technologies as a technological advancement, or if we just get the right technology, we can still keep using fossil fuels but make them cleaner.

Tracy Wholf

That was the last ad, but before we totally depart from it, I want to bring up something here that obviously this ad directly speaks to all of the policy initiatives that Donald Trump has put in place, wanting more data centers, wanting more energy to power those data centers.

We know that that’s not going to come cheaply. It’s not going to come easily. And of course, what we’re seeing now is we’re starting to see communities push back against these data centers. People don’t want these in their homes.

And what I find interesting here is back in 2021, a lot of reporting that we were doing was about the pushback against renewable energy in a lot of these places. And this case of, ‘not in my backyard,’ I don’t want industrial solar, I don’t want wind.

And I’m just curious, how is this all going to go over for those communities? As this ad just showed us, the intention is we’re going to put these things everywhere and in your backyard. And so I just think it’ll be very curious to see how this will go over, broadly, across both aisles of the political spectrum. Because the reality is, we do need more energy and would you want that big shiny thing that we just saw in that ad powering it or would you want solar panels or a wind turbine? I don’t know, it’s just something that I thought about.

Emily Atkin

Yeah, so let’s do like a little summary then. Nayantara, how does those progression of ads tie into your research?

Nayantara Dutta

Yeah, so, we fielded our research from 2020 to 2024, and we have annual themes based on what we saw across four oil majors.

The first one in 2020 was climate leadership. So really saying we’re a part of the change.

Then after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, what we saw was energy security in 2022.

After that, it became the “both and” equation. Saying, ‘We’re investing in fossil fuels and we’re also exploring alternatives like CCS and green hydrogen.’

And then the last theme was fossil fuel dependence. So now there is no pretending anymore. It’s really blatant. The manipulation is more obvious than it ever has been before, where they’re saying you can’t live without us. You need us. We’re building new technology that’s powering the future and we’re here to stay.

But what’s funny is that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The growth in renewables we’re seeing is crazy. Renewable energy is cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable than any of the fossil fuel derived alternatives like CCS that they’re proposing.

And so what is most striking to me is that they’re so confident in lying, but people who have done their research know the truth. They really believe in their own dominance, but I don’t believe in their continued dominance.

Emily Atkin

Well, I hope that this segment and your report helps people sort of ground themselves for the next time they hear a fossil fuel ad, because like I said at the top, they are totally everywhere.

I just heard one on the New York Times, the Daily Podcast, interviewing a famous climate activist about the need to get away from fossil fuels. And then right in the smack in the dab of it, there’s an ad from I think it was API, saying exactly the type of messaging we just talked about today about how we are powering progress, about how we are powering energy security during unstable times.

Nayantara Dutta

So much of the news we consume is actually branded content from fossil fuel companies. In our research, we also publish the brand studios within large publishers who are working for oil and gas. New York Times, T Brand Studio, Washington Post, The Economist, all of the major places where you get your news are also not exempt from this fossil fuel influence. Apart from Heated.

Emily Atkin

And now, I was gonna say, and now is where we put an ad for us where we say that we don’t take any fossil fuel ads, right? Oh my God. Actually, this whole thing has been an ad for us! Gotcha!

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Tracy Wholf

Good. Do you mind if I ask one question before we totally wrap? Because a couple years ago, the secretary general, I want to bring this up.

A couple years ago, the secretary general of the UN came out and said that countries should be banning fossil fuel advertising. Nayantara, can you tell us where are we at on that?

Nayantara Dutta

Yes, good point. There is a great resource, which is a website called World Without Fossil Ads, which tells you more about the specific legislation that’s passing or is currently under process. We are seeing vast improvements over the past couple of years.

Climate activists are doing excellent work. I would say the Netherlands is a key example of this. There are specific cities around the world that have banned fossil fuel advertising, museums, different, different other types of companies. And so we are seeing real grassroots pressure building, which is really encouraging.

A lot of the companies that we discussed have had their campaigns taken down for greenwashing. And so people’s voices go a long way in making sure this climate obstruction is not made to air any longer.

Emily Atkin

Nayantara Dutta is the head of research at Clean Creatives and the lead author of this new report analyzing fossil fuel advertising. Nayantara, thank you so much for joining us

Nayantara Dutta

Thank you.

A side effect of the war in Iran is that fossil fuels are falling out of favor. People are starting to realize that sunlight can’t get stuck in the Strait of Hormuz; that EVs can’t have their fuel supply held hostage on a tanker; and that there’s no such thing as a barrel of wind.

It’s probably no coincidence, then, that Big Oil is working overtime to polish its reputation as prices surge and black clouds of poison fill Tehran’s skies. Take this ad from the American Petroleum Institute that aired last week on The New York Times podcast The Daily, during an interview with climate writer and activist Rebecca Solnit.

“Today, America’s natural gas and oil keeps the country moving, growing and building, and makes every day a little easier,” the ad’s narrator says. “But energy demand is growing, and the infrastructure built today will help secure a more affordable, reliable future, with enough energy to go around.”

It’s strange, given the current geopolitical situation, hearing the oil industry tell us that the only way we’re going to have an affordable, safe, and consistent future is to continue to invest in fossil fuels (reminder: even “American” oil is still priced on a volatile global market).

But this type of messaging is not just limited to this political moment, or to The Daily. A new report from the advocacy group Clean Creatives reveals that the oil industry has systematically reshaped its advertising over the past four years to portray fossil fuels as permanent, indispensable, and necessary for economic stability and national security.

Put another way, fossil fuel companies are no longer trying to convince us they are good-faith partners in the fight to preserve a safe and stable climate.

Now, they are focused on convincing us that the world is only safe and stable if they are in charge.

“State of the Art Propaganda”

Before we get into the details of this new report analyzing fossil fuel advertising, it’s important to just ground ourselves briefly in why we care about these advertisements in the first place.

Oil companies spend nearly $7 billion a year on media, creative advertising, and PR. They do this for one reason, and one reason only: because it works.

Ads are one of the most effective ways the oil industry buys social license to operate—that is, permission from the public to maintain business as usual. Without that social license, the industry would be more vulnerable to regulation or other attempts to reform it or (gasp!) transition away from it.

“The fossil fuel industry’s ad campaigns are state of the art propaganda developed in partnership with public relations experts and based on almost a century of collaborative experience,” Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard University researcher who studies fossil fuel communications, told us back in 2019. Fossil fuel ads are such an obstacle to climate action that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has publicly called for a worldwide ban.

That’s why it’s so important to know how the oil industry is trying to manipulate us. Because they are very likely, to a certain degree, succeeding.

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”From Greenwashing to Gaslighting”

Understanding this manipulation is why Clean Creatives analyzed a whopping 1,859 ads from BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron between 2020 and 2024—everything from social media ads to TV spots to executive speeches.

What they found was a coordinated evolution in the story Big Oil is telling about itself. “Greenwashing has taken on a new form,” said Nayantara Dutta, the report’s lead author.

In 2020 and 2021, oil companies were still all about your straight-up, typical sort of greenwashing. Their ads were filled with net zero pledges, “clean” energy investment promises, wind turbines, sunsets, and dogs. (We covered that phase a lot in the newsletter).

Then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine—and almost overnight, the messaging changed. Instead of talking non-stop about energy transition, the report found, companies started emphasizing security. Fossil fuels were no longer framed as a problem to be phased out, but a safeguard against chaos.

(This is almost certainly because most of the big oil companies actively stopped investing what little money they already had in the energy transition and went back all-in on fossil fuels. So much for that happy wind-swept dog!)

By 2023, the industry had landed on a new argument: We can do both. We can expand fossil fuel production and address climate change! We can drill more oil and lower emissions!

But by “do both,” the industry really just meant “drill more oil” and “drill more oil but call it climate-friendly.” This is where you start seeing heavy promotion of things like carbon capture, hydrogen, and “lower-carbon” fuels—technologies that sound climate-friendly, but conveniently preserve the central role of oil and gas.

But by the time Trump was re-elected in 2024, even that balancing act started to fade. Many ads stopped pretending there was transition happening at all, and instead settled into something much more blunt: fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they’re essential.

Shell, for instance, began emphasizing liquefied natural gas as a long-term pillar of the energy system, dramatically increasing its focus on LNG in its strategy and communications. Its CEO also started framing LNG as a climate solution. (Spoiler: It’s not).

API’s recent ad in The Daily is evidence that this industrywide messaging shift continues. “API’s ad in The Daily clearly demonstrates the focus on energy security and domestic oil and gas production we discovered in our analysis,” Dutta told HEATED.

She added: “It’s crucial to keep in mind that the API is supported by at least 6 advertising and PR agencies helping them with their media buys, narrative framing, and creative. The New York Times should follow other news outlets, like The Guardian and Vox, which have banned fossil fuel ads since 2020 and 2021, respectively.”

Reminder: oil is not inevitable

Across companies, platforms, and countries, the fossil fuel industry’s message is clear: You need us, and this is just how the world works.

But it’s important to remember: The oil industry is spending $7 billion a year telling you oil is inevitable not because it’s true, but because it desperately needs everyone to believe it. If everyone does not believe this, they are screwed.

There’s a line that circulates online about gender: If the binary were natural, it wouldn’t need to be enforced by law. The same logic applies here. If fossil fuels were truly inevitable, there would be no need for a constant, multi-billion-dollar campaign to convince us of that fact. It would just be.

Instead, what we have is an industry that must relentlessly assert its own permanence. That insistence is not evidence of inevitability. It’s just the sound of power trying not to lose control.

The climate cost of war with Iran

It gives me no pleasure to report that I wrote about what a declared war with Iran would mean for the climate a little more than six years ago.

Given our current reality, I’ve removed the auto-paywall for archived posts so anyone can read it. You can find it here.

Support climate journalism

Want to hear me talk more about fossil fuels?

You’re likely aware by now that HEATED has its own podcast. (Make sure you’re subscribed for our episode on Thursday, where I’ll watch some fossil fuel ads with report author Nayantara Dutta and give you my reactions!)

But I also go on other podcasts, too—and they’re WAY fancier than mine! Recently, I was on A Matter of Degrees, a super thoughtful show hosted by Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson. The podcast tells stories about the powerful forces behind climate change and the tools we have to fix it.

On my recent episode, we talked about the inseparable connection between authoritarianism, state violence, and fossil fuels. They did a great job with it and made me sound very smart. Check it out here, or listen on Apple or Spotify.

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Emily Atkin:
All right, I just want to start by saying: I told you that question was all right.

Tracy Wholf:
Ha! So we should let everyone know what happened right before we started interviewing Tom Steyer.

I’m going to paint the scene. Emily and I have been working really hard and burning the candle at both ends, so I only had a chance to look at Emily’s question set about a half hour before we got on with Tom. And the first question I read is — and I’m going to read it the way I interpreted it. Is that okay? Can I do a dramatic reading here?

Emily:
Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Tracy:
“I’ve made no secret over the years of my deep skepticism of the billionaire class. So it would be weird if I didn’t ask you something that a lot of my listeners are probably thinking, but nobody has said to your face yet. Do you think it’s ethical that you exist?”

Emily:
So you call me immediately — you look at it and you call me — and you’re like, “You can’t start with that question.”

Tracy:
First of all, you know that meme of the cat where it’s frantically typing? I read that and I was like: Emily.

And this is where we tell everyone: I am yin and you are yang. I am A and you are B.

But I was so impressed. I was really impressed, because you were right. You said if he can’t answer this, he shouldn’t be governor. And he did not flinch when you asked it. In fact, he sat there cool as a cucumber. And to your point, he’s clearly been very well prepped. I take it all back — you were right.

Emily:
That was my thought. I was like: if he’s not prepared to answer the question, should you exist as a billionaire, when agreeing to be interviewed by me, then he’s not prepared to lead a garbage can. If you search my name and the word billionaire, you don’t get anything positive.

And I still do — even after that interview — have some skepticism.

Read more

You can watch our conversation at the top of this newsletter or on YouTube, or listen on all your podcast apps. If you’d prefer to read rather than listen, just scroll down for text and PDF transcripts.

HEATED podcast producer Tracy Wholf and I also recorded a short segment right after the interview reacting to what we heard. If you’d like to hear our off-the-cuff thoughts, I’ll be sending them out shortly in a subscribers-only newsletter. Make sure you’re a paid subscriber to get it!

Key moments from today’s show:

If you're short for time, and can’t read or listen to the full conversation, here are some key takeaways.

• On welcoming billionaires to California: “If you come here and you want to [start/grow a business], I think that’s great. But you should be prepared to understand that you are not leaving everyone else behind. You did not create this on your own.”
  

• On his previous fossil fuel investments: “The idea that, 25 years ago, we invested in fossil fuels—absolutely true. But I really had a conversion… I went from being somebody who was blithely investing in everything in the economy to, no, no, no, no, that’s not okay. And I need to leave billions of dollars on the table to make sure that I’m actually doing the right thing.”
  

• On the Oxfam study showing billionaires have wildly carbon-intensive stock portfolios: “I don’t think that’s true of my portfolio, because my portfolio is focused actually on the technologies of moving us away from fossil fuels, and away from emissions and to a net zero world.” (More on Steyer’s investment business, Galvanize).
  

• On whether he’d commit to an independent climate audit of his entire stock portfolio: “Well, I think that—look, if this is the bulk of my portfolio, this has to be dramatically negative.”
  

• On his proposal to break up electric utility monopolies in the state: (This part you just have to listen to because it’s not succinctly quotable. You can also read about his plan, and its critics, here.)
  

• On accepting campaign money from electric utilities (like Gavin Newsom): “I would never do that. I’m not taking corporate PAC money. I’m not taking money from people who want something for me to not tell the truth. … To a very large extent, I’m saying to Californians, I can’t be bought.”
  

• On why his campaign launch video didn’t mention climate change: “Because when I talk about electricity, I’m talking about climate. When I talk about wildfires and insurance, I’m talking about climate. When I’m talking about technology growth and inventing the future in California and building the companies about it, I’m talking about climate. I’m trying to talk about climate in terms of the way that people experience it, which is either costs or health and job creation. …
  
  I’m always talking about climate. I’m never describing it as climate. I’m trying to put it in human terms because people are experiencing the world as human beings and they can understand this is cheaper and it’s a better deal for us and we can drop electricity prices. Those are the things that people can hear. And once you get too scientific, too disconnected from their day to day, people are so pressed and so stressed that it’s very hard for most people to hear that, honestly.”
  

• On why he’s running himself, not just funding another candidate: “This is not an ego trip. I don’t think I’m doing this all by myself. I think I want to be part of a group of people, which clearly include you and your listeners, making changes that are necessary to actually get the outcomes that are necessary.”

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HEATED’s previous coverage of billionaires:

In case you’re wondering where my skepticism comes from.

• 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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Text transcript

(Full PDF transcript)

Emily Atkin:

Today I’m interviewing Tom Steyer, the climate activist billionaire who’s running to be the next governor of California.

Before we get into it, here’s a quick summary of Tom’s platform: populism and affordability, single-payer health care, abolishing ICE, building a million affordable homes in four years, and holding a special election to raise corporate taxes.

Despite being a billionaire himself, Politico has called Tom “the most vocal candidate in the race about the need to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy.” He’s also been endorsed by key unions, including the California Nurses Association, United Domestic Workers Union, and school employees.

Now, I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t have a problem with Tom’s platform. But one of the reasons I wanted to interview him is that I am deeply skeptical of the idea that a billionaire can be trusted to solve structural problems like wealth inequality and climate chaos.

That skepticism comes from my entire lived experience as a reporter. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve covered billionaires promising to be climate champions, only to watch those promises fall apart. And there’s a simple reason for that: billionaires generally do not want to change the system that made them rich.

To expect a billionaire to dismantle the system that concentrates wealth and power in their hands — the one that lets corporations buy politicians, and externalize the costs of pollution onto workers and communities — is a little like asking someone sitting at the top of the world’s tallest tree to saw off the branch they’re sitting on.

But I want to be fair. Tom has probably done more than any other billionaire to break that mold. He’s spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars not just on climate causes, but specifically on trying to beat back the corporate influence that makes climate action so hard to achieve in the first place. So I think we can hear him out.

There’s also something happening in this election that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: fossil fuel interests are actively going after a billionaire — Tom — for his proposal to break up electric utilities in the state in order to lower Californians’ electric bills. So I wanted to give him a chance to talk about that too. After I grilled him on his own structural power first, of course.

I also wanted to talk with Tom about how he plans to use the California governorship for climate action nationally, and why his campaign launch video didn’t mention climate change at all.

His answers are the kind of things listeners could probably argue about for hours, and I hope you do in the comments.

So here’s our conversation.

Emily Atkin:
Tom Steyer, welcome to the show.

Tom Steyer:
Emily, thank you so much for having me on.

Emily:
Let’s get right into it. I’ve made no secret over the years of my deep skepticism of the billionaire class. So I’m going to ask you something a lot of my listeners are probably thinking, even if maybe nobody has said it to your face: Do you think it is ethical that you exist?

Tom:
Look, the implication is: Is there something wrong with somebody who starts a business, that business grows over a long period of time, creates something valuable, and they own part of it — and that part ends up being worth more than a billion dollars? In my opinion, no.

But let me say this: if you want to come to California — and people come from all over the world and all over the United States to start businesses here, because this is the best place to start a business and grow a business — there’s an ecosystem here to support that. It’s been built up over decades. This state has been built by working people. It continues to run because of working people.

So if you want to come here and start something, great. The sky’s the limit. But you are now part of a community, a state, an ecosystem that you did not create, but from which you benefit. You have to be a good citizen.

That means understanding you did not make your own money. You are not self-made. This system is the result of hundreds of years of people fighting and dying to build it.

So if you come here and take advantage of everybody else’s work and sacrifice and then think you did it all by yourself, that’s not fair.

Emily:
So it sounds like you’re saying it’s ethical for billionaires to exist, but it’s not ethical for them to exist and not pay their fair share. Is that fair?

Tom:
Absolutely. And they need to think of themselves as part of a whole system, including all 40 million people in the state of California. I’m for prosperity, but I’m for shared prosperity — not leaving people behind. That is a huge part of what this campaign is about.

Emily:
I ask because there’s a version of a California voter who actually likes what you stand for on climate, on inequality, on all of it. But those voters have also spent the last decade being told by billionaires that they were going to solve all their problems — that Elon was going to electrify transportation, that Bezos was going to fix health care — and it hasn’t panned out.

So for that voter specifically, the billionaire-skeptical one, what’s your argument for why they should trust you?

Tom:
Let me address that. The skepticism and the anger at these people who have been so arrogant, so selfish, so full of themselves, so obnoxious — do I share that? Heck yes. Heck yes. Do I understand why people feel that way? How could you not?

I will say this: almost 20 years ago, my wife and I took a pledge to give away the bulk of our money while we’re alive. I will not die a billionaire. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.

And for basically the last 14 years, I’ve been working full-time as an advocate for economic and environmental justice, for working people in this state who I think have been on the short end of the stick for 45 years. There’s math and data to show that’s true.

So to a very large extent, what I’m running on is that I’m the person who will get results — not just talk about it, but get it done.

Emily:
I also want to give you an opportunity to address another reason my audience might be skeptical of you, because I have a very climate-focused audience, very focused on accountability for Big Oil and fossil fuels.

Another reason they might be skeptical is that you have a history of investing in fossil fuels. So how do you answer somebody who says they don’t want to trust you on climate because of the way your wealth was built?

Tom:
Well, it wasn’t built on fossil fuels. It was built on everything, including fossil fuels. My awareness of this happened somewhere in the mid-2000s, and by 2012, when I left my business, I had completely divested from fossil fuels.

And I’ve spent decades working on this problem. That was, I think, way ahead of everybody else.

In fact, the big reason I walked away from my business — which was incredibly profitable and has continued to be incredibly profitable without me — is that I felt I was in a business focused on profits and results without awareness of the second-order effects. And I decided we were never going to invest in fossil fuels again.

That has been a rule in my life for 15 years. I’ve been working on climate for a really long time. This is not something I decided to do because I’m running for governor.

So yes, 25 years ago we invested in fossil fuels. Absolutely true. But I had a conversion in terms of understanding what was going on. I went from being someone blithely investing across the economy to saying: no, that’s not okay. And I need to leave billions of dollars on the table to do the right thing.

Emily:
And we want people to have conversions, right? We don’t want people to never change their minds.

And I don’t know if you remember this, but I’ll give you credit here for being somebody who’s been doing this for a long time. Back in 2014, I was a 24-year-old reporter, and you went on a trip to the Canadian tar sands—

Tom:
God, I remember that so clearly.

Emily:
—to talk with Indigenous communities affected by tar sands development, because that was really the height of the Keystone XL pipeline fight—

Tom:
Which I was strongly fighting against, and which we did stop.

Emily:
—and there was an extra spot on your plane.

Tom:
Was that you?

Emily:
That was me. I was the reporter who came with you to report on it.

Tom:
My God, Emily. That was such an epic trip for me.

Emily:
It really was. It was a trip that made me fall in love with climate and environmental reporting — getting to talk to communities affected downstream by oil development.

Tom:
It was incredible. I went up there so people couldn’t say, “You’re just some jerk running your mouth who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” And what we saw looked like the mountains of the moon.

They were creating a massive amount of runoff after mining and refining the oil, and they put it in these tailings ponds with gravel on the bottom. So it went right into the water system. All of the toxicity in that slurry went right into the water system, and it was a cancer cluster.

Every fish, every deer, every drop of water had massive amounts of toxicity in it. I was just like, my God.

Emily:
Yeah. I remember talking to people about how their way of life was being taken away from them — their hunting, their fishing — because of the pollution from those tailings ponds.

I remember someone getting teary-eyed talking about how fishing wasn’t just a source of sustenance; it was part of the culture they wanted to pass down to their kids. And they couldn’t do that anymore. It was really painful.

Tom:
It was incredibly painful. I’d gone to Alaska in 2006 to see what the land and animals and birds and fish looked like before Europeans showed up. And then we went there and saw what happened when industry arrived and devastated the people who had been living there.

I could go on about how heart-wrenching that was.

Emily:
I know. We should get back to your campaign, but I did want to acknowledge that we’ve both been here on this issue for a long time — for me, 10 years; for you, even longer.

But I do have one more question in this billionaire section, and then I promise we’ll get to your proposal.

Tom:
That’s okay. These are absolutely fair questions, and I’m not defensive about them. I had a conversion experience. I’m glad it happened. It needed to happen, and I took a different path.

Emily:
Right, and I appreciate that.

So just to be clear: you divested from fossil fuels a while ago, and you’ve spent a lot of your accumulated wealth on climate causes. At the same time, though, it’s my understanding that an investment portfolio of your size is still massively carbon-intensive, no matter the level of fossil fuel exposure.

I was reading a 2022 Oxfam report — which I’m happy to share with you — that found the average billionaire’s investment portfolio generates around 3 million tons of CO2 a year, which is more than 300 times greater than what comes from private jets and yachts, which is what most people think of when they think of billionaire carbon emissions.

So I wanted to know: do you know the carbon intensity of your investment portfolio?

Tom:
Let me address that.

I started an investment business called Galvanize Climate Solutions, which is totally focused on the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. It is 100 percent the opposite of what you’re talking about: technologies and businesses that enable us to get to net zero.

So when you say “the typical billionaire,” let’s be clear: I’m not the typical billionaire.

I think this is the leading investment platform in the world for investing in the energy transition. And that’s the point I want to make: the economics are dramatically behind the transition.

The transition is happening because, as I wrote in my book Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War, it’s better for people right now. Clean energy is cheaper. EVs are faster. All of these things are better. We’re not asking people to eat their gruel and sacrifice. We’re saying: this is here right now, and it’s simply a better deal.

Fossil fuels are a loser.

So in answer to your question, I don’t think that’s true of my portfolio, because my portfolio is focused on the technologies that move us away from fossil fuels, away from emissions, and toward a net-zero world.

Emily:
Have you ever done an audit of the carbon intensity of your portfolio? Would you consider doing one?

Tom:
Well, if this is the bulk of my portfolio, it has to be dramatically negative. We’re not just investing in technologies to reduce emissions; we’re investing in technologies that can enable sequestration at the gigaton level this decade.

Emily:
I think this is a good transition from fossil fuels and solar to another powerful class that deserves scrutiny: electric utilities and your proposal surrounding them.

Californians are paying some of the highest electricity rates in the country. The three major investor-owned utilities have raised rates between 80 and 110 percent over the last decade. You’re promising to cut California’s electricity bills by 25 percent by breaking up the utility monopolies PG&E, Southern California Edison, and SDG&E.

So I want to give you a chance to make that case directly to our listeners, because it is a bold promise. How does your proposal actually work?

Tom:
I’ll answer that, but let me just say: Californians pay twice as much for electricity as the average of the rest of the country. If I cut electric costs by 25 percent, we’re still paying 50 percent more than the rest of the country.

So when people say it’s a bold promise, it’s actually not that bold. Paying 50 percent more than everyone else still doesn’t sound like a great outcome to me.

Emily:
Ha. Hey, you said it.

Tom:
The real issue here is monopoly. These are three legal monopolies. Most places don’t have this kind of arrangement.

People think utilities make money by charging for electricity and then pocketing the difference after their costs. That’s not how it works. They make a capital expenditure — say a new pole or a new grid upgrade — the Public Utilities Commission accepts it as part of the rate base, and then they get a guaranteed return on that investment.

Their return is based on a rate base the PUC allows, plus a guaranteed return of about 10 percent.

So if you and I are running an electric utility and we have a problem we can solve with either a $100 million facility or a $200 million facility, what happens? In a competitive system, we’d want the $100 million facility. But in this system, we’d rather build the $200 million one, because 10 percent of $200 million is better than 10 percent of $100 million.

There’s a huge incentive to make bigger investments, because they’re a monopoly. And when that raises electricity prices? Well, too bad. If you want electricity, you have no choice.

Emily:
So you’re saying those investments are not always necessary? Because it’s also my understanding that there are a lot of things the utilities do need to invest in, especially in California.

Tom:
Totally. There are necessary investments. The question is: do we do them the cheapest possible way or the most expensive possible way?

Take wildfire prevention. Of course it has to be done. But if the system rewards the most expensive option, that’s what they’re going to choose.

So there are two things we need to do. One is change the incentives. The PUC has to stop encouraging and permitting this kind of behavior. That’s the first thing, and we can do it quickly.

The second is that we actually need to introduce competition. Right now the utility can basically say, “You don’t like it? Tough. You have no legal choice.”

Emily:
I like what I hear when I hear, “I’m going to take on the utilities, I’m going to lower the bills, I’m going to break them up.” My instinct is: how are they going to allow you to do that?

Tom:
Allow? First of all, the governor gets to choose the PUC members. Second, yes, we’d have to pass legislation. But this isn’t some crazy idea I just made up. Versions of this exist elsewhere.

A lot of this comes down to what the law allows people to do. If you and I own a warehouse and put solar on the roof, okay, we’re generating electricity. So what? Who are we allowed to sell it to? At what price? That’s just a legal question.

Are people allowed to put solar on the roof with a battery and use that electricity and sell it to their neighbors? In this system, no.

But there’s an electricity revolution happening in the world, and it’s happening at breakneck speed.

Emily:
Right.

Tom:
Prices are coming down like crazy. A bunch of countries added 50 percent more electricity generation last year, not through utilities or the government, but because people bought solar panels and hooked them up.

In Germany, people routinely have plug-in solar panels on their balconies. They put them out there, plug them in, and use the electricity.

Emily:
On their balconies. So that’s part of your campaign promise—

Tom:
This is here. This is already here.

We have these old monopoly electric systems that were built in the early 20th century on older technology. The technology is changing really, really fast. The question is whether we’re going to keep a legal system that insists we live in the first half of the 20th century when we’re in the 21st.

Our responsibility is to bring down costs for people and get them the power they deserve.

Emily:
I will say it does seem like PG&E in particular is at least somewhat threatened by this proposal.

Their response to your campaign — and to others proposing utility reform — appears to be a coordinated dark-money attack campaign. There’s this 501(c)(3) called California Energy Facts that’s been systematically targeting every politician proposing rate relief, including you. But our reporting suggests it’s not an independent watchdog like it claims to be. It’s essentially a PG&E front group run by PG&E president Carla Peterman.

Are you aware of that?

Tom:
I’m not, but I was told the big electric monopolies are going to give money to every campaign except mine. Does that suggest maybe I’m onto something good?

Emily:
Well, not only are they not giving you money — it appears they’re actively spending money against you.

Tom:
Yes, and that’s exactly my point: they’re going to try to prevent me from winning.

Emily:
I guess my question is: do you need that money?

Tom:
I wouldn’t take their money, for God’s sake.

Emily:
You wouldn’t?

Tom:
No. Absolutely not. I would never do that. I’m not taking corporate PAC money. I’m not taking money from people who want something from me in exchange for me not telling the truth. No.

Emily:
Is that how you view using your own money to fund this campaign?

Tom:
Yes, because I want to be able to say I can’t be bought. It’s expensive to run in California. And my point is: if you want to take on the powers that be, if you want to change things, you can’t take money from the powers that be, because that’s why they’re giving it to you.

So to a very large extent, I’m saying to Californians: I can’t be bought.

Emily:
I want to zoom out for a second, because this sounds like it could be a way for California to serve as a testing ground for policies that might later spread to other states. Historically that’s often been what California has been, especially on climate policy.

And that’s another reason we’re having this interview, because as much as I love California, this isn’t actually a California podcast. It’s a climate podcast.

So I’d like to ask: how do you see the California governorship as a tool for climate action nationally?

Tom:
I love that question, Emily, because I’ve spent decades preparing myself to answer it.

I have a simple framework. Four rules.

First: polluter pays. If you emit, you pay. Otherwise you’re saying everybody else is going to pay for your pollution.

Second: never do environmental policy without doing environmental justice. There has been structural racism and unfairness in where we put toxicity. That trip we took to the oil sands was proof of that. Those First Nations people were absolutely crushed. So you can’t do environmental policy without EJ from the start.

Third: the tech is here. The world already has the technology to get to net zero — or at least dramatically reduce emissions. The question is whether we are willing to deploy it. Because it’s cheaper. We’re not asking people to pay more for electricity or more to fill up their cars. We’re saying: it’s cheaper and better. This is now about deployment, not invention.

And fourth — and this is the one I think is even remotely controversial — I’m a huge believer in natural-world sequestration. We can use photosynthesis, Mother Nature’s gift to us, to sequester CO2 at the gigaton level.

The rough idea people have had is that we need to get down from something like 42 billion tons of CO2 emissions a year, and that by 2050 we’d need to be sequestering maybe 10 billion tons — 25 percent of that. But someone I really respect said to me a year and a half ago: it’s 10 to 20, Tom, because emissions are not coming down at the speed we need.

So I’m a huge believer that before 2030, there are multiple ways in the natural world to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the ground or ocean at the gigaton level, and at a cost that is much cheaper than people understand.

To get to net zero, we have to be good at sequestration. The natural world is the way to do it, and we could have an immense, fast impact if people got behind that.

Emily:
That’s a big vision, and I’m glad to hear it. But help me understand something. I watched your campaign launch video, and I was surprised, given your background, that it didn’t mention climate at all. Why?

Tom:
Because when I talk about electricity, I’m talking about climate. When I talk about wildfires and insurance, I’m talking about climate. When I talk about technology growth, inventing the future in California, and building companies around that, I’m talking about climate.

I’m trying to talk about climate in terms of how people actually experience it: costs, health, and jobs.

Every time I’m talking about health, I’m talking about asthma and reducing particulates that go along with emissions. Every time.

So yes, I’m always talking about climate. I’m just not always describing it that way. I’m trying to put it in human terms, because people are living this as human beings. They understand cheaper power. They understand a better deal. They understand lower electricity prices.

Once you get too scientific, too disconnected from everyday life, people are so pressed and stressed that it becomes hard for them to hear.

Emily:
Do you think that talking about it explicitly as climate makes it polarizing?

Tom:
I’m not worried about the polarizing part. I’m worried about whether it’s viscerally impactful.

If I say to you, “I’m going to drop your electricity rates by 25 percent,” that is viscerally impactful. If I talk about cheaper transportation, that’s a big deal. This war has raised prices at the pump 40 percent. That’s a big deal.

So what I’m saying is: I am talking about climate, but not the way scientists talk about it or many advocates talk about it. I’m trying to talk about it the way human beings experience its impacts.

Emily:
When do you think it is politically a good idea to start talking about it explicitly as climate?

Tom:
Let me say this: “polluter pays” is explicit. That’s money. That’s saying to California polluters: no, you don’t get to make the rest of us pay for your pollution. You pay for your pollution. That’s specific. That’s concrete.

Emily:
This is my last question, because I know we’re running out of time.

You have more money than you could ever spend. You’ve funded climate candidates, built organizations, spent hundreds of millions trying to move this issue. A lot of people would argue that that’s actually the more powerful position to be in.

So why do this? Why do you need to be governor? What can Tom Steyer the governor accomplish that Tom Steyer the billionaire climate activist cannot?

Tom:
I think we’re at a crisis point in this country in multiple ways. And the governor of California has a platform that can be transformational in multiple ways — in terms of what democracy looks like, how we take care of everybody in a fair and just way, and how we preserve the natural environment.

One of the big issues is housing. We need to build a lot of houses, because we have way too few. That’s a climate issue. How you zone, where you put those homes, whether you continue to sprawl outward — which means more transportation and the destruction of natural space — that’s a climate issue too.

So in all of these ways, there is a platform here, at a critical time in America and at a critical time for climate.

I’m sure your show has gone into where we are in terms of heating and biodiversity, but it’s pretty hard not to see this as a critical moment. And if you listen to Jim Hansen, his prediction is that heating is going to accelerate much faster than people expected, and that we’re heading to a much worse place much sooner than anyone thought.

So when you ask whether I think this role has more impact than I could have as an independent activist — honestly, I do.

No joke, Emily.

Emily:
Is it one of those things where you’re like, “It’s just easier if I do it myself?” You know how sometimes you’re deciding whether to hire someone or fund someone to do something, and you’re like, nah, it’s easier if I just do it?

Tom:
Well, let me ask you a question: if there were somebody doing this and saying what I’m saying, would I be happy to support them? Yes.

This is not an ego trip. I don’t think I’m doing this all by myself. I want to be part of a group of people — which clearly includes you and your listeners — making the changes necessary to get the outcomes we need.

I want to be part of an army solving this. I have no illusion that any one person is going to solve it. I want to be part of a coalition making good decisions, pushing society forward, and protecting our future.

But Cain isn’t an NBC climate reporter anymore, he tells HEATED in an exclusive interview. Last week, the veteran journalist resigned, citing burnout from near-constant internal fighting to get important climate stories on air—stories that he says were routinely deprioritized, buried late in newscasts, or cut entirely.

“It just really got to that point where I was just kind of exhausted by the sales, by the constant trying to explain and remind, like, hey, this is important. Please run this story,” Cain told HEATED. “It just wore on me after a while.”

In our conversation, 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. ”The networks, I think, are bending the knee to the current political atmosphere,” she says.

Listen to the full conversation at the top of this newsletter. It’s also available on all your podcast apps and YouTube.

How corporate broadcasters bend the knee

Coincidentally, Media Matters has just released a report analyzing climate coverage at NBC, CBS and ABC over the last year. And the data backs up everything Chase and Tracy say in today’s show.

According to that report released Wednesday, corporate broadcast climate coverage dropped 35 percent from 2024 to 2025—from 771 minutes to 505 minutes across NBC, CBS, and ABC combined.

Even more stunningly, only 8 percent of all corporate broadcast climate segments mentioned fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change. So even when corporate news networks do cover climate change, they systemically refuse to explain why it’s happening.

There is no journalistic reason for any of this. The United States suffered 23 separate billion-dollar weather disasters in 2025—the third-most on record. That alone should have warranted lots of airtime for climate stories.

More importantly, 2025 was the year Trump declared war on the planet. He gutted the EPA, rolled back climate and clean air regulations, scrubbed federal climate data from public access, and overall began a systematic dismantling of decades of environmental protections. This will translate directly into more people getting sick, more communities destroyed, and a hotter, more dangerous planet.

And yet the networks largely looked away. According to the Media Matters report, corporate news networks only aired a combined 30 segments about Trump’s climate actions in 2025, representing just 15 percent of their total climate coverage. ABC News was the worst on this, running only 4 segments about Trump’s rollbacks for the entire year. NBC aired 10 such segments.

CBS aired the most segments covering Trump’s climate actions in 2025—16 in total. And that was very likely because of Tracy.

In our episode today, Tracy talks about what it was like constantly fighting for those segments. "I constantly felt like the ugly stepchild,” she said. “aPeople would see me coming down the hall and run.”

She and Chase also talk about what it might mean for these networks now that they’ve pushed out the loudest people fighting for those stories from the inside.

Support independent climate journalism

Key moments from today’s show

If you're short for time and can’t listen to the full conversation, here are some of the most illuminating things Chase said about the challenges of covering climate change at a major corporate broadcast network:

• On needing to seem “objective”: “It just felt like I was just constantly, to use a sports analogy, in the play-by-play booth—having to stay back at arm’s length and hold up this supposed objectivity about this subject. But for me, it’s really hard to be objective about all life on planet. How can I be objective about the air that I breathe?”

• On being compelled to give a platform to liars: “I don't want to go to an oil company and give them a chance to lie to me. I don't want to go to a lobbying group and let them misrepresent what's happening and mislead viewers and cut into the time that I have to actually communicate what's going on. … We know that oil is making the planet hotter. I don’t need the oil company to lie to me and say that it’s not.”

• On avoiding climate talk during extreme weather events: “It kind of reminds me of some of the conversations when there's a mass shooting. It's like, now's not the time to talk about gun reform because there are people mourning. Isn’t that the exact moment to talk about gun reform? Isn’t it the exact moment to talk about climate change when you have a weather event that is amplified by climate change?”

• On pandering to climate deniers: "[There’s] this perception that the climate deniers in America are this big group. And that if they cover climate too much they're gonna lose viewers. I would argue exactly the opposite."

• On the downsides of leaving: “I want more impact, but I also recognize that I was having impact. There were [climate] stories on TV. And so, I guess there's a little bit of guilt in here too.”

Chase is taking a big risk leaving his steady job to go independent. As someone who did the same thing for similar reasons seven years ago, I know that risk well.

But I also know we have an incredible community here, many of whom will be interested in Chase’s journey, and the stories he’ll tell now that he’s free to do as he pleases. I’m rooting for him and I hope you will too.

You can follow Chase’s reporting by subscribing to his YouTube channel. You can also find him on TikTok and Instagram.

Meet our new producer in episode one, linked at the top of this newsletter and available on all your podcast apps and YouTube. (Subscribe to our channel!)

But Emily, why are you doing this?

Great question. For almost seven years now, HEATED has been a text-only operation—minus that one six-episode podcast mini series we did in 2020 on coronavirus. (Only OGs will remember).

But most people don’t actually get their news by reading it. They get it by consuming it via social media, mostly in video form. And loads of people prefer listening to their news rather than reading it, so they can multitask while driving, cooking, or peddling on the bike. (It’s me. I’m loads of people).

I’ve wanted to bring HEATED into the audio/visual space for a while, I just didn’t have the right person to help me. I needed someone who knows the climate beat inside and out, who understands video production, who gets my personality, and—crucially—who is super Type A. Now I have that person. Thank you, David Ellison.

I’ve also been feeling lots of pressure from the climate news environment crumbling around me. This felt like the right moment to try and expand.

Am I about to become a master of short-form TikTok get-ready-with-me climate explainers? Probably not. (Although never say never, I guess.) But I do believe journalists have a responsibility to meet audiences where they are, without dumbing down the reporting. So that’s what we’re going to try and do.

Subscribe now

What will this podcast be like?

I recommend listening to our introductory episode to find out! Did I mention it’s at the top of this newsletter?

But basically, 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!

We also want this to be a two-way street. So please let us know if there’s anyone in particular you’d like us to interview, or any subject you’d like to us to tackle.

Leave a comment

How will you fund this?

HEATED has always been 100 percent reader-funded. We’ve never had fossil fuel ads, corporate sponsors, or billionaire owners with “evolving priorities.” And we never will!

Depending on how this whole thing goes, though, we might enter into the world of YouTube ad monetization. If that happens, we’ll do everything we can to ensure fossil fuel ads never grace our content. And if you want to avoid ads altogether, you can always just listen/watch on the newsletter.

Really, though, this whole thing is going to depend on our community.

For now, the podcast will be free while we gauge interest and grow the audience. But producing a high-quality video podcast takes real work: booking, research, editing, distribution, all that jazz.

So if you value HEATED and want to see it reach more people in more formats—while remaining 100 percent independent—becoming a paid subscriber is what will make that possible.

Support the HEATED podcast!!

Text transcript:

Emily Atkin: The billionaires who control our information systems do not want you informed about climate change.

The last few years have seen major declines in climate change news coverage across the U.S. and abroad. We’ve seen entire climate reporting teams laid off or reassigned, big newspapers running fewer climate investigations, and climate all but disappearing from television coverage.

One of the most concerning recent examples was at CBS News, which used to run some of the best climate coverage on network television. They were so good at not only covering the science of climate change, but critically looking at the polluters contributing to it and the politicians delaying action.

But after David Ellison, the son of MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison, bought the parent company Paramount Global last year and installed anti-woke opinion writer Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, he dismantled the network’s climate reporting team. The reason, Ellison said, was that he was “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.”

I reported on the CBS News climate layoffs for my newsletter, Heated, back in October. And when I was talking to sources both inside and outside the newsroom about it, they kept bringing up one impacted member of the climate team, Tracy Wholf.

Tracy Wholf was the senior climate producer at CBS News, and everyone told me that she was the heart of the CBS climate team. She was the one pushing for more accountability stories, educating the entire newsroom about climate science and making sure local CBS affiliates had the resources and confidence to cover climate. One newsroom source told me, “Without Tracy, there is no climate unit.”

Covering Tracy’s firing honestly left me pretty frustrated because the fact is we simply cannot afford to lose more journalists like her. As climate change accelerates and polluters spend billions to delay action so they can profit, 2e need more reporters asking hard questions, following the money, and explaining the science in ways ordinary people can actually understand.

But here’s the good news. Turns out my worry was short-lived, because a few weeks later, Tracy reached out to me and said:

Tracy Wholf: Hey, Emily, have you ever thought of starting a podcast?

Emily Atkin: This is Heated, a podcast dedicated to covering climate change, whether the billionaire-owned media class likes it or not. I’m your host, Emily Atkin.

Tracy Wholf: And I’m her producer, Tracy Wholf.

Emily Atkin: On this show, we’ll break down the most urgent and growing climate threats, shine a light on the powerful interests pushing delay, and challenge misinformation head on.

Tracy Wholf: We’ll also feature conversations with scientists, policymakers, activists, and journalists working on the front lines of the climate story.

Emily Atkin: Our goal is to provide you a truly independent, unbought source of information about climate change, pollution and environmental harms.

Tracy Wholf: We have no corporate sponsors, no billionaire owners, and we take no nonprofit money. Our only source of revenue is you, our audience.

Emily Atkin: Today’s episode is just a little table setter to introduce you to me and Tracy so you can learn a little more about our histories and decide whether we’re people you want to trust on this topic. So let’s get into it.

Tracy, why don’t you tell the people a little about how you became a reporter? Like what made you want to do this job?

Tracy Wholf: Well, it was definitely for the steady income and the work-life balance.

Emily Atkin: For sure. Oy vey.

Tracy Wholf: Hilariously, so journalism was actually a second career for me. I originally went to undergrad and was a theater major. And I spent the first 10 years of my adult life performing, which is also a roller coaster of unemployment and low paychecks.

So I thought, hey, why not like go back to school, get my master’s in journalism and go into that?

Emily Atkin: So you weren’t like, let’s go into finance.

Tracy Wholf: No, I didn’t take that advice, right? But it was funny. My first job in journalism, I actually worked for Dan Rather on a show called Dan Rather Reports. I was covering the 2012 Republican primary down in Florida, and I had picked up the Orlando Sentinel newspaper on my way to like, Mitt Romney spaghetti dinner. hell yeah.

And there was a story at the very bottom of the front page that said pythons, which are invasive species in the Everglades, were eating native mammals to the point of extinction. And it just kind of blew my mind. And so I took the newspaper back to my executive producer when I was back in the office in New York a few days later. I showed it to him, and he was like, you should go back. You should go on a python hunt. And I thought, OK, why not?

Yeah, we went down and we did a python hunt. And this was back before, like now they do python hunts every year to try to control the species. And, you all these hunters come out and try to catch as many pythons as they can. But back then there were like two guys that did this. And so I went into the Everglades with one of them and we walked around and around and around. And finally, at like the last hour of our hike, we found this nine foot female who was like hidden in the grass. And he just like walked over and like, you know, grabbed it with his hand.

And we captured it, and a few weeks later we found out through necropsy that she had 19 eggs inside of her. And that’s how I got into environmental journalism. From there I went to work for PBS News Hour Weekend, which rested soul, also just ceased production fairly recently. And then I moved to National Geographic and I did a really cool documentary series called Years of Living Dangerously. And I went to the Middle East with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I went to China with Sigourney Weaver and looked at climate change issues.

And then Donald Trump got elected in 2016 and I was like, woo, need to maybe take a pause here for a hot second. And I went to ESPN and was doing some investigative reporting with them for a couple of years. But towards the end of my tenure at ESPN, was still really itching to do climate journalism. And then eventually, because Joe Biden got elected, there was a lot of interest in talking about climate policy. A lot of the networks wanted to cover climate change again. So I went over to ABC News to launch the climate unit and then eventually moved to CBS.

And then you told what happened, so here I am with you.

Emily Atkin: That’s so cool, though. I mean, you’ve had such a cool career in climate environmental journalism since you started. I mean, what made you want to stay in the environmental and climate space, even though you were covering Mitt Romney?

Tracy Wholf: Yeah. I mean, I think what happens when you start to cover climate and the environment is you really start to understand what’s going on in the natural world around us. And I think it’s just really hard to look away, right?

When I took my little break to go to ESPN, I was really excited to cover sports. But even when I was at ESPN, I took that job because I wanted to cover really hard topics through the lens of sports. And so I eventually started covering climate change through the lens of sports. It’s such a good topic to focus on climate. There’s so many climate angles and sports stories. so climate change is a beat in the newsroom that really infects so many other topics, right? Like it’s a business story. It’s a national security story. And so I just really found that I was able to cover climate change, but also cover a lot of other topics that were really interesting to me.

But I was never able to ignore what was going on in the climate because it just had so many dire consequences. But I always did climate through television, video.

You, on the other hand, took a more traditional route. So how did you get into it?

Emily Atkin: Yeah, well, I always wanted to be a journalist since I found out that that was a job that you could do.

Which actually was like not until I was 18 or 19 years old. For some reason, it just never occurred to me that that was a job you could do until I took a journalism 101 class. And this is really embarrassing, but I’ll just tell you. When I took my journalism, my first journalism class in college, I was like a freshman in college. I didn’t know what I was signing up for. I thought it was like a class that you took on how to write a journal. I literally did not know that journalists, like maybe like a creative writing class or whatever. I really did not know.

I was just like a college student, like, whatever, I’ll sign up for anything. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. And I took this class and the professor was this former reporter for the Staten Island advance. And he was just your stereotypical old school reporter who had this fierce love of the First Amendment and what journalism’s role in society was. Preserving democracy, you can’t have a functioning democracy without a free press. That’s why the founders wrote it into the Constitution, because they understood that good information was fundamental to a functioning democracy. And as a journalist, it is your role, your primary role to protect democracy through telling the truth. And I just fell in love with it immediately. And it was sort of like, it was like it snapped in my head. I was like, I’m never doing anything else.

And something about me is thatwhen I get really determined that I’m gonna do something, you actually can’t convince me that I’m gonna do anything else. People would be like, what’s your plan B if journalism doesn’t work out? Journalism, famously stable job industry. I was like, there is no plan B. It will work out for me. So I just loved the idea that I could help people parse fact from fiction. I could hold power to account. And I would by extension be performing a public service.

But I will say I never saw myself as a climate reporter. I wanted to be a politics reporter, a campaign reporter. But it turns out it’s really hard to get a job as a political reporter, especially when you’re right out of college.

Tracy Wholf: It’s a little competitive.

Emily Atkin: Yeah. It’s the most competitive job you can get, at least in this space. And so I applied to a climate reporting position at this place called ThinkProgress. I was working at a legal trade publication called Law 360. I applied to this climate reporting position thinking that the pool of applicants would not be as big and I could use that to get into a bigger newsroom, a more public facing newsroom and then use that to inform my future political coverage, like sell myself to another newsroom.

So that’s what happened. I was on the climate desk at ThinkProgress for three years. I was a climate reporter. I got promoted to climate editor and then I went to my editor and I was like, hey, I would really like to switch desks and I got to do that. So I was covered the 2016 presidential election, traveled the country covering all these candidates. There was like a million Republican candidates in the field at the time, Bernie and Hillary too, on the Democratic side. And then I switched over to a political reporting job at Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is actually a conservative leaning television conglomerate. But also I was covering politics and also I would try to cover climate change there as well.

But I sort of over time began to realize that like political reporting as a job was not what I always dreamed it to be. It was kind of a grind that didn’t seem to have much of a purpose because the media environment was so saturated. I didn’t really feel like there was a huge need for me. And also I felt like a lot of the stories were so like only relevant for less than 24 hours, not really.

I don’t know, not really helping people. And I started to realize that the climate story was actually far more interesting, far more necessary. I realized that it was everything I wanted to do, everything I was passionate about, why I got into this job in the first place. Like, educating people about a complex problem. You’re giving voice to voiceless victims. And you’re shining light on powerful people, the perpetrators of this crisis, who profit from it.

So it’s the ultimate accountability journalism story. And so was like, all right, Sinclair Broadcast Group isn’t going to give me the bandwidth to do this. No? You don’t think? Why? Story for another time. But so then I went, I applied for another job and I got a job at the New Republic where I covered climate change for another three years before I started my own publication, Heated, which this is an extension of that. So. Yeah.

But it’s interesting and I’m so happy to be doing this with you because one of the things I learned at Sinclair and then one of the things that I’ve been covering a lot at Heated is this lack of climate coverage on network news, on television news, where so many people get their news. Maybe you could give us some insight into why we don’t see climate on TV very much.

Tracy Wholf: Well, I think you used to see it a lot. Like, for example, when I first got to ABC News in the fall of 2021, the World News Tonight broadcast live from Glasgow from the COP that year. That’s huge. Like David Muir was at the COP to talk about climate policy on the international stage. So there was a point where climate was covered really heavily by the networks. There were really robust reporting teams at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN.

But in talking to lot of executives in network news, they really saw climate journalism as a public service, something that, you know, it checked a really nice box. They felt like it was something that the public needed. I would say there’s a lot of research out there that shows that audiences really want climate reporting, especially in the news. But I think what we’ve started to see lately is there has been a dip in that coverage, especially as with this new Trump administration coming in.

We’ve just seen corporations really change their tone on you know, ESG environment, their sustainability goals. And so I think you started to see that in the media landscape too. And so unfortunately, you know, network news is undergoing a digital transformation that’s really changing the budgets of newsrooms. And so one of the first things to go are those climate teams.

Also climate journalism on TV, it’s really hard. You have to have really strong visuals. And so that can be expensive depending on where those visuals are. I mean, the number of times I would have reporters come into my office and be like, “Hey, I’ve got a pitch to go to Alaska.” I’d be like, can you put another dollar in my pitch jar? Because everyone wanted to go to Alaska to do stories. And I get it. It’s a super critical place to do climate reporting. But it’s also really expensive. It’s really hard to get to. It’s really dangerous, depending on the time of year that you want to go there. But more importantly, in an evening news situation, there’s

Not even 30 minutes that we need to fill with the news. That’s not a lot of time. And so when you think of, especially today, just the fire hose of stories that are happening, sometimes it’s really hard for climate stories to rise, as we would say in print, above the fold or rise to the top of the rundown in broadcast because there’s just so many other things that feels like they need to be reported on in that very short amount of time.

So climate journalism is kind of a slow burn sometimes. It’s not always breaking news when there’s big hurricanes, big fires. Yes, we make those connections there. And that was something that we were always trying to elevate and do. But it just became harder. It became a lot harder. And on some level, I understand the pressure that newsrooms are under to deliver the most topical stories under tight budgets. But it’s really a shame because it’s still a really critical, valuable story that deserves reporting, that needs that accountability. And I’m hopeful that that’s something that we can do here.

Emily Atkin: Me too. I mean, one of the things that frustrates me about this whole thing is that I feel, tell me if you think I’m wrong about this, but I feel like the climate story is much easier to cover and justify as one of those harder hitting, fast moving stories if you are willing to approach it as an accountability story. If you’re willing to approach it as a story of powerful people taking advantage of powerless people.

If you’re willing to call out the fact that climate change is not bad because we’re all taking too many individual flights, no, it’s bad because corporations have poured billions of dollars into delay despite knowing the consequences of what they’re doing. If you’re willing to cover it like that, it’s not that hard to cover. I don’t think.

But I feel a reluctance in a lot of mainstream media to cover it that way, or at least cover it that way all the time, because they don’t want to be seen as taking a side, as being an activist. That’s at least what I’ve seen. And that’s sort of why I went on my own.

Tracy Wholf: Right. Well, I think there’s always been a misconception that climate journalism is a form of activism. And I would argue it’s absolutely not. Like, we cover climate the same way a crime reporter would cover gun policies, right? And the reality is, if you want less deaths from guns, then maybe you need to limit the access to guns. That’s not taking an activist stance. It’s showing you there’s a problem and a solution, and this is the reality.

I think we do the same thing as climate journalists. There’s a problem. There’s a very obvious solution. Here is what’s preventing that solution from becoming a reality. And we’re going to explain to you why. And we’re also going to talk to you about why this isn’t in the best interest of certain businesses.

I think a big challenge that you and I have always had in our careers is trying to prove to people, I am not an activist. I am not a tree hugger. We really are trying to come at these stories from a very critical lens, from ethics and standards of journalism to bring you the reporting.

Emily Atkin: Yeah, absolutely. I hear myself sometimes talking about climate change and talking about how policy to reduce carbon in a systemic way is the only way to solve this problem. And I hear myself and I’m like, am I being an activist right now? Am I being annoying? And I’m like, no, this is what the research shows. This is my job as a journalist, you know?

And I really want to illustrate those systemic drivers of environmental harms on real people, not just limited to climate change, with this show. As a journalist, that’s like what I’m really passionate about doing. Because of course, we all consume energy. We all have a role to play in driving this crisis, but we as individual people do not set energy policy. There are way more powerful forces at work driving the climate crisis and people deserve to know about them.

Tracy Wholf: Yeah. I mean, what you and I aim to do with this podcast is we will bring on the best guests to the show that sit in these spaces where change is happening. We’re going to continue to lean on the reporting that you’ve done, that I’ve done in our careers. We will break news. We will analyze it.

And we really want to see Heated in other spaces, not just on Substack, but beyond. Because I think it’s really important at this time, we shouldn’t be diminishing climate journalism. We should really be elevating it and pushing it because it’s more critical now than ever.

Emily Atkin: Yeah. I’m really excited about doing this with you. I’m really excited about some of the episodes and interviews that we have planned.

So if this sounds like something that you, dear listener, would be interested in, you can follow Heated on YouTube or really wherever you get podcasts will be. But you can find our full reporting, our companion writing and community discussions on Substack, which is where we’ll be the most. So search Heated and Substack, or you can just type heated.world into the search bar.

We’re really excited and see you soon.

On Monday, The Supreme Court announced it will hear a case about the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for climate change.

This is huge news for people who care about holding polluters accountable. The high court’s eventual decision could influence the future of dozens of lawsuits nationwide accusing oil, gas and coal companies of lying to the public about the risks of their products, and seeking financial compensation for climate disasters.

If you want a breakdown of the specific case the Court agreed to review, and what the companies are trying to accomplish procedurally, I recommend reading this overview by Emily Sanders for ExxonKnews. Sanders has also done a lot of great work tracing how the oil industry is funding other efforts to kill climate cases.

But today, I want to focus on something else: the fact that Justice Samuel Alito has not recused himself from the case, despite having reported significant financial investments in the fossil fuel industry.

The conflict of interest is frankly astonishing, and I genuinely do not understand why it isn’t a bigger story.

A brazen conflict of interest

Justice Alito’s most recent financial disclosure reports ownership of 28 individual stocks—the most, by far, of any Supreme Court justice. Altogether, Alito’s individual stock investments are valued at approximately $645,000.

(Note: federal disclosure forms report assets in broad value ranges—for example, “$15,001–$50,000”—rather than exact amounts. So, to estimate totals, I used the midpoint of each range. Example: For holdings listed as “$15,000 or less,” I used $7,500. For holdings listed as $15,001–$50,000, I used $32,500).

Of that $645,000 portfolio, roughly $185,000 is invested in eight companies whose core business is fossil fuel extraction, refining, coal production, or fossil-fuel-powered utilities. That means nearly 30 percent of Alito’s individual stock portfolio is directly tied to the fossil fuel industry.

Put another way: 8 of the 28 companies Alito personally invests in—more than one-quarter—are fossil fuel or fossil-fuel-dependent companies.

Here’s the breakdown of Alito’s fossil fuel investments:

• $15,001 to $50,000 in Phillips 66, a major oil refining and midstream company and named defendant in several state climate liability lawsuits.

• $15,000 or less in ConocoPhillips, a major U.S. oil and gas exploration and production company and named defendant in several state climate liability lawsuits.

• $15,001 to $50,000 in OGE Energy, a holding company for Oklahoma Gas & Electric, which generates electricity largely from natural gas and other fossil fuels.

• $15,000 or less in Woodside Energy Group, one of Australia’s largest oil and liquefied natural gas producers.

• $15,000 or less in AES Corporation, a power generation company that operates natural gas and coal-fired plants.

• $15,001 to $50,000 in Black Hills Corporation, utility that distributes natural gas, with a significant portion of its power supply coming from fossil fuels.

• $15,001 to $50,000 in Fortis Inc, a utility holding company that owns electric and gas utilities.

• $15,001 to $50,000 in BHP Biliton PLC ADR, a global mining giant that produces metallurgical coal used in steelmaking.

I will also note that I did not include any of Alito’s investments in major petrochemical manufacturers on this list, even though those companies rely heavily on petroleum and natural gas to make plastics, chemicals, and agricultural products.

Alito also has investments in Dupont, Dow, and Corteva.

Why Alito’s fossil fuel investments matter

The petitioners in the climate case before the Supreme Court are Exxon and Suncor Energy. Alito is not personally invested in either of those companies, which is perhaps why he hasn’t recused himself, as he has in other cases involving the fossil fuel industry.

But the Supreme Court’s decision in this case won’t just affect Exxon and Suncor—it will affect the entire fossil fuel industry. That’s not even according to me; it’s according to the American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil and gas trade association, which filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court for this case.

In their brief, API was clear:

• “This case will have broad implications for the entire petroleum and natural-gas industry.

• ”If Respondents’ claims were to succeed, the results would be disastrous … for the energy industry.”

• ”Ad hoc sanctioning and regulation of energy companies will destabilize the whole sector.”

In addition, Alito holds stock in two companies that are consistently getting sued over climate change in state court. Phillips 66 and ConocoPhillips are both plaintiffs in several climate liability lawsuits, including ones filed by New Jersey, California, and Chicago.

These are the exact type of lawsuits that will be affected by the Supreme Court’s decision. And they’re the reason why Alito should recuse himself from this case.

The Supreme Court is supposed to be the last line of defense against the corrupting influence of money in public life. But when a justice holds hundreds of thousands of dollars in the very industry whose fate he’s being asked to decide, that defense entirely disappears.

Recusal exists precisely for moments like this. The ethical path is clear. The question is whether anyone with power will say so out loud.

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Correction: A previous version of this story listed Alito’s average investments in fossil fuels as $197,500. The correct number is $185,000.

Are you a parent navigating a climate-changed world with children? The 19th’s climate reporter Jessica Kutz wants to hear from you.

From school closures due to extreme weather, to more frequent disasters that uproot family life, to rising health concerns, climate change is affecting so many aspects of parenting. Kutz wants to know: How is it affecting you and your family?

If you have 30 minutes to connect with Jessica during a one-on-one Zoom or phone call, please complete this short form. She’ll be in touch with more details!

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The Trump administration is on the verge of stripping away the federal government’s power to regulate climate pollution—no matter how severe the consequences become.

On Thursday, the EPA is expected to rescind the endangerment finding, the federal government’s landmark conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger human life and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The move would be one of the largest deregulatory actions in American history.

While environmental groups will undoubtedly sue, they’ll have their work cut out for them. If even one of the EPA’s many legal arguments hold up in court, those precedents could restrict future presidential administrations from trying to regulate planet-warming emissions. Fossil fuel companies, power plants, and other major emitters could effectively be free to pollute as much as they want—forever.

You might think that major oil companies would be thrilled about this. After all, the industry’s most powerful lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, coordinated a multi-industry campaign against the federal regulation of greenhouse gases beginning in the 1990s, tried to block the endangerment finding before EPA even finalized it in 2009, and then spent years attacking it in court.

But it turns out, API isn’t celebrating. Instead, the trade group—one of the most influential and well-organized lobbying forces in the world—is now hedging, backtracking, and sending mixed signals about whether it wants the endangerment finding rescinded.

The reason is simple: oil corporations have realized that repealing the endangerment finding could backfire, leaving them more vulnerable to accountability than ever before.

Big Oil’s legal shield is cracking

Over the past decade, the fossil fuel industry has faced a growing avalanche of lawsuits and state laws aimed at forcing them to pay for their role in driving climate chaos.

Specifically, dozens of active lawsuits now accuse big oil companies of deceiving the public about climate change while knowingly fueling it—and then sticking taxpayers with the bill for the damage. At the same time, states like Vermont and New York have passed climate “superfund” laws that force major fossil fuel companies to pay into state-run funds to help cover the costs of climate disasters.

These efforts have seriously rattled API and many of its corporate members, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP. At a recent Federalist Society event, West Virginia attorney general John McCuskey—one of the oil and gas industry’s staunchest allies—called them an “industry-destroying problem.”

“There will be no more oil industries, there will be no more coal industries, there will be no more natural gas industries,” he said. “If we lose one, we lose them all.”

But the oil industry has so far been successful in fighting most of these efforts, in part because of the endangerment finding. A critical part of their legal defense has been that, because the federal government already regulates greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, any claims under state law are preempted. Therefore, they say state and local lawsuits should be thrown out of court, and state laws should be struck down.

That defense is now being threatened by the Trump EPA’s actions. If the administration’s final rule says the Clean Air Act doesn’t give EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases, then it will be considerably more difficult for Big Oil to contend state efforts are federally preempted.

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API’s flip-flopping

This likely explains why, this past September, API came out against a key element of the Trump administration’s proposal to repeal the endangerment finding—even though API itself had pushed the same argument for more than a decade.

In a regulatory comment, the trade group said that it “believes EPA has authority to regulate GHGs under the CAA.” API similarly warned the EPA not to try overturning Massachusetts v. EPA—the landmark ruling that affirmed the EPA’s authority.

To be clear, API did not suddenly become a climate champion. The rest of its comment encouraged EPA to narrow and weaken the endangerment finding to the point where it would become effectively useless as a tool for reducing emissions, maintaining only the guise of regulation.

But it was a significant about-face for an organization that, before its members started feeling threatened by climate liability lawsuits, argued that EPA didn’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at all under the Clean Air Act.

Then, just weeks ago, API reversed course yet again.

On January 12, only days after EPA sent its endangerment finding rule to the White House for review, API president Mike Sommers told reporters that the trade group supports the agency’s repeal of the endangerment finding for motor vehicles—but not for stationary sources, like oil and gas facilities.

In other words, the major oil companies want to have it both ways: they’d like to repeal climate regulations on cars so gas demand never declines, but preserve enough climate regulation so they can defend themselves in court.

But here’s the problem: the endangerment finding underpins regulations on cars and trucks and regulations on power plants and oil and gas facilities. The EPA didn’t do separate analyses. Greenhouse gases pose the same risks, no matter their source. If the endangerment finding falls for mobile sources, there’s no clear basis for preserving it for other sources.

It’s difficult to say whether API’s latest flip-flop represents its true preference or whether it’s an attempt to align itself with the Trump administration, which appears determined to wipe out the endangerment finding. The trade group may have wanted a scalpel, but it appears willing to accept a sledgehammer.

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The next fight: blocking climate liability

If the Trump administration succeeds in wiping out the endangerment finding, the oil industry’s next priority is clear: protecting itself from climate liability.

That’s why API and its allies are now focused on other ways to do that.

This past October, House Republicans submitted an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to block cities and states from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. In December, EPA removed a peer-reviewed model for estimating climate damages called the Framework for Evaluating Damages and Impacts, or FrEDI, from its website without explanation. This was exactly the sort of tool cities and states could use to inform climate laws.

And in January, Republican state lawmakers began a concerted legislative push to prohibit state climate lawsuits against the oil and gas industry.

All of this aligns with API’s 2026 agenda, which includes a top priority of stopping what it calls “extreme climate liability policy.”

Still, Pat Parenteau, an emeritus law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School who has followed the climate lawsuits closely, believes that a case will eventually break through.

“The oil companies are undoubtedly accountable for the damage being done. And there will be a day of reckoning,” he said. “But only if the states that are bringing these cases have the wherewithal, the capacity, and the political determination to see them through, no matter how long it takes.”

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Further reading

• Trump EPA to take its biggest swing yet against climate change rules. (Politico)

  EPA’s expected move has been hailed by conservatives who have long denied that human activity has played a large role in causing increasingly extreme weather or that climate change represents a global threat.

  
  “It’s a bright new world. It’s much brighter than it was a year ago,” said Myron Ebell, who ran EPA’s transition team for Trump’s first term and has been working to repeal the finding since the ink was still wet.

• Trump administration decision to deny the science of climate change puts communities at increased risk. (Appalachian Voices)

  “The people of Appalachia are all too familiar with the devastating effects of flooding and other natural disasters that have been made worse by a rapidly warming planet,” said North Carolina Program Manager Ridge Graham. “The EPA’s decision to abandon its responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases ignores the severe dangers our communities face and the economic benefits of responsibly preparing for a changing world.”

• The EPA is barreling toward a Supreme Court Showdown. (New York Times)

  “The goal is not just to rescind the endangerment finding, it’s to overturn Massachusetts v. E.P.A. and make sure this cannot come back, unless Congress decides to get involved,” said Steven J. Milloy, the founder of a website that has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change. “Anything else is not good enough.”

In other news…

• Climate change is erased from a manual for federal judges. (New York Times)

  In a new attack on the science of climate change, a federal agency has stripped a chapter on global warming from a manual written to help judges understand important scientific questions they may face in their courtrooms.
  

  The chapter was deleted after a group of Republican state attorneys general complained about it to the Federal Judicial Center, a government agency that provides resources to judges. In recent years, judges in the United States have had to contend with a widening array of cases related to climate change, putting jurists in the position of having to understand the complexities of the science and research behind its causes and effects.

• Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show had a big message about Puerto Rico’s grid. (Canary Media)

  Bad Bunny highlights the ailing grid in his 2022 song ​“El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), which he sang yesterday from a sparking utility pole in a show seen by perhaps 135 million viewers.
  

  Despite billions of federal recovery dollars and post-hurricane repairs, Puerto Rico’s 3.2 million residents continue to endure widespread disruptions, electrical surges, and soaring electricity rates — even on storm-free days. Utility customers in Puerto Rico experienced an average of 27 hours of power grid interruptions not related to major events like hurricanes per year between 2021 and 2024. By contrast, people living on the U.S. mainland lacked power for an average of just two hours per year, according to federal data.
  

  Yet rather than invest in Puerto Rico’s recovery, the Trump administration is clawing back key federal funding meant to modernize and decarbonize the territory’s electricity system.

In last week’s newsletter, I struggled with a question: How are we supposed to keep caring about climate change while so much acute state violence is unfolding before our eyes?

I was able to eke out a few answers, and they seemed to really strike a chord with a lot of you. The post reached about 40 percent more readers than my pieces usually do, and many of you reached out to me directly, saying how helpful it was in motivating you to get back to climate and environmental work.

But a few days later, while preparing for an hour-long radio conversation about the piece, I realized something important: My original piece actually understated the case for keeping our eyes fixed on climate change, pollution, and the corporations fueling it during this political moment.

On further reflection, I think paying attention to polluters may be one of the best ways to understand what’s currently happening in the United States. Here are a few of the connections I didn’t fully spell out the first time.

Authoritarianism is fueled by fossil fuel dollars

I’m almost embarrassed to have not included this point in round one. Because the fact is, so many of the horrors we’re witnessing today were brought to us directly by Big Oil.

The fossil fuel industry was one of the largest corporate backers of Donald Trump’s return to power, giving at least $75 million to his campaign and affiliated PACs, and nearly $20 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Oil and gas companies were also some of the biggest donors to Republicans in 2022 and 2024, helping secure the GOP majority in both houses.

That money helped entrench a political movement openly hostile to democratic norms. This was not an accident. Authoritarians are better for fossil fuel business. If governments actually answered to the public, the transition away toward renewables would likely move much faster.

This is why the demand that climate activists “stay in their lane” has always rung hollow to me. The fossil fuel industry isn’t staying in its lane. It’s actively underwriting democratic decay.

Interestingly, research shows that countries become significantly more democratic when oil production starts to decline. So when we talk about transitioning toward renewable energy, we’re not just talking about a climate solution. We’re talking about a potential path toward healing democracy as well.

Democracy is climate infrastructure

Many climate groups already understand the point I just laid out above: you can’t regulate polluters in an authoritarian state. That’s why so many climate organizations, like the Climate Justice Alliance and Sunrise Movement, are now deeply engaged in showing up to anti-ICE protests.

E&E News reported earlier this month:

The youth-led climate organization the Sunrise Movement has been organizing “Wide Awake” protests outside hotels hosting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in the Minneapolis region. Noisy demonstrators wielding signs, makeshift drums and sometimes saxophones show up outside hotels between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., hoping to make nights miserable for ICE agents and the hotels housing them.

Some people think these groups are abandoning climate goals by doing this. They’re not. They’re defending the conditions that make climate action possible.

Big Oil is funding anti-protest laws nationwide

The legal tools now being used to crack down on anti-ICE dissent didn’t appear out of nowhere. Many were built to protect fossil fuel interests.

After the 2016-2017 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, oil and gas companies and their allies pushed state laws that sharply increased penalties for protests near “critical infrastructure” like pipelines and refineries. These laws were written broadly, expanding felony definitions and criminalizing actions as minor as being present near sites deemed essential. Today, they cover roughly 60 percent of U.S. oil and gas operations.

But these laws don’t stay confined to fossil fuel projects. Because “critical infrastructure” often includes transportation hubs, utilities, and government facilities, the same statutes can be used against other movements the state wants to suppress—including protests against immigration enforcement. The legal architecture designed to silence pipeline opponents is now part of a general crackdown on dissent.

This is why paying attention to polluters is essential in this moment. Fossil fuel companies didn’t just buy protection for pipelines. They helped build the framework now being used to narrow who gets to protest at all.

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Environmentalists have long been called “domestic terrorists”

Trump administration officials have recently taken to using the language of “domestic terrorism” to describe people protesting immigration enforcement, including legal observers and journalists.

That tactic didn’t appear out of nowhere. In many cases, it was rehearsed on environmental movements.

I saw this up close while reporting in northern Minnesota during protests against the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in 2021. Indigenous water protectors were surveilled, harassed, criminalized, and framed as threats to public safety. Law enforcement agencies used counterterrorism language to describe people trying to stop a pipeline from crossing treaty-protected land. We later found out that Enbridge had paid local police departments millions of dollars to carry out this repression.

This has happened before. During protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline , Indigenous water protectors were described as “insurgents” and “jihadists.” More recently, in 2023 and 2024, Georgia prosecutors charged protesters opposing the construction of a police training facility known as “Cop City” under the state’s domestic terrorism statute, including individuals accused of nonviolent acts.

Say it again: climate change is state violence

As Amitav Ghosh documents in The Nutmeg’s Curse, environmental destruction has long been used as a more palatable way to achieve the same ends as overt killing, by destroying the conditions people need to survive, and then calling the outcome inevitable or natural.

That logic is still with us. When an administration dismantles a climate or environmental regulation, it does so with a clear understanding of how many people that action is projected to kill. Every major rule comes with a cost-benefit analysis that explicitly tallies how many lives it is expected to save through fewer heart attacks, asthma deaths, premature births, and heat-related illnesses.

Rolling those rules back is a decision made knowing certain lives will no longer be saved. Which is why it matters that the EPA recently announced it would stop considering the value of human life in these analyses. You don’t remove that column unless you’re trying not to look at it.

Seen this way, the connections stop being theoretical. The same state willing to criminalize dissent, erode democratic safeguards, and look away from violence in the streets is also willing to let people die slowly through pollution and heat—as long as the right industries remain protected.

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Very often, I don’t know how I’m supposed to move forward.

How am I supposed to keep writing about, and caring about, climate change and pollution and government capture by Big Oil, when the government is executing people in broad daylight? How am I supposed to watch the country descend into full-throated fascism, and then log on to my computer and say: anyway, about those methane regulations?

This is something I’ve struggled with a lot over the last few years. Watching state-sponsored terror campaigns, genocide, famine, hate crimes, and then opening my laptop and returning to the climate beat. My job asks me to direct your attention toward the horizon. But my own eyes are fixed on the acute violence happening right in front of me.

In these moments, I find I need to hype myself up, to talk myself into continuing, to tell myself that continuing to pay attention to climate change is not insensitive or irresponsible, but necessary. I thought it might be helpful this time to share with you some of the things I’ve been repeating to myself this weekend.

Alex Pretti cared about this work

This isn’t the most relevant for every situation but it’s what’s helping me the most tonight, as I ask myself how to return to work tomorrow. On Saturday, the Associated Press reported:

Pretti’s mother said her son cared immensely about the direction the county was headed, especially the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations.

“He hated that, you know, people were just trashing the land,” Susan Pretti said. “He was an outdoorsman. He took his dog everywhere he went. You know, he loved this country, but he hated what people were doing to it.”

If Pretti could care about two things at once, so can I.

Climate change is state violence, too

When I get into these funks, it’s like I start believing that climate change is something separate from state violence—and it’s not.

The climate chaos we’re experiencing now, and what we will continue to experience, is a direct, conscious choice by the state to allow certain people to die. It kills through heatwaves, asthma, hunger, and displacement instead of bullets and batons, but the logic behind both is identical: certain people, mostly brown, can be sacrificed.

I always need to remind myself that these are not two separate emergencies competing for attention, but one story unfolding on different timelines. That helps reignite the fire to continue.

Immigrant rights depend on climate justice

While doomscrolling this weekend, I came across a video of birds flying south for the winter, with a text overlay that said “migration is an earth right.” It had more than 900,000 likes.

That simple 20-second clip was powerful to me, not just because of the actual message of the video—that immigration is natural, that borders are manmade—but because of how many people seemed to understand that connection.

But while immigration is natural, the climate crisis is not. This conscious decision by powerful governments and polluters is increasingly forcing people from their homes, and into the horrific violence we’re witnessing today.

Scientists and migration researchers are increasingly clear: climate-fueled droughts extreme weather, and environmental degradation are already contributing to migration pressures around the world. The horrors we’re seeing from ICE now are just a glimpse of the violence that could unfold as climate change worsens, and those migration pressures increase. Climate change is also driving a rise in eco-fascist rhetoric, wherein conservatives argue for increased border militarization to prevent brown people from further bespoiling the pristine U.S. environment.

These stories aren’t distractions from the current political moment. They’re a necessary complement.

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The fascists want us to stop paying attention to climate

I’m a primarily spite-motivated person, so this one is perhaps my most-repeated mantra. One of the oldest tricks of authoritarians is to shock and overwhelm people until they feel exactly the way I was feeling after Pretti’s murder, and until I started writing this newsletter.

Fuck them and fuck that.

It’s also ok to take a little break

But when spite is not enough to get me back on the horse, I always give myself permission to take a break. I’m in this for the long haul. The horrors will be here when I return.

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Anyway, that’s the pep talk I’ve got for myself this weekend. It’s certainly not foolproof, but it’s enough to get me back to work tomorrow.

If you’ve got your own ways of staying upright, I’d genuinely love to hear them. How are you staying present, or angry, or compassionate, or awake? What are the mantras or rituals or distractions or coping mechanisms that work for you?

Let me know. None of us get through this by ourselves.

And when all else fails, bake.

Did you know? Air pollution regulations actually do more harm than good if you ignore all the lives they save.

That sentence sounds deranged because it is. But it’s also the honest-to-God logic behind the Trump administration’s new approach to regulating air pollution, which kills more Americans every year than car accidents.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the EPA plans to judge all future air pollution rules solely by their costs to industry—not by the number of hospitalizations, chronic illnesses, and deaths they prevent. Maxine Joselow reports:

Under President Trump, the EPA plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, when regulating industry, according to internal agency emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times. …

The change could make it easier to repeal limits on these pollutants from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country, the emails and documents show. That would most likely lower costs for companies while resulting in dirtier air.

“Dirtier air” may sound dangerous. But if you don’t acknowledge what it actually does to people, it’s really nothing to worry about—at least according to Trump’s EPA.

The Trump administration insists this is not what’s happening. Carolyn Holran, an EPA spokeswoman, told the Times in an email that the agency is still weighing the health effects of PM2.5 and ozone; it just won’t be assigning them a dollar value in cost-benefit analyses. “Not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact,” she said.

But functionally, that’s exactly what it equals. In regulatory cost-benefit analysis, monetization is how harms are weighed, compared, and justified. If the EPA refuses to assign a dollar value to the illnesses and deaths caused by air pollution, those harms cannot influence the outcome of the rule. And if they cannot influence the outcome, they may as well not exist for policy purposes.

Make no mistake: this is air pollution denial, a phenomenon the Trump administration has been advancing since 2017. It’s taken different forms over the years: Attacking the science linking particulate pollution to premature death, minimizing the harms, arguing the evidence was too uncertain to justify federal policy. But the goal was always the same: to stop regulatory agencies from treating air pollution as a public health problem. The Trump EPA has now reached that endpoint.

The first casualty: nitrogen oxide limits for gas plants

The EPA’s new approach to air pollution regulations is already being used to justify allowing the fossil fuel industry to pollute more.

In 2024, the Biden EPA proposed strict limits on nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions from new gas-fired power plants. To justify the rule, Biden’s EPA estimated that reducing this pollution would save anywhere from $27 million to $92 million per year in avoided doctor visits, hospitalizations, and deaths. (Nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide form PM2.5 and ozone—the main ingredients of smog—which damage lungs, hearts, and brains).

Trump’s EPA is, of course, trying to weaken this rule. And on Monday, the Trump EPA posted a cost-benefit analysis of its proposal. Instead of updating the math on how many illnesses and deaths the rule would prevent (which would have been alarming, because it would have been a lot less) the agency just… did not count those health benefits at all. It only counted how much the new rule would cost the fossil fuel industry. Turns out, it was a lot less!

The EPA says it’s doing this because they disagree with the Biden administration’s methodology for calculating the health benefits of reducing deadly air pollutants. And this is, for the record, a longstanding partisan fight. For decades, Republicans have argued that Democrats overvalue health benefits to justify regulation, while Democrats have argued that Republicans undervalue health benefits to make regulation look unnecessary.

But even amid those fights, both sides have always agreed that the EPA has to make some calculation of health benefits—because the agency’s mission is literally to “protect human health and the environment.” In the past, there has had to be some semblance of adhering to that mission, no matter which party held power.

That is what makes the Trump administration’s approach so stark. Rather than argue over how to calculate the health benefits of reducing pollution, it has chosen not to calculate them at all. In a way, it’s almost refreshing; at least they’re not pretending the EPA works for anyone but the industries who funded Trump’s campaign.

But mostly, it’s horrifying. Air pollution causes more than 200,000 early deaths each year in America. It drives up rates of asthma, heart disease, and stroke. It disproportionately harms children, low-income communities, and communities of color—the people who have the least structural power to fight the industries doing the polluting.

Those harms remain real whether or not the EPA bothers to count them. And the decision to stop counting them tells you everything you need to know about who is in charge.

But hey, at least we’re frying french fries in beef tallow again.

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If a nation’s diet requires ecological destruction to sustain it, can it really be called healthy?

There was a time when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have said no. Before he became the nation’s top health official, Kennedy built his career arguing that human health and environmental health were inseparable—that pollution in rivers became pollution in bodies, and that climate change itself was a public health emergency driven by industrial systems. His premise was simple: when the ecosystems that sustain life become unstable, human health becomes unstable too.

But in office, Kennedy has begun governing as if health begins and ends inside the human body. Nowhere is that clearer than in the new federal food pyramid his department unveiled this week—an inverted version of the original triangle that encourages beef and dairy consumption on nutritional grounds while ignoring the deeply harmful environmental systems required to produce those foods on an industrial scale.

The new inverted food pyramid isn’t merely a poster meant to guide individual choices. It is a set of policy guidelines that directs billions of public dollars toward specific foods, and the agricultural system that supplies them. It determines what food gets bought for school meals, child-care centers, senior-meal programs, and WIC food packages. It guides what foods the government buys for the military and federal cafeterias. It determines how SNAP educates low-income families about “healthy choices.”

In other words, when federal nutrition guidelines shift, the food system shifts with them. And with this new food pyramid, the food system will shift toward producing a lot more beef and dairy—the most resource-intensive and climate-polluting foods we produce at scale.

Americans already eat far more beef and dairy than most of the world. The average American consumes roughly 57 pounds of beef a year—nearly three times the global average—and the United States is the largest consumer of dairy on Earth.

The current rate of meat and dairy consumption is already threatening our health—not necessarily through the act of eating it, but through the impacts of producing such massive quantities of it. Industrialized animal agriculture is one of the largest sources of water contamination in the country. It is a massive contributor to drought in the West; the number one reason for Brazilian Amazon deforestation; and responsible for up to 18 percent of global carbon pollution. Our appetite for meat and dairy are so high that, even if fossil fuel emissions were completely stopped today, the world’s current appetite these products could push warming past the catastrophic 2 degrees Celsius threshold.

Now imagine a world that eats even more meat and dairy than today. The result is straightforward: more cattle, more methane, more water use, and more land dedicated to grazing and feed crops. And where does all that land come from? From native grasslands, prairies, and forests, which are some of the most effective carbon sinks on the planet. Converting them to pasture or cropland releases carbon stored in soils and vegetation and prevents those landscapes from absorbing more in the future. Globally, that process, known as land-use change, is already a major driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and deforestation.

The United States plays a central role in that system. Much of the grain that feeds American cattle is grown in the Midwest, where fertilizer runoff contaminates drinking water and fuels the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

These ecological pressures eventually show up as public-health problems. Nitrate contamination in water is linked to increased risks of birth defects and certain cancers. Fertilizer runoff and algae blooms threaten fisheries and coastal food supplies. And the carbon and methane released through land conversion and cattle digestion worsen climate change, one of the greatest health crises of our time.

Some insist this picture changes with grass-fed or “regenerative” beef. And in certain ways, those systems are better: well-managed grazing can improve soil structure and reduce some local pollution. But they cannot solve the basic math. Pastured cattle require far more land per calorie than feedlot cattle. Scaling that model to satisfy higher demand would require converting vast areas of grassland and forest into pasture—land the country does not have without sacrificing carbon sinks and wildlife habitat.

Even if the land existed, the climate math would still be punishing. Cattle belch methane no matter how they are raised, and methane is an extremely potent warming gas. Soil carbon gains from grazing are too modest and too slow to offset the methane produced over an animal’s lifetime. In practice, fully grass-fed beef remains several times more climate-intensive per gram of protein than poultry or legumes. It works at small scales. It does not work as the backbone of a national diet.

This is my biggest problem with the new food pyramid. It treats food as a purely biological input rather than a public ecological choice—as if health exists on a separate plane from the land, water, and climate that make nourishment possible in the first place. Thinking this way may make sense for individual bodies in the short term. But in the long term, and in the aggregate, it’s deeply irresponsible.

You cannot build a healthy society on top of an unhealthy biosphere. The climate, water, soil, and land that produce our food are as important to our health as the food itself. Without them, all our talk of “healthy eating” becomes a kind of denial—pretending we can thrive while the systems that keep us alive break down.

RFK Jr. used to know that. He used to preach it. But somewhere along the way, his environmentalism went out to pasture.

Previously in the RFK Jr. cinematic universe

Today’s article is the latest in my personal, ongoing quest to make people who care about the environment realize that RFK Jr. is not, in fact, Making America Healthy Again. In case you missed my previous dispatches:

• “Make America Healthy Again” is dead. (March 2025)

  Kennedy can remove all the fluoride from all the drinking water systems in America. It’s not going to make up for dismantling the Mercury Air Toxics Standards, which are “critical to protect babies from harmful mercury from coal-fired power plants.”
  

  Kennedy can rescind every approval of every food dye currently backed by the FDA. It’s not going to make up for undoing regulations on car and truck pollution, which will lead to “significantly more toxic air pollution from vehicle exhaust, exacerbating the risks of asthma, lung disease, and heart attacks.”
  
  You can remove all the grains and seed oils you want from a kid’s diet. It doesn’t matter if her water is polluted by industrial agriculture and arsenic-tinged coal waste; if her air is full of tiny soot particles that lodge deep into her circulatory system; and if every environmental group she wants to join to fight it is disbanded because their activities have been defunded and/or criminalized.

• Organic farmers expose RFK Jr.’s delusion. (March 2025)

  Last October, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood in front of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and promised that Donald Trump would reform America’s corporate-controlled, synthetic chemical-laden agricultural system. …
  
  Kennedy was asking people to believe something delusional: that Donald Trump would do something bad for the fossil fuel industry. Industrial agriculture is one of Big Oil’s largest and most lucrative markets. Most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are made from fossil fuels. During the campaign, Trump promised to give the fossil fuel industry anything it wanted in exchange for massive campaign donations—which it gave. So how could Trump possibly “Make America Healthy Again” while committed to a “Drill Baby, Drill” agenda? How does that make any sense?
  
  Obviously it doesn’t. But Kennedy convinced millions it did. And now organic farmers are paying the price.

• RFK Jr. is full of crap. (May 2025)

  Kennedy’s form of environmentalism is the equivalent of toasting all-natural marshmallows over a tire fire. It might make for a good photo, but it’s poison. True environmentalism requires protecting natural resources, listening to scientists, and prioritizing public health over polluter profits. Kennedy used to understand that. Now, he’s full of crap.

Further reading on the new food pyramid

I wasn’t sure where to place this in the main article, so I just left it out. But I do want to be clear that I don’t have an issue with everything in the new food pyramid. Emphasizing vegetables and minimally processed foods and minimal sugar sounds great to me. But there are also lots of issues, and we should be honest about them.

• Kennedy said his dietary advisers would have ‘no conflicts of interest.’ Some did. (New York Times)

  Three of the nine members have received grants or done consulting work for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; one of those also received a research grant from and serves as an adviser to the National Pork Board. At least three members—including two of the same ones who have done work for red meat groups—have financial ties to dairy industry organizations, such as the National Dairy Council. Another is a co-creator of a high-protein meal replacement product. The experts did not write the guidelines, but produced reviews of scientific evidence on which the guidelines were based.

• The new food pyramid is lying to you. (Vox).

  Emphasizing minimally processed foods is generally good advice, and there is admittedly something refreshing and inspiring in hearing the federal government champion whole foods so vocally. But “just eat real food” is a dubious proxy for nutrition knowledge, and it can misleadingly demonize forms of food and processing that are perfectly fine or beneficial (more on that later).
  
  The new guidelines reasonably recommend stricter limits on added sugars, one of the greatest contributors to poor health in the US, and on refined grains such as white breads. “I think that’s the way it should be,” David Ludwig, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a professor of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me. “Those should be targeted for reduction.”
  

  But MAHA instincts cash out most prominently in the guidelines’s central emphasis on eating meat, dairy, and eggs. The tone, text, and visual language of the guidelines make “protein foods” appear as the central food group, with animal foods depicted as the primary source. Plant-based options such as beans, lentils, and nuts are listed as protein options but are barely present and notably subservient to animal products in this food pyramid, and the scientific report released alongside the guidelines emphasizes the importance of animal proteins. The guidelines also instruct Americans to “consume dairy,” which in reality is not necessary for good health, and it’s not clear why fortified soy milk, which was included as an appropriate substitute for dairy in the previous guidelines, was excluded from this document.

• RFK Jr.’s new food pyramid draws mixed responses from health experts. (MS Now)

  The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines announced Wednesday were greeted with mixed reviews from nutrition experts, who praised the move to avoid highly processed foods but questioned the guidelines’ focus on more protein consumption.
  

  “There’s good stuff in this and some not-so-good stuff,” said Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, who called the new guidelines “muddled, contradictory, ideological and retro.”

• Why it still makes sense to limit saturated fats. (Undark)

  While the science on unsaturated fats has evolved, it hasn’t to the same degree with respect to saturated fats. Even nuanced reviews of saturated fats point to harms for people with cardiovascular risk factors. …

  There likely is merit to discouraging [ultra-processed foods]: While not all ultra-processed foods are equally unhealthy, there is an emerging consensus on their adverse effects. … Still, Gardner cautioned against replacing ultra-processed foods with increased consumption saturated fats, which also carry documented harms if consumed in excess.

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I hate conspiracy theories. I always have. As a journalist, they’re usually the thing I’m pushing back against.

And yet, for a few years now, I’ve found myself saying something slightly heretical on panels and in conversations with other reporters: we need to start engaging in more overtly conspiratorial language. Because the actual story of climate change—the one we’ve reported exhaustively—is one about coordinated power, deliberate deception, and a bought-off government that repeatedly acts to promote an industry that is poisoning humans and the environment for profit. It just so happens to be a real conspiracy.

The Trump administration’s recent invasion of Venezuela has put this conspiracy at the top of the news cycle. Trump framed the attack explicitly as an oil play, bragging about handing Venezuela’s oil infrastructure to U.S. companies. He said he privately briefed oil executives in advance of the attack, but did not inform Congress. He made clear that if U.S. companies were hesitant to enter Venezuela, U.S. taxpayers would step in to shoulder the financial risk.

These statements strip away every remaining excuse for decorum. When a president deploys military might and taxpayer dollars to expand Big Oil’s power, journalists and climate advocates shouldn’t be afraid to say why that’s really happening—or to use the kind of language that makes it finally click in people’s brains.

If there were ever a moment to embrace climate conspiratorial language, it’s now. If we don’t, we’ll miss a rare chance to show the public who the government really works for, and who pays the price.

Here’s how I’d put it, if anyone needs a hand.

A climate script for the conspiracy-minded

You may think that the biggest climate conspiracy is chemtrails. You’d be wrong.

But climate-altering chemicals are being dumped into the atmosphere at an astonishing rate. And the government is actively trying to cover up what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who it hurts.

Airplanes aren’t the ones releasing world-changing amounts of climate-altering chemicals into the sky. Fossil fuel companies are. Fossil fuel operations are notorious for emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, mainly carbon dioxide and methane. Just look at these graphs showing how much heat-trapping gas has accumulated in the atmosphere over time.

The U.S. government is actively trying to cover up these numbers. Since taking office, Trump has proposed shutting down the country’s longest-running carbon dioxide monitoring station. He’s secretly directed NASA employees to draw up plans to destroy two satellites that monitor global carbon dioxide levels. And he’s moved to end the program that requires fossil fuel companies to track and report greenhouse gas emissions from more than 8,000 facilities.

The government has also been working overtime to cover up the massive harm this pollution causes. Trump has altered or deleted nearly every federal scientific report and web resource that’s come out in the last two decades showing that climate change is killing people, costing money, and making us less safe. He says it’s because all the studies are flawed and alarmist. Really? All of them? Every single one?

The real reason the government is doing this is simple: Because it’s bought and paid for by Big Oil, the most profitable and powerful industry in the world. Before the election, Trump promised oil executives he would give them whatever they wanted in exchange for campaign support, floating a $1 billion price tag. How much the industry actually gave is impossible to know, thanks to dark money and opaque PACs. But from what we can see, Big Oil spent $219 million to influence the 2024 election, with at least $75 million going directly to Trump’s campaign and affiliated PACs. Eighty-eight percent of oil and gas money went to Republicans.

And now, the government is deploying the U.S. military to help the industry dump even more of these climate-altering chemicals into the atmosphere.

Trump explicitly stated his intention for the U.S. to control Venezuela’s oil. He laid it out plain as day: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Trump didn’t tell Congress about the Venezuela attack before it happened. But he did claim to tell oil executives. Let that sink in. The president reportedly informed private oil companies about a military invasion before informing the people’s elected representatives. So who does the government work for, exactly?

The oil industry has tried to deny receiving advance notice prior to the invasion—but only through anonymous sources. To this I remind you: Oil companies are notorious liars. They spent decades lying about climate change, burying their own research showing fossil fuels were destroying the planet, and funding disinformation campaigns to confuse the public. If they really didn’t speak to Trump, why don’t they say it loudly and proudly?

Now, plenty of people have correctly pointed out that it will be difficult and expensive for U.S. oil companies to take over Venezuela’s oil. But that’s much less of a problem when the government works for you. After industry sources told CNN that oil companies “were reluctant to commit to reinvesting” in Venezuela, Trump immediately fell over himself to offer to help them—with taxpayer money, of course. Trump said oil companies rebuilding Venezuela’s infrastructure will “get reimbursed by us, or through revenue,” with the U.S. government potentially subsidizing efforts by energy companies to rebuild the country’s oil industry.

Oil companies are trying to publicly act like they don’t want Venezuela’s oil. But here’s what’s indisputable. Chevron’s stock soared as much as 10 percent after the invasion. Exxon and ConocoPhillips shares rose around 3 to 4 percent. Oil service companies like SLB, Baker Hughes, and Halliburton jumped between 4 percent and 9 percent. And U.S. refiners Marathon Petroleum, Phillips 66, PBF Energy, and Valero Energy were up between 3.4 percent and 9.3 percent.

Another thing that’s indisputable: Venezuela’s new acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, is the country’s oil minister. She’s long been the go-to contact for senior oil executives, with strong ties to Republicans in the oil industry who actively pushed for her to lead post-Maduro Venezuela. I’m sure that’s just a crazy coincidence.

Perhaps all of this could be defensible if the outcome for ordinary Americans were actually positive. Trump insists it will be—that oil expansion means jobs, security, and prosperity.

That claim is the heart of the conspiracy. It’s not that Trump and the oil industry are working together; that part is in plain sight. It’s that the public is being told this partnership exists for our benefit, when in reality it exists to preserve fossil fuel dominance in a world where that dominance is threatened by people simply understanding the truth—that oil and gas pollution is transforming the climate, making us sicker, poorer, and less safe.

That’s why Trump works to obscure emissions data, suppress climate science, and discredit anyone who explains the harm. It’s why he’s willing to spend taxpayer money, deploy military force, and rewrite foreign policy. Not because any of this serves the public interest, but because all of it serves the same goal: keeping fossil fuels flowing, even as the scientific case for transitioning away from them becomes overwhelming.

And doing that requires a public that is less informed, more economically strained, and easier to distract—too busy coping with rising costs and mounting crises to demand a transition that would reduce pollution, lower long-term costs, and make wars over energy unnecessary.

So no, you don’t need to worry about chemtrails. You need to worry about who controls energy—and what they’re willing to do to keep it that way.

Further reading:

• Trump taking ‘drill, baby, drill’ plan to Venezuela ‘terrible’ for climate, experts warn (The Guardian)

• Why the federal government is making climate data disappear (Grist)

• The U.S.-Venezuela-Guyana Oil Triangle (Drilled)

• U.S. to control Venezuela oil sales “indefinitely,” Energy Secretary says (New York Times)

• Trump to meet with oil execs about Venezuela on Friday (Politico)

Catch of the Day: Grey cat Ethel would never roll over on her belief that everyone deserves a safe climate. But she would maybe roll over for a belly rub.

Thanks to reader Agnes for the submission.

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