This year’s World Cup has something no other World Cup has had before: commercial breaks. This means that each match now contains two three-ish-minute opportunities to absolutely demolish the vibe of the party by talking about things that nobody wants to hear about, but probably should.

Here are three of my suggestions.

“You know, these commercials are only happening because of climate change.”

This will probably be your most natural transition from game to grooaaan. Back in December, FIFA announced that this year’s World Cup would include three-minute hydration breaks for players midway through each half of every match, and that broadcasters would be permitted (but not required) to run commercial breaks during that time.

These mandated water breaks, FIFA said, are due to increasingly intense heat and humidity conditions putting player safety at risk. This overall rise in extreme heat is caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, as the New York Times explained Friday:

Since the last time World Cup matches were played in North America in 1994, the world has warmed roughly 1.3 degrees [Celsius]1. And the frequency of extreme heat in June and July has on average tripled across this year’s 10 host cities that previously hosted World Cup games. …

In recent days, the English team has practiced in the Miami sun in an effort to acclimatize its athletes and prepare for what could be one of the hottest tournaments on record. And last month a group of 21 scientists, including physiologists and climate experts, wrote to FIFA, the sport’s governing body, saying that its current safety guidelines for heat were insufficient and “impossible to justify,” and urging it to give players longer breaks and implement “aggressive” locker-room cooling, among other steps.

FIFA has framed these hydration breaks as an attempt to ensure players remain safe. Others have a more understandably cynical interpretation: That FIFA is using player welfare as an excuse to money grab. The breaks are, after all, mandated no matter the weather. It could be cool and raining and commercials would still run.

“This is effectively a parallel to greenwashing, where the use of climate change and the pretence of care for players is used to distort the Laws of the Game and insert commercials,” wrote reddit user Hot-Job-6281 on Friday.

But even if FIFA is exploiting the climate rationale for ad money, the climate rationale still exists. The world is getting hotter, and it is threatening the safety of World Cup players and spectators. An analysis by Climate Central found that climate change is “boosting the likelihood of performance-impairing heat” during 97 of 104 scheduled World Cup matches. It also happens to be making our at-home watching experience super annoying. So do your part: tell your friends. It can’t be more bothersome than the ads themselves… right?

Read more: The 2026 World Cup could be the hottest yet

“Omg, that last point was crazy! Almost as crazy how much this event pollutes.”

OK, now we’re getting into the territory of possibly being more annoying than the commercials. But this is your duty; you must persist.

Last month, geographer David Gogishvili at the University of Lausanne told AFP that this year’s World Cup would "produce the largest carbon footprint in the history of international sport:" anywhere from 5 million to 9 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. For comparison, the 2024 Paris Olympics emitted around 1.75 million tons.

Other estimates have been similar. An analysis from the New Weather Institute found that the 2026 World Cup is “on track to be the ‘most polluting’ World Cup ever,” with total emissions hitting nearly two times the historical average. They conservatively predicted that the World Cup would emit about 9 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is about the same as 21 gas-fired power plants running for a year; 1.9 million cars driven for a year; or 9 billion pounds of coal burned.

This is mostly because FIFA chose to have not one, but three host countries: the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and a total of 16 host venues. In addition, the tournament added an extra 16 teams. That all means a lot of air travel. Scientists estimate air travel emissions for the World Cup to be around 7 million tons of CO2 equivalent, with worst case predictions at 13.7 million tons.

Why does this matter? For one, FIFA is doing this while publicly touting a commitment to sustainability, including reaching net-zero emissions by 2040. As Jules Boykoff wrote for the Guardian, “to passively allow Fifa to willfully trash the environment is to succumb to greenwashing: the duplicitous practice of talking a big green game, but failing to follow through with meaningful sustainability measures.”

The biggest problem is not just the emissions from one tournament. It fact that model FIFA is choosing an ever-increasing emissions model for the future of the sport, which is already suffering under a warmer world. As Le Monde put it, “FIFA is embracing this irresponsible approach, which risks harming both players and the sport itself.” In other words, FIFA is helping make future tournaments hotter, riskier, and more polluting. No amount of water breaks are going to solve that problem.

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“Oh man I’m having so much fun!! It’d be more fun if we weren’t supporting Saudi Aramco though.”

Be sure to save this one for when everyone is super drunk. They will love it.

Aramco, the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil and gas company, is the world's largest corporate climate polluter, estimated to be responsible for over 4 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1965.

It is also a top sponsor of the 2026 World Cup and has a four-year global partnership agreement with FIFA, “which means the fossil fuel giant’s logo is likely to be visible on the field, online and on TV during this year’s World Cup and the Women’s World Cup in 2027,” the L.A. Times reported.

FIFA has defended the partnership by saying Aramco’s revenue (~$400 million!) is being reinvested in the game. But FIFA hasn’t mentioned what it’s giving back Aramco in return: social license—aka, permission from the public to maintain business as usual. By propping up the world’s most beloved sport, Aramco is trying to buy the love of its millions of fans, even as its core business helps make the sport far more dangerous. This practice is called sportswashing.

This one might piss off your friends enough to get them to want to do something about it. And if they do, you can point them toward action. On June 21, the Sierra Club is organizing “Protest Fossil Fuel Sportswashing” actions at various stadiums across the U.S., calling on FIFA World Cup and other teams to drop fossil fuel sponsorships. Actions are happening in L.A., Miami, New Jersey, Toronto, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and Cleveland. You can find more info here.

If your friends don’t get pissed off about this, though, it’s possible you might get kicked out of your party. And if that happens, well, maybe you need better friends.

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If you have any other party-ruining factoids, let me know in the comments.

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Further reading:

• The FIFA World Cup is brought to you by Saudi oil. These fans and players want to stop it. From CBC Radio in Canada:

  Dutch athlete Tessel Middag is one of more than 130 professional women’s soccer players who signed an open letter in 2024 criticizing FIFA’s decision to partner with Saudi Aramco. Activism, she says, comes naturally to women’s soccer players, who have always had to fight for their place in the sport.
  
  "We feel like the good work that we and our predecessors, the women that came before us have done, would be dishonoured by partnerships such as the one that was announced with Saudi Aramco," Middag said.

• Meet the baseball player who’s tired of promoting Big Oil. Sammy Roth over at Climate Colored Goggles has an exclusive interview with Los Angeles Angels relief pitcher Brent Suter, “the first American pro athlete to speak out against fossil fuel advertising in sports.”

  Have I used and directly benefited from fossil fuels in my life? Absolutely. Do I believe that continuing to fully depend on fossil fuels as a society is dangerous? Absolutely. We need to find ways to power our society in cleaner ways, and I want to represent companies that want to be part of the solution.

Previous HEATED coverage of climate and sports:

• Fossil fuels made the Olympics 5 degrees hotter.

• How oil companies use football to promote anti-climate policy propaganda

• There’s no such thing as a “climate-friendly” Super Bowl.

It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. Whitehouse first introduced the resolution in December 2025 and tried to get it passed last January. Nearly every week since, the Senator has taken the resolution to the floor, asking, “Climate change is real. Can we agree on that simple truth?”

Apparently not. After Whitehouse’s most recent attempt, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected “with a smile on my face,” he said. Johnson proceeded to recite a popular playlist of fossil fuel talking points to counter the argument that climate change is a problem worth tackling.

“I don’t deny climate change. Climate change is real. It has always changed; it always will,” said Johnson. “I certainly am not going to subscribe to any resolution that would cause policy here to spend trillions — misspend, waste, trillions of dollars on a fool’s errand trying to hold back the tides.”

Whitehouse did not sound surprised.

“I would only advise my friend from Wisconsin that he just might want to consider running his argument by the University of Wisconsin before trotting it out on the Senate floor,” he replied.

“Persist through frustration”

Whitehouse keeps doing things like this. For years, he has been one of Congress’s most relentless climate voices, delivering more than 300 “Time to Wake Up” speeches on the Senate floor about climate change and the fossil fuel industry’s political power.

Lately, that persistence has taken a more targeted form: pressing the Trump administration over its extraordinary new favors to the oil and gas industry; investigating its decision to exempt Gulf drilling from endangered species protections; and pushing a windfall profits tax on oil companies at a time when Republicans control Congress and the White House.

Whitehouse knows none of it is likely to move through Washington right now. But that’s not really the point. The point, he argued, is to make the obstruction visible: to show the public exactly how fossil fuel money shapes Republican politics, and how that corruption translates into higher costs, weaker laws, and a government willing to contort itself on behalf of Big Oil.

“If I had a motto it would be, ‘persist through frustration,’” he told HEATED in an interview last week.

For Whitehouse, the issue is not as simple as Johnson’s apparent inability to understand science. “He doesn’t care because the fossil fuel industry has such a grip on his party,” Whitehouse said.

The reason Whitehouse puts himself through the weekly exercise is for something bigger. “The beast of the fossil fuel industry’s control of the Republican Party is something that is very much worth fighting against,” he said. “That beast is really very, very bad for our democracy, really bad for Americans’ costs that they have to pay, and deeply, deeply corrupting.”

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From God Squad to windfall profits

There are few stronger political bonds than the one between oil companies and the Trump administration. In March, the administration offered a particularly stark example: A little-known federal committee known as the “God Squad” granted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico an exemption from the Endangered Species Act.

The exemption was requested by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who argued that protecting oil companies from pending endangered species litigation was “a matter of urgent national security.”

The committee agreed, even though the Gulf is home to 20 threatened and endangered species, including sea turtles, manta rays, sharks, and the Rice’s whale—a species with fewer than 100 individuals remaining.

Whitehouse doesn’t buy the committee’s rationale that national security is harmed by protecting endangered species species. “The idea that ongoing oil and gas drilling in the Gulf meets that standard is pretty preposterous, but for the oil and gas industry, this administration does not hesitate to do preposterous things,” said Whitehouse.

That’s why Whitehouse is leading a group of 26 senators to investigate the Trump Administration’s decision to grant the exemption. On April 27, the group sent letters to Secretaries Burgum and Hegseth requesting documents and information related to their decision, to ensure it complied with the law. The group gave a response deadline of May 18^th.

Two weeks after that deadline, Whitehouse told HEATED, neither Burgum nor Hegseth has responded.

“They have a free pass not to meet these deadlines because they control the House and the Senate,” Whitehouse said. He said he would now consider using Freedom of Information Act requests and potentially litigation to obtain the documents. “But that’s a very long, slow, arduous process that takes us well beyond November.”

Whitehouse anticipates that any FOIA requests will show that the so-called “God Squad” treated Gulf oil and gas production as central to national security. But to him, that only raises a bigger question: If fossil fuel production is so essential to the country’s security, why are oil companies allowed to reap enormous profits while Americans pay higher prices?

“If there were a national security problem here, you’d think that they’d call on the oil and gas industry to help solve it by not exporting so much and not creating, literally, the biggest profits in the history of humankind,” says Whitehouse.

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Fossil fuel companies have seen profits surge since the U.S. and Israel engaged Iran in a war that has stalled traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. As of May 31, the average price of a gallon of unleaded gasoline in the United States was $4.33; exactly a year ago it was $3.15, according to AAA. Prices will continue to fluctuate depending on whether ships can traverse the Strait, where 20% of the world’s petroleum passes.

During the first month of the conflict, the world’s top 100 oil and gas companies were earning $30 million every hour in unearned profit, according to exclusive analysis by The Guardian.

“We’re looking at a quarter trillion dollars this year under the current projections of where things go,” says Whitehouse. “A quarter trillion dollars for a handful of big fossil fuel companies who can use a tiny percentage of that to buy the loyalty and fealty of Republicans in Congress and the Trump Administration.”

That’s why Whitehouse reintroduced the Big Oil Windfall Profits Bill in May to “provide consumers guaranteed relief while maintaining American competitiveness and reducing inflation by combatting corporate profiteering.”

The bill targets the largest companies that produce or import at least 300,000 barrels of oil a day, taxing them per barrel an amount equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the average price per barrel the previous year.

Essentially, companies keep their customary profit, but anything above that would be taxed and returned to certain Americans, including single filers who earn less than $75,000 in annual income and joint filers who earn less than $150,000 annually. If oil is roughly $100 per barrel, this could generate a tax of about $33 billion per year, providing a check of $216 to qualified single filers and $324 to qualified joint filers.

“Elon Musk does not get a check, but lower-income people could expect one, because for them it really makes a big difference,” says Whitehouse.

If the idea sounds utterly ludicrous, it’s already happening in other countries. The United Kingdom passed a windfall tax on energy firms in 2022 to help address rising utility bills stemming from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The original tax was due to expire at the end of 2025, but was extended and increased by both Conservative and Labour governments through 2030.

“Even moderate Democrats like President Biden ultimately supported this when the Ukraine invasion took place,” says Whitehouse, referencing fall 2022, when Biden accused oil companies of “war profiteering” after they posted record profits.

If such a bill feels futile at a time when Republicans control all three branches of government, it doesn’t faze Whitehouse, who believes it’s his responsibility to make clear to the American people what is happening.

“It matters, I think, for people to understand exactly how it is that they’re being gouged, so that they understand that these unbelievably huge profits are really not necessary — they’re an artifact of big oil,” he says. “Because once you understand how something is being done to you, you feel a little bit more agency and mastery about being able to demand that it be stopped.”

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In related news…

Trump may have reportedly scrapped his plan to spend $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to protect his political allies, but he’s still using public money to prop up the dirtiest of his fossil fuel allies.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg broke the news that Trump is planning to use wartime powers to give $700 million in taxpayer money to the coal industry.

From CBS News:

Mr. Trump will invoke the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law that gives the U.S. president emergency authority over domestic industries, to distribute $75 million for a new coal export terminal in Oakland, California, and $425 million to support 13 existing plants across 10 states: West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Oklahoman, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

The president is also expected to announce nearly $200 million in Department of Energy grants to build two new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia and to restart a coal plant in Maryland. The facilities in Alaska and West Virginia would be the first new coal plants built in the U.S. since 2013.

I thought this response from Ted Kelly, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, was worth reading:

This announcement is just the latest in a suite of sweetheart taxpayer-funded deals to the coal industry: Over the past year, the Trump administration has illegally ordered five aging coal plants to operate past their retirement dates, ordered the Department of Defense to procure electricity from coal plants, announced $625 million to prop up aging coal plants and opened up 13 million acres of federal lands to coal mining.

At the same time, even as electricity costs and demand continue to skyrocket, the administration has been blocking the construction of hundreds of solar and wind projects that can provide clean, low-cost and fast-to-deploy power. It has even resorted to wastefully paying energy companies nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to abandon their offshore wind projects.

The picture is clear: Expensive, polluting coal continues to get “concierge, white glove service,” while affordable clean power gets blocked, delayed and canceled at every turn – no matter the cost to families.

To sum it all up in a quote: Pouring taxpayer dollars into dirty, unreliable coal plants that bleed money is a surefire way to drive up families’ electricity bills even higher. Utilities are retiring coal plants for a reason – to save money. At a time when we need more power on the grid, doubling down on one of the most expensive, polluting energy sources is the worst possible answer.

How can Patagonia, the brand, own the name of a geographical region? That’s the most common question I keep seeing asked about Patagonia™’s controversial lawsuit against Pattie Gonia, the environmental activist and drag queen.

I’m interested in that question myself—not just legally, but morally. Because as I’ve been reading through all the lawsuit coverage, I’ve noted that almost no one is talking about what this dispute means for Patagonia as an actual place, shaped by Indigenous histories, colonial conquest, and ongoing struggles over land and sovereignty.

So over the last couple days, I did two things. First, I spoke with a trademark law professor to understand how a company can legally trademark a geographic term in the first place; what rights that trademark actually gives it; and whether Patagonia™ really “had no choice” but to sue Pattie Gonia in order to protect its brand.

Then, I spoke with two scholars of Patagonia, colonialism, and Mapuche self-determination to understand the deeper politics behind the name itself: how “Patagonia” became a colonial fantasy of empty wilderness, how that fantasy obscures the Indigenous people and histories still rooted there, and what it means for a U.S. corporation to profit from that mythology while policing how others use it.

The legal question of place ownership

One of the strangest things in Patagonia™’s lawsuit against Pattie Gonia appears in paragraph 19 of the complaint, where the company describes its trademarks as “fanciful.”

In trademark law, “fanciful” means “a completely made up term,” said Alexandra Roberts, a trademark law professor at Northeastern University. “So like Excedrin, Rolex, Xerox, stuff like that,” she said. “And that kind of mark gets the broadest protection.”

This is, of course, false. Patagonia is a real place: A vast region at the southern end of South America, spanning parts of present-day Argentina and Chile. So for Roberts, the fact that the company describes the mark as “fanciful” is “shocking and obnoxious,” she said. “It’s definitely disingenuous.”

The “fanciful” claim probably won’t matter to the outcome of the lawsuit, Roberts said. But it does highlight what’s bothering so many people about it. Patagonia™ appears to be asserting ownership rights over the name of a real place. How can it do that, legally?

The short answer is: Pretty easily. “Geographic names can absolutely be trademarks,” Roberts said. There are a bunch of rules, but in this case, what matters is that Patagonia™ is not using the word Patagonia to tell consumers where its clothes come from. It is using Patagonia to tell consumers who its clothes come from.

Over many decades, Patagonia™ has successfully made the name of a real place function as the name of a company that has little to do with the place itself. This is not unusual: Amazon is a rainforest and a river and also one of the world’s most powerful corporations. Andes is a mountain range and also a brand of mint chocolate candy. Tahoe, Yukon, and Denali are places and also SUVs.

These companies don’t own the place itself; rather, they own the commercial meaning they have built over years around those names. For Patagonia™, that means they own the use of “Patagonia” as a brand for apparel and outdoor gear.

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Did Patagonia have to sue Pattie Gonia?

Now, before we get into the deeper ethical question of what it means for a company to build a brand out of a place it did not create, there’s one more legal argument worth clearing up.

There’s a common claim that, because Patagonia™ owns this trademark, it had no choice but to sue Pattie Gonia over her attempts to file a trademark for selling clothing. If it didn’t, Patagonia™ risked weakening its trademark and opening the door for others to use the name too.

Roberts, however, doesn’t buy it. “That is BS,” she said. “I think that is dramatically overblown.“

The idea that all companies must aggressively defend their trademarks against all potential violators, or else risk losing their right to that trademark, is “kind of a myth or a misconception,” Roberts said. “Declining to sue one infringer doesn’t tend to hurt that owner in his case against another infringer,” Roberts said.

“Litigants like to say that it matters, and lawyers whose job it is to send cease-and-desist letters and file lawsuits like to say it matters,” Roberts said. “But there’s not good evidence that it does matter.”

Roberts compared it to Taylor Swift. Swift can let small fan artists sell handmade Swift-inspired goods on Etsy, while still reserving the right to sue major commercial infringers. “That’s her choice,” Roberts said. “Nobody’s going to say to her in court, ‘Oh, but what about all these little users on Etsy that you didn’t go after?’”

Trademark policing does matter in certain cases, Roberts said. If a company allows one specific infringer to use its mark for years, then tries to sue that same infringer later, a court may say it waited too long. And if there’s very clear, blatant infringement going on all around a company, and they don’t take action against any of it for a long time, then that may affect the company’s ability to sue in the future.

”But when it’s not a straightforward slam dunk case, and you make a decision as a company that it isn’t good for your brand to sue, that’s not something that will hurt your ability to enforce later,” Roberts said.

That distinction matters because this legal argument is Patagonia™’s moral alibi. The company is framing the lawsuit against Pattie Gonia as something it was reluctantly required to do, rather than something it affirmatively chose to do.

But according to Roberts, Patagonia™ did have a choice. And once you understand that, the larger ethical question becomes harder to avoid.

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Patagonia© vs. Patagonia the region

For Dr. Claudia Briones, an anthropologist and editor of Contemporary Perspectives on the Native Peoples of Pampa, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, the premise of this entire trademark fight is outrageous.

“No company or individual could ever ethically claim exclusive commercial rights over a regional name like Patagonia,” Briones told me. “Capitalism or capitalist interests can neither transform everything into merchandise nor swallow up and benefit from everything in its own exclusive benefit.”

Her outrage speaks to the deeper ethical question underneath Patagonia™’s lawsuit against Pattie Gonia. Legally, Patagonia™ may have built trademark rights around the word “Patagonia” as a brand name for outdoor clothing and gear. But morally, Briones argues, the company is still doing something harmful: turning the name of a real region, with real people and histories, into private commercial property.

“It’s outrageous that a corporation that exploits a name as part of its marketing sues others for doing the same,” Briones said. “They should ask for permission, apologize, and share part of their profits with the most vulnerable residents of the region.”

To be fair, Patagonia© does fund environmental organizations in Argentina and Chile, and has supported conservation work in the region. But conservation philanthropy is not the same thing as accountability to the people whose lands, histories, and landscapes helped make the brand valuable in the first place.

“Patagonia has been always interpreted by outsiders in ways that serve their interests,” said Lucas Savino, an associate professor in the Centre for Global Studies at Huron University College and author of Decolonizing Patagonia: Mapuche Peoples and State Formation in Argentina. “This particular lawsuit, it's almost another episode of that long story of Patagonia being up for grabs.”

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How outsiders marketed Patagonia to claim it

To understand what Savino means, you only need a little bit of history.

Long before Patagonia became a global shorthand for fleece jackets, it was home to Indigenous peoples, including Mapuche and Tehuelche communities. The name “Patagonia” itself is a colonial label from the 1500s, derived when Spaniards encountered Indigenous Gününa-këna and Aoinikenk peoples whom they called “Patagone” because of their supposedly large feet.

But the most important history for understanding Savino and Briones’ critique is what happened in the late 1800s, when the emerging states of Argentina and Chile wanted to control the region. In order to justify conquering it, they marketed the region as a “desert”—a place that was, effectively, empty.

“For the states of Chile and Argentina to dominate Patagonia, they needed to first make it a desert,” Savino said. “So they had to imagine it as a desert, as a place of wilderness that needed the forces of civilization.”

But Patagonia was not a desert, nor was it empty. Still, that marketing was used to justify what’s now known as the “Conquest of the Desert”—a bloody Argentine military campaign that slaughtered “more than 1,000 Mapuches, displaced more than 15,000 more from their traditional lands and enslaved a portion of the remaining Indigenous people.”

”Even to this day, in those communities, they speak of acts of genocide,” Savino said.

That is why Savino sees Patagonia™ as participating in a much longer pattern: powerful outsiders defining Patagonia for their own purposes.

“I always think of Patagonia, the company, as replicating the corporate version of the 19th century military campaigns by the Argentine and the Chilean states,” Savino said.

Savino emphasized he was not trying to draw a direct equivalence between a corporation using a regional name and a state committing genocide. His point was about the underlying logic: In both cases, Patagonia became useful only after it is turned into an image of empty wilderness.

That image is still powerful today. Briones said Patagonia continues to be marketed as “pristine, sparsely populated, and beautiful nature,” even though the region contains many ecosystems, communities, and political struggles. Governments still see it as a place of “natural resources” to be exploited through oil, gas, mining, wind energy, forestry, and tourism projects. Mapuche and Mapuche-Tewelche communities, meanwhile, continue to fight for recognition, land, and self-determination.

So when Patagonia™ builds a brand out of the region’s name, landscapes, and wilderness mystique, Briones argues that it is not simply borrowing a pretty word. It is profiting from a story about Patagonia that has always been politically loaded.

That is where the company’s environmental image becomes complicated. Patagonia© is globally admired for its environmental advocacy. But Briones said its version of environmentalism still appears rooted in a classed, consumer-friendly idea of nature—one disconnected from many of the people who actually live in the landscapes the company invokes.

Savino made the same point more bluntly: “The Indigenous peoples I work with there, I work with these rural communities for the most part—some are urban—but they could never even afford a piece of Patagonia.”

Does the critique apply to Pattie Gonia, too?

Briones and Savino both saw a meaningful difference between Patagonia™ and Pattie Gonia, the drag artist.

“I don’t know Pattie Gonia, but I suspect there must be a big difference since she is not a corporation, right?” Briones said. (Technically, Patagonia™’s lawsuit is against Pattie Gonia’s corporation, Entrepreneur Enterprises, Inc.)

Either way, however, Briones said Pattie Gonia should be clear about what the name is meant to do: whether it is a critique of the company, or whether it also relies on “a more or less idealized vision” of the region’s landscapes. In the first case, Briones said, “her sarcasm would be excused.” In the second, “explanations and apologies are also in order.”

Savino similarly said the scale is different. Patagonia, the company, uses the regional name “without sarcasm, without irony, without humor,” then builds its corporate image around the fantasy many consumers already have of the place. Pattie Gonia’s name, by contrast, appears to be “part of artistic expression,” he said. “The name change is witty.”

But the deeper question, Savino said, is not only who gets to use the name. It is who gets to define what Patagonia means. “The story is more than the name,” he said. “It has to do with who also gets to control the narrative of what Patagonia is.”

As for what accountability would look like, Briones acknowledged there is no simple answer. But she said Patagonia™ could start by acknowledging what it has done: using a region’s name, landscapes, and mythology to build a global brand without real permission from the people most connected to that place.

“The company could apologize for not having asked for permission and for commodifying a region,” she said. A possible form of compensation, she added, should happen locally, among “vulnerable residents and environmental organizations of the places whose landscapes are used for the Company’s promotional purposes.”

As a whole, they say the issue is not just whether Patagonia™ has a legal right to enforce its trademark. It is whether a corporation should be able to turn a real place into a brand, profit from the fantasy of that place, and then claim the power to decide who else can use its name.

After just a few conversations, I don’t have a perfect answer to that. But I do think it’s worth asking.

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Note: I’ve reached out to a number of Indigenous activists and organizations in Patagonia to get their take. I’ll update you if and when I hear back.

Hey!! If you’ve gotten this far, and you’re new here, I’m Emily and I do all the reporting, writing, editing, fact-checking, and legal worrying for HEATED myself. I don’t take ads, run sponsored content, take corporate money or nonprofit funding. That’s how I keep this work 100 percent independent—and, as much as possible, free for everyone to read.

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Kate Marvel spent more than a decade at NASA studying the future of life on Earth. Then the Trump administration made that job feel impossible.

“Instead of saying, we value your science and here’s how we’re going to protect it, we were being told things like, ‘Make sure you take your pronouns out of your email signature,’” she told HEATED. “That was the highest priority.”

Marvel, a prominent climate scientist, resigned from NASA in March amid the Trump administration’s sweeping attacks on federal science. Since Trump’s second term started, more than 10,000 federal employees with STEM Ph.D.s have left the government—mostly through layoffs, firings and buyouts—and more than 7,800 research grants were terminated or frozen. It’s, in other words, a nerd purge.

In her resignation letter, Marvel wrote that she never expected to voluntarily leave her dream job. For her, NASA had always “conjured up a sense of awe and a promise that America could be a better place, one that provides its people with not only a good life but also wonder and discovery as a birthright.”

”I still believe in that promise,” she wrote. However:

I was wrong to believe it was enough to simply do good things, to think that the benefits of knowing about our home world would be self-evident. I anticipated that our work would be questioned, but only because its implications were politically inconvenient. I never expected that science itself would come under attack, simply because it—like journalism, history, and even the best kind of art—is a way of seeking the truth.

I’m leaving because I want to tell the truth.

In our conversation today, Marvel tells the truth about what’s happening to federal science under the Trump administration. We talk about the work she was doing at NASA before Trump, and why the administration would want to make that work difficult to accomplish. We talk about Trump’s nomination of a billionaire donor to lead NASA, and how he’s discouraging climate research. We also talk about one side-effect of Trump’s attack on science that no one is talking about: The loss of nerd culture, and why that culture is important to democracy.

Then, for paid subscribers, we keep going into one of the most controversial questions in climate science: geoengineering. We talk about what it means to study technologies that could intentionally alter the climate system, and why the collapse of trusted public science makes those future decisions even more dangerous. We also get into our feelings about the state of federal science, and the strategies we’re deploying to not just cope, but fight back.

This transcript has been edited for length and readability. You can listen to the full, unedited conversation at the top of this newsletter or on YouTube.

Emily Atkin: So what happened at NASA? Why did you leave?

Kate Marvel: I really wrestled with this decision. Because who leaves NASA? That is the coolest job ever.

But it was chaos. And there are some people who can work through chaos, who can just be laser focused. And I was really having a hard time getting science done. Every day we would wake up and be like, well, is this the day we get fired?

We would write grants, they would disappear into black holes, or you would hear back that this is a great project, we really want to fund this, but we have no idea if there’s gonna be any money. And because you’re getting no information from the high, high, high ups, it’s basically just rumors swirling around.

I really struggled. Because I think there is a place for folks in the government trying to hold things together. But it was my job to do science. And I just felt like I couldn’t do science in this context.

EA: This is a nerd’s worst nightmare, right? You got your dream nerd job. And all of a sudden, you cannot be nerd.

KM: I think that’s a great way to put it. This administration is so anti-nerd that it feels like a personal attack, not just on me, but the whole country.

EA: It’s true. Especially in science, the concept of nerdiness is that you’re gonna go down a rabbit hole that no one even thought about going down. And it sounds like what’s happening in the federal science space is that rabbit holes are being covered up. You can’t go down rabbit holes, unless they’re the preferred rabbit holes of the administration.

KM: Yeah, and those rabbit holes are pretty stupid. They’re relitigating questions that we know. It’s sort of like the equivalent of asking what happens when you mix vinegar and baking soda..

But pretending we really don’t understand if vaccines work? No, we do. We don’t know if climate change is happening? Yes, we do. We don’t know if it’s caused by humans? Yes, we do.

So I miss my rabbit holes, because I knew that my rabbit holes were maybe eventually going to lead us somewhere better.

EA: What were the rabbit holes that you were diving down when NASA was functioning well?

KM: My research followed two basic but related tracks. One was: What does climate change actually mean? On one level, we know what it means. It means the temperature of the Earth goes up.

But how that translates into changes in what we actually experience—changes in drought risk, changes in rainfall, especially extreme rainfall, things like the seasons, things like the timing of the monsoon—those are questions that are more difficult to answer.

The second part of my research was feedbacks. We don’t have a great understanding of what the Earth does when you increase carbon dioxide this quickly. And the reason we don’t really have that good understanding is we’ve never done this experiment before. And it was one of my interests to try to understand and constrain some of those feedback processes.

EA: These are big scientific questions. They’re things that we need to know to make good policy choices, to protect ourselves and to prepare for what’s coming. Is NASA no longer studying these things?

KM: I want to be really clear that there are amazing scientists still in this organization who are doing amazing work and fighting really hard to keep doing amazing work.

But we are losing something—and not just at NASA, but at the NSF, the DOE, the NIH. We’re losing this neutral arbiter of science.

I’m not saying that scientists are not human beings with our own values and preferences and feelings. But we’re also nerds. And when you have big federal systems full of nerds, indoctrinated in the culture of being nerds, of always asking questions, of changing your mind when the evidence dictates that you should change your mind—if we lose that sort of universally agreed upon source of objective reality, I think we just have massive problems as a democracy going forward.

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EA: How is the Trump administration specifically changing or harming the culture of federal science? That nerd culture you speak of, where we look at the evidence and we change our mind if there’s a problem.

KM: At the highest levels, putting political appointees in positions that are fundamentally not supposed to be political. There have been a lot of these newspaper reports of DOGE going through grants and automatically canceling or refusing to review grants with specific bad words—things like diversity or woman or climate or future or Earth.

EA: Woman, a famously political word.

KM: Exactly. Should they vote?

And as a result, there is kind of this reflexive urge to self-censor. It comes from a good place. It comes from, well, I think this is an interesting question. And if I change a word here and there, am I gonna be allowed to continue asking this interesting question?

But that is obviously a slippery slope. Because you start changing words in a way that is very moral and defensible, then where’s the limit? At what point do you say, I have fundamentally altered the research question?

Having to hide things does things to you. It does things to your science, it does things to your soul as a person.

EA: It’s interesting because yes, the Trump administration slashed a bunch of funding for science, went in and did cuts and firings, but you still had a job. So what did your job look like under Trump, and why were you like, I can’t do this?

KM: My job was to do science, and it was really unclear how long that would continue. It was unclear what exactly I was supposed to be doing because, again, I’d written grants saying I want to do this project. They had been peer reviewed, we had been told, okay, you can do this project, this sounds like a good idea, but then there was no money.

I’m good at making work for myself. I’m good at continuing to do the science, even when it’s not really clear exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. But every day we’d wake up and think: Are we gonna get fired today? Are all of our grants gonna get canceled today? What words are we not allowed to use today?

And it felt that at the highest levels, instead of saying, we value your science and here’s how we’re going to protect it, we were being told things like, make sure you take your pronouns out of your email signature. That was the highest priority.

EA: That’s so annoying, by the way.

KM: The greatest problem facing America.

EA: So you were at NASA during the first Trump administration as well, correct? What was different then between that administration and this administration?

KM: Yes. The first time we had an administrator who was essentially a NASA fanboy. He really loved NASA and he wanted to take care of NASA. And we were very largely protected from political interference the first time around.

This time around it felt distinctly different because of the chaos. We had an administrator who was nominated, then he was un-nominated. And after he gave a million dollars to a Trump PAC, and he was renominated. [Editors note: It was actually $2 million].

One of the last straws for me was reading an interview with him in Science Magazine, which is one of the leading journals for nerds. It’s a nerd newspaper. And in this interview, he said, well, it’s just not good for NASA to be seen convening scientists or publishing papers on politically controversial topics.

And I was like, it’s not our fault it’s controversial, Jared.

EA: Of course his name is Jared.

KM: I’m sure there are nice Jareds out there! But this particular Jared just did not give me a lot of confidence that he was going to stand up for our science.

[Editor’s note: NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s full quote was: “For NASA to assemble scientists and put out papers on politically charged issues, whether or not this is an impending climate catastrophe, is not helpful to the broader NASA mission.”]

EA: What can you communicate about the experience of federal scientists overall under this administration?

KM: I think there is a certain amount of bewilderment.

A lot of scientists were the kids who got the A’s in school, the kids who worked really hard, the kids who went to graduate school, the kids who sat down and really kind of wrestled with the math and the methods and the sometimes really boring hard slog of science. And most of us did that under the assumption that everybody thinks this is a good thing to do.

It is good to cure and prevent diseases. It is good to do research and development that then filters down into the private sector and makes a lot of money for people and boosts the economy. It is good to have information about the weather, about the climate.

I think we all kind of assumed that this was universal, that essentially everybody believed it. And it has been a shock. A lot of people are saying, well, you guys are so naive. And maybe we were. But it has felt very shocking to be attacked for doing the science.

I kind of expected that we would be targets as climate scientists. What I did not expect was that they would go after pediatric cancer research first. And that has been very, very confusing. Why are we under attack? What did we do wrong? Why does everybody hate us all of a sudden?

EA: Do you have any idea?

KM: Totally out of my wheelhouse, but there are politically motivated attacks on science. The conclusions of climate science are very inconvenient to a lot of people.

But I think there is a more general attack on science, and I think it completely mirrors the attack on journalism. Because science and journalism are both trying to do the same thing: figure out what’s true and tell people about it. And sometimes if what’s true contradicts what the administration is saying is true, that is very, very, very threatening to the administration.

I think you see that in authoritarian regimes worldwide and throughout history, that you want to have a very tight grip on the control of information. You want the government to be able to say what’s real and what’s not. George Orwell articulated this really well. If the party says two plus two equals five, two plus two equals five.

And it doesn’t matter that that’s transparently wrong. The point is to force loyalty to the regime by getting people to go along with things that they know are wrong.

EA: So dark.

KM: It’s so dark. But as I became an adult, I was like, those stories that they read you when you’re a kid where there’s good and there’s evil, those are totally unrealistic. In the real world everything is nuanced.

And that has been very interesting for me to realize that no, wow. There’s good and evil. In this particular scenario, it is so obvious to me what the right thing to do is. The battle between scientists and authoritarians, I know what side of this divide I’m on.

EA: I keep thinking about that quote from NASA Jared that really sent you over the edge, that “it’s not good for scientists to dive into controversial topics” like climate. And it occurs to me, who else besides scientists would you want to dive into controversial topics? What do we lose by avoiding federal scientists diving into controversial topics?

KM: A lot. Especially because this is not a hypothetical. Climate change is happening. It’s happening now. It will continue to happen.

And as it gets worse and worse, we’re gonna start seeing ideas being floated, right? We’re gonna start seeing people saying, well, let’s try to somehow refreeze the ice sheets. Let’s try to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and bury it. Let’s try to block the sun by spraying particles into the stratosphere.

All of those things are controversial and all of those things are going to require trusted scientific input. I’m not saying scientists should make these decisions. But I do think that we need to have that information on the table to make decisions. And if we don’t have a knowledge base, that is incredibly dangerous.

EA: You’re saying that the federal government is the best place to do that type of science, to be the arbiter of this research, right? Can you tell me a little more about why you think that is?

KM: Most basic science is federally funded. Even if there’s a university doing scientific research, a lot of that funding will come from federal sources. And the reason we do that is everybody benefits from this, but there’s no clear profit motive to find out stuff about the world. Once you find out stuff, then there is a clear profit motive to use it. But there has been this recognition that that can’t be left to the private sector.

There’s been this consensus ever since World War II that this is a good thing, that we get enormous return on investment for every dollar that we spend on research and development. And I think the fact that we spend more on research and development than any other country, and we have the biggest economy—those two things are not separate from each other.

EA: I also want to go back to what you were talking about, spraying aerosols in the atmosphere and using geoengineering. I recently came across this excerpt from your book in the Wall Street Journal. The headline is, “To fight climate change, we need to start hacking nature.” It kind of makes it seem like you’re saying that in order to fight climate change, we need to start geoengineering the planet. Is that what you were saying?

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ICYMI: I wrote about Shein’s acquisition of Everlane earlier this week. If you prefer to read rather than listen/watch, you can find that here.

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Big news on the “green capitalism” front: Everlane, the much-beloved clothing brand built on a promise to make fashion climate-friendly, is being purchased by Shein, the most-polluting fast fashion brand on Earth.

The prevailing public reaction to this sale (valued at $100 million, first reported by Puck News) has been shock and disappointment that such an ethical, sustainable brand would sell out to such a massive planetary ghoul.

But I’m here to tell you that Everlane was never actually “good” for the planet. It was, however, really good at selling the idea that buying lots of new clothes could be sustainable. And that’s what Shein is actually buying: not an eco-friendly company, but an eco-friendly image.

The good Everlane has done

Now look: I’m not saying Everlane’s entire pro-Earth marketing strategy was a lie. By the dismal standards of the fashion industry, the company has done quite a lot to reduce emissions, water use, and virgin fossil fuel materials.

A 2020 Stanford Business profile of Everlane founder and then-CEO Michael Preysman noted that the company waited six years to make its first pair of jeans because it wanted to wait for a manufacturer that could recycle 98 percent of the water used in production. It also noted that Preysman had committed in 2018 to removing all virgin plastic from the company’s supply chain, stores, and offices by 2021.

By 2022, Everlane was publicly describing its work around three goals: “Keeping Earth Clean,” “Keeping Earth Cool,” and “Doing Right By People.” The company also began publishing impact reports and setting climate targets. Everlane says its carbon goals are aligned with a 1.5°C pathway: cutting per-product emissions 55 percent by 2030, reducing absolute emissions from stores and headquarters 46 percent by 2030, and reaching net zero by 2050 or sooner.

By 2025, Everlane claimed to have already achieved a 42 percent reduction in per-product emissions and cut absolute Scope 1–3 emissions 60 percent below its 2019 baseline calculation. Trellis reported that 90 percent of Everlane’s materials in 2024 met “lower-impact” standards, such as being organic, recycled, or “responsibly sourced.”

The work seemed to be continuing up until Everlane’s acquisition by Shein. Last year, Everlane announced it would co-invest in textile mill decarbonization projects alongside two other sustainable fashion brans, Reformation and Eileen Fisher. (I reached out to the Apparel Impact Institute, the group coordinating the investments, to see if Everlane’s contributions would continue under Shein’s ownership. No word back on that yet).

So yes: Everlane made real efforts to reduce harm, measure emissions, improve materials, clean up parts of its supply chain, and talk about fashion’s environmental impact in ways most apparel brands did not. (The company also did some notable pro-climate media partnerships with The New York Times and The Atlantic).

But reducing harm to the planet is not the same thing as being good for the planet. And that distinction matters, because the fashion industry’s climate problem is not merely that too many clothes are made badly. It’s that too many clothes are made, period.

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Everlane’s DTC business model relies on overconsumption

Everlane is nowhere near Shein-style ultra-fast fashion. But it’s still a major fashion company whose direct-to-consumer business model relies on a basic formula: keep selling people new clothes, in new colors, in new patterns, in new shapes, in perpetuity.

That cycle of overconsumption is fundamentally incompatible with a safe climate. The United Nations Environment Program’s 2024 Global Resources Outlook found that resource extraction and processing account for more than 60 percent of climate warming emissions, and that global resource use has more than tripled since 1970—from 30 billion tonnes to 106 billion tonnes. Without urgent action, UNEP warned, material extraction could rise another 60 percent by 2060.

Fashion is a major expression of that crisis, responsible for up to 10 percent of global carbon emissions. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that clothing production approximately doubled over 15 years, while clothing use fell by almost 40 percent. In the United States, landfills received 11.3 million tons of solid waste textiles in 2018, equal to 7.7 percent of all landfilled municipal solid waste.

In order for a fashion company to be truly climate-friendly, it would have to make and sell fewer clothes. And that’s the contradiction every “sustainable” fashion brand eventually runs into: To actually be good for the planet, it must discourage overconsumption. But to survive, it usually has to encourage it.

That is why Everlane could never truly be climate-friendly. Its individual practices may have reduced harm, but its business model still always depended on accumulating more stuff. In fact, there is probably a real case to be made that the company’s focus on making better quality products was part of the reason it wasn’t able to sustain itself. After all, you have to keep selling shit to stay in business. Obviously, Everlane was no longer selling enough shit.

But that’s also what makes Shein’s acquisition of Everlane so alarming. It’s not so much that Everlane “sold out.” It’s that Shein has bought the exact kind of brand it needs to launder its genuinely ecocidal business model.

Because Shein is not burdened by any true desire to slow the cycle of resource extraction. Shein is the final boss of overconsumption: a company whose entire model is built on producing and selling a staggering volume of cheap clothes, as quickly as possible, to as many people as possible.

So I am willing to bet a large sum of money that Shein is going to use Everlane to greenwash itself. Everlane, as Startup Fortune reported, “helped define the language of clean design and ethical sourcing for a generation of digitally native shoppers.”

Now that language belongs to Shein. It’s our job not to fall for the lie.

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In the month since a deadly hantavirus outbreak was first reported aboard the MV Hondius, the story has become many things: A story about our lingering COVID-19 trauma, a story about how shitty America’s global outbreak response has become, and a story about how how no one should ever go on a cruise, even if it is an awesome Arctic expedition.

But three infectious disease scientists I spoke to this week told me that hantavirus also needs to be a climate change story—specifically, about what happens when an increasingly hotter and chaotic planet reshuffles where diseases can spread.

If we ignore or dismiss the climate angle of the hantavirus story, “we miss the opportunity to get ahead of the curve,” said Kirk Osmond Douglas, director of the Centre for Biosecurity Studies at the University of the West Indies in Barbados, who has studied the connection between hantaviruses and climate change.

“Climate health models allow you to see into the future what could potentially be,” said Douglas. “And knowing what’s coming … would actually save you a lot of money, and potentially also a lot of lives as well.”

So what is coming when it comes to hantaviruses and climate change? How are they connected? And how could the rapidly approaching Super El Nino—a phenomenon worsened by climate change—affect the spread of hantavirus and other infectious diseases?

That’s what we’re going to explore today.

Hotter planet + infectious diseases = bad

Reporting on the climate impact to a specific disease outbreak is a little like reporting on the climate impact to a specific hurricane or wildfire as it’s happening. Without an attribution study, it’s really difficult to pinpoint the exact influence.

In the case of this specific outbreak of the Andes virus—the only strain of Hantavirus known to spread from person to person—we still don’t even know exactly where it originated. One rapidly-spreading theory is that the first known patient was exposed while birdwatching near a landfill outside Ushuaia, Argentina, but local officials, birding guides, and medical experts have strongly pushed back, saying it likely originated further north.

But even without that information, we can talk about the conditions that make hantavirus outbreaks more likely. And generally speaking, a hotter planet and infectious diseases are a bad mix, at least for humans. A 2022 study in Nature Climate Change found that over half of known infectious diseases have already been made worse, in some way, by climate hazards.

In many cases, that’s because a changing climate allows disease-carrying wildlife to spread in places they didn’t used to, said Dr. James Shepherd, an infectious diseases specialist at Yale University:

As the planet warms, as the environment heats up, then the range of diseases also changes, because diseases that are tropical or subtropical can now become temperate diseases. If their vectors and their reservoir hosts can move northwards, for instance—which is what we’re seeing with tick transmitted infections—then they can move into areas that had never seen them before.

The good news is that hantavirus is not a tropical or subtropical disease, so it’s not at risk of moving into temperate zones. The bad news is that it’s already a global disease. There are more than 40 types of hantavirus across the world, and they exist in rodents pretty much everywhere.

So in terms of climate change, infectious disease experts aren’t so much worried about hantavirus reservoir hosts (that’s science-term for disease-carrying rodents) moving from tropical zones into temperate zones. They’re more worried about them moving from nature into places where humans live, work, and generally exist.

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How climate change is pushing humans and rodents together

To be clear: there are many non-climate-change reasons that rodents are increasingly moving from nature into places where humans are. Across the world, we’re cutting down more forests, expanding more farms and cities, and pushing more roads and mines deeper into wild habitats.

But many studies show that, in addition to those factors, climate change is also pushing rodents into closer contact with humans.

Back in 2021, Dr. Douglas helped conduct a systematic review of the scientific literature around hantavirus and climate change. What he found was that, in areas where climate change was making things wetter, rodent populations were exploding. He told us:

When you have a lot of rainfall, what happens? The soil moisture increases, plant and vegetation growth increases, and then you get a production of food and food availability for the rodent. And so you get a population boom within the rodent population. And when you do that, then you increase the risk of humans coming into contact either directly with rodents or indirectly with contaminated dust through the infected rodents excreted, whether this be feces or urine. … Flooding can also flush rodents out of their habitat and then rodents will be dislocated and oftentimes they find themselves closer to human dwellings.

Rodents and humans also risk coming into more contact in places where climate change is making drought worse, too. Here’s Dr. Douglas:

Droughts also impact negatively on food availability … So you have less food available, [the rodents] go seeking food from somewhere. And what do humans do during droughts? Particularly within the Latin America region, they store grain. That’s where you have the most attraction for rodents … [which] also brings them into closer contact with humans.

This pattern has also shown up in human disease data. A 2024 study in JAMA Network Open found that after severe flooding in China’s Yangtze River basin, the risk of rodent-borne hantavirus disease remained elevated for up to three years.

Of course, the data can be complicated. One study in Arizona, for instance, found that extreme flooding didn’t help the area’s dominant kangaroo rat population—it nearly wiped them out completely. Meanwhile, however, the area’s pocket mice survived and surged, permanently changing which rodents dominated the landscape.

So the picture of climate change’s impact on weather and rodent population can be complicated. But it’s not the only way climate change worsens the spread of infectious diseases like hantavirus.

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Climate change worsens urbanization and biodiversity loss

Climate change is also worsening other problems that are contributing to disease spread—like increased urbanization, or, put another way, the exodus of people out of rural areas and into cities, where rodents thrive. Here’s Dr. Shepherd.

One of the great effects [of climate change] on us, as hosts of infections, is that we’re moving. … But we’re moving because we can no longer sustain lifestyles that used to sustain us for millennia, like subsistence farming, for instance, in Africa. There are parts that are getting too dry or too wet or too unpredictable. …

So we’re urbanizing a vast movement driven by climate, driven by unpredictability, driven by the difficulties of growing food in a very unpredictable climate. This is resulting in massive expansion of cities, primarily in the hotter, poorer parts of the world. The biggest cities in the world in 50 years are nearly all going to be in Africa. And they’re going to be projected close to 100 million people in some of these cities.

Another problem that climate change is worsening is the loss of biodiversity. The IPCC has found that, with every little bit of warming, extinction risk rises: at 1.5°C, the median share of species at very high risk of extinction is estimated at 9 percent, at 2°C it’s 10 percent, at 3°C its 12 percent, and so on, and so on. That’s not good for diseases.

“As biodiversity goes down, as environments are denuded, often things that carry infections and transmit infections, hosts and vectors, tend to be more robust,” Dr Shepherd said. “They move in.”

Still, overall, scientists are clear that it’s difficult to pinpoint the precise influence of climate change on this specific strain of hantavirus. Here’s Dr. Angel Desai, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, Davis.

It’s tough because while there are all of these things going on with climate, there’s also all these other things going on in the context of human behavior. So it’s always a challenge to be able to parse out what exactly is specifically related to climate-related factors and what’s related to the other factors. But in my mind, I think that it’s all connected together, and that’s driving these changes we’re seeing in infectious diseases.

Why talking about the climate connection is important

Still, each scientist I spoke to was adamant that, even if we can’t pinpoint the exact influence of climate change on the Andes virus outbreak, it’s still worth talking about.

One reason is because, in the very near future, forecasters predict we’re about to experience one of the strongest El Nino events in recorded history—an event made stronger by climate change. That may impact rodent populations around the world, but also specifically in Argentina and Chile, where the Andes virus originates. Here’s Dr. Shepherd:

When you’re having what we’re gonna have later this year, a very strong El Nino year, which is gonna be stronger because the planet’s much warmer than it was before. The rodent populations in the wet, humid, agricultural areas of the world tend to explode and overpopulate, have massive increases. And that will increase the number of... pathogens that they carry and introduce into the environment

Another reason it’s wise to talk about climate change in relation to this hantavirus outbreak is that it highlights the need for governments to invest in research models that take climate change into consideration when forecasting disease outbreaks. Here’s Dr. Douglas:

Why can’t you forecast the risk of infectious diseases that can assist you in planning and preparing just like you would for a hurricane? You don’t want to wait until the hurricane is at your door to ensure you have food supplies, ensure that you have taken all the necessary preparative steps to minimize the impact. It’s not that you’re going to prevent it. It’s to mitigate and to reduce the risk.

Overall, the scientists I spoke with said this hantavirus outbreak highlights the fact that the conditions for infectious disease outbreaks are changing faster than our systems for predicting and preventing those outbreaks.

And in a climate-changed world, we can no longer think of diseases like hantavirus as something to eradicate. “As far as infectious diseases are concerned, they are here forever,” Shepherd said. “They’re part of our environment. They’re part of the natural order of things.”

That doesn’t mean outbreaks are unavoidable. It means disease risk is fundamentally shaped by the health of the natural world. “We need to recognize that we’re not top dog,” Shepherd said. “We’re just another member of an exceptionally complex interdependent ecosystem.”

Destroying habitat, reducing biodiversity, and rapidly warming the planet do not just harm “nature” in some abstract sense. They also weaken some of the barriers that help keep pathogens away from people. And ultimately, by disrupting the environment so completely, Shepherd said we are likely to fuel more pandemics.

“We have to recognize that we are part of a complex, biodiverse planetary system,” Shepherd said, “and that we screw with it at our peril.”

Special thanks to Drs. Kirk Osmond Douglas, James Shepherd, and Angel Desai for sharing their expertise that informed this story.

Our good friends at the Popular Information newsletter have calculated the real cost of the Iran War so far: $72 billion for the first 60 days, or about $1.2 billion in taxpayer dollars per day.

The numbers are revealing, in that they show the Trump administration is perfectly capable of finding money when the goal is destruction. But when it comes to protecting Americans from fossil-fueled extreme weather, suddenly we’re told the cupboard is bare.

Because at the very same time Trump is spending roughly $1.2 billion a day on war, his administration is proposing to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA—the agency that helps keep Americans alive when the weather turns deadly. Supposedly, we just can’t afford it.

The Trump administration recently released a proposed budget that would cut NOAA by 26 percent. This proposed $1.6 billion cut—equivalent to about 1.3 days of the war in Iran—would eliminate NOAA climate, weather, and ocean research labs, zero out grants that help improve rainfall and flood prediction, and cut the Integrated Ocean Observing System—our national system for monitoring what is happening in the ocean, where hurricanes strengthen, and where coastal flooding begins. And this comes on top of DOGE-driven layoffs last year that eliminated roughly 880 NOAA jobs, including staff at the National Weather Service.

The stupidity of this is almost difficult to overstate. Because Trump is not proposing to gut NOAA during some calm, stable weather period. He’s doing it at the very moment forecasters are warning that a potentially dangerous El Niño may be on the way.

The newest long-range forecast from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts shows a 100 percent chance of a so-called “Super El Niño” forming by November, potentially one of the strongest El Niño events ever recorded. El Niño is a natural warming pattern in the tropical Pacific, but it acts like a planetary heat amplifier—raising global temperatures, reshuffling rainfall patterns, and increasing the risk of droughts, floods, heat waves, and other extreme weather.

Even a regular El Niño would risk pushing global temperatures into record territory. And it’s not like we’re starting from a great baseline: More than 60 percent of the U.S. is already in drought, which means a lot of landscapes are already primed for wildfire. Forecasters are already warning about elevated wildfire danger across multiple regions this spring and summer.

.Under a normal administration, this would be the moment to invest in the agency designed to help us understand, forecast, and prepare for extreme weather.

But this is not a normal administration. It is one completely and totally captured by the fossil fuel industry, which is desperately trying to suppress accurate information about climate change. And NOAA, in addition to being a weather forecasting agency, just so happens to be one of the most prestigious climate science agencies on Earth.

This is why NOAA is being targeted for such huge reductions: Not because we need to save money, but because its research threatens fossil fuel dominance. Project 2025 said this out loud. It called NOAA one of the main drivers of the “climate change alarm industry,” said the agency should be broken up and downsized, and called for much of its climate research to be disbanded.

So this is not just a proposed budget cut. It is a political attack on the government’s ability to understand climate change and warn the public about what’s coming.

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That’s not just my assessment. It’s also the assessment of Craig McLean, the former acting chief scientist of NOAA, who spent more than 40 years at the agency.

In a recent post for SciLight, McLean wrote that the NOAA budget request “is not streamlining. It’s sabotage.” His argument is simple: You cannot eliminate the research that improves forecasts, protects communities, and helps the country understand what is coming—and then pretend you are making the agency more efficient.

McLean knows what it looks like when politics corrupts weather science. You might recall, McLean was the NOAA official at the center of “Sharpiegate,” the infamous Trump-era scandal in which the president falsely claimed Hurricane Dorian was threatening Alabama, then displayed a forecast map that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie to make him look right. McLean pushed back after NOAA leadership rebuked its own forecasters for correcting the president, calling for an investigation into whether the agency’s scientific integrity policy had been violated. McLean was then relieved of his position.

This week on the HEATED podcast, I spoke with McLean about what these cuts would actually do, why NOAA research matters far beyond “the weather,” what Sharpiegate revealed about scientific integrity under Trump, and why attacking climate science is so dangerous at the exact moment Americans need it most.

You can find the full interview at the top of this newsletter, on your favorite podcast app, or on YouTube.

Some quick but necessary background

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed this lawsuit in the dark ages: 2020. In it, he accused ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Flint Hills Resources, and the American Petroleum Institute of “deliberately undermining the science of climate change, purposefully downplaying the role that the purchase and consumption of their products played in causing climate change … [and] failing to fully inform the consumers and the public of their understanding that without swift action, it would be too late to ward off the devastation.”

By covering up what it knew about climate change, Ellison’s lawsuit alleges the oil companies violated Minnesota laws against consumer fraud, false advertising, deceptive trade practices, fraud, misrepresentation, and failure to warn.

As a remedy, Ellison’s lawsuit is seeking money to help cover climate-related costs in Minnesota, the return of profits tied to the oil companies’ alleged deception, and a court-ordered public education campaign correcting the record on climate change. (Remember this, it will become important soon).

The case has spent the last six years tangled up in procedural purgatory. But last month, the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to take up the oil industry’s latest appeal. And on Monday, the stay in the case dissolved, meaning Minnesota’s lawsuit could finally start moving toward discovery—the juicy part of the legal process where companies may have to turn over internal documents and answer questions under oath.

So naturally, that’s the moment the Trump administration swooped in with a lawsuit seeking to kill Minnesota’s case.

The DOJ’s case is built on a lie

The DOJ’s complaint is an incredible piece of rage bait for anyone following these cases closely. It is, in essence, an exercise in the propagandistic practice of repeating something false over and over and over in the hopes that eventually, people will start to believe it.

The falsehood that the DOJ’s complaint is built on is that Minnesota’s lawsuit is a covert plot to set national energy policy. In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ claims Minnesota’s lawsuit is seeking to “regulate global greenhouse gas emissions,” which falls under federal authority, and therefore must be dismissed. I thought about listing all the times here, but I will spare you. You can just read the complaint.

What’s more important to sear into your brain is that this just… isn’t true. Remember when I told you what Ellison’s lawsuit is seeking? Reimbursement for climate-related costs, the return of profits tied to deception, a court-ordered public education campaign. Do you see “a change in greenhouse gas regulations” there?

You don’t! Because it is not there.

This lie is not only the center of the DOJ’s complaint. It is the backbone of the oil industry’s broader, multi-pronged campaign to achieve permanent, sweeping legal immunity from all climate lawsuits nationwide.

We discussed this two weeks ago in our newsletter/podcast episode about the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act,” the bill introduced by Republicans Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Harriet Hageman, which would make it illegal to sue the fossil fuel industry or any fossil fuel-adjacent company over damages from climate change.

HEATED

Republicans introduce extreme bill to ban lawsuits against Big Oil forever

The U.S. Congress is considering an extreme bill that would make it illegal to sue the fossil fuel industry over the damage they cause to the planet, the economy, and our health…

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2 months ago · 127 likes · 5 comments · Emily Atkin

To justify that bill, Cruz and Hageman argued that climate liability lawsuits are attempts by states “to impose a radical climate agenda nationwide.” And they’re not! They are just, factually, not.

Now, it is true that the impact of a bunch of successful climate liability lawsuits might wind up being national. If Big Oil is forced to pay for even a fraction of the damage it lied its way into worsening, fossil fuels may become more expensive. That is the entire point of accountability: costs stop being dumped entirely on the public and start landing, at least in part, on the companies that helped create them.

But that is not the same thing as “regulating global greenhouse gas emissions.” It’s just your basic fraud lawsuit with consequences, just like the successful lawsuits against Big Tobacco and Big Opioid.

But the oil industry needs to spread conspiratorial disinformation like this, because it’s the only way it’s going to build support for its insane ask for complete legal immunity.

So if you care about climate accountability, cement this in your brain now: these lawsuits are not secret attempts to regulate fossil fuels. They are attempts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for deception. The industry and its paid political allies are going to keep loudly proclaiming otherwise, because they desperately need a valid-sound argument to justify shielding Big Oil from the law, and making communities continue to bear the costs of catastrophic climate change. So it’s important to be armed with the truth.

And you’d like to learn more about the various ways Big Oil is trying to achieve legal immunity, check out our interview at the top of this newsletter with Mike Meno, the communications director for the Center for Climate Integrity.

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Related reading:

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I’ve been trying to “detox my life” from plastic for a few weeks now. It’s had its ups and downs.

One thing I’ve noticed is that avoiding plastic has a high up-front mental cost. Before you can replace the products leeching hormone-disrupting chemicals and microplastics into your skin, mouth and lungs, you first have to identify them. That identification process requires a level of vigilance that, frankly, I am not used to deploying toward the objects in my home. Before doing this, it had not even registered to me that wearing invisible braces meant I was literally chomping on plastic 22 hours a day1. (Attentiveness in general may not be my strong suit.)

But after several days of inspecting stuff I’d previously only assessed for ease-of-use and aesthetics, I realized that even I—a person who’d thought of herself as fairly plastic-conscious2—had a lot more to notice. I’d never looked closely enough to realize my electric water kettle had little plastic parts on the inside; that my metal water bottle had a plastic straw; or that the pasta pot I’d thought was ceramic for the last four years was actually nonstick. I’d never clocked that I owned exactly zero non-polyester sweatshirts or sweatpants or bras or underwear. And I’d never stopped to think that my Ninja Creami was basically a tiny lathe for shaving microplastics.

The act of noticing has not been completely annoying, though. While it was certainly easier to move through my life without really thinking about the objects I was using and touching, in retrospect, it was a little like sleepwalking. Being more mindful about my stuff has made me feel weirdly good about myself, like I’m at least trying to take care of me. I’m also getting this fun placebo effect from sorting out and storing all the polyester clothes in my closet3. Turns out, wearing natural-material clothes makes me feel about 20 percent healthier at all times—even if my partner did tease me for looking like a “crunchy food co-op member.” (To be fair, we were on our way to the food co-op when he said it.)

The act of buying new, non-plastic stuff is a different story. This, friends, feels mostly bad.

I’ve already spent a little over $1000 replacing high-impact items in my life—workout clothes, water kettle, underwear, etc—and I’m not even close to done. And while I can admit to a slight dopamine rush when I get something new and high-quality (I “oohed” and “aahed” when I got my stainless steel water kettle), the overarching feeling I’ve gotten from the buying process has been financial dread—not just for myself, but for anyone who chooses to move away from products that are demonstrably harming our health and the planet.4

And that financial dread quickly moves into rage when I remember that plastic is only “affordable” because it’s been made artificially cheap by policy. Since 2012, U.S. plastics plants have received $9 billion in state and local tax subsidies, shifting part of the industry’s costs onto the public before its products even reach the shelf. Combined with all the other subsidies we grant the fossil fuel industry, its extensive lobbying power, and the fact that we don’t have extended producer responsibility laws, I feel like I’m constantly being reminded that plastic is only cheap because its real costs are not built into the price. Because our officials care more about this massive corporate donor than the health of our bodies and the planet.

Anyway! Tracy recently asked me what’s been the most unexpected part of the plastic detox process so far. I told her: I always knew avoiding plastic would be annoying. I didn’t realize I would also have to become annoying. (Even more so than usual.)

Because in addition to the mental cost and the financial cost, there is a social cost to avoiding plastic. You have to be willing to become the person who constantly interrupts the flow of traffic to ask for a metal fork or a real glass, and bear whatever reaction people may have. I felt this most acutely last week when I traveled with a group of friends to Nashville, where plastic was the default material holding almost every piece of food and drink I received. If I had wanted to seriously avoid plastic that weekend, I would have had to opt out of whole pieces of the trip. I imagined it was like trying to be vegetarian in the 1990s, or gluten-free before 2010: functionally impossible unless you’re willing to make huge social sacrifices. I’m not. I just drank from the plastic cup.

I’m also lucky enough to have friends who are very supportive of any endeavor I’m taking for the planet or my health. But I don’t think that’s the case for most. I’m willing to bet there’s a large portion of people who, if they tried to avoid plastic in front of their friends, would be dismissed or eye-rolled or called a pussy. And I think this may be the thing that makes a plastic habit most hard to break: Not the act of replacing the straw, but the fear of becoming the person who makes everyone talk about the straw.

The upside, though, is that this also means there’s something useful you can do even if you’re not in a position to move away from plastic yourself. You can be cool to the people who are trying. My friends were cool to me, and it made a big difference. A couple even said they wanted to try it.

Anyway, those are all my thoughts for now, at least the ones I can put into written form. If you want to hear more specific details about my plastic detox, Tracy and I recorded a podcast episode about what I’ve been doing, what I’ve replaced, what I’m still struggling with, and what this process has made me notice about the need for systemic change. It’s at the top of the newsletter.

This episode is for paid subscribers only, not because I want it to be, but because giving everything we make away for free is unfortunately not turning out to be an incredible business strategy. I’d like to continue working with awesome people to help me with this project. The more people subscribe, the more I can give away for free! Also, if you subscribe, you can ask me anything you’d like in the comments about my personal process. I’m happy to answer.

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I’ll update you all again when I get the results of my pee test back. Make sure you’re subscribed to get it.

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In related recent news…

• Now may actually be a good time to start shifting away from plastic. The American Prospect reports:

  Petrochemical prices are spiking to four-year highs as the key ingredients, known as feedstocks, cannot get out of the Persian Gulf. Roughly $20 billion to $25 billion worth of petrochemical products moves through the strait annually, and about 40 percent of exports of polyethylene, used mostly in packaging and containers, came from the Middle East last year. Polyethylene prices are up 37 percent since February, and polypropylene prices are up 38 percent.

• Oregon passed a law to shift more of the costs of plastic onto producers. But producers are fighting back. Central Oregon Daily reports:

  The future of Oregon’s Recycling Modernization Act is up in the air after a federal judge said portions of the law may be illegal, and can’t be enforced without full argument. On Feb. 6, Judge Michael Simon issued his initial order in the lawsuit that aimed to overturn the law meant to reform Oregon’s recycling system.

• Millions of pre-term births and thousands of infant deaths linked to phthalates: From NYU Langone:

  Exposure to a chemical commonly used to make plastic more flexible may have contributed to about 1.97 million preterm births in 2018 alone, or more than 8 percent of the world’s total, a new analysis of population surveys shows. The chemical was also linked to the deaths of 74,000 newborns, the researchers further estimate….
  
  According to the new work, [phthalate] exposure may have contributed to 1.2 million years lived with disability, a measure of all the years that people have lived or will live with illnesses, injuries, and other health issues caused by being born prematurely.

New study shows changing your personal care products actually does make a difference. From U.S. Right to Know:

The findings, published in the May issue of Environment International, indicate that switching from conventional personal care products to nontoxic alternatives can rapidly and significantly reduce exposure to harmful chemicals. Even a few changes in only a few days can lower body levels of substances linked to hormone disruption, cancer, developmental problems, and reproductive toxicity, the study shows.

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The U.S. Congress is considering an extreme bill that would make it illegal to sue the fossil fuel industry over the damage they cause to the planet, the economy, and our health.

Last week, Big Oil’s top-funded Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Representative Harriet Hageman (R-WY) introduced a bill called the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026. They framed it as a way to “protect American energy from leftist legal crusades punishing lawful activity.”

What it actually does is give the fossil fuel industry a permanent shield against lawsuits and state laws that seek to hold the industry financially accountable for climate change, and for misleading the public about the catastrophic health, economic and environmental consequences of using their products.

The gun industry achieved a similar type of legal immunity in 2005. That law, called Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, has largely prevented victims of gun violence from seeking justice against irresponsible industry actors, and has sometimes resulted in victims being forced to pay gun industry legal fees.

This would do something similar for the fossil fuel industry. But unlike the gun industry’s liability shield, there would be no exceptions at all.

What the bill says

The bill states very clearly: “A qualified liability action may not be filed or maintained in any Federal or State court.”

It defines a “qualified liability action” as two things: a “climate lawsuit” or an “energy penalty law.”

A climate lawsuit is defined extremely broadly:

Any suit… that is brought against any person engaged in the energy business that seeks damages, including punitive damages, injunctive or declaratory relief, or abatement, restitution, or any form of equitable or other relief for alleged past or future harm resulting directly or indirectly from climate change, including because of marketing, alleged misrepresentation, alleged failure to warn, or any other speech.

According to the bill, the “energy business” only applies to fossil fuel companies. Solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear companies are not defined as “energy”—which should tell you a lot about what Republicans mean when they use the term.

The bill also bans “energy penalty laws,” defined as any state or local law that requires fossil fuel companies to pay for climate-related harms. That would eliminate “polluter pays” laws, like the climate superfund policies passed in New York and Vermont. These require major polluters to contribute to the cost of climate adaptation.

In summary, the bill says:

• No state or municipality can file a climate lawsuit

• No state or municipality can pass or enforce a law making polluters pay for the consequences of their pollution

• Existing climate cases would all be dismissed

• Existing polluter pay laws would be voided

• Private citizens can never sue fossil fuel companies over climate harm

All seems like things a really innocent person or entity would need!

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Why is this happening?

So why is Ted Cruz going this far? To understand that, you have to understand what’s happening in the courts right now.

”Today, there are 11 states and dozens of communities that together cover one in four people living in the United States suing Big Oil,” Mike Meno, communications director for the Center for Climate Integrity, told HEATED.

The lawsuits span different courts, different states, and different allegations. But in general, Meno said, plaintiffs are saying “Hey—our communities are facing greater risks from wildfires, sea level rise, floods, droughts, and it’s going to cost us a lot of money to protect residents from those harms. The companies that knowingly caused these damages, they should have to pay, the same way that tobacco companies were made to pay for the public health harms that they knowingly caused.”

While many of these lawsuits have been dismissed, others are moving forward—a scary prospect for Big Oil, which as you may have heard, has really been struggling financially lately.

Honolulu’s case against Exxon and Chevron seeking billions in damages from rising seas and worsening storms is moving forward. Lawsuits in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine are also all moving past procedural stage.

And most notably, the city and county of Boulder, Colorado’s lawsuit against Exxon and Suncor was recently allowed to proceed by the Colorado Supreme Court. So now, to avoid being forced to hand over internal documents and defend themselves in front of a jury, the oil industry has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. (The Supreme Court has agreed to review that case.)

But oil companies don’t want to challenge each individual cause in court. They’d prefer to have blanket legal immunity so they never have to spend money or time defending themselves on the merits again.

And the crazy thing is: The oil industry has already achieved legal immunity in a couple states. It hasn’t been covered much in mainstream media, but Utah and Tennessee recently passed laws shielding fossil fuel companies from climate lawsuits. And similar bills have been introduced and are gaining traction in a bunch of other red states, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Iowa, as part of a coordinated campaign orchestrated by right-wing activist Leonard Leo.

But while state laws are good for Big Oil, nothing is sweeter than federal immunity. And if they achieve it, Meno says, the consequences could be catastrophic.

”We are not talking about Big Oil being above the law for one year or one presidential term,” he said. “If they were able to get something like this passed through Congress, it could be for all time.”

“What’s really scary to think about is the bad behavior that fossil fuel companies have engaged in over the years,” Meno added. “How much worse do we think their behavior will get when they’re given that sort of get out of jail free card?”

Where are Democrats?

Despite the extreme nature of this bill, this story has been largely absent from mainstream press. And that’s perhaps understandable, because about 7,000 other fires are burning right now.

But watchdog groups like the Center for Climate Integrity anticipated a bill like this was coming—and that it would drop at a very chaotic moment when no one had the capacity to pay attention. That’s why they asked Democrats to prepare.

Last year, nearly 200 groups sent a letter to Democratic leaders in Congress, warning them that the fossil fuel industry was going to try to pass a liability waiver in a moment of political chaos.

”We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to pass some form of liability waiver and shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception,” the groups wrote. “That effort—no matter what form it takes—must not be allowed to succeed.”

And yet, so far, no Democratic lawmakers appear to have issued public statements responding directly to the bill.

But Meno said that can easily change—if enough public pressure is applied.

“The most important thing for anyone listening right now who’s alarmed about this is that they themselves contact their members of Congress, because we know that in these chaotic times, bad actors can exploit the confusion to try to rush through bad legislation,” he said. “And so the most important thing folks can do is really raise an alarm about this, share news about it online, and go to NoimmunityforBigOil.org to learn how to do that.”

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This post is a shortened version of today’s podcast episode, available at the top of this newsletter, on your podcast app of choice, or on YouTube.

In the full episode, we go deeper into how the fossil fuel industry is spreading disinformation to build public support for legal immunity. We break down the specific legal arguments Big Oil’s lawyers are making, how those arguments are being parroted by bought-off politicians, and why those arguments only work if people don’t actually read the lawsuits themselves.

It takes a lot of work to produce climate journalism that is accessible to every type of news consumer: a reader, a listener, and a watcher. It takes three times the effort and three times the resources.

But climate accountability journalism needs a bigger audience, so we’re committed to doing it. And we’re also committed to not paywalling this content.

To keep doing that, we need community members to step up and become paid subscribers.

Help keep HEATED free for all

We also want to reward our paid subscribers in other ways, so later this week, we’ll be releasing our full interview with Mike Meno about the fossil fuel industry’s push for a legal immunity shield. Make sure you’re subscribed to get it!

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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.

Subscribe to follow along!

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.

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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.