Damages
Law & Order meets the climate crisis as we dig into the stories behind the hundreds of climate cases around the globe.
Episodes
April 13, 2024 • 42 mins
Lots of news lately on stories we've been following, so in today's episode: an update! The landmark Carbon Majors report has been updated with some surprising new data, and the European Court of Human Rights has sent down an historic ruling that will shape how EU legislators look at energy and climate.
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Shell announced in late 2023 that it would be shutting down all of its onshore activities in Nigeria and concentrating its efforts offshore. It leaves behind poisoned water, multiple political and economic crises, and a country that is measurably worse off today than when its oil industry began. Meanwhile the government continues to target environmental activists.
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The U.S. government's definition of what constitutes an "ecoterrorist" has long driven backlash against environmental activists and in recent years that definition has only broadened. Investigative reporter and Drilled senior editor Alleen Brown dug into this recently and found that the Department of Homeland Security had been warning officials in Atlanta about the threat posed by "Defend the Atlanta Forest" for months before polic...
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January 31, 2024 • 73 mins
In June 2022, Michel Forst became the first UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders. In that role he has spent the past year visiting various countries and speaking out about the increasingly onerous laws and aggressive tactics being used against climate protestors. Today he released a statement on the UK, saying he is "extremely worried" about "the increasingly severe crackdowns on environmental defenders in the United Ki...
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January 28, 2024 • 33 mins
About a decade after UK courts made history with the first "climate necessity" ruling in history, the UK government has passed new laws that not only restrict what protesters can do, but also how protesters are allowed to defend themselves in court. Some judges don't apply the new laws so strictly, but others have held people in contempt for just trying to explain themselves.
In some courtrooms, the climate necessity defense has be...
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January 27, 2024 • 44 mins
While protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation garnered international news coverage, at the southern end of the pipeline, cops moonlighting as pipeline security were suppressing free speech with impunity. In this episode, reporter Karen Savage tells us what happened at Bayou Bridge, and what lessons the story holds for the climate movement and for anyone who believes in the importanc...
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In December 2023, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers closed the comment period on its draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,172-mile pipeline that’s been pumping 500,000 barrels of oil per day since May 2017.
The pipeline runs from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to southern Illinois, crossing the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Over the past six years, every court in the country has ruled th...
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As we resume our season focused on the global criminalization of climate protest, reporter Martha Troian brings us to Canada, where the Wet'suwet'en people have been fighting for years against a gas pipeline they never authorized on their territory.
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January 27, 2024 • 32 mins
Globally, climate activism has shifted over the past few years. It’s more constant now and includes more direct action than ever before. Some of that action has critics, including climate scientists and climate advocates, clutching their pearls and worrying that protest will turn the public away from the urgent need to act on the climate crisis. But social science researchers who study structural change and protest say there’s no h...
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From Ecuador to North Dakota, British Columbia to New Zealand, the backlash against Indigenous-led environmental protest is always particularly harsh, infused with colonialist entitlement to land, water, and other resources. Historian Nick Estes walks us through what that looks like in the U.S., and the great team behind the documentary The Territory brings us a recent example from Brazil. Check out the film here.
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January 27, 2024 • 49 mins
In April 2023, Joanna Oltman Smith walked into the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. with fellow activist Tim Martin, and smeared water-soluble kids' finger paint on the glass display case containing a Degas statue called "Little Dancer." The two read off a statement about the importance of protecting actual, living children as well as we do sculptures of them. Smith and Martin figured they would be charged with vandalism, but e...
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October 24, 2023 • 59 mins
Welcome to Outrage + Optimism, where they examine issues at the forefront of the climate crisis, interview change-makers, and transform anger into productive dialogue for building a sustainable future.
In this episode, the hosts discuss the slow progress made at the negotiations in Bonn and how the perceived lack of direction has led many in the climate community to feel anxious about how successful talks will be in Dubai later in ...
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October 14, 2023 • 28 mins
A new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) looks at the details of Guyana's planned "Gas to Energy" project and finds mostly benefits for ExxonMobil and more debt for Guyana.
Read the full report here: https://ieefa.org/articles/guyana-gas-energy-project-unnecessary-and-financially-unsustainable
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October 1, 2023 • 32 mins
We're bringing you this crossover episode from our sister podcast, Inherited, because there's a way in which the constant vilification of protestors and criminalization of their actions has effectively distracted a lot of people from the reason they're out in the streets or in museums or at sporting events in the first place: the climate crisis is already having a devastating impact on communities around the world, and it's only go...
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October 1, 2023 • 44 mins
It’s no coincidence that the backlash against climate protest looks the same from country to country. Not only is industry sharing tactics across borders, but also the Atlas Network—a global network of nearly 600 libertarian think tanks—has been swapping strategies and rhetoric for decades. This episode features reporting from Amy Westervelt, Lyndal Rowlands, and Julianna Merullo from Drilled, and Geoff Dembicki from DeSmog. You ca...
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October 1, 2023 • 23 mins
President Biden made his first trip to Vietnam as President this week, with the intention of "upgrading" diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. Not on the agenda? The country's move to use trumped-up tax evasion charges to suppress civil society groups, including five climate activists that have been imprisoned using this tactic since 2021.
Read The 88 Project's report on this practice: https://the88project.org/weaponiz...
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October 1, 2023 • 29 mins
Since the 2019 passage of the "Dangerous Attachment Devices" bill in response to anti-coal protests in Queensland, Australia's states have moved quickly to follow suit.
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October 1, 2023 • 32 mins
When she was just 22, Disha Ravi, co-founder of Fridays for Future in India, had police show up at her home, borrow a pen and paper to write an arrest warrant on the spot, and bundle her onto a plane to fly across the country to a city she'd never been to. Here she explains what happened, how it's still impacting her two years later, and why she'll never let it stop her activism or force her out of India.
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October 1, 2023 • 34 mins
There's a lot of discourse happening about free speech in the context of "cancel culture" these days, but precious little coverage of the push all over the world to criminalize protest...particularly environmental and climate protest. We'll be digging into this trend in detail over the next several months, but first a look at what prompted extractive industries to start agitating for governments to crack down on protest, what tacti...
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August 1, 2023 • 26 mins
In more than 30 climate cases making their way through U.S. courts today, oil companies are using an argument they've been laying the legal groundwork for since the 1970s: that since everything they've ever said about climate change was in the interest of shaping policy or blocking regulation, it's protected speech, even if it was misleading. In this episode we take a look at how those cases are playing out and the likelihood that ...
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