DRILLED

As the crabbers' 2018-2019 season comes to an abrupt close, they prepare for a year that could see the fishery close altogether. Meanwhile the oil industry is pushing to quash the crabbers' climate suit, forcing the question: Which industries do we protect, and which do we let go? As natural resources are increasingly impacted by climate change, who will pick the winners and losers and how will we survive? 

As the crabbers' lawsuit against the world's 30 largest fossil fuel producers is filed, we take a look at the evidence, and what exactly sent crabbers—particularly more conservative ones—to court. 

Now facing annual closures due to climate change, crabbers learn some new information that spurs them to become the first industry to sue Big Oil. 

As the 2015 delay wears on, and holiday markets come and go, crabbers are getting desperate. Some are forced out of business, others worry that this is the new normal. 

In 2015, West Coast crab fishermen were shut down by climate change. Atmospheric changes had warmed waters and upended everything from the food chain to ocean upwelling. They didn't realize it would be their new normal, or that scientists had been telling the oil industry this would happen since the 1960s. Welcome to season 2 of Drilled: Hot Water. 

Two new reports highlight that, since the Paris Agreement in 2016, the fossil fuel industry has ramped up both oil production and greenwashing. 

Plus: why the heck are mainstream media outlets making Big Oil's ads for them? 

In a batch of aggressive countersuits, Exxon is accusing the counties, cities, and states of conspiring to quash its First Amendment rights to political speech. It's an idea with a long and twisting history that we dig into in this episode. 

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Fossil fuel industry influence campaigns ensured that we lost a critical 30 years not taking action on climate change. But all is not lost. The technology to address climate change exists, and if there's one thing history teaches us about America it's that radical social change is entirely possible here. 

If you unravel climate policy back to its origins, eventually you get to academic research. Although oil companies dramatically reduced their own scientific research on climate in the 1990s, by the early 2000s they began funding research centers at prestigious universities throughout the country, subtly shaping the research that any eventual policy would be based upon. 

To make media manipulation and lobbying truly effective, oil companies and their public relations firms also had to shift the culture, influencing everything from civil discourse to how religious groups viewed the issue of climate change. 

In addition to using journalists' views on their own objectivity against them, oil companies exploited various weaknesses in science, namely scientists' tendency toward not prioritizing or valuing good communication skills, and their absolute refusal to be certain about anything. 

As climate disinformation campaigns ramped up in the 1990s, oil companies and their PR firms exploited weaknesses in the U.S. media system and propped up "contrarian" scientists to push the narrative of scientific uncertainty and shift how journalists covered the issue. 

As the price of oil dipped in the early 1980s, management changed at most oil companies and the industry as a whole became more concerned with preserving its core business than expanding in new directions and being "energy companies." Then the campaigns to undermine the science began. 

Launching November 14th, Drilled is a limited series investigative true-crime podcast about the crime of the century: the creation of climate denial.