New York District Court Judge Loretta Preska has denied repeated requests to delay Donziger's criminal contempt trial until at least one of his lawyers can be present. Barring any last-minute changes, he'll stand trial Monday, November 9th, after...

The case takes a bizarre turn with a sting operation, U.S. subpoenas, accusations of fraud and bribery, and finally a verdict in Ecuador.

With the Ecuadorian plaintiffs racking up good press and an endorsement from the country's president, Chevron kicks things up a notch, bringing on new lawyers and PR firms to tell a very different story. Support our work: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled

In September 2009, Chevron filed an international arbitration claim against the government of Ecuador over the Lago Agrio case. In the years since the company has pointed to the decisions of that arbitral panel as something akin to court decisions,...

The trial gets underway in Ecuador, an election changes the calculus, and a global PR war kicks into high gear. Support our work: patreon.com/drilled

How did this case come about in the first place? We go back to the early days of oil colonialism in Ecuador, in the 1960s, the partnership between oil men and missionaries, and the impact on indigenous communities in the Amazon. Support our work:...

In August 2019, an American lawyer was put on house arrest as he awaited trial on criminal contempt charges. The charges stem from a decades-long case that began with pollution in the Amazon and has since spanned continents and courtrooms while the...

A few weeks ago the Trump administration quietly proposed a rule that would make it harder for financial managers to investment retirement funds in environmentally or socially responsible ways. The fossil fuel industry had been calling for the rule...

The FBI arrested Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Larry Householder, this month for racketeering, or as the state attorney general put it "bribery, that's what it was." Private utility First Energy bribed Householder and a handful of...

An advocacy group in The Netherlands began campaigning for a ban on fossil fuel ads, including event sponsorships, earlier this year. Campaigner Femke Sleegers joins us to explain the roots of the campaign, its goal, and the initial response to it....

Despite tax breaks, royalty cuts, and other COVID-related incentives, Chesapeake Energy—a pioneer in the American shale gas (fracking) industry—declared bankruptcy this week. It's the first example of what we expect to be many of the government...

Two big new suits, in Minnesota and D.C., were filed within 24 hours of each other and allege the same thing: that fossil fuel companies misled consumers about climate change.

A new report from Carbon Tracker finds that not only have oil and gas companies not been budgeting for plugging and abandoning wells, they've been grossly underestimating the cost of that work, especially for fracking wells. The COVID-19 pandemic has...

Amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, some climate activists have been saying "now's not the time to talk about climate." In this episode we bring you an encore presentation of the latest Hot Take episode, in which Amy and Mary Annaise Heglar...

Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine focused on what she calls "disaster capitalism," the sort of corporate feeding frenzy that happens in the wake of major crises. It was on a research trip for that book, to post-Katrina New Orleans, that she...

Reporters Alexander Beunder and Jilles Mast have been combing through 150+ boxes of documents from the personal archive of one of the Netherlands' top climate skeptics during the 1990s, a guy named Fritz Böttcher, and made a shocking discovery:...

Last week, The New York Times ran a story on the GOP's favorite new climate narrative: If you think quarantine is bad, just wait til the Dems impose climate action on you. In this special ep from Hot Take, with Mary Annaise Heglar and Amy Westervelt,...

In April 2020, Fred Singer, longtime king of the climate deniers, died at the age of 95. In this episode, investigative reporter Dan Zegart, author of the book Civil Warriors, about the 1990s tobacco litigation, joins to talk about Singer's place in...

Political scientist and environmental policy expert Leah Stokes joins us to discuss the many things the new film Planet of the Humans gets wrong about renewable energy, environmentalists and the fight for climate action. Related stories:...