Around the world, climate and other environmental protestors are being harassed, attacked, and arrested at an increasing rate. Laws are being passed that levy life-altering prison sentences and fines on protestors arrested near anything deemed “critical infrastructure,” which is defined so broadly it’s hard to find a public space that 

 be near it anymore. Corporations are suing protestors and NGOs, comparing protest to organized crime. Governments are growing increasingly comfortable branding environmental protestors as “domestic terrorists” or instruments of “foreign influence,” and going after the nonprofit status of environmental nonprofits. And so far the media is largely participating in the rhetorical “othering” of protestors, opting in most cases to focus on the disruption that protest causes rather than the change it seeks, and to marginalize activists. In this print and audio series we’ll take an in-depth look at how climate protest has evolved in recent years, where this backlash is coming from, how it’s grown so quickly, and what it feels like to be someone who’s concerned enough about the future of humanity to join a protest, only to find themselves facing police violence and several years in jail.

We’ve worked with reporters on almost every continent to cover this trend from as many angles as possible and trace how particular tactics and ideas have spread across borders. The result is more than two dozen print and audio stories that we’ll be releasing over the next several months. The stellar team behind this project includes: 

Alleen Brown is an independent investigative journalist. Her reporting on state and corporate repression of Indigenous-led Dakota Access Pipeline opponents at Standing Rock has been cited in civil rights cases, reports submitted to international human rights bodies, and more than a dozen books. Her investigation mapping over 6,500 prisons against heat, wildfire, and flood risk has provided foundational information for organizers and policymakers defining what climate change will mean for mass incarceration. She has reported extensively on the intersections between environmental crises and racism, poverty, immigration, violence against women, and criminalization. She was previously a staff reporter at The Intercept and has written for Grist, The Guardian, Inside Climate News, The Appeal and other publications. Alleen is from St. Paul, Minnesota, and lives in New York.

Fredrick Mugira is a Ugandan multiple award-winning water and climate change journalist, media trainer and development communication specialist with over 10 years of wide-ranging experience. He has reported from various countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and USA. Fredrick has won various continental and national journalism awards including: the prestigious CNN/Multichoice African Journalist award; the UN Development Journalism Award; the 2018 and 2015 Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP) fellowships. He was also shortlisted for the Energy/Water journalism Lifetime Achievement award at the Africa Utility awards 2018. He heads Water Journalists Africa, a network of over 700 journalists in 50 African countries who report on water. He cofounded InfoNile, a geojournalism platform mapping data on water issues in the Nile River basin with journalism stories to promote transboundary peace. 

Anna Pujol-Mazzini is an investigative journalist, podcast producer and fact-checker. She is a former international correspondent for Reuters, AFP and The Daily Telegraph and she specialises in gender, LGBTQIA+ rights and the environment.
Her work has been published by The Washington Post, Reuters, TIME Magazine, National Geographic, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, among others.

Martha Troian is an award-winning independent journalist and writer. Specializing in investigative journalism, she has worked for and contributed to media outlets across North America for close to 15 years, often writing about Indigenous politics, justice, crime, data deficits, and environmental and human rights issues. She was the McLaughlin Centre Science Journalism fellow with the William Southam Journalism Fellowship at Massey College, University of Toronto for 2019-2020. Previously she was a participant of the Investigative Journalism Intensive Program at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Currently, she is working as a producer with the Institute for Investigative Journalism probing water contamination and Indigenous communities. She is proudly from Lac Seul First Nation and Wabauskang First Nation in northwestern Ontario, and a mother to her young son.

Geoff Dembicki is an award-winning journalist and author from Alberta, Canada, currently based in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to VICE, DeSmog, The Tyee and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy and The Guardian. He’s the author of Are We Screwed? How a New Generation is Fighting to Survive Climate Change, which was published internationally by Bloomsbury USA in 2017, and The Petroleum Papers, published by Greystone Books in 2022.

Karen Savage is an investigative journalist who has covered environmental justice communities extensively and has been reporting on resistance to pipeline construction in Louisiana since 2015. Her work has appeared in Undark Magazine, The Appeal, Project Earth, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Bridge the Gulf, Youth Today, Truthout and City Limits. Karen is an alum of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she teaches environmental reporting.

Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo, Reporter, Nigeria 

Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo is an award-winning environmental journalist and the recipient of several journalism awards including the UNEP Young Environmental Journalist 2012, 2019 Green Accord Environmental Award, Italy and UNFCCC CDM-African Radio Contest 2011. She created, produced and presented the most popular environmental show on Nigerian TV, Green Angle on TVC News. I have hosted the BBC World Service's Environmental Radio Programme, Local Warming. Ugochi comes from a community ravaged by erosion - a key factor that inspired her passion to pursue environmental journalism. I am a fellow of the Lancaster University Environment Center – Recirculate Programme. From erosions, flooding and desertification in Nigeria, oil pollution in Ogoniland of 
the Niger Delta, depleting Africa's last rain forests to frozen lapland, Finland, she has visited rugged terrains to share underreported environmental stories. She currently works as a freelance journalist covering environmental issues across Africa and Europe, and co-hosts Djoliba - a multi language African radio show on RadioX Basel, Switzerland. 

Lyndal Rowlands is a freelance journalist. Her audio journalism can be found on 

First Eat with Nakkiah Lui: an Audible Original

The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, SBS

where she was a UN Correspondent. Lyndal’s work has been recognised with a UN Correspondents Association prize for climate journalism, a UN Foundation Press Fellowship and a UnionDocs Pod-Pod residency. She’s a member of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, The Science Journalist Association of Australia and the Society of Environmental Journalists. She was born in a valley full of brown coal mines and her favourite sound is a magpie warbling.

Rishika Pardikar is an Indian environmental journalist tracking science, law and policy. Her areas of expertise are climate change and biodiversity, both nationally within India and internationally with a keen focus on negotiations under UNFCCC and UNCBD. Her work has appeared in The Lever/ Jacobin, Foreign Policy, science magazines like AGU's Eos, China Dialogue and Indian media like The Hindu and The Wire. She lives in Bangalore.

Wudan is an award-winning narrative journalist, podcast producer, fact-checker, and entrepreneur. She writes about contrarian characters, unlikely connections, creative solutions, slow-moving crises — or any combination of the above. Her work appears in 

The Atlantic, The California Sunday Magazine, The Guardian, High Country News, Longreads, MIT Technology Review, National Geographic, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The New York Times, 

The Real Free Speech Threat

The fossil fuel industry was one of the first major users of PR in the U.S. and it continues to spend more than most other industries. PR firms don’t just handle media placements and advertising for fossil fuel clients, they help craft strategies. As one publicist put it to me recently, “it wasn’t the oil companies that invented greenwashing, it was PR firms.” Despite the billions of dollars it’s spent on PR over the years, the industry and its favorite firms are not exactly innovative. They come back to the same five key narratives over and over again, leaning on whichever plays best at any particular point in time: 

 - From fueling wars to preserving national security, the industry loves to highlight it’s role in keeping America safe…even when it’s profiting from wars that it has also helped to manufacture. 

- Keeping nature separate from humans and reminding us over and over again that economic growth is more important than conservation has helped the industry stave off regulation for decades. 

 - From keeping the lights on to providing the building blocks for life-saving medical devices, smart phones, cosmetics and fast fashion, the industry loves to remind consumers that they need it. 

 - Nothing keeps regulation away like voluntary solutions that make it seem like the industry is really trying. 

 - Just in case people still aren’t thrilled about dirty air, dirty water, and climate change, the industry makes sure to fund museums, sports, aquariums, and schools, which serves the dual purpose of cleaning up its image and making communities feel dependent on the industry and thus less likely to criticize it.

Information Pollution

For a long time there’s been a call amongst some climate advocates in the U.S. for the government to nationalize oil in order to manage the transition away from fossil fuels. The counter-argument is usually to point at countries like Venezuela, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates, all of which have only doubled down on fossil fuel development since nationalizing their industries. With that in mind, we began in 2023 to dig into this question and get a feel for how petrostates operate, starting with the host of this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP28), the United Arab Emirates. 

Our partners on much of this first phase of petrostate reporting are the Centre for Climate Reporting in the U.K. 

Petrostates

To understand the current state of disinformation in the U.S., it helps to know the history of how and why the PR industry was created. 

In response to a protest, the country’s largest oil company sent in private security teams, who wound up killing several protestors, including women and children. The company’s spokesperson claimed the protestors were hired by a labor union trying to stir up trouble.

Sounds like it could have been written about any of a half dozen recent pipeline protests, right? But these are the basic details of a mining strike in 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado. The mine was owned by Standard Oil, and the Rockefeller family had only a few years prior been raked over 
the coals by a messy antitrust lawsuit and a series of 

 about their monopoly on the country’s burgeoning oil industry.

They needed help burnishing their image, so they called on another industry that was just emerging at the time: Public relations. Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the first modern PR guy, came up with that idea that the protestors were 

 Today we would call them “crisis actors” and it’s an accusation thrown at almost every protest, but few people know the whole thing was created
 by a PR guy working for an oil company back in 1914.

Lee invented all sorts of other tricks of the trade too. 

 for a start. Before Lee, companies had a pretty adversarial relationship with the press and vice versa. Lee thought businesses would do better to tell journalists more of their story themselves. It was so unusual that when he first began sending press releases to The New York Times, the paper printed them verbatim. On behalf of rail, coal, oil and tobacco clients Lee also created seemingly independent information bureaus, like the 

, whose experts were regularly quoted criticizing railroad tax proposals.

Again, this was more than 100 years ago. And Lee was followed by generation after generation of PR experts, each adding another bell or whistle to America’s disinformation machine—some on behalf of oil, others on behalf of the chemical or tobacco industries, often on behalf 
of all three at the same time.

For years, the story about disinformation has been that Big Tobacco created it all and then Big Oil copied them. And there's a thread of truth there. Some of the same phony scientists who sold America on the idea that smoking was safe turned around and told them not to worry about climate change. But it’s not the whole story. To get that, we need to look at the context that enabled climate denial to flourish, an information system polluted by 100 years of propaganda. And we need to look at who was hiring those phony scientists—not companies, but PR firms. When people focus on one particular form of science denial, or on one technique that this or that industry copied from another, this is the big picture they miss: the disinformation machine driving everything from QAnon conspiracies to climate denial, vaccine hesitation to white nationalism. It’s bigger than any one industry, but it was built on behalf of all of them, and if we want to have any hope of addressing the large, intersecting, complex problems facing us today, it must be better understood. And then reconfigured, or dismantled altogether.

Just as Ivy Lee was building the modern PR industry, the U.S. government realized it needed a bit of propaganda to help sell American citizens on World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had made staying out of the war a key part of his campaign, and now he needed to convince Americans that it was a good idea to join in...without looking like a hypocrite. He tapped George Creel, a journalist turned political campaigner who had helped with Wilson's electoral bid, to build out what was eventually called the Committee on Public Information and generally referred to as The Creel Committee or the Creel Commission. Creel tapped some of the nation's greatest journalists (Ida Tarbell, for one!), filmmakers, artists, and publicity men to create a 360-degree assault on the 
American public. They made films, created compelling posters, and even launched the world's first "influencers." In cities and towns across the country, Creel and his team found influential members of society and trained them to give 4-minute pro-war speeches before screenings of 
silent films or big events. They were known as the "4-Minute Men".

Several members of the Creel Committee went on to be major influences on the burgeoning PR industry. One of them was a young publicity agent from the theater, Edward Bernays. Bernays had done some creative promotion of plays with particular social missions and had worked for major ballet companies as well, and his work caught the eye of Creel. It didn't hurt that Bernays's uncle was Sigmund Freud—on both sides, in a bizarre and some might say Freudian twist (Edward's mother was Freud’s sister, and Freud was also married to Bernays’ father’s sister). Bernays grew up in Vienna, hearing all about Freud’s theories on the deeply buried human impulses that drive behavior. While Ivy Lee was 

 part of the Creel Committee, he handled publicity for the American Red Cross during the war effort, and he and Bernays worked together often through their respective positions. Bernays became a trusted colleague of Lee's during the war, the only other PR guy that Lee thought his equal. It was after WWI that Bernays famously said, “If propaganda could be used so effectively in war, why could we not use it in peace?”

At the time, democracy was still a relatively new idea, and those in power were almost universally terrified of it. Propaganda—which Bernays later 

 because “the Germans had given it a bad name”—was created as a reaction to growing public criticism of the titans of industry who had once been hailed as heroes. But it was also created to provide those in power with the tools to manipulate the masses. Bernays, Lee, and 

—Adolf Hitler—were all close readers of French philosopher Gustav Le Bon, who posited that the public, or as Le Bon put it 

 could only be both satisfied and safe when it was controlled. Like Le Bon, Bernays had a real disdain for the public, writing in his seminal book 

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

To be clear, Bernays saw himself as part of that “ruling power,” and he relished the role of manipulator.

Ivy Lee died fairly young, in his 50s, and when he did Edward Bernays inherited many of his clients, including both 

the fossil fuel industry trade group that Lee had helped Standard Oil create as World War I was ending. While Ivy Lee largely focused on shaping and controlling the way the media got information as a way to mold public opinion, Bernays tried to manipulate the masses more directly. His best known trick was obliterating the taboo against women smoking in about six months, a 

They tasked Bernays with increasing sales, and he actually went to a psychoanalyst to talk about what cigarettes signified. You guessed it, phalluses. This got Bernays thinking about the “penis envy” women supposedly feel and an emergent push for women’s rights, and boom he had it: he would make smoking a women’s empowerment issue. He convinced a few young women he knew to stage a smoking “protest” in New York, calling cigarettes “freedom torches,” then alerted the press to the protest. It made headlines across the country and within a few months women all over the country were smoking and American Tobacco’s sales were soaring.

So, to recap, PR emerged as a way for industry to deal with a three-pronged threat: the rise of investigative journalism and activism shining a light on the misdeeds of industry, the emergence of regulation (which previously left industry to its own devices), and the expansion of the vote to members of society that had little in common with captains of industry. It was wildly successful. The first wave of PR effectively put a stop to the muckrakers’ early calls for corporate accountability.

Then the Depression hit and once again America’s bosses were the bad guys. Publicists like John W. Hill helped companies like 

paint labor unions, social security, and the New Deal as socialist. Hill paid commentators like 

 to write op-eds in newspapers and magazines, or join panel discussions 

 ginning up fear about these ideas. (At one point, Hill’s firm Hill & Knowlton was paying Sokolsky $40,000 a year to write pieces criticizing Social Security and the New Deal—that's a high six-figure salary in today's dollars). Hill would go on to mastermind the 

 (TIRC), a hub of science denial around smoking...that sounds an awful lot like the research bureaus Ivy Lee had set up some 40 years before. Not a huge shock given that Hill idolized Lee.

Hill’s client roster also included the 

 during those years, so it's no surprise that you see the same tactics deployed by TIRC then used by oil companies to combat rising concern over "the greenhouse effect" or by agribusiness to combat rising concern over GMOs. In fact Hill would have folks from the tobacco companies and chemical companies join the API, because he spotted ways for all three industries to work together—to lobby together for or against regulation, to trade strategies and ideas, even to create new products together. Without PR firms bringing them together, these industries and companies 
may have tended to stay in their own worlds, but the type of cross-pollination Hill enabled was hugely influential.

In fact it’s how the cigarette filter came about.

Cigarette filters are one of the reasons oil and gas companies were named defendants in the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. “When tobacco companies needed to assess the toxics in their cigarettes and in cigarette smoke, the people they turned to to do it were the oil companies,” says Carroll Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Oil companies had been testing exhaust and refinery smoke for years because of the Clean Air Act, so they were the ones that had the sophisticated equipment and the knowledge to test for toxins in cigarette smoke.

“And when the oil companies reported back to the tobacco companies on the toxins they were in fact finding in that smoke, you know, what did they do with the information?" Muffett said. "Did they go public and say there's a massive risk here? No. They entered into joint enterprises, joint ventures with the tobacco companies to produce cigarette filters.”

Since the inception of the PR industry, its most expert practitioners have deployed a handful of techniques on behalf of multiple industries and really in service of all industry: to paint business as a good faith member of the community, to sway public opinion, to avoid what infamous PR guy Rick Berman calls "public judgement," and to create political will in their favor. But they weren't operating in a vacuum. In deploying these techniques on behalf of industry, they fundamentally shifted the information ecosystem in America.

Today, it's not just industries that want to avoid regulation or deal with a crisis who use PR techniques, it's everyone from your local county government to your favorite musician to the most 
earnest nonprofit. It's the filter through which all information flows to the public. Which doesn't 

 to be a bad thing, but it has certainly led to the information pollution we have in the U.S. today, where trust in journalists and experts is at an all-time low, the public is tremendously confused, people can (and do) just consume "news" that tracks with their opinions, and so on. To clean up that pollution, it helps to know how to spot these techniques. Our hope with this investigation and related podcasts and documents is to help people do just that—not to make people even more suspicious of everything they see, or double down on getting their information only from one trusted YouTuber, but to pull the mask off a bit and help people find their way through the filters to the information they need to make important decisions about their lives.

Mad Men

The ABCs of Big Oil

For decades now, the fossil fuel industry has told the same story: Oil equals development and prosperity. Access. Equality. Stability. A better quality of life. As the world’s fossil fuel companies race to tap the last of the planet’s oil reserves we have a chance to examine that promise up close, in real time.

What it looks like on the ground in countries like Guyana, Uganda, and Mozambique is a lot like what the first phase of extractive colonialism looked like a hundred years ago. Working with reporters living in these countries we are continuously investigating what this new flavor of oil colonialism looks like, starting with an in-depth, two-year reporting project in Guyana. 

Several miles off the coast of Guyana sits one of the world’s largest oil reserves. In 2015, ExxonMobil, which had held offshore drilling leases in the country for decades, announced it had found oil and would begin production as soon as possible. Government officials quickly got in line, and in 2019 the first barrels shipped from ExxonMobil Guyana. Today, Exxon projects that oil from Guyana could account for 25% of its total production in the next few years. But environmentalists and government corruption watchdogs have begun to push back on the project. Why 

 an oil industry in the midst of climate crisis? And especially in a country at great risk of climate impacts? Via a contract that will sooner put Guyana in debt than make it a rich oil state, no less?

In just a few years, Exxon has co-opted both government and civil society, buying up social license in every corner of the country. Oil executives and Guyanese officials are still telling the story that oil equals development and prosperity, and on paper Guyana is the fastest-growing economy in the world, but average citizens aren’t benefiting from the boom. Today, there are only a couple of journalists left covering the project with any sort of skepticism, and one lawyer left willing to take it on in court. 

New Oil Colonialism

In the U.S., the response to climate litigation is often “who cares when this Supreme Court is ultimately going to knock it back anyway?” And the answer is simple: discovery. Discovery is a term that describes the fact-finding phase of civil litigation. During the discovery phase, lawyers can access primary documents, depose current and former employees and executives, and generally get a whole bunch of information they couldn’t previously access. 

The oil companies have been fighting like hell to avoid this phase because it will undoubtedly produce ten more “Exxon Knew” series, if not more. It will provide evidence for all the other cases, too, not just in the U.S. but globally, where the industry doesn’t have Supreme Court justices ready to do their bidding. It’s true that it’s entirely possible that any climate case that gets to the U.S. Supreme Court will result in a pro-oil ruling. But not before massively increasing the risk of accountability for these companies along the way. Even the U.S. government might be forced to finally act if the public, armed with mountains of evidence that politicians have colluded with fossil fuel executives to sell their future, demands it.

And it’s important to remember that climate litigation does not begin or end with the U.S., nor does accountability for U.S. oil companies. It’s entirely possible that documents unearthed via litigation in one country can be used to hold a company accountable in one of the other 100 countries in which it operates. 

Given the importance of climate litigation today, and the fact that in its 2022 mitigation report the IPCC included litigation as a key mitigation tool for the first time ever, we keep tabs on these cases, both on the website and via multiple podcasts.

Climate Cases

La Lucha En La Jungla

Every few years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases an assessment, which consists of several reports prepared by three working groups. Working Group I focuses on the scientific evidence for climate change; Working Group II on the impacts, adaptation and vulnerabilities; and Working Group III on mitigation, what we can do about it (and what's stopping us).  The 2018 IPCC report got a LOT of media attention, more than any previous report, thanks to a combination of uncharacteristically stark warnings from climate scientists and a media cycle that wasn't quite as inundated with crises as the current one.

On April 4, 2022, the IPCC released the mitigation report for its current cycle and folks if the 2018 report was blunt, this one is absolutely screaming "do something!!!" Yet, coverage was as slim as those pre-2018 days. There are lots of mitigating circumstances, 'scuse the pun. For a start, the release of the report was pushed back thanks to the fraught approval process for the report's Summary for Policymakers, or SPM (you can read more about that 

). That meant that reporters got zero time with the actual report before we had to write about it, which was particularly problematic because some government representatives involved in the SPM process succeeded in watering it down so much it reads like the summary of an entirely different report. Plenty of reporters will only read the SPM; if they do, they'll miss the importance of this report. Then of course there's Russia's invasion of Ukraine, subsequent war crimes, and the world bracing itself for WWIII. And the endless pulse of Covid-19 vibrating underneath at all. Not to mention mass shootings, insane school boards, book banning, a looming Trump 2024 campaign, the midterms that Democrats seem destined to lose, a Supreme Court nomination process that McConnell is doing everything to derail yet again. These are deeply troubled times. So I get why the story of yet another dire warning on climate might not register for some outlets

But that's why I'm here. I'm a climate reporter. It's all I focus on, and pretty much all I think about, and I've been covering IPCC reports for 20 years so I've got a pretty good handle on them. 

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