Drilled

We are a global multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability. Climate accountability — investigating and understanding the various drivers of delay on climate action — is critical to understanding and addressing climate change. Our work includes both print and audio stories, and beginning in 2023, we also began co-publishing with a variety of other publications. Our Back Story Drilled was started as an audio project by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt in 2017. Westervelt had been a print climate reporter for 15 years by that point, and a staff reporter for the NPR station in Reno for two years. She was looking for a story that could be turned into a reported narrative podcast, and she found it in the dozen or so climate liability cases filed in the wake of the ExxonKnew reporting that documented Exxon’s knowledge of climate change and the role of fossil fuels in exacerbating it, beginning in the 1970s. While sitting in a courtroom in San Francisco, Westervelt looked around at the lawyers and the activists and the scientists and thought “aha, what about a true crime podcast about climate change?” Drilled was a hit, and has grown from what was going to be one limited-run audio series into an ongoing investigative reporting project digging into the various forces obstructing action on climate. Podcast This is a fascinating way examine the climate crisis – by treating the subject as you would a true crime story. The topics are heavily North American-focused, but the issues are global in nature and always alarming. Recent episodes have focused on how fossil fuel companies are backing anti-protest bills and how ‘Big Oil’ is shifting the responsibility for climate change onto the individual. Why should you listen to it? Westervelt is a brilliant investigative journalist and she gets to grips with these often complex topics that goes beyond the usual platitudes. The idea of treating the climate crisis through the lens of true crime is also bold, and it pays off.