Global Climate Reporting Network Launches "The Real Free Speech Threat" Podcast

 This week, award-winning investigative journalist Amy Westervelt unveils a new global climate accountability reporting network: Drilled Global. Westervelt is a true, crusading journalist, exposing the duplicity, corruption, and environmentally damaging actions of the fossil fuel industry.

The report is an integral part of her new podcast series, The Real Free Speech Threat.

Bringing together reporters in the U.S. Europe, Australia, Latin America, and Africa, Drilled Global will focus on cross-border investigations of the companies and organizations blocking global climate action. The project's work will break down the geographic silos on climate coverage, telling a global story in a truly global way.

Drilled Global aims to not only expose what both companies and pro-industry operatives are doing all over the world, but also support, and in some cases train, a global network of journalists focused on climate accountability.

“Oil companies and PR conglomerates are global. They not only operate at a global scale, but also coordinate globally on strategy, particularly when it comes to climate, given the influence that global UN climate conferences have on domestic policy-making,” the Costa Rica-based Westervelt writes. “But efforts to investigate what they’re doing, how, and what effect it’s having on climate action and the energy transition have so far been very siloed. We believe a global network of journalists who are able to continuously investigate the various actors blocking climate action, report on them locally and regionally, and also plug into collaborative cross-border, multimedia series co-published by our ecosystem of media partners will go a long way toward plugging that gap.”

Reporters include Nigerian journalist Ugochi Anyaka, who won the Covering Climate Now award for audio in 2022; investigative reporter Geoff Dembicki in Canada; investigative journalist and former Reuters correspondent Anna Pujol Mazzini in France; Fredrick Mugira, a multiple award-winning water and climate change journalist in Uganda; investigative journalist Rishika Pardikar in Bangalore, India; ABC producer and award-winning journalist Lyndal Rowlands in Australia; First Nations reporter Martha Troian; and Guyanese oil and gas reporter Kiana Wilburg, reporting on major industry moves in the Latin America and Caribbean region, with more coming on board in the months ahead.

The first cross-border package, “The Real Free Speech Threat,” will look at the growing criminalization of protest and the role of polluting industries (particularly oil and gas and agribusiness) in that growth. In a print and audio series that will run through the end of the year, the Drilled Global team, and series’ contributing editor Alleen Brown, who covered this topic extensively for The Intercept for years, will 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. The package will include stories from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, France, Guyana, India, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

In the last two years, Westervelt's reporting has inspired two Congressional hearings into climate disinformation, been read into the public record on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and was cited as key to preventing a “liability loophole” for the fossil fuel industry from making its way into the U.S. government’s Covid-19 relief package. Most recently, she released the three-part podcast series “Herb,” exploring the other side of the free speech coin: Big Oil’s move to expand legal protections for corporate free speech. Later this fall, the Drilled team will also launch an online archive, Petroganda, highlighting the top five narratives deployed by extractive industries to block climate action, with weekly updates on how these narratives are still being used today.
 
Drilled Global is a cross-border climate accountability reporting project. We produce print and audio stories that track trends in climate obstruction, follow fossil fuel companies’ actions in multiple countries, and trace the origins of anti-climate policy trends. The project grew out of the award-winning investigative climate podcast Drilled, and includes reporters on nearly every continent, as well as a broad constellation of co-publishing partners. Learn more at drilled.media.

Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative journalist and executive producer of the independent podcast production company Critical Frequency, which specializes in reported narrative podcasts. In 2020 she was executive producer of Unfinished: Short Creek, a co-production between Critical Frequency and Stitcher that was named one of the best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and received a Wilbur award for excellence in religion reporting.

In 2021, she led the reporting and production teams of This Land S2—an investigative, narrative season revealing the various forces behind efforts to unravel tribal sovereignty in the U.S.—which was nominated in April 2022 for a Peabody Award. Her investigative climate podcast Drilled, a Critical Frequency original production, was awarded the Online News Association award for excellence in audio journalism in 2019 and Covering Climate Now's award for excellence in audio journalism in 2021. In 2015, Amy received a Rachel Carson award for women greening journalism, for her role in creating a women-only climate journalism group syndicating long form climate reporting to The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Economist, and many more outlets. 

Check out Amy Westervelt's new podcast series, The Real Free Speech Threat.