The Problem Class

Sometime last year, I was asked to participate in a closed door conversation in which a mix of academic researchers, journalists, and climate campaigners were asked to share their unvarnished thoughts on what they thought climate foundations should be doing as the Trump administration made clear its intentions to gut the EPA and remove even the word "climate" from all government websites. Lots of people made interesting observations and at one point I felt compelled to interject and say "look the elephant in the room is donors, or what I like to call 'the problem class,' and how much their interests actually align with this administration. Or at least how reticent they are or will ever be to call out other billionaires."

While we have you here, just a reminder that a key tool of the billionaire takeover of the world at the moment is the capture of as many channels of media as they can get their grubby paws on. There has never been a better time to support independent journalism! If you're a free subscriber and can afford it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Doing so supports not only our reporting, but also keeping it free for those who can't afford a subscription. We're in the process of transitioning to a new website that will enable us to offer subscribers a lot more, too, including bonus content, early releases of the podcast, and more (if you have a request, email me! amy@drilled.media). Thank you!

No one disagreed, but now we're here a year later and I have to say I've never been more shocked by the so-called climate "movement." I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't the immediate cowering that so many organizations and politicians are doing, the mass exodus from the U.S., the sudden shifting of strategies or shutting down of initiatives. To be extremely clear: I am in no way complaining that activists haven't shown up. It hasn't been this dangerous to be an activist of any kind in the U.S. in a long time, and lots of the folks who would typically be out protesting the hijacking of government climate science by climate deniers are busy protesting the various other ways fascism has arrived in the U.S. This is how it works, right? They scare and exhaust everyone into submission. I have all the empathy in the world for individuals struggling to stay afloat right now and unable to take the risks involved in hitting the streets.

That empathy does not extend to people sitting on mountains of money and afraid to spend it to fight, to make it safe for those activists to come out and be heard, to resist the dismantling of decades worth of work and research for fear that...what? Their money will be seized? You know a great way to make sure that your money goes towards the issues and policies you support as opposed to building Trump's new ballroom? Spend it on the shit you supposedly care about.

Hey by the way, we're amongst the only people who ever say this stuff out loud and it's not particularly safe or easy to do. We risk losing funding, but it's more important to us to be honest and credible. If you appreciate that candor, please consider a paid subscription.

It's not just the nonprofit sphere, either, the media has been unbelievably cowardly as well, cutting climate reporters and departments and opting instead for personal essays, like this month's elegies from both The New Yorker and The New York Times (twice!) for summer holidays (particularly European ones) as a casualty of heat waves. Lest we talk about the actual, you know, casualties. Good to remind rich white people that they lose something too in a climate-unsafe world, but a bummer amidst a dearth of reporting on the hard costs or the necessary solutions (not the techno-utopian ones, those are getting plenty of coverage too). In the face of increasing danger, the problem class has reverted back to its preferred approach to climate, focusing alternately on doom and technological fixes.

And let's not forget the policy wonks who have for at least a year been crying out for a "Joe Rogan of the Left" only to clutch their pearls at the sight of Hasan Piker and scream "No! Not like THAT!" The harsh reality is that from the climate crisis to the cost-of-living crisis we're dealing with the very predictable problems of late-stage capitalism and the capitalists aren't too keen on confronting that reality.

A bright spot amidst it all are the community fights against data centers, which bridge various divides and are delivering wins. It feels good, great even, to see people fight against powerful interests and win, many of us have felt desperate for something, anything to show that such a thing is still possible. And yet, here too, there are signs of delusion...if we're fighting one center at a time, as opposed to working towards neutralizing the power of the industries and individuals behind them (an unholy alliance of Big Oil and Big Tech), won't those centers just get built somewhere else? Some community without the funding and energy and time to fight it? Are we not just doing the sacrifice zone thing again, on a global scale? A similar approach is happening with carbon capture. Amidst community backlash to large-scale CCS projects in the U.S. Midwest and Canada, at last year's COP in Brazil, I sat in on a panel that was pitching CCS projects as lucrative development dollars for Global South countries; it's the electronics recycling, clothes recycling, plastic recycling scams all over again but this time make it CO2 and data.

Meanwhile Peter Thiel is busy quietly making the entire country of Argentina a Network State, Palantir is brokering deals with governments all over the world to secure their citizens' private data, and we're often failing to talk about why these guys are so into AI in the first place. It's more money in their pockets, sure, but more than that it provides them the thing they most crave: relief from their greatest fear, the unwashed masses rising up against them and insisting on actual democracy. AI's 24-hour surveillance capabilities promise these guys a peaceful night's sleep in their bunkers. That's the permit we should never grant.

Latest Climate Must-Reads

• [Podcast - U.S.] New Drilled Miniseries, in partnership with High Country News! "The Propagandist" - This 3-part series, released in conjunction with the 10-year anniversary of the Standing Rock protests, takes us into the smarmy world of corporate espionage, infiltration and propaganda via never-before-published internal documents from Tiger Swan, Energy Transfer's private security company. Meticulously reported, written and hosted by Alleen Brown, it's a fascinating look at one of the earliest examples of corporate propaganda deliberately fanning the flames of division. Paid subscribers to this newsletter, our Patreon, or Pushkin+ get early access to all three episodes! Check out the trailer below:

• [Report - U.S.] "A Field Guide to Fossil Fuel Front Groups: Coordinating a Supreme Court Campaign to Shield Big Oil," from Consumer Watchdog traces the funding behind various pro-industry amicus briefs filed in the Suncor v. Boulder climate liability case headed to the Supreme Court. Most of them are funded by fossil fuel billionaires or companies. And the defendants themselves—Exxon and Suncor—fund many of the amicus groups, a fact that is obscured by the Supreme Court's all but useless disclosure rules, which require that amici disclose who funded the creation of the brief itself, not who funded the group behind it.
• [Article - Uganda] "Africa’s Longest Crude Oil Export Pipeline Isn’t Just Taking Indigenous Land, It Is Disturbing the Dead," by Diana Taremwa-Karakire for Drilled - Diana has been doing tremendous reporting for us on the impact of EACOP in Uganda and Tanzania. As with her other stories, in this one she speaks with the people directly impacted--Indigenous groups whose departed loved ones have been unceremoniously moved to make way for the pipeline.
• [Article - Canada] "Inside the Grassroots Revolt Against Carbon Capture Pipelines," by Taylor Noakes for DeSmog - Building off of Drilled's reporting for our Carbon Cowboys season, focused on the ethanol kingpin who's gone from dominating the Midwest to building the corn ethanol industry in Brazil, with a massive side-helping of carbon capture, this DeSmog story traces the community backlash to carbon capture pipelines in Alberta, which is linked to the opposition the Summit Carbon Express is facing in the Midwest.
• [Article - Global] "Short sellers reap $2bn profit as modular nuclear reactor stocks tumble," by Ramsay Hodgson for the FT - Someone call the ecomodernist brigade, SMNRs are not in fact an easy way to do nuclear, turns out. Hodgson traces how short sellers, anticipating the inevitable end of the "hype cycle" around small modular nuclear reactor companies, have made a killing as their predictions have come true. The hype had been driven in part by the notion that AI hyperscalers could power their growth dreams with SMNRs, Hodgson reports, but has cooled "amid growing concerns over the lack of immediate revenue and the long build-out timelines for the technology."
• [Article - New Zealand] "Legislation to end climate lawsuits against companies passes third reading in Parliament," by Lilian Hanley for RNZ - As the country's Supreme Court cleared the path for a climate liability lawsuit, rightwing Parliamentarians pushed through preemptive legislation blocking climate suits brought under tort law (liability suits). It's an unprecedented overreach by the government into the courts, and one the U.S. is trying desperately to replicate via national legislation proposed by Ted Cruz and new model legislation from ALEC that will encourage states to adopt their own preemptive laws blocking citizens' rights to sue corporations for pollution. What could possibly go wrong?
• [Article - U.S.] "US conducted ‘mass spying campaign’ against leftwing groups and anti-ICE protesters, records reveal," by Sam Levin and Rachel Leingang for The Guardian. Amongst the groups infiltrated was the Minneapolis chapter of youth climate group Sunrise.