 [00:00:00] For more than a decade now, maybe more than two decades, people have been talking about how the thing stopping us from acting on the climate crisis is not so much science or technology.

It's not about understanding the problem or even having the technology to do something about it, but about political will. We have enough data. We know how greenhouse gas emissions change the atmosphere. We know how they'll continue to change it. We know what the impacts of those changes will be.

We know that human activity is the largest source of those gases by far, and we have all sorts of good and viable options for doing things differently, and yet. No government on Earth has managed to do what's required to adequately address this problem, and every international body formed to deal with it remains hopelessly [00:01:00] incapable of doing so. In a few months, I'll be headed to the 30th conference of the parties, the Annual Climate Summit that brings together all the members of the UN framework on the Climate Change Convention and ask them to figure out a way to work together on this problem. We've covered the crisis of legitimacy facing that body before, but it's more dire than ever right now, and it does not help that the US has adopted the toddler approach to climate change pretending it isn't there and hoping that does the trick.

The lead up to the conference, I got my hands on a new book that's been pulled together by the Climate Social Science Network at Brown University. It's an exhaustive global survey of the peer reviewed research on climate obstruction, which might sound boring and academic, but if you're a listener to this show, you know that I loved Nerd Out on some Social science.

This is the first book of its kind because [00:02:00] climate obstruction is a relatively new field of research. It's fascinating. It's also a really good way to prep for all the nonsense we're about to see at this year's COP in Brazil. So prep with me. I'm reading the book before I go and talking to some of the researchers who worked on it to get a sense of where we're at, why we're here, and what the heck might work to get us unstuck.

I'm Amy Westervelt. Welcome to a new season of Drilled. We're calling it “Obstruction”. Today, welcome to the World of Obstruction.

 So I'm Timmons Roberts. I'm a professor at Brown University and Director of the Climate Social Science Network. Climate. Social Science Network is a network of 800… more than 800… scholars. We're now in 49 countries. So this is a group that's people who study sort of the politics of climate change, and especially we're focused on who's blocking action on climate change.

Our theory of change is that we've failed largely at addressing climate change because we didn't understand the opposition that we faced, and we were quite naive about that.

 I am Jennifer Jacquet. I am a professor at the University of Miami and I'm also the research associate research director at the Climate Social Science Network headquartered at Brown University.

 Christian Downie. I'm a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra.

 They were joined also by Carlos Milani, professor of International relations at Rio de Janeiro State University, and coordinator of the University's interdisciplinary observatory on climate change, who was having some wifi issues because, hey, that's life these days. 

Let's start with the most basic question. Can I have you give me a quick definition of climate obstruction? What is it? What is this thing we're talking about?

 In the book we define climate obstruction as intentional actions and efforts to slow or block policies on climate change, and we focused on 2015 onwards or the sort of post Paris agreement world.

 I am glad that you mentioned this about the reason that we haven't acted has a lot to do with not understanding the opposition. 'cause it leads right into my next question, which is that you start with this framing of, you know, we're not behind on or not acting on climate just because of, you know, these various things that people have pointed to in terms of, you know, issues with neoliberalism or democracy, but also because of this concerted effort to obstruct climate action. I think it's so important to have it spelled out and it’s one of those things that seems obvious, but I've never seen it in a paper before. So can you talk a little bit about why it's important to have this really explicitly stated and supported, and how important a contribution you think this volume will be to this kind of larger understanding of the issue?

 Yeah. So I'm gonna start again on this and I promise I won't be the dominating the conversation so much, uh, later on. But these are really, to me, a key, um, change in the way we're starting to think about why we're not acting on climate change. I mean, there's, we just hear again and again that, oh, humans are selfish, or the science isn't there, or the technology of renewable energy just is, is lame.

And it's, you know, intermittent and unreliable that our democracy can't, um, function dealing with hard problems or that neoliberalism is this economic system that drive us to make short term decisions or our religion, our [00:06:00] religious base and other cultural beliefs are such that we can't solve big problems, but we have solved big problems in the past. Acid, rain, ozone. Lead and asbestos, all kind. And those are just the environmental examples. But we have many others that our societies have risen to the challenge of, and I think this case is different because we've had a leading industry, the largest industry in the history of humankind, oil and gas and coal, the fossil fuel industries have learned from those past regulatory efforts and said, wait a minute, uh, we don't have an alternative.

We're just gonna fight it. And, um, and block any, any, um, effort to really, seriously address climate change. And their strategies were sophisticated. They were tailored for every political context in the world, you know, for every town or us state or sub region to nations and, you know, un [00:07:00] negotiations as we'll talk about. And then even in the same countries, the strategies change as the president changes or as, uh, you know, political winds shift though. You know, that's sort of answering your first question on, you know, why is, you know, what's, what's new here on why it's important to say it's not inevitable. Again, that it's pretty fatalistic to say that humans can't solve big problems.

Um, so just throw up your hands. So we've gotta address this problem and the insights from learning about obstruction offers new knowledge about how we might actually count. Um, counter it. And I would, uh, really ask my colleagues to help me on this, but I think this volume is a quantum leap. We've never had a really global look.

We have 110 of the world scholars. I mean, the list of people involved in this book is really a who's who, um, in this area of climate, politics, research. And, um, you know, we have a far range of far wider range of [00:08:00] sectors that we're just starting to understand. We have all these topics and we pull together a bunch of work, which is a lot of, which is original.

So there's. That we've never had anything like this, and I'm really quite excited to have this thing coming out.

 And I, I guess I would just add there, Amy, that. It was so exciting to be scholars and professors and see the coalescence around a subfield that is climate obstruction globally. And you, you know, we've learned a lot about the history of climate science. We understand that these companies largely understood climate science in their early, even in the early 20th century potentially.

But we don't see the first example of actual climate obstruction until 1980 with the American Petroleum Institute. We only know about that now because of great reporting and, and digging done by civil society and journalists in the nineties. And then this field is really born in the late nineties and early two thousands in in terms of having academics and [00:09:00] scholarly attention. And so now in 2025, we finally see enough kind of, uh, research come together to justify a global volume like this that I just think is really, really exciting. And we did learn a lot of new things along the.

 And I, I think there's a yet another. Issue that should be mentioned? Uh, I think this umbrella concept like, uh, climate obstruction is important because it shows how climate policies are not only a sectoral policy. Uh, I mean climate policies at the beginning were very much related to a scientific issue, to an environmental agenda. And we can really understand through the lenses of climate obstruction that climate policies, they touch transport energy, they, they touch agriculture. I mean a, a series of other fields and, and, and other policies crossing across the board of, uh, uh, governmental policies. And I think that this is important, uh, uh, for the sake of understanding this [00:10:00] umbrella concept of climate obstruction. And, and also, I mean, and yet another issue I think that we could. Easily understand, particularly through chapter number, uh, four, I think it was the chapter on the far right. Uh, for example, the linkages, the connections between, uh, democratic backlash and, uh, the, the growth of climate obstruction networks and organizations in different countries with so many different contexts.

But with this commonality of attacking climate policies altogether, also for the sake of attacking, uh, democratic advance.

 Okay. Can you talk a little bit about what sorts of entities get involved in obstructing climate policy? I know, um, you're like, yes, we, we gave you a whole book about this, but, um, but yeah, in broad strokes, what are the sorts of entities that get involved in these kinds of activities?

 Look, one of the key findings, I guess, from [00:11:00] all the work that we've done to bring this book together is that, as you may guess, large oil and gas corporations are really front and center here, but importantly, they're not the only ones. So a lot of the early work focused on organizations that your listeners will be familiar with, ExxonMobil, Chevron, shell, and others, and the role that they've played obstructing. Action on climate change. Of course there's a good reason to do that. We know since the 1980s, these organizations have spent tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, um, denying the existence of climate change funding, television campaigns, online campaigns, social media campaigns, et cetera. But as I said, they're not the only ones.

So we have a lot of evidence now about the role of coal companies, utilities, car manufacturers, meat and dairy producers, um, that have joined in efforts to delay slow down climate policies. So if you take the meat and dairy industry, for example, it's a sector that's uniquely emissions intensive compared with other agricultural industries because of its methane emissions. Um, and so they've played a key role too. The [00:12:00] other kind of interesting thing we observe is that. You have these supply chains that create coalitions right across the economy. So if you think about utilities that we've rely on to generate electricity, well in many countries they still are dependent on coal and gas.

So you see coalitions between coal, gas, and utilities. Well, you take one that you wouldn't really think of like railroads in many places, railroads are dependent on coal. Um, and so they work together to ship to, to move the coal around the country. So you see these coalitions right up and down supply chains. One manifestation of this is large trade associations that represent multiple industries, um, taking positions to block climate change. So in the US it's well-known groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers. These are large member-based organizations that represent, you know, some of the largest industries in the country. In Europe, there's groups like the European Roundtable of Industrialists, um, in Indonesia there's the Chamber of Commerce and [00:13:00] industry and so on. So many of these larger bodies that represent business right across society have taken quite extreme anti-climate positions, in part because of, uh, these linkages across supply chains. So the short answer is yes, it's oil and gas, but it's much more than that as well.

 Let's talk about responsibility. I, I really like this framing that you have in there of attribution for obstruction mapping to attribution science around emissions. So I'd love to have you guys talk about what makes fossil fuel producers uniquely liable for both climate change itself and climate obstruction.

I know we just talked about the fact that they're obviously not the only ones, um, but they are a, a major source. Um, so yeah. So what makes them uniquely liable?

 Yes, thanks Amy. I feel seen with this question, so I really like it and I think you've, you've stated it well on drilled, you know, you have the actual pollution, the, the greenhouse gas emissions, and you have a set of [00:14:00] actors that emerge in attribution science who is responsible for these emissions. And then you have a separate issue that climate obstruction is really interested in about information pollution. And the lobbying and these obstructionist actions. And this is not a necessarily a one-to-one overlap in terms of these two, um, in, in terms of these sets of entities. So one way that it does seem uniquely different is, for instance, Saudi Aramco state owned fossil fuel company does seems less involved in climate obstruction than investor owned ExxonMobil. Um, and, and for all sorts of reasons, that's true. Far less influential, certainly in the US context. Um, that's true. And then you also have these interesting, um, because we have, we've identified this network of climate obstruction because we are aware now of, of major PR firms like Edelman being involved in climate obstruction. Edelman has [00:15:00] very little to do with climate emissions, with greenhouse gas emissions. But a lot to do with information pollution. And so we identify this new set of actors who have responsibility in the realm of climate obstruction, but who may have very little responsibility in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

 I think this is one point, as Jennifer was saying that we were trying to make clear in the book, is that some actors are more consequential than others and not all participants here in obstruction, you know, are equally liable. I just kind of, one additional point there that we make in the book is that these types of actors that you're talking about, some of these large oil and gas producers, and we know from some great existing studies, there's about 90 carbon majors, for example, that are responsible, um, across oil, gas, and cement for a large chunk of rises in global, uh, mean average global temperatures and even sea level rise.

So this attribution science is really pinpointing that, but it's not as, as Jennifer was saying, it's not only that these companies are responsible for the emissions, but they also continue to spew out [00:16:00] emissions, expand their production. Um, even though many of these firms know better than most because of their in-house scientific knowledge, the damage that they're doing, how their practices are heating the planet. And then for these organizations to go on and use these huge amounts of revenues that they're generating in profits, to use a large chunk of that to then engage in political activities, to try and delay policies, to try and block policies that are actually gonna reduce emissions. I think that's why you're seeing some of these organizations being taken to court, being fined loud, liable in courts and human rights commissions right across the world.

 And we no doubt we should think of those original emitters as the kind of beating heart of climate obstruction that you don't have Edelman without ExxonMobil. But nevertheless, we have to think of the network as a whole as we identify, you know, sort of the main entities involved in shaping public opinion and, and politics.

 And there are some actors and they are very important at opening some doors that would not have been opened without their [00:17:00] responsibility and their share of responsibility. As Jennifer said, of course, I mean

the PR firm or some religious actors, uh, as the case here in Latin America, for example, they are not the key emitters, but they are those who are helping, uh, pollute the information environment and and contributing to the dissemination of climate disinformation. And these are roles that are very important for the sake of delaying action.

 Right. I wanna get into the 10 key findings that you summarize in this chapter for the rest of the book. Let's start with, it's not just about climate denial. Thank you. I feel like I, I can't believe we're still having that conversation where it gets reduced to that, but we are, so let's talk about that.

 Yeah. And I will say there, there were more than 10 findings in this book, of course. So we had to leave a lot out of this list. But, um, this is, to me, the biggest one and people don't really often get it or know that this is, this sort of transition has happened that, [00:18:00] that the, those who were denying the reality of climate change have largely moved on.

There are some, you know, weirdos and, you know, extreme people who. Continue to say, oh, it's not real. I heard one just the other day at a, um, a hearing about, um, offshore wind, uh, in Rhode Island. Um, but he was one of 25 pieces of testimony against offshore wind. The rest were saying things like it's not, you know, it's not reliable, it's not affordable, it's uh, you know, uh, it's gonna itself cause you know, a lot massive environmental damage and so on.

And those kind of arguments are really attacks on climate solutions and we're seeing a huge surge in those. So, some excellent research built on earlier work by John Cook, who has a wonderful things like, um, a game called Cranky Uncle. And, [00:19:00] um, about, you know, how do you help sort of. Pre bunk or help people, you know, recognize misinformation. So a categorization scheme that he built and then was built upon by Travis Cohen and me, Jim Ko at, uh, Exeter University in the uk. And what they've shown really is that just even quantitatively if you, you can use, um, sort of AI or other machine learning to categorize, you know, types of claims about climate change.

And we're seeing a market shift away from this, attacking the science itself about the reality of climate change, but rather much more about the solutions. So some people are calling this sort of delay is, or, um, as William Lamb in an article called Discourse, is a climate delay that's been proven useful for understanding the shift.

Um, you know, people are saying, well, we should, we'll act on it later. Or the techno when the technology gets better or, we'll, you know, we'll hope that some, [00:20:00] uh. You know, great technology will fall from the sky or the, you know, the usual things will become viable, like, uh, nuclear fusion or, um, you know, hydrogen and so on, that, you know, you've covered a lot in this, on the show. So anyway, and then there's other attacks, which are on the scientists and on the activists and on people like us. So on the, even on the journalists and the social scientists. So there are, there are new approaches to slowing down action on climate change. They don't need to really say that it's not happening.

They can now attack the solutions and those of us who are seeking to advance solutions quickly,

 This is not to say that climate denial, uh, does not exist anymore, right here in Brazil, for example, for a denialist government, I mean, denying the actual existence of climate change, right? We had ministers one in the US right now.[00:21:00]

 Yeah. exactly. I know that my own back backyard. But I think that just for us to understand of the, of course, obstruction is much more than denial.

 But denial is still there. And even it's, uh, even if it's not only. Denial anymore. Sometimes we can even, uh, still listen to some forms of interpretive denial, such as the current president of Petro Brass under government. Right. Saying that, for example, uh, drilling oil at the mouth of the Amazon doesn't have anything to do with floods in the south cone of, uh, Brazil. Well, that's a sort of, uh, dissociating cause and effect, which Stanley Cohen has, I mean called exactly of denial. Right. And I think that this is, uh, these are kinds of messages that, uh, in, in spite of all the advances in the scientific fields, we can still listen from politicians and key managers of oil [00:22:00] industries and other businesses.

 Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Um, okay, we've said, we've mentioned this a couple times. Already, but We'll, we'll probably repeat it a few more that it's not, it's not just oil. Um, it's not just big oil though. So can I have you guys talk a little bit about what are some of these other industries that are, um, particularly involved in climate obstruction?

We mentioned animal Ag before, um, so Jennifer, I'm sure you'll have more to add on that, but what are some of the other ones as well?

 Yeah. I think part of our excitement around this book was expanding out the sectors that. We talk about. And so we have various, uh, chapters dedicated to other sectors, one of which is animal agriculture. And we have known since 2006 when we got the first global assessment of livestocks impacts on greenhouse gases that the livestock sector counts for anywhere from 15 [00:23:00] to 25% of anthropogenic warming, depending on the kind of accounting that you use. So, um, it's not the biggest, um, uh, greenhouse gas emitter, but it's up there. And terms of what's interesting is you'll hear in the, um, animal agriculture industry frequently say that they get a disproportionate amount of attention relative to the, their emissions. And I think our view, um, is inverted to that. So again, this kind of, you know, sort of classic difference I think between what the scholars might say and what the industry might say. Um, but yeah, animal agriculture is a major, um, polluter as to why it hasn't received the same amount of attention. One reason, of course, is that the science itself on attribution has lagged behind, um, what we know about, um, just sort of warming generally.

So, you know, as we've understood climate [00:24:00] change, we've had to understand who is actually responsible for it, and identifying the livestock sector has come later than it has around some of the other sectors. Notably, of course, the IPCC does not, um, identify livestock as a particular sector. Animal agriculture is included here because now we have a growing body of evidence.

It's not huge, less than a dozen papers actually, but to show that the meat and dairy industry has actively been involved in climate obstruction. That they have, um, downplayed denied, delayed, lobbied against, influenced public discourse around the topic of climate change. And that was a prerequisite a lot of people would like, have liked to see.

A lot of authors, for instance, would've liked to see the financial sector and its role in climate obstruction. But because we don't have a scholarly basis on which to build that, um, body of evidence, we set it aside for the next volume.

 Yeah. [00:25:00] The only point to add there, I guess is one of the really nice things about this book was to spotlight some of these industries that we've been talking about that don't always get the attention. So oil, gas, and coal. Yes. But utilities actually, we don't have a huge amount of scholarly information about utilities. And yet the little we do know is that they've played a key role all the way back to the early 1990s in some of the original coalitions like the Global Climate Coalition that played such a significant role obstructing climate change. And in many countries they still do. Um, and in many jurisdictions, they're some of the most powerful corporations. Some of them are state owned entities as well. So utilities is one, uh, that we talk a little bit about in the book and others that perhaps your listeners don't think so much about, like car manufacturers, organizations like Toyota for example, you wouldn't necessarily jump to or imagine when you're talking about climate obstruction. But some of these car manufacturers that have bet on, you know, internal combustion engines continuing for some time continue to obstruct things like, uh, fuel efficiency standards for cars. So right [00:26:00] across the economy, a whole range of sectors, a whole range of corporations that don't necessarily come to mind. We're now starting to see emerging interests, unfortunately, showing that these organizations too are, uh, engage in the types of political activities that really mirror what oil and gas have been doing as well.

 Yeah. That kinda leads to my next question, which is about the trade association. So you mentioned that trade associations have this huge role to play in climate obstruction, and I'm wondering if you can give a little bit of an overview and then a couple of examples of specific ones and what they get up to.

 Sure. So we've spoken about these networks of organizations and, and some of the language we use is there's a whole range of organizations that really enable climate obstruction. You actually might have seen the, um, UN Secretary General last year calling on PR for, for example, to stop, I think in his words, um, uh, you know, halting. Was it, uh, planetary obstruction, for example. So there's a whole range of enablers and trade associations are perhaps one of the most [00:27:00] important. Um, to give you an example, perhaps I can draw on some of the work, uh, that, um, I've been doing with Robert Braw, which is really kind of focused in on the political expenditure of these organizations.

So to be clear, what's a trade association? Well, that really, these are member based organizations that firms kind of hide behind often to do their dirty work. So I'm talking about groups like the American Petroleum Institute. One of the largest in the us, probably one of the largest in the world. It represents Shell bp, ExxonMobil, but it also represents a whole range of refiners and others. And so what we did in, in one piece of work is we went through their tax filings of about 90 organizations, um, that have engaged on climate issues between 2008 and 2018, just to see, you know, how much money do they have at their disposal, how much money they spending on politics. And what we found over that decade is of those around 90 trade associations that are working on climate issues, they had total revenues of more than 25 billion US dollars.

So huge sums of money. Um, the oil and [00:28:00] gas sector alone, this is just the trade associations had 4.6 billion US dollars in revenues. What was also interesting is, um. 13% of that, or about 3.4 billion was just being spent on political activities. So these trade associations that are working on climate change issues in the US were spending 3.4 billion US over a decade, um, on a whole range of political activities to try and shape climate policies. The other kind of scary thing to know about these numbers is from the political science literature. We know that actually firms themselves spend more on politics than trade associations. So 3.4 billion is really just scratching the surface. Um, and then the other thing we're interested in. Was, what are they spending that money on? So coming, we've spoken, uh, a moment ago about Edelman and others, but advertising and promotion was the largest, uh, was the largest pot. So these organizations spent, again, I'm hopeful, I'm not drowning you in figures here, but $2.2 billion just on advertising and promotion. So most of their political [00:29:00] spending is going to social media campaigns, television campaigns, radio, uh, and others. Um, and that's a lot more than they actually spent on lobbying. They also spent huge sum sums of money, almost 400 million on external grants to other organizations. So yes, we tend to think about these organizations. They do the lobbying in this type of stuff, but they also do a lot of pr, they do a lot of external grants. Um, and that was one thing I was curious about, you know, is why are you guys giving all these external grants to sporting organizations, museums, historical societies, and others? Um. And a few years ago I was, I did some interviews with some of the lobbyists in these organizations, and I noted that a, a bunch of them were giving small amounts of money to a whole range of tra charitable organizations, uh, in Washington, DC and you would ask them why.

And some people said, oh, it's just simply because we want to, um, solve Alzheimer's, for example. But when you pushed a little bit more, you know, is it really because you care about cancer or solving Alzheimer's? You know, it, it probably won't come as a [00:30:00] surprise to those that work in Washington dc but. Often you give a small, there's a charitable dinner in DC you give $10,000 to a particular organization and that buys you a seat at the table. And perhaps at that particular dinner, the honorary guest that night is the Senate Finance Chairman. So you buy a seat at the table, the money goes to this charity.

You sit next to the Senate Finance Chairman, you organize a meeting with their chief of staff on Monday morning, and that's how you facilitate lobbying. So these are very sophisticated playbooks that these trade associations are using to shape climate and energy policies, uh, on behalf of their members.

And there's huge sums of money as we detail in the book, going to this.

 I would only add to that, that, um, the first instance of climate obstruction that we note in the book is by the American Petroleum Institute in 1980.

Uh, so a trade association, and the first example we have of climate obstruction by the meat and, and dairy industry is by the National Cattleman's Beef Association in 1989, and we know [00:31:00] that they've been heavily involved moving forward from there too.

So again, the role of trade associations does appear to be prominent across many different sectors.

 I find it interesting to look at the trade groups that are sort of cross industry. Like I've been obsessed of obsessively monitoring IATA for the last couple years. 'cause I just think it's interesting that you've got like the oil companies, the airlines, and they're. Putting out so much garbage about sustainable aviation fuels at the moment. Um, but anyway, yeah, I'm, I'm curious about the cross industry groups and how, how active they are and why industries might hide out in those groups.

 It allows firms to hide in the crowd. So the authors in chapter three use that phrase. Um, and it came up in a lot of interviews I've done as well. You know, often they'll talk about trade associations as the tip of the spear or, but the. It allows firms to kind of go out in public and say, you know, we support the Paris Agreement.

We support net zero, but at the same time, channel [00:32:00] money to organizations that can come out and try and undermine these agreements, undermine policies to meet them. So it's really a way to protect the social license of the firms that are members of them. So we often see firms say one thing in public, the CEO will give a a press statement or so on, but if you follow where the money's actually going to these trade associations, uh, you know, they're undertaking political activities that are in direct, direct contradiction to what some of the leaders of these firms are saying in public. So it's that reputational protection. I think that really comes out in some of the chapters in this book as well.

 yeah, yeah. Okay. Let's talk about. Another layer to this, the think tanks, which are just everywhere and growing all the time. Um, how do they get involved in climate obstruction and what are some good examples of, of the think tanks that are particularly involved?

 Well, I think that based on the context of, uh, Latin American countries, uh, I think, think tank are not very, uh, a very frequent reality. Right. And very often they have [00:33:00] been set up, uh, in Brazil, in Argentina, in Chile and other countries also, uh, through funds coming from global north countries and global north, uh, companies.

Right. Exactly. To, uh, portray this, uh, uh, um. Image of, uh, producing scientific knowledge, policy relevant knowledge, but with a key message of, uh, spreading doubt, uh, spreading, uh, the need to, let's wait a little bit and then implement later when we have more information about, uh, what is really needed to do, perhaps in the less costly way, uh, when more technology's available so that, so that we don't have to, uh, be confronted with all the costs that are, uh. Here, I mean, uh, for us to implement, uh, true, uh, climate, climate policies. So I think that, that think things, they, they, they are one of these, uh, hinge actors together with religious groups, uh, which help open doors, particularly [00:34:00] between the official and civil society world, right? Because they're, uh, within the civil society, very often, uh, you dunno if they're speaking on behalf of a government or on behalf of civil society because they have this nature that is kind of hybrid. Uh, uh, it's a think thank and, and, and you dunno if it's really coming from a social movement, from a civil, uh, civil society or from a government. And I think this hinge, uh, function, opening doors, it's very important because if you withdraw the hinge of a door, it's going, it's going to open somehow, but it's not going to open so easily. And I think they, they play this role, which is very important.

 The other thing I think that's detailed quite clearly in the book, and there's some terrific work by a, a handful of researchers focusing, trying to understand this network of, of think tanks. Now many of the most dominant, um, uh, are in the US as Carlos was saying, and they're channeling money right across the world. But we spend a little bit of time in some of the chapters talking about the Atlas network. [00:35:00] So this, for those of your listeners that haven't heard of the Atlas Network, this is a global network of organizations of all of think to. Banks, they're very much free market orientated. Um, they focus on neoliberal policies.

It's organizations like the Heartland Institute in the us, the Free Market Foundation in South Africa, the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the United Kingdom. In my own country, in Australia, the Institute for Public Affairs is another prominent trade association. Um, and so we see this network of organizations we're knowing a, we're starting to know a lot more about how they operate, the interlinkages between them, including funding flows, personnel, the interlocks between boards and so forth. But in many countries, as Carlos is saying, they play a very, very influential role, um, here in Australia. The Institute for Public Affairs that I just mentioned, for example, has very close ties to a number of conservative politicians that have been very outspoken, even questioning the science of climate change.

And I'm sure that's true right across the right, across the world. So we're seeing this close connection, the way they spread [00:36:00] ideas, but also their links, uh, right into national parliaments.

 I, um, I just spent a bunch of time at the Atlas Archive in California and, um, my favorite little like tidbit from there was this project where they funneled money. They, the API funneled money through Atlas to this fringe Catholic priest to try to work on getting Catholic bishops to be less interested in environmental issues and in fact, to get them to think about environmentalism as like a cult that was, uh, a dangerous threat to Catholicism.

 Wow, there's no length right that, that these organizations won't go to.

 It's amazing. Yeah. Um, it's wild. it's wild.

how much they do. Yeah, Sorry, go with j just what point, uh, Christian was saying, I think that they also play a role in [00:37:00] organizing, uh, a political message that is broader, that goes beyond climate through the organization of CPAC here in Brazil, in, in other countries, for example, conservative political action. These, these networks of these banks, they play a key role because they get funds.

 I mean, they get, uh, support even from governmental authorities depending on the government. And they organize a conference. And that gives legitimation, I mean, in terms of, uh, uh, uh, uh, the image that they put portrays socially, everybody, oh, they're organizing a conference. So they, they are knowledgeable.

They must be respected because they are organizing something that is, they, they bring precedence, I mean leaders from different countries, or not only to talk about climate, but climate is always there, of course.

 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We've mentioned the PR firms a couple times, but let's talk about them more specifically as kind of agents of obstruction. Um, how do they operate, how do they act, um, [00:38:00] kind of act to enable climate obstruction.

 So, um, as we mentioned earlier, PR firms are work for hire. They're doing works on behalf of their clients. They don't do the work that they do without having money behind that effort. On the other hand, we also know that PR firms want to position themselves to be sort of loyal to certain industries to guarantee certain kinds of contracts moving forward. And so we see deep relationships between some PR firms and, uh, some polluting industries. Um, there were. Again, because we focused in this volume on 2015 to the present, uh, you know, we're really interested in work, uh, scholarship around that time as well. And so there have been examples in chapter four on the animal, [00:39:00] um, agriculture industry of the Red Red Flag.

It's an Irish PR firm, uh, very involved in, um, positioning the animal agriculture industry as sustainable and, um, so much so in fact that Extinction rebellion, you know, protested outside of Red Flags headquarters in, in 2019 because of this, um, immense amount of bidding that they do on behalf of the animal ag industry. Um, and there were a few other interesting examples I think of, of PR firms that people may not have typically heard of as being involved in climate obstruction, um, that appear in this volume.

 Yeah, I mean, I was, I was actually gonna talk about Edelman, but maybe you'll, you're sick of, do you wanna hear more about, I was just gonna use the energy citizens example as a good one if, Yeah.

Um, I mean, it's an older one now, but I guess we were talking about trade associations a moment ago, and so firms hire PR firms, but also trade associations hire PR [00:40:00] firms as well.

Um, so they work for a whole. Range of organizations in these networks that are obstructing action on climate change. And this is an older example, but I think it's just a classic case of how these things operate. Right? So in January, 2012, ahead of the US Presidential elections, we saw this alliance of organizations and citizens called Energy Citizens Run a campaign titled I'm an Energy Voter.

 We're leading the world in oil and natural gas production. That means lower energy costs more growth, more security. For Americans, more energy means more opportunity. We exceed the right policies to make it happen. I'm Chris and I'm an energy voter.

 It's this kind of campaign that sprung up and the campaign involved newspapers, online TV ads, um, and you had ordinary Americans looking into the camera saying, I'm an energy voter. I care about energy. Um, I wanna support American jobs. I support more oil and gas drilling. You could go to a website, say called Vote for energy.org, that told you more information about, um, where different [00:41:00] politicians stood on energy issues.

Now this all looked like a kind of grassroots, legitimate campaign by ordinary citizens that cared about energy issues. But it turns out, thanks to a lot of great investigative journalism and others that actually the American Petroleum Institute, this organization we've been talking about. Had contracted Edelman to run the campaign to pay for the actors to appear in these ads, to set up the website, to do all this type of work.

So that's really what these PR firms are doing. Uh, they're running a whole lot of AstroTurf organizations as well. It's not just setting up a TV campaign. And when we went back through the, the tax data I looked at before, what we actually saw in those years when Edelman High, uh, set up, um, the Energy Citizens campaign on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute, um, we know that the API paid Edelman $120 million in contracts for public relations in those two years.

So I think there's some clear links there and, and large sums of money behind these types of campaigns that organizations like Edelman and others run for trade [00:42:00] associations and for firms.

just wanna jump in to add, you know, you can see in these campaigns, in this framing in general, why some of these other sectors then get lost vis-a-vis oil and gas because. Often, especially in the United States, um, climate change and energy are really conflated and it's about energy use or energy voter and not necessarily about emissions.

 yeah, let's talk about governments that are obviously major agents of climate, destruct destruction, and obstruction. Um, yeah. How do, how do governments get involved in climate obstruction? I think sometimes people might think of climate obstruction as being something that's happening on the way to government, but, um, but you talk in this book about how governments themselves are often doing this too.

So let's, let's talk about some examples.

 Okay, I'm gonna jump on, uh, this, talking about the Bolsonaro administration, of course, because climate in Iowa existed in [00:43:00] Brazil. Prior to his administration, of course there were books, there were reports it had been published with. Before his administration. But what, uh, the machinery, the governmental machinery, uh, made possible was, uh, to make, uh, climate denial something official as part of the actual rhetoric of the government. And not only of the rhetoric, but of the act actions of that government, I mean, nationally and, uh, globally through the participation of, uh, a country like Brazil and multilateral climate, uh, uh, negotiations, for example. It's interesting to see, uh, the behavior, the change of behavior between, uh, Brazilian governments, uh, in, uh, negotiation of the Paris Agreement in, uh, 2015 and, uh, later on, uh, in Glasgow, when on, we had another cop and we had another government and, uh. The behavior and, uh, the political stances taken by that government. The same country, but different governments were totally different. Right. [00:44:00] And another level of, uh, differentiation, which I believe is also important is to see how, uh, similar, um, uh, leaders may actually, uh, act differently if we compare, like we're doing some research comparing Brazil and Argentina, the two cases, for example. The Malay government doesn't have a very much strong, uh, uh, opinion about climate, but it's also because Argentina doesn't play the same level, uh, the same, uh, uh, road that Brazil has historically played in multilateral uh, uh, climate negotiations. And also because the environmental movement and the climate movement in Argentina is not so strong, uh, uh, to the level that. Climate obstruction would be needed. So when we, we make this comparison, the comparison between Brazil and Argentina, it is, it's interesting to see that climate obstruction is also, it also conflicts with the level of, of [00:45:00] organization, of environmental movements and climate movements nationally. Right. And if there is a climate governance at the national level, then climate obstruction will need to be stronger in order to, uh, dismantle legislation to go, uh, uh, uh, against, uh, the organization of participatory councils, for example, at the national level where civil society, the science community may play a role, uh, when you don't have that kind of governance, uh, organized at a national level, the Argentinian case, of course, you don't need to, uh, uh, to have such strong climate obstruction actions to the same, uh, level as still, for example.

 Who's gonna talk about Trump? I'm just kidding.

 So I'll jump in there to talk about Trump. So here in the US it's just, uh, you know, people are in shock, uh, about how effective the [00:46:00] rollback has been of American climate policy. And, you know, we of course had been through this before in the Trump's first term, but they kind of failed to achieve a lot of the rollback that they were seeking to because they did a sloppy job and they had whatever, poorly written laws and so on.

But anyway, so we've seen, and we're seeing right now in the US a shocking attack on climate action by the government itself. It's a new phase of obstruction, there's no question. And this is, you know, this volume we finished before Trump came into office. For the second time that is. Um, and so there's gonna need to be, you know, the new phase of Trump, uh, led obstruction volume sometime in the future. But the point I'd like to make is that there's always been obstruction and the US has actually always been a leader of obstruction globally, that in the UN [00:47:00] negotiations we have, I've been attending for, you know, over 25 years. And it's, um, you know, the US was always the problem child. The rest of the world waited for to figure out what the heck the US was gonna do because we have this crazy super majority required by the Senate.

And everybody in the world, in the smallest African countries know about the quirks of, you know, Joe Manchin or something in the US Senate. Uh, and there's been, you know. Very sophisticated blocking of global action in the us sorry, by the us um, negotiating team through all those years through Democratic and Republican administrations. It's been bad. The US has, I mean, with a few, a very few exceptions, like in the run up to the Paris Agreement, the US did a little better, but, um, the, anyway, there's been, the US has been really important and I think, so [00:48:00] there's much to be learned from that because we need still to understand where did the US position come from? How did the US government become such a, um, you know, a force for obstruction in global solution to climate change? And we really can go back to the beginning when the un FCCC, the UN Climate Treaty was being first drafted, there was very strong influence from the oil and gas and coal industries. They organized, they got their way, they used their trade organizations, their politics, you know, their political connections. So there's different types of government-led obstruction. Some are more subtle, but I, uh, and some are extremely blunt. Um, but I think it's really important for us to understand

Transcription

Timmons Roberts (Brown University), Jennifer Jacquet (University of Miami), Carlos Milani (Rio de Janeiro State University), and Christian Downie (Australian National University) join Amy to walk us through an overview of what climate obstruction looks like globally, and what we can expect in the year ahead.

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