Episode #286
Amy Westervelt: Think Tanks, Greenwashing, + The War On Reality

Amy Westervelt pulls back the curtain on the machinery that has helped powerful industries shape public understanding for more than a century. From early corporate PR to modern think tanks, greenwashing campaigns, captured university research, and strategic legal influence, she shows how the information ecosystem itself has been bent in service of fossil fuel profits. What emerges is not just a story about big oil, but a broader warning about how policy is shaped long before laws are written, often through institutions that present themselves as neutral, expert, or benevolent.

Our interview with Amy Westervelt has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Amy Westervelt online in the early summer of 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today with Amy Westervelt. Amy, I’m so glad that you’re here. We tried to do this four years ago, and we finally got there.

Amy Westervelt 0:12
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 0:13
Amy is an independent investigative climate journalist. She’s won many awards, published on numerous platforms, and is a pioneering podcaster who has created or participated in a number of excellent shows. She’s focused on oil, climate, and gender. She has a special expertise on green PR, which I hope we get to talk about. She’s won a lot of awards. I’m not going to read them all. She’s has a book that came out in 2018 called “Forget Having It All: How America Messed Up Motherhood and How to Fix It,” and a book coming out this fall, I think?

Amy Westervelt 0:50
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 0:50
“Brought to You By: Inside Big Oil’s Total Information War.” Amy, what is your love project right now? You’ve got the book off to the publisher?

Amy Westervelt 1:08
Yes.

Dave Chapman 1:08
You’re working on the latest season of Drilled, your top podcast. You made a deal with Pushkin, so they’re now distributing.

Amy Westervelt 1:18
Yep. That’s cool.

Dave Chapman 1:20
That’s exciting.

Amy Westervelt 1:20
Yeah, I think the big next thing, I guess, is I’ve been working on an investigation for a couple of years with the people at ProPublica, looking at oil money in university research and beyond. I feel like there’s been a few stories that are like, “Oh, you know, this company gave this much money to this school. Isn’t that terrible?” But we’re really trying to look at what companies are trying to buy with that money and what they get, and sort of like how they use universities.

Amy Westervelt 1:41
I actually am finding so many parallels in the agriculture space on that as well, where so many of the big industrial ag companies and industrial ag business people have done very similar things in terms of starting particular research centers to really try to… I don’t know.

Amy Westervelt 2:08
I think think tanks shouldn’t exist. I’ll just tell you that right now. I think that for whatever side of the political spectrum they’re on, there’s not a real need for them, except to try to shape policy. They came about really because there was a concern that there weren’t enough academics at universities who were pro-business. There was, alongside a push to try to change that.

Amy Westervelt 2:08
There was the creation of this kind of parallel knowledge system in the formation of think tanks to try to get, again, this intellectual soil in which policy ideas could be planted. They’re really interesting the way they operate. They’ll put out these policy papers and things like that, but they train the people who work there to go on TV shows and radio shows to get these particular talking points out.

Dave Chapman 2:08
One of the things that I have learned from your work is the significance of think tanks and how they’ve been used as a weapon, as a tool of change, much, much bigger than I realized. Could you talk a little bit about that? How did that happen?

Amy Westervelt 1:27
I think of it almost as like pre-lobbying now. It’s like they need a certain amount of credible information from academics to be able to make the policy argument for certain things. You just see it everywhere. Anyway, those stories are going to start to come out at the end of this month, and then run through around September or October too, so that that should be interesting.

Amy Westervelt 2:16
They’re experts at what is called the Overton window effect, which was also named by a think tank guy, but this idea of throwing out the most radical ideas at either end of the political spectrum as a way to get people to shift – sort of to get the middle to shift one direction or the other.

Amy Westervelt 4:36
If you want to, like privatize roads, for example. If that’s a goal of yours, then you might have a think tank that talks about privatizing all transportation and all infrastructure, and people are like, “Oh, that’s crazy.” But then you start to talk about the benefits of privatized roads as a model, a solution, and it might sound a little bit more palatable to people. That kind of thing they’re really good at.

Amy Westervelt 5:07
They also file amicus briefs in a lot of court cases, and for the longest time I didn’t understand this at all, because they all spend a lot of money on it. It’s not surprising to learn that the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation is opposed to taxes, or to learn that a left-wing think tank is opposed to abortion restriction. These are not things that are surprising viewpoints. I didn’t know why they did it.

Amy Westervelt 5:42
Then I actually did an interview with Sheldon Whitehouse, the senator from Rhode Island and a lawyer before that. It’s like, “Why do they do this?” and, “Oh, it’s not about the brief. It’s about the relationship that the person they hired to write the brief has with the Supreme Court justice that they’re filing it to.”

Amy Westervelt 6:03
What they do is they look for people who clerked for particular judges, either at the appeals court level or the Supreme Court level, and they have them write these briefs. The whole point of them is to include particular case precedents that will then give that judge the precedents that they can use to rule a particular way.

Amy Westervelt 6:27
It’s coming from someone that they trust, it’s someone that clerked for them, it’s someone they have a good relationship with, all that kind of thing. It’s this very, like, I don’t know, sort of hidden way into trying to shape the judicial system, too. These organizations have loads of money, they have a lot of influence, and they’re not really regulated in any way.

Amy Westervelt 6:53
They’re not technically lobbyists, so they don’t have to file lobbying disclosures. They’re pretty good at hiding who funds them. In some cases, they’ve organized against any kind of transparency rules around that funding, and they’re really, really effective both at media relations and this court program, and then kind of lobbying on the Hill, too. They’ll meet regularly with certain lawmakers and put together presentations for them, give them position papers, all of that stuff.

Dave Chapman 7:30
They present themselves as a resource rather than as a lobbyist.

Amy Westervelt 7:36
Yeah. We’re just doing research. It’s providing information, but it’s information in service of a particular policy position. But like I said, they’re not beholden to any of the rules that other people who are openly lobbying are required to operate under.

Dave Chapman 8:06
You do a lot of work around the influence of large corporate entities, and how they have done really an amazing job of sculpting America into a system that works for them better than it used to.

Amy Westervelt 9:17
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 9:17
When did that really take off? When did things change?

Amy Westervelt 8:33
I think from an information perspective, I would say that things changed really at the turn of the 20th century, because corporations starts to have multiple problems with democracy. The first 50 to 100 years, they’re doing pretty well. They can kind of do whatever they want. Most of the people who have the right to vote, their interests align with the people that are running the big companies, so there’s not a huge amount of pushback against what the large industrialists want to do.

Amy Westervelt 9:36
All of a sudden, right at the turn of the century, really, some of the first laws are passed on corporations in the U.S. You have investigative journalists starting to do these big exposés, like Upton Sinclair in the food industry, or Ida Tarbell and Standard Oil. These companies maybe aren’t the great pioneers that we might have been told they were.

Amy Westervelt 9:37
Oh, this was early, like the late nineteens, early 1920s.

Amy Westervelt 9:36
Then you also have the vote extending to more and more groups of people that don’t necessarily share the interests of the Rockefellers and their colleagues. Into that kind of situation, you have the birth of corporate PR, because these companies need a way to shape the information that voters are getting in a way that will make them more likely to vote against their own interests and in the interests of the corporations that have a lot at stake at this point.

Amy Westervelt 11:36
Specific industries like the tobacco industry, coal, oil, rail, actually was a really early one as well, and chemicals right there at the beginning as well, they all start to use these tactics and techniques to try to shape the context that they’re operating in and to deal with what I call creeping democracy. They’re concerned about how much control is getting away from them, and they need to kind of wrestle that back in a way

Amy Westervelt 11:36
Corporate PR really helps them do that, because they can do things that really shift the context in which people are voting. My favorite example of this is Edward Bernays, because I just think he was such a genius. He was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, so he grew up like learning about psychoanalysis around the dinner table, and he had this in mind as he went to work for different companies. People would hire him to do…

Amy Westervelt 11:36
When we think about PR, it’s like, “Oh, they want their executive to be interviewed in the New York Times, or they are doing a press conference, or they want to sell more cars, or whatever,” but he would get hired to change social norms. When the tobacco companies hired him, they wanted him to help them get rid of the taboo on women smoking, because they figured that they were losing out on, like, half of consumers. It’s so smart.

Amy Westervelt 11:36
First he did what he always does in this situation, and he goes to see a psychoanalyst to talk about what the underlying things might be that drive people to smoke, and this and that. He decided to connect it to women’s empowerment, and he stages a fake protest. He calls up several of his friends who had debutante daughters, and he gets them to march up and down Fifth Avenue, smoking cigarettes in the name of women’s empowerment.

Amy Westervelt 11:36
Then he calls all the newspapers to tell them that this protest is happening, and they all cover it. Nobody knows that this is just a PR stunt. They all cover it, and within one to two years, women were smoking. It was not a taboo anymore. There were women smoking sections at the theater.

Dave Chapman 8:33
My mother was one of those women who started smoking. I think she had no idea that she was just being crudely manipulated by big tobacco. That’s what you see when people talk about, “I don’t want to be told what to eat.” That’s a real common reaction. “I don’t want the government telling me what to eat,” and I say, “Don’t you realize that somebody is already telling you what to eat, and it’s working, and you’re listening? You don’t even know it.” So the best PR is invisible.

Amy Westervelt 13:49
Exactly. One of my favorite Bernays examples is men’s watches. There was a watchmaker who hired him, because at the time they wanted men to wear wrist watches, but men were not into this at the time. It was considered a very feminine thing, because they were connected to bracelets, and so, real men had pocket watches. Again, he thought about, like, “Okay, what is the most manly type of dude in society that we can get to wear these watches to shift this thinking?”

Amy Westervelt 14:28
He did this all the time. This, to me, is like the early seeds of the think tank stuff. He would commission studies from doctors or from economists or experts of various kinds to kind of wrap his work in the whiff of credibility. He commissioned a study to look at how many men were being killed in warfare when they would light a match to look at their pocket watch.

Amy Westervelt 14:55
Then from there, he estimated that some 20% of casualties could be reduced if men wore wrist watches instead. He gives this study to the military, and they go for it, and they made wrist watches standard issue for soldiers. That’s the kind of stuff that he did, and it’s genius. Again, I doubt that any one in that chain of events knew that it was just a watch company trying to sell watches.

Dave Chapman 15:42
Was Ivy Lee a contemporary of his?

Amy Westervelt 15:47
Ivy Lee actually was even before Bernays. He mentored Bernays a little bit. He’s generally considered like the first corporate PR guy. He worked for Pennsylvania Railroad, and then for Standard Oil. He actually got like loaned out to the Rockefellers at one point from the Pennsylvania Railroad, because they were dealing with a labor strike at a coal mine in Colorado, and so he went out and tried to help them with that.

Amy Westervelt 16:16
Then they liked him so much they kept him on for all things Rockefeller and Standard Oil, and then eventually their petrochemical business as well, which is another thing. Again, I feel like we think about PR, it’s sort of like, “Oh yeah, media relations and things like that,” but he got sent at one point by Standard Oil to Germany to try to convince Hitler to tone down his rhetoric, because it was bad for business.

Amy Westervelt 16:47
Standard Oil had just signed a contract with IG Farben, which is a chemical company. They were seeing petrochemicals as a huge business, and all of this unsavory business with Hitler was like cramping their potential profits, and so they sent Ivy Lee over there to try to talk some sense into Hitler and Goebbels, and all of that.

Dave Chapman 17:15
Talk to Hitler to tone down this antisemitism.

Amy Westervelt 17:22
He did. He was like, “It’s too much. It’s not going to go over well with Americans.” Then he also advised him against it. They were trying to kick journalists out of Germany at the time that were critical of the Third Reich. Ivy Lee was like, “That’s not going to go over well with U.S. consumers. You should tamp that down a little bit.”

Amy Westervelt 17:48
Ivy Lee worked for the railroads, Standard Oil, the American Red Cross, and he and Bernays crossed paths because they both worked for the Creel Commission, which was this commission that got pulled together to sell the U.S. public on World War I, because President Woodrow Wilson had run on this platform of keeping the U.S. out of World War I.

Amy Westervelt 18:12
Once he got elected and realized that, in fact, he needed to actually join this war, he had to sell the public on it, so he guys. At the time, Bernays was doing PR for the theater. He hadn’t really started his big corporate PR career. He was doing PR for different plays on Broadway.

Amy Westervelt 18:45
There’s a documentary by Adam Curtis called “The Century of the Self,” where he actually interviewed Bernays later in his life, because he lived to be like 101. He went to interview him, and he talks about this time period, and he says that part of what made him go into corporate PR was that he saw what PR was able to do for Woodrow Wilson.

Amy Westervelt 19:12
He’s like, “Woodrow Wilson was like the most boring, unlikable man, and he got a hero’s welcome all through the streets of Paris. If we could do that for him, we could sell anyone anything.” That’s how those two met. Then Ivy Lee was diagnosed with cancer fairly young in his life, and he passed all of his clients on to Edward Bernays.

Dave Chapman 19:42
Okay. I need to ask you to talk about E. Bruce Harrison.

Amy Westervelt 19:47
Oh, yeah. He’s so interesting. I think I have such a fascination with all of these guys, because I just think they’re really interesting. A lot of times they’re very behind the scenes, and they’re shaping so many things that we’re doing and thinking about. Even just the choices that we have in this way that I don’t think is that well known.

Amy Westervelt 20:09
E. Bruce Harrison was another PR guy. He, like a lot of them, started out as a journalist. He was a sports journalist in Alabama, and then he went to work for actually a Democratic senator doing campaign PR for a period of time. Whenever the corporate lobbyists would come in, he found himself really liking them and enjoying talking to them, and so at a certain point the chemical lobby asks him to come and work for them, and he says, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

Amy Westervelt 20:42
This is the precursor to the American Chemistry Council today. It was, I think, they were called the Chemical Manufacturers Association then, but it’s the same trade organization. He goes to work for them, and almost immediately Rachel Carson’s book comes out, “Silent Spring.”

Dave Chapman 21:02
Can you tell people just a little bit about what was the impact of “Silent Spring”?

Amy Westervelt 21:09
That book?

Dave Chapman 21:10
Themical companies were scared.

Amy Westervelt 21:12
They were scared. They were calling it “Pearl Harbor” for the chemical industry. It was really the first real questioning of why we were using all these chemicals so widely, what impact they might have, and how little we actually knew about the impact they might have. The impact on animals and the environment, but also on health, and in particular children’s health.

Amy Westervelt 21:43
I think it’s hard for us to imagine today a book having this much power, but it had everyone talking. There were excerpts in the New Yorker, there were excerpts in a bunch of different newspapers. All of the politicians felt like they had to say something about how they were going to address the problems in this book. All of a sudden there’s all this talk about…

Amy Westervelt 22:11
Again, at the time, we didn’t even have the Environmental Protection Agency at that point. There were no environmental regulations to speak of.

Dave Chapman 22:20
We didn’t have the internet.

Dave Chapman 22:22
We didn’t have the internet, that’s right.

Dave Chapman 22:27
People did read books. That’s where they got information from. I think it’s really hard for a younger person now to even imagine that a book would have that kind of impact, but it did.

Amy Westervelt 22:37
Yeah. It really opened people’s eyes to something that I think part of it was that people did have some feeling that this was happening, and that it wasn’t quite right, and that things had changed in this really fundamental way, and they weren’t sure about it, but no one had really kind of put words to that, and she really did that. She was also a very gifted writer, so that didn’t hurt either.

Amy Westervelt 23:00
It was very well written, and it got picked up everywhere. LBJ ends up working to pass a bunch of legislation. Nixon follows on with more. In a span of like five years, you’re getting the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, all in one term. That’s how quickly it went.

Amy Westervelt 23:42
All of a sudden all these industries are really caught on the back foot, and this is like a thing that you see kind of happen throughout history. I talked about the regulations and stuff, they went, “Oh my gosh, what are we going to do?” Corporate PR. Then this happens, it’s sort of the next wave of them being like kind of caught off guard by a sudden shift in the context they’re operating in, and again the corporate PR guys kind of come to the rescue, and E. Bruce Harrison is sort of chief amongst them.

Amy Westervelt 24:17
He actually like has a fairly losing strategy when it comes to Rachel Carson, which ends up informing a lot of what he goes on to do. The whole chemical industry goes with this strategy of trying to smear her. It’s like attack the messenger. They went for everything from she’s a lesbian to she has cancer, so it’s a personal vendetta, she’s not really a scientist, because she worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service as a science writer.

Amy Westervelt 24:50
I think she had dropped out of school one credit shy of getting her master’s in biology, because she’d had to care for sick family members or something like that. They used that, and they went after all of these different things, and none of it worked. I think maybe because she was quite calm in the way that she would speak about these things, and I think also, like I said, I think people kind of could sense that there was some truth to what she was saying.

Amy Westervelt 25:21
They could see it themselves in their surroundings and in the food that they were seeing, and all of that kind of thing. It didn’t work, and he kind of like went away and did another job for a while, and came back as all of these regulations had been passed, and he had a new idea. It was informed by this loss that he’d had with the Rachel Carson stuff

Amy Westervelt 25:47
His idea was that if corporations just did certain good environmental things, that they could redirect the public’s attention to those things and get the attention off of them in these other realms, and that if they did a lot of voluntary actions, that that would take the pressure off of having to have regulation. He starts to pull together all of these different industry groups, that was another big thing of his.

Amy Westervelt 26:17
It was like, “Forget any one company doing this. It’s too risky, but if we all come together and fight against the Clean Air Act, then it’ll be less bad, and even better if we call ourselves the National Environmental Development Association. That sounds good. It sounds like we’re doing really good green things.” He’s generally considered the sort of godfather of greenwashing. He invents this tactic, and it’s very effective.

Amy Westervelt 26:52
He goes on to do it for oil companies that are trying to stop the Kyoto Protocol from being ratified, he does it for a mix of tobacco companies and automotive companies that are pushing back against clean air regulations. He kind of like just repeats the same strategy over and over again, depending on what regulations are being proposed.

Dave Chapman 27:26
As I recall, kind of one of the first times they really brought this strategy out was for Rio Earth Summit.

Amy Westervelt 27:32
Oh yeah, for the Rio Earth Summit. This is so smart. You’ve had Melissa Aronczyk on the show too, right?

Dave Chapman 27:40
Yeah.

Amy Westervelt 27:40
She spent time with him before he died, too. Again, it’s so smart, and it’s so subtle that I think people miss it for what it is. He worked for a few years leading up to the Rio Earth Summit to pull together these coalitions of industries and companies that were concerned about the idea of emissions being regulated. Who saw that as a real threat and who were on board with the idea of proposing voluntary actions that would look like business was taking it seriously enough that regulation wasn’t needed.

Dave Chapman 28:30
I just think it’s important, and I know a bit of your opinion, because I’ve listened to a lot of your work now, but did the oil companies not believe that climate change was real?

Amy Westervelt 28:43
They had more information than anyone on how real climate change was. The oil companies had started researching this in the late 60s and early 70s, and had done the bulk of the… all the best research on global warming and climate change had been done by the oil companies.

Amy Westervelt 30:21
This is actually a big part of this whole university project I’ve been working on too, that they start pretty early on trying to make sure that there’s always an economic argument against doing anything about emissions, that the solutions that are not going to keep fossil fuels in the mix are discredited in a variety of ways, that they’re less funded, all of that kind of thing.

Amy Westervelt 30:21
They have a very clear idea by at least 1980 of exactly how much warming we’re on track for, what causes global warming, largely the combustion of fossil fuels, and what that means for their business. By 1992 they’re well aware of how potentially dangerous it is that the world’s leaders are getting together to talk about this problem.

Dave Chapman 30:44
Dangerous to them.

Amy Westervelt 30:44
Exactly, yeah. To their profits. This strategy of sort of proposing voluntary efforts as a way to avoid regulation, that is like a real E. Bruce specialty, and it is really something that you see getting used over and over. You see it in the plastic stuff, even. In fact, actually, there’s video of an Exxon lobbyist talking about this as the plastic conversation is getting going around: should we regulate plastic bags and plastic straws and things like that?

Amy Westervelt 31:27
He says we’ve got to do the same thing that we did with climate, where if we offer something like advanced recycling, which is this thing where they basically burn plastic to turn it into a very toxic fuel, which also generates more emissions when it’s burned, but anyway, we can offer this thing, and that will make it look like we’re trying to do something about this problem, and it will keep regulation at bay. This is like the strategy over and over again.

Amy Westervelt 28:44
By certainly the late 70s, early 80s, they had realized that this was a threat to their industry, and that at a certain point there would probably be regulation around emissions, and the best way to get ahead of that was a combination of telling people it wasn’t a real problem and investing, actually, in the research, starting pretty early on to shape what the allowable solutions would be.

Amy Westervelt 32:07
Then at Rio, it really works to keep the idea of mandatory emissions reductions just off the table entirely. It’s all, “What can industry do voluntarily, how do we tackle this via planting trees, and maybe doing some energy efficiency programs, and very much not, ‘Hey, maybe at some point we need to stop burning fossil fuels.'”

Amy Westervelt 30:21
In fact, we don’t talk about that at COP, the annual climate summit, the U.N. The Rio summit is what starts these annual U.N. climate summits. We’re now going to have number 31 this year. The first time anyone mentioned transitioning away from fossil fuels at one of these conferences was two years ago, and people acted like it was a really radical, huge leap forward. A pretty effective strategy.

Dave Chapman 33:21
In an early episode of Drilled, at first they were funding real research, and they were starting to see the real problem. They were starting to reimagine their own role, their own business model, that they would shift from being oil companies to become energy companies, knowing that people were still going to need to create energy, but maybe they would become solar companies and wind companies.

Dave Chapman 33:48
Then they turned away from that, and they went back to being oil companies, and they shut down the research. What happened?

Amy Westervelt 33:57
A few things happened. One, I think they realized that they would not be able to make as much money off of solar and wind as they can off of oil, just by virtue of how those commodities are structured. There’s a great book that’s called “The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet.” I don’t know if you’ve read this book, but it’s about this exact question, and specifically with respect to solar.

Amy Westervelt 34:26
If you just think about what’s required for solar energy versus fossil fuel energy, it’s like you build a solar plant, there’s some amount of equipment and materials and labor involved in that, and then there’s not that much input required for the next 30 years. There’s not like new barrels of oil or there’s not new PV panels being pumped out 100,000 times a day. It’s just that one batch and then it’s…

Amy Westervelt 35:01
You make that money once, and then there’s a little bit of maintenance fees and things like that, but there’s not the sort of ongoing profit that you’re going to get from oil and gas, and they don’t control every part of that chain. They can’t take a percentage off of every piece of that supply chain the way that they can with oil and gas, much as they’ve done a very good job convincing everyone that they have absolutely nothing to do with the price at the pump. It’s just completely out of their control. That’s not true.

Amy Westervelt 35:44
Anyway, at a certain point, Exxon realizes they’re not going to be able to make as much money off of these other things. Well, not just Exxon; the whole fossil fuel industry realizes they’re not going to be able to make as much money. They have a certain amount of assets that are going to be stranded if they make this shift.

Amy Westervelt 36:06
They’re pretty locked into getting shareholder dividends that are not going to be able to be paid if they transition in this way. I think they also think they’re going to be able to solve it in other ways. The more I’ve been looking into carbon capture and carbon removal and geoengineering and all these things, I think that there was quite a belief for a long time that there would be some future new technology that would deal with the emissions side of fossil fuels, so we didn’t have to transition to a different energy source.

Amy Westervelt 36:41
There’s a bunch of economic things happening in the early 80s too, where the money that was there for that research in the 70s is suddenly not there. You’ve got a gas glut, you’ve got prices kind of falling, and you’ve got new leadership that doesn’t see things the same way, so all of those programs kind of get cut and they double down on being oil companies in much the same way that they are in the present moment.

Dave Chapman 37:11
What about all those dreams of carbon capture and solving an existential problem with technology. Do you think that as things have evolved that it turns out that that’s not viable, or do you think that it is possible?

Amy Westervelt 37:31
I think that it can be part of the solution, but I don’t know. I did a story, probably 10 or 15 years ago on lab meat. I remember I brought together… We did a little event as part of it too, and we had like a couple of ranchers and some chefs and some people that were involved in these lab meat startups. Then we had a guy who had the coolest job that I want when I grow up, which was that he was a historian of past futures.

Amy Westervelt 38:13
He studied what people in the 50s thought the future would be, and at different points in time, how people envisioned the future. I was like, “This is fascinating.” He was like, “In some ways it’s like people thought refrigeration was really weird at a certain point, and they got over that, and maybe the same thing will happen with lab meat.”

Amy Westervelt 39:00
But he’s like, “I just think it’s kind of strange and kind of like giving up on humans being able to do things to say that rather than eating slightly less meat we’re going to create this whole weird technological product and also get everyone to change their behavior so much that they want to eat this thing. That seems more possible than just maybe one less meat meal a week.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s a good point.”

Amy Westervelt 39:15
I feel the same way about the technology and fossil fuel situation, where it’s like, so we’re going to take this enormous amount of land and put a bunch of direct air capture and carbon capture machines on it, and we’re going to create a whole new pipeline infrastructure.

Amy Westervelt 40:13
It’s so like, “Why would we spend all of that money and time and energy robbing Peter to pay Paul when we can just do this thing that we’ve known about for 30 years that works, and now, oh, by the way, it’s also very cheap?” I don’t know why we would do it. Also just from a pure physics standpoint, we don’t have the space underground to store the volumes of CO₂ that oil companies and various other folks are suggesting we could store, solely as a way for them to continue making profits. I don’t know. I’m just sort of like, “Why would we do this?”

Amy Westervelt 39:41
Even though we know that if this stuff leaks it can be very harmful to people’s health and it can also kill ecosystems and all that stuff, we’re going to build this global pipeline infrastructure and do all of that, even though we know that at most it could only ever reduce like 5% of emissions, rather than just reducing energy consumption and transitioning as much as we can away from fossil fuels.

Amy Westervelt 41:07
Anyway, like I said, I think, sure, does this technology exist, and does it work at a small scale, and could we use it as part of a mix of things to reduce emissions? Yeah. Can we do it to enable the status quo? No, that would be silly. It would be a waste of time and money.

Amy Westervelt 41:27
No, it’s great.

Dave Chapman 41:27
One of the great dreams that’s quite popular now is to redo agriculture in a way that carbon is sequestered and put back into the ground by plants. It’s a beautiful and not crazy idea.

Dave Chapman 41:28
It’s great. I don’t know that it can do as successfully as some people believe, but of course it’s the sensible thing to do.

Amy Westervelt 41:58
Why wouldn’t we do it?

Dave Chapman 42:00
Agriculture is so much better if you do that anyway. But you have a new series called Carbon Cowboys. It’s the latest. Let’s talk about Carbon Cowboys.

Amy Westervelt 42:13
Yes. I think that this, what you’re describing, makes total sense to me. It’s like, why wouldn’t we do that? It’s a win-win. It improves agriculture. It creates a revenue stream for farmers, and it successfully sequesters carbon. There’s zero reason not to do it. What we’ve been looking at in this most recent season is the corn ethanol industry, and how they’re trying to capitalize…

Dave Chapman 42:42
This is the latest season of Drilled. For people who are hunting, it’s the latest season of Drilled called Carbon Cowboys.

Amy Westervelt 42:50
Yeah, we partnered with a group of reporters in Brazil because we wanted to look at corn ethanol in both the U.S. and Brazil, because Brazil is rapidly becoming a big corn ethanol place as well, even though they only really started doing it maybe 10 years ago, in part because of this guy that we follow in the season.

Amy Westervelt 43:15
Actually, the whole way I started looking at that story was through the carbon capture thing, because I was doing a story on carbon capture. I genuinely thought that I must not understand the technology well, because I’m not a physicist, and I thought, “Well, maybe there’s just some part of this that I’m not getting.”

Amy Westervelt 43:37
So I interviewed probably a hundred people, most of them people who are fairly supportive of carbon capture, because I wanted to see where I was going wrong. I came away from it thinking even less of the technology than before. But in the course of doing that story, I talked to someone who said, “You should look at this carbon capture pipeline fight that’s happening in the Midwest over the Summit carbon capture pipeline.”

Amy Westervelt 44:09
I said, “Yeah, I haven’t heard about it at all.” They said, “Well, it’s this pipeline that’s been proposed to connect a bunch of corn ethanol plants all throughout the Midwest, to go from Iowa to North Dakota. People really don’t like it.” What I kept hearing was that I’ve never seen something unite so many people across party lines against it

Amy Westervelt 44:33
It was like libertarians, environmentalists, ranchers, everyone was against this, because either they didn’t like the idea of carbon capture, they were worried about leaks, they didn’t like that they were using eminent domain to take people’s land, they didn’t like that this was going through farmland, all of these things.

Amy Westervelt 44:55
But there were quite a few industrial corn growers who really liked this idea, because it was enabling them to access the sustainable aviation fuel market. Corn ethanol has had really like nine lives. Every couple years, I think, “Surely we’re not doing corn ethanol anymore,” but no, they’ve gotten like a new tax break, or like a new market to sell into.

Dave Chapman 45:24
Last I looked, half of the corn crop in America went to ethanol. Is that still true? Do you know?

Amy Westervelt 45:30
I think it’s even probably increasing because of this new market. The Inflation Reduction Act created a subsidy for captured carbon, a tax credit. Initially, I think it was $100 for each permanently stored ton of carbon, and $85 for carbon that was used for what’s called enhanced oil recovery. This is the other part of why I think carbon capture is a problem.

Amy Westervelt 45:47
I think 75% of it now gets used for enhanced oil recovery, which is just injecting it underground to get more oil out. How that is a climate solution, I do not know, but that’s what it’s been sold as. 45Q is this tax credit that creates a revenue stream for capturing carbon. In the last six months, it’s been changed. That’s what it was: $85 a ton for permanently stored carbon, and $50 for enhanced oil recovery. Now it’s $85 a ton across the board.

Amy Westervelt 46:46
There’s no incentive to store it permanently. You can use it for oil drilling all you want, and you still get $85 per ton. Not only did the corn ethanol guys have a financial incentive on that side, but also, in order to qualify as sustainable aviation fuel, they had to get their carbon scores lower. The only way to do that was car

Amy Westervelt 47:11
They’re very excited about all of these new climate tax credits. But if you look at it, you’re like, “But this isn’t reducing emissions in any way.” This is increasing land use for crops that are not going toward food. It’s competing for land with food crops. It’s creating all kinds of domino effects in terms of land use change, because now all of a sudden it’s become lucrative to do corn ethanol again.

Amy Westervelt 48:01
It just seemed nonsensical to me. We started looking into it, and then we realized that this guy who was doing this pipeline in the Midwest had also kind of gone to Brazil and started the corn ethanol industry there.

Dave Chapman 48:19
This is Bruce Rastetter?

Amy Westervelt 48:22
Yeah, this is Bruce Rastetter. He’s a big industrial ag guy in Iowa and has become a real ethanol kingpin in Brazil as well. He’s got a whole hospital wing named after him down there. We started looking into it, and it’s just… I don’t know. It’s one of these situations where I feel like we’re throwing money and time and attention and energy and technology at something that we know doesn’t actually work to solve this problem, instead of putting all that into something that would. It’s solely to make 20 people more money.

Dave Chapman 49:14
Do you think that that outcome is a result of the think tanks? I’m just curious how it is that, no matter what we do, it seems like it always goes wrong.

Amy Westervelt 49:28
This is actually the subject of my book. It’s not just the think tanks, but the whole kind of corporate capture of the information ecosystem. I do think it’s that. It’s the PR, and the think tanks, and the corporate-captured university research, and the management consultancies, and the lobbyists, and the law firms. They’re all working together, funded by these industries that have the infinite money cheat.

Amy Westervelt 50:08
There’s a book by a guy named Steve Coll. He’s a reporter. I think he was at The New Yorker. I’m not sure where he is now. But anyway, there’s a book about Exxon that he wrote. It’s called “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.”

Amy Westervelt 50:20
I think that’s a really good term for a lot of these companies, because they operate at a level that’s actually so much more powerful than any one government, because they are in multiple countries, and they have a huge amount of power over what happens in multiple countries at once.

Amy Westervelt 50:40
They’re very involved in geopolitics, and they’ve really done a good job of capturing the information ecosystem in a way that makes it hard for people to get good information about the things that affect their lives. I think that’s a big problem for democracy. It’s a big problem for individual sovereignty and people being able to have the information that they need to make big decisions about their lives, all of that.

Dave Chapman 51:17
Okay, just a second, Amy. You need to explain this more clearly to me, because one thing that is for sure is every kind of information is available to everybody now. It used to be, there were a small number of publishers if you weren’t accepted by them. There were three TV stations if you weren’t accepted by them, but here we are talking.

Dave Chapman 51:40
You have many years of incredible interviews and podcast episodes, so people can learn a lot. I agree with you, but explain for me more clearly why it is that they’ve captured information when anybody can start, and everybody is starting a podcast. What is it that they’ve captured?

Amy Westervelt 52:06
A, I think, because they’re doing it in multiple channels at once. It’s much more effective, and it’s also the way that that information is being used. It’s being used to shape and sell policy. It’s being used to influence particular stakeholder groups, particular publics, as Melissa Aronczyk describes it. You’ve got voters, sure, but like lots of different constituencies of voters.

Amy Westervelt 52:40
Like an oil company, they’ll have the think tank that they fund research at, they’ll have the university that they fund research at. But then they’ll have like five or six influencers that they’re funding to kind of pump out stuff as well. They might also be funding a podcast or two, very under the radar through a couple of other entities, sometimes one of the think tanks that they also fund.

Amy Westervelt 53:07
Then they’re also funding a lobbyist firm, they’ve also got a law firm that’s filing strategic litigation for them. It’s this ability to attack from all sides that really shapes the context that they’re operating in, in a way that you or I just does not have that kind of influence.

Dave Chapman 53:30
It seem they have the Supreme Court on their side now too.

Dave Chapman 53:33
They do. This is why I think, actually, that the corporate free speech issue is such a huge problem, because you’re talking about an entity that has a megaphone a hundred times the size of any one person’s voice, and the ability to consistently drown out what anybody else is saying, being protected as much or more, even at this point, than an individual who’s trying to advocate for a particular position, or an academic who’s trying to get basic information out there.

Dave Chapman 54:14
in the university space, I was talking to a bunch of researchers at MIT. MIT has loads and loads of fossil fuel money just absolutely flowing through it. There are also some very good researchers there who aren’t taking any of that money, or maybe did at one point, but then didn’t, or maybe did, but they used it to research something good. I don’t know.

Dave Chapman 54:45
The problem is things will happen. For example, they got a bunch of money from an oil company that wanted to invest in carbon capture research, so the announcement to all of the academics in this one department was like, “Hey, bring us your proposals about carbon capture. What do you want to look at, this, that, and the other?” This one researcher I talked to said he wanted to look at the potential health impacts.

Dave Chapman 55:14
He said it wasn’t even really from a negative standpoint. It was like, look, one of the things that communities are really concerned about with these pipelines is the potential for leaks, and what might happen if it leaks, and how many people will go to the hospital.

Dave Chapman 55:29
People always point to the story of Satarsha, Mississippi, and how 80 people went to the hospital. It sounds like a zombie apocalypse. People are like wandering around, foaming at the mouth, and cars are stopping on the road, and it’s scary to people. He said, “I want to investigate this and see what is the real risk of leaks and what actually would happen to people so that we can give people good information about this.”

Dave Chapman 55:57
I said, “Oh, that sounds like a good idea.” He said, “Yeah, I thought so too, but the principal investigator told me that I should look for a more positive project.” There’s so many little things like that happening all the time that are keeping really important ideas just out of the public square in a way that I think is really damaging to people’s ability to make decisions.

Dave Chapman 56:32
Even though, yes, of course, everyone can start a podcast, you do have now tech companies working really in lockstep with these big corporations, helping them to drown out everybody else. Letting them juice the algorithm, spend a fortune on advertising, and really drown out anyone that doesn’t agree with them. The media is not doing its job, holding the powerful to account. That’s not a thing that is rewarded by newsrooms at this time.

Dave Chapman 57:20
Yeah, you get fired.

Amy Westervelt 57:23
I’m really fun at parties, Dave?

Dave Chapman 57:28
I understand. That’s okay. We can laugh together. But would you say that there’s any distance between big oil and big ag? Are they just partners in everything?

Amy Westervelt 57:48
I think they work together quite a bit, I would say. They show up in a lot of the same rooms, they show up in a lot of the same trade associations. In a lot of ways, actually, I think big ag has been more successful than big oil in blocking certain types of regulation.

Amy Westervelt 58:14
It’s almost more of a non-starter to go against big ag than it is to go against big oil, which is really saying something, because big oil has quite a chokehold on the government. I think they’re pretty tight.

Dave Chapman 58:33
Yeah. It’s almost invisible to people at first, again, of course, but then you see what a huge percentage just of fossil fuel emissions are attributed to agriculture, and it’s like, “Oh gracious.” They’re almost the same. Where does one start and one stop?

Amy Westervelt 59:00
They’re in business together in a lot of different ways. Although I would say I almost feel like tech is becoming an even bigger partner for the oil industry these days. I think they’re both really in love with this whole data center buildout idea that in some ways is making an opponent out of big ag, but in other ways, like there’s all these industrial ag guys selling land for these data centers as well, and seeing it as a revenue generator.

Dave Chapman 59:48
Are you familiar with land sparing, that term.

Amy Westervelt 59:53
No, I don’t think so.

Dave Chapman 59:54
It’s also called rewilding sometimes. Listen just for a second, because this is a strange one. The idea is that if you make agriculture as intensive as possible, so you’re getting the highest possible yield from any piece of land that is possible, that you will need fewer acres in order to feed the population. As a result, you won’t need so much land to be farmed, and so you can allow it to rewild.

Dave Chapman 1:00:28
Everyone agrees that rewilded land, land that has not been farmed, is the greatest possible carbon sequestration that you can get. A mature forest is much higher than a young forest, and so forth, and so on. I’m just curious, because this is a serious idea. It came out, I think it was in Nature, and I was preparing to do a conference about 2020. It was the year that Covid began, and Paul Hawken was going to come and keynote. It was going to be a great two-day conference.

Dave Chapman 1:01:10
I was meeting with some of the faculty from Dartmouth, trying to win their love, so that they would send their students and all that. The head of Environmental Studies looked at me and said, “You know that organic agriculture is worse for the climate than conventional,” and I said, “No, what are you talking about?” This was what he was talking about because the yields are lower per acre, and thus, of course, you need more acres to get the same amount of food.

Amy Westervelt 1:01:43
Actually, I’ve heard this applied to animal agriculture before, too, from the Breakthrough Institute. They’ve put this forth a few times, this idea that actually, if you have more intensive confined animal operations, that minimizes the impact because you’re concentrating it on less land, but it doesn’t account for all of the impacts of that either, like the runoff and the methane and this, that, the other.

Amy Westervelt 1:02:22
I’m a climate reporter, but I don’t think that climate should be the only thing that we’re thinking about when we’re looking at environmental issues. I actually think that this is a big problem when we talk about an

Amy Westervelt 1:02:57
Climate doesn’t get enough coverage, but biodiversity gets like almost none. I’m shocked at how buried that issue tends to be, and it’s scary. It’s scary what’s happening to species all over the planet, just because of… I don’t know. It’s not even like bad decision making, it’s like not even making decisions.

Dave Chapman 1:03:35
Right. We kind of sleepwalk into it.

Amy Westervelt 1:03:37
Yeah. What do you think about that land sparing idea, then?

Dave Chapman 1:03:44
I think it’s nuts.

Amy Westervelt 1:03:46
It sounds that to me, yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:03:49
I’m looking for the language I can answer it on my terms. I’m trying to get the language to answer it on their terms.

Amy Westervelt 1:03:57
On the climate side of things.

Dave Chapman 1:03:58
There’s a way of thinking, and it seems to me like it’s very reductionist science. It’s like, if we do this, then that happens. I go, “That’s not how reality works.”

Amy Westervelt 1:04:14
Well, that’s a big problem with a lot of these more techno-optimist kinds of solutions in general. I find it to be a very particular type of person over and over again. The people that are really into geoengineering too. It’s like people for whom looking at life through a spreadsheet just makes a lot of sense, and the idea that what seems right in a mathematical equation doesn’t map to reality. It is just very hard for them to compute. I don’t know.

Dave Chapman 1:05:01
Amy, one thing about it is that when I hear what the executives at Exxon or BP are doing, I go, “Well, that’s very cynical.” They know the truth. They know that what they’re doing is destroying the planet as a habitat for their grandchildren. They know that. They’re doing it anyway. They don’t quite get the same pass. I think that people who, at the moment, are champions of land sparing are well-meaning people, and they believe that this is the way. I just think they’re wrong.

Amy Westervelt 1:05:40
I think people start to feel quite desperate for solutions too. If the solution is a massive overhaul of the energy system or the food system or constitution, all of these things feel very insurmountable. If there is something that people can look at that makes them feel like this is something they can do in the near term, it’s achievable, it’s politically viable, all of these things, I think that there’s an appeal to that too.

Dave Chapman 1:06:09
You’re somebody who looks in the crystal ball a lot and sees very hard things. As you say, it’s not very popular at a party. I have a friend, and he said, “I have no fun at a party, but when the stuff hits the fan for somebody, they want to come talk to me.”

Amy Westervelt 1:06:37
That’s true, yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:06:38
I think there’s truth in that. That there are people who can handle harsh realities, but they aren’t necessarily a lot of fun at the party. I’m constantly being pressed to be more optimistic.

Amy Westervelt 1:06:55
I know.

Dave Chapman 1:06:56
I’m curious for you. You’ve done this work for a long time. Thank you. What are your thoughts? I don’t ask you to solve all the problems, but I’m just like, what are your thoughts? Are things genuinely getting worse, or is it getting better and getting worse? Are we in a ballgame here, or are we just running for our lives?

Amy Westervelt 1:07:23
I don’t know. It’s a very turbulent time, the understatement of the year. It’s pretty hard to predict things at the moment, I think, but there are a few silver linings. I actually do look for optimism where I can find it, and one of the things I think is that I, on the climate side of things, do feel like the industry has possibly overplayed its hand a bit in the last year. It’s been so emboldened that it’s done a few things that I think have made people go, “Wait a minute. These are the bad guys.”

Amy Westervelt 1:08:09
I really feel like actually everything that’s been going on with Iran coming so close on the heels of the Russia-Ukraine situation has meant that a lot of people, instead of looking at that and believing for a second time the industry’s line that, “Oh, if we had just had even more oil development, this would all be fine,” have gone, “I don’t think that’s actually true.”

Amy Westervelt 1:08:36
It doesn’t hurt that you’ve got Spain and France and a few other countries being like, “Well, we just decided to start to transition, and so we’re in a much better position now.” Spain with solar, France is much more nuclear, but they both have been kind of doing a lot better than the rest of Europe at this moment in time. I think that it has really made people start to question fossil fuel dominance in a way that I had not seen before.

Amy Westervelt 1:09:13
I really hadn’t seen it outside of the climate choir, but in the last few months I’ve seen quite a few people who are historians of American history, or people who study democracy, or things like that, actually really connecting fossil fuel dependence with authoritarianism, with risk, and a general national security risk, which, by the way, the U.S. military has been saying for at least 20 years.

Amy Westervelt 1:09:50
That’s not a radical new idea, but I think that there’s a lot more people kind of waking up to that idea, so that’s interesting. I think also that the reality is renewable energy is getting cheaper, and that people all over the world are seeing that it gives them a certain amount of insulation from the geopolitics around fossil fuels, too. There is that.

Amy Westervelt 1:10:24
I think people in general, in a lot of places in the world, are starting to understand, maybe not as much as I would hope, but getting there, that there’s less of a left-right problem than there is a top-down problem. We might have different ideologies here and there, but we’re not the ones trying to limit everybody else’s options. We’re not the ones trying to limit what information people have to make decisions about their lives.

Amy Westervelt 1:11:06
That actually the much bigger problem is the very small percentage of people who are in control of information, wealth, and decision-making in this world. I do feel like I’m seeing more hopeful signs of people starting to clock that in a way that I haven’t seen in a long time, so those are things that make me feel slightly better about the future.

Dave Chapman 1:11:39
Okay. We’ll have to follow up sometime. I have a lot more that I would love to talk about, but this has been great. So, Amy Westervelt, thank you so much. Thank you for the work that you do. I really am a fan. I appreciate that.

Amy Westervelt 1:11:55
Thank you so much. That’s so nice. Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to you, Dave.