Covering the Cover-up of Climate Change

Leah Dajches: Let's play a game. I'm going to read you a quote by a US president and I want you to try to guess who said it. "Our land, water, and soil support a remarkable range of human activities, but they can only take so much and we must remember to treat them not as a given, but as a gift. These issues know no ideology, no political boundaries." Did you assume these words in support of addressing the challenges of climate change were spoken by Joe Biden or maybe Barack Obama? Did you guess Bill Clinton? Well, you're wrong. The statement is taken from a 1988 campaign speech given by former president George H.W. Bush. That same president helped launch the UN's framework for addressing climate change. That convention would later lead to important agreements on the issue. And, yes, George H.W. Bush was a Republican because climate change was once a bipartisan issue, until it wasn't. What happened?

Matt Jordan: To find out, we're going to talk with Geoff Dembicki. Geoff's work exposes how fossil fuel companies did their own research about climate change early in the game so they would know how to frame counterarguments once the science became more widespread. An investigative climate journalist, Geoff is a regular contributor to the media outlet DeSmog and author of The Petroleum Papers, which was named a top 10 book in 2022 by The Washington Post. We're going to talk with Geoff about how these climate companies use the public media system to sow skepticism and cynicism about climate change. Geoff, welcome.

Geoff Dembicki: Thanks for having me here.

Matt Jordan: So, your research on the book that flowed from it describe misinformation campaigns enacted through news media around the topic of climate change so tell us a little bit about what brought you to this research and kind of what you learned about that.

Geoff Dembicki: Sure. So, I grew up in the province of Alberta in Canada and we kind of joke that it's Canadian Texas, huge oil and gas industry. You drive around and you see farms and cowboys. And the politics in a lot of ways are kind of similar to a Republican State. And so, I grew up always being around oil and gas infrastructure and as I got older and got into journalism, I started to get interested in how these companies were able to maintain high levels of support for their businesses even while the news about climate change became more and more dire. And so that's kind of what led me to this topic of climate disinformation and misinformation.

Leah Dajches: I noticed that you label yourself as an investigative climate journalist. What exactly does this mean?

Geoff Dembicki: Investigative climate journalists to me means kind of going beyond the immediate news headlines of the day and looking into the deeper power structures that kind of determine what news we even see or what political decisions are being made about climate change. So, these days, I do a lot of that work by going into primary documents. So, the oil industry has been producing documents about its own knowledge on climate change for decades and decades, and so that's something that myself and a lot of other journalists have a lot of interest in. And I also look at more contemporary stuff too, but it's basically trying to go deeper than regular news.

Matt Jordan: So, what you're doing is you're looking at what the oil and research has told them about climate change and then wondering why it's not showing up in the media in the same way? Is that a fair way of characterizing it?

Geoff Dembicki: To some extent, yeah, but a lot of this sort of deeper, more investigative material about oil and gas has been making its way into mainstream media for a few years now and really changing the conversation.

Matt Jordan: So, describe how it makes its way into mainstream media. So obviously, it starts with think tanks that are funded by the fossil fuel industry, but how do these ideas and frames make their way into everyday public conversation?

Geoff Dembicki: Well, if we're talking about climate change denial or softer forms of it the classic model of that which is what characterized a lot of the '90s and 2000, you would have some innocuous sounding group or a think tank or some type of scientist, and usually, they had industry connections and they would put out this idea that climate science is uncertain and you shouldn't trust it. And they were very good at getting those types of stories placed in The New York Times and many other media outlets. And these days, that's still happening to an extent but it's a little bit more subtle and hard to pin down.

Matt Jordan: So do they-- a think tank will put out like talking points, memo, that they want their people to be sounding off on whenever they're in media or is it just about framing-- or maybe it's not just about, it's both of these things about making sure that things like, say, the economic frame is always the one that is used or so how does this work exactly?

Geoff Dembicki: So, a more contemporary example might be the Biden administration is proposing a new policy on climate change. And then immediately, a think tank like the Heritage Foundation, for example, will put out a study saying this new climate policy will kill 1 million American jobs. And then journalists who are sort of on the lookout for any type of controversy or high stakes drama will then report on that study along with the legislation proposal. And that sort of gets this message out that anything we do on climate change will cost a lot of jobs and hurt communities.

Matt Jordan: And so that means that the conversation is not about climate change, it's about jobs. So, it's a reframing of the conversation off of the topic in a way in just about making it all about economics?

Geoff Dembicki: Yeah, and I mean to an extent, climate policy is all about economics because we're talking about changing the way our economy functions and making it less polluting. And there are a lot of positive jobs created in that process. And so, when groups that are opposed to climate action try to get attention in the media, it's always about focusing on jobs destroyed rather than jobs and industries created.

Matt Jordan: Because that makes it seem like a crisis and that's the one way that they know that they can draw in people to their-- or is there a flack element to this? One thing that media theorists talk about is how companies with a lot of resources can say, threaten to pull advertisements or do this as a way to discipline news organizations to keep them from running certain types of things. Do you have evidence of that happening in relation to climate change as well?

Geoff Dembicki: I think it's maybe a bit more subtle than that. I think these anti climate frames get repeated so many times and by so many different organizations that it begins to seem to many journalists and editors like this is just common sense or this is how a reasonable policymaker must think. And so that kind of gets internalized and then influences the coverage but you also still see examples of oil and gas companies using legacy media to promote false and misleading claims. So, there was-- on an episode of The New York Times podcast The Daily just a few days ago, BP ran an ad saying that it is committed to fixing climate change, but it didn't mention that it's also producing more oil and gas than ever before in its history.

Matt Jordan: So, is that just greenwashing, which is what people call like public relations techniques to make it seem like a company that is polluter is really concerned with the environment or is there something else going on?

Geoff Dembicki: I think that's a pretty classic example of greenwashing. And the reason that we're still talking about greenwashing after so many years and companies are doing it is because it seems to work for them.

Matt Jordan: Is it because we don't-- again, if it's about agenda setting and setting the frames of the debate, is it because it takes it off of what they don't want us talking about and puts it on what they do want us talking about is this one sub minuscule topic where we're actually on solid ground in terms of public opinion?

Geoff Dembicki: Yeah, it's kind of-- it's a form of deflection but I think there's a more insidious consequence of greenwashing, which is that it sets up companies and organizations that are contributing most to the climate emergency and portrays them instead as climate leaders and then that allows them entry to the policymaking space. So, for example, at the most recent COP talks in Dubai, the international climate negotiations, there were more fossil fuel delegates at this year's talks than ever before in the history of this process.

Matt Jordan: So, what types of solutions do fossil fuel companies offer as solutions? We'll fix the problem, we'll self-regulate, we'll clean it up, we've heard this kind of thing in every economic sector. What are they offering as solutions?

Geoff Dembicki: These days, it's all about carbon capture and storage. And so, this idea has been around for decades but it's a technology that oil and gas and also coal and other major industrial polluters say will allow them to capture their greenhouse gas emissions and then effectively bury those emissions deep underground. And so, on the surface, this sounds great and makes this a certain amount of intuitive sense but carbon capture and storage is incredibly expensive technology and there's not really any great example of it working at scale anyplace around the world. And so, by oil and gas companies constantly saying that they support this technology and they want taxpayer money for it, they can look like they're taking the problem really seriously while still not really altering any of the fundamentals of their business.

Matt Jordan: I remember reading in The New York Times about I want to say two or three months ago, a story-- it was an op ed. That was essentially arguing that all we needed to do was to dump iron dust into the oceans and that allowed for kind of exponentially more carbon capture. And I wonder if this is the type of thing that a think tank would create and seed out there to get people distracted from, keeping it in the ground.

Geoff Dembicki: It's definitely possible and I think one way to gauge whether a climate solution you're hearing about in the news is legitimate or not is, how complicated this solution is because what you described sounds incredibly complicated. Carbon capture and storage is also very complicated but installing a wind-- a lot of wind and solar and transitioning off of gas-powered vehicles into electric vehicles, it's pretty simple. It doesn't require a lot of technology that doesn't already exist.

Leah Dajches: So, climate change was once a bipartisan issue, what happened?

Geoff Dembicki: Well, it took a really deliberate effort on the part of oil and gas companies and some of the think tanks that were associated with them. People may forget, but in the 1980s and early '90s, doing big, aggressive legislation on the environment was seen as a pretty reasonable bipartisan thing to do. George H.W. Bush passed Acid Rain Legislation and would go around bragging about it. And he also highlighted the real economic gains that came from that. Conservative governments all over the world did the same and so when climate change first started to become a big issue of public awareness in the early '90s, organizations deliberately tried to undo that consensus. And so, in my book, I talk about a specific meeting that took place at the Hilton in Washington, DC in 1991 it was set up by the Cato Institute, which is a think tank that was founded by the oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch. And so, at this event and many others, people gathered to strategize about how to change conservative politics so that they were all about opposing environmental solutions rather than seeing them as common sense.

Matt Jordan: So, what types of things did they do? What types of-- how did they seed discord in the party? What were the type of frames that they used to do that?

Geoff Dembicki: Well, the first thing they did was attack the fundamental science of climate change. So, at this conference I'm referring to, the Cato Institute conference, they produced a brochure that sort of described a shift in thinking that needed to happen. And the people who were organizing this were kind of aware that what they were doing was a little bit out there so they acknowledged in the materials that like you may have heard about climate change, you may be concerned about it, you may think there is a scientific basis to this but in fact, the science is flawed. And this is an attempt on behalf of government to control your life. You won't be able to live freely if we're enacting climate legislation. And so, it was a combination of attacking the basic science and then scaremongering about the economic impacts. And so, if you imagine that sulfur rain legislation I mentioned earlier, that entire effort was based on the fact that there was sound science around acid rain and that it would be good for the economy. And so, there was a deliberate effort to undermine all of that so that no conservative could be seen as an environmentalist.

Matt Jordan: So, did that kind of cascade over into other forms of expertise? Is there a kind of toxicity towards scientists of all kinds in partisan media or is this something that has been specifically used for climate scientists?

Geoff Dembicki: I mean I think it has bled over into sort of just a generalized distrust of experts in the United States and it's a bit of a tragedy because that really didn't need to happen. There was a moment when there was a different path forward for conservative politics and media. And I talk about this in the book too but in the late 2000s, Rupert Murdoch decided that climate change was real and it was a big deal and he made a decision to use all of his media properties including Fox News to spread pro-climate messages. And what happened was along came movements like the tea party, which were aggressively opposed to any sort of environmental legislation or government regulation at all. And the tea party benefited from the involvement of oil and gas billionaires like Charles and David Koch and other people who saw its effectiveness as a way to challenge government regulation. And so, by the time the tea party had really gained prominence and left its mark on the United States, Fox News and a lot of Rupert Murdoch's other news properties had swung so far in that anti expert right wing populist direction that there really was no going back after that.

Matt Jordan: I see. And so, they're chasing their audience, basically. Whatever the audience wants, let's give that to them.

Geoff Dembicki: Yeah, and they didn't want pro-climate messages apparently.

Matt Jordan: Wow. So, you're talking about Rupert Murdoch, disinformation strategy is what we know about the media ecosystem, is that they need-- they need people, they need help, they need compliant media actors and distributors for it to help. Obviously, you talk about the think tanks like the Cato and Heritage Foundation and whatnot, what did they know about our news media system? Like for example, I think you talk in your book about the Global Climate Coalition, another group that-- what do these people and these strategic messaging, what do they know about journalism and compliant actors that allows them to launder their stuff so effectively?

Geoff Dembicki: I mean earlier on, they knew that-- and this has been discussed at length among journalists and media scholars and whatever, but these actors knew that the media wanted to appear balanced and not biased in any way or ideological. And so, they were able to get climate change deniers onto the air with climate scientists because outlets and newspapers saw that as providing a form of balance. But of course, media has gotten a bit smarter about that and realized that if you put a denier on with a scientist, you're giving equal weight to both of them. And that the strategy of denial is never to win the argument, it's just always to sow doubt about the argument. And so, I think those actors have had to shift and become more sophisticated in their strategies but one thing that always works is if you produce a study with data, no matter what you're arguing and no matter how suspect the data, you can always guarantee a bit of news coverage because the data gives you some authority. So, if you say Biden's climate plan will cost 1 million jobs and we did a study that proves it, just the sheer fact of having those numbers can lead to it being covered.

Leah Dajches: Just a reminder, this is News Over Noise. I'm Leah Dajches.

Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.

Leah Dajches: We're talking with Geoff Dembicki, an investigative climate journalist based in New York City.

Matt Jordan: There was-- I read some news this week about the EU adopting a zero-carbon net standard. What is it about their media system that is different from the US media system that allows for consensus to emerge around things like this?

Geoff Dembicki: I mean that's a-- it's a really interesting question especially because climate change denial only really appears to have taken off in a big way in English speaking countries. So, Australia, Canada, US, the UK to some extent. And in Europe, they've always been a little bit further ahead in terms of climate awareness and wanting to do something about the problem. And I don't know whether that's just differing cultural attitudes or there's a different sense of politics, but it is true that the climate disinformation we see here hasn't taken a hold in quite the same way over there. But Europe is still home to major oil companies like Shell and Total and Eni in Italy. And all of those companies, like the American ones, studied climate change internally going back decades and decades ago and were part of strategies to create doubt and uncertainty about the science. So, Europe definitely has played a role in this as well.

Matt Jordan: So just describe that when they studied it before maybe a lot of climate change scientists were studying it and they found things out, what did they find out and what did they do with that knowledge?

Geoff Dembicki: So, what I always like to say is that the oil and gas industry was really the original climate expert. They were doing some of the earliest work to figure out the link between burning fossil fuels and what that would do for the warming of the atmosphere. And so, Exxon in particular in the '70s was doing super sophisticated research. At one point, they spent $1 million on a tanker that sailed around the Gulf of Mexico taking air measurements. And Exxon predicted that the current levels of consuming oil and gas, the world would heat up a certain amount by the year 2020 and so on, and there were researchers including this guy, Geoffrey Supran, who recently went back through the old Exxon predictions and matched them against the current warming that we're now seeing and found that they were very accurate. So, Exxon was doing some of the best climate science in the world at the time and it wasn't doing it for altruistic reasons, it was doing it to understand an emerging threat that could hurt its business.

Matt Jordan: Sounds a lot like big tobacco and doing a similar thing with studies of addiction, studies of how to frame cigarettes as a thing. So, to see similar, I wonder if some of the same PR firms worked on both.

Geoff Dembicki: Actually, some of them did. And there was a moment in the '90s when both issues overlapped and some of the PR people were doing cancer science, denial at the same time that they were doing climate science denial.

Matt Jordan: What's the liability for a company do you think that buries research like this about the public interest and health outcomes if and when I mean civil liability seems to be pretty high? The tobacco industry is any indication.

Geoff Dembicki: Well, we might soon find out, in regards to oil and gas because there's over 20 lawsuits in the US right now trying to hold the companies accountable for exactly this type of lying.

Matt Jordan: In relation to-- so what's the damage? Like a person dying or crops being wiped out? What are they-- what's the cause for the suit?

Geoff Dembicki: It's different in all the jurisdictions but the lawsuits that really kick this off were filed by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland. And they argued or they are still arguing through their lawsuits that those cities will have to pay heavy costs in order to adapt to rising seas and other climate consequences. And you can quantify the amount of money that the cities will have to spend. And they're arguing that the oil and gas industry intentionally lied about its own knowledge of the science and this stalled regulations that could deal with the problem. And the costs of that are now being pushed on to taxpayers.

So, it's actually-- it's quite a similar argument to what states used against the cigarette makers in the '90s.

Matt Jordan: Health outcomes, we have to pay for them. That makes a lot of sense. I was reading also that China seems to have hit peak carbon output. Do you see things like that-- the predictions are, it's going to start coming down because they've started investing in renewables and whatnot. Why do you think we don't see more positive stories about solutions like this working? Because I mean in Pennsylvania, for example, we know just anecdotally from driving around that there are more and more windmills, we know that a higher percentage of our electricity is coming from-- it's now the biggest source of electricity, but you don't read stories about this is working fast. Why do you think the news doesn't want to cover a story like that?

Geoff Dembicki: I don't know. That's a-- it's a good question and I'm sure the Biden administration is really asking that too because they pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which as listeners probably know is one of the most consequential pieces of climate legislation in US history and it represents hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on clean energy projects all over the country. But when people are polled about this policy, they either don't know it exists or they don't know it happened under Biden or they don't know that the clean energy projects being funded in their own backyard are due in some part to this investment. And so, I'm not sure why more of these stories don't make it into the media but I think there is a sense that media coverage on climate change has been dominated so long by this view that any climate action is like economically disastrous. And so, it's hard for some people to break out of that frame. And I think one other aspect is that the realities of the energy industry have been shifting so fast that people aren't even aware of how much change there's been. When I first started reporting about climate change 10 years ago, renewable energy was outrageously expensive. And now, it's the cheapest form of energy.

Matt Jordan: So, is this a failure of climate activists to match the might of an agenda setting of the fossil fuel companies? You'd think that this would be a good story, that would fit all the journalistic incentives, but we don't see it.

Geoff Dembicki: It's true. And that's maybe something I should look into in my research. I think to a certain extent, the groups and people opposed to climate action have just built a really effective information ecosystem and it's been influential and worked for a long time. And it's so loud that it kind of dominates the conversation in a certain way.

Matt Jordan: Do you see the same type of-- your work is historical looking back at the kind of emergence of these types think tank apparatus and kind of the way that the impact cascade through the media system. Are they still cranking out material or are they still actively working in ways that you can discern?

Geoff Dembicki: Yeah, definitely. So, all of the groups that originally spread hardcore climate science denial, they include organizations like The Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute. In Canada, a group called The Fraser Institute. They're all still active and they're all still influential. They don't outright deny climate change is happening anymore because that's just seen as a bit too crazy an opinion to have. And so now, they engage in this softer form of denial where they say that climate change may be happening but it's not a crisis. And therefore, we shouldn't do anything too drastic to address it. And this sort of achieves the same outcome, which is to slow down the policy making process. And just to give you an understanding of how influential these groups still are, so the entire moral panic around critical race theory was started by an activist working with the Manhattan Institute, and that's had a massive impact on conservative politics. The Heritage Foundation is leading this thing called Project 2025, which is an 1,000 page policy document that it hopes Trump will implement when he comes into power. And a lot of people in Heritage have also worked on the Trump campaign and vice versa.

Matt Jordan: One thing that like-- obviously, consensus forming is something that people who have vested status quo interests are going to keep from happening if that's going to impact their bottom line. And we know that one of the ways in which that people can keep that from happening now is just by pumping so much pollution into the ecosystem, media ecosystem that nobody knows what's true. They call this flooding the zone.

Geoff Dembicki: The Steve Bannon strategy.

Matt Jordan: Steve Bannon idea, right. So, you just put so much out there that nobody knows what's true and this is what Russia has been doing for years in terms of their own kind of authoritarian things, which is that when nobody knows what's true, then they just kind of go with what feels good or whatever. And this seems to be what we see with climate change as well is that there's just enough dissonance out there in the media ecosystem that if you want to latch on to-- and to not wanting to believe it, you can. And the way you talk about it being wed to issues with consumers would be concerned about. I have a large Ford F150, these people want to take it away or I like eating beef, that's another of my favorite things that you keep reading about, is that they want to take away your steak.

Geoff Dembicki: Or your gas stove.

Matt Jordan: Right. All of these seem like a just a strategy meant to mobilize skepticism and doubt because it suits the kind of lazy biases of consumers.

Geoff Dembicki: Yeah, and that strategy also personalizes climate action or climate obstruction I guess in a really effective way because when we talk about positive climate action, it often looks like improvements in the global supply chain or the falling cost of renewables or national legislation or an international agreement. And these are all important things, but they're sort of distant, they're abstract. You yourself might not be involved with any of that on a day-to-day level. But when someone tells you that the people in charge are going to take your burger in a way, you feel that very viscerally. And you're wondering like, am I going to be able to have my barbecue next week? And that might scare you and piss you off.

Matt Jordan: And it seems that this is not just been about what you don't want to happen but also giving people a positive solution to this that makes them feel like they're empowered to help even though those-- it's a drop in the bucket. So, this idea that we can kind of consume our way toward a better climate by buying a Tesla or by buying things that-- where the individual is given a feeling of agency over the problem but the solutions would really be large structural shifts that only governments can do.

Geoff Dembicki: And that also to some extent is part of a deliberate climate obstruction strategy. So, BP, the oil company famously helped popularize the idea of the personal carbon footprint, which actually it sounds like something legitimate like you should be aware of the emissions caused by your consumption and take action on that. It's sort of a feel-good empowering message but it really does deflect attention from the actual powerful people who run these companies that are actively blocking legislation all of the time behind closed doors or routing millions of dollars through dark money organizations to think tanks that stand in the way of solutions. And so, yeah, I would say that all fits together.

Leah Dajches: So recently, Fox News used Taylor swift and her CO2 emissions as a talking point to ignite rumors and conspiracy theories about the upcoming election. And really, Swift's involvement with it. But with this story, they miss the much larger point about the role of celebrities as primary carbon emitters. And so, they discredited this fact and by doing so, I'm wondering how do you think Fox News contributes to the noise surrounding the climate crisis?

Geoff Dembicki: And the Fox News example is really kind of funny and interesting because they're criticizing her carbon footprint and her pollution and that sort of inherently contains an acknowledgment that emissions are bad and that climate change is serious, but Fox kind of never went that extra step with their viewers.

Matt Jordan: Yeah, they want to point out the hypocrisy of somebody who is nominally in support of clean air but not acknowledge that.

Geoff Dembicki: But I would say personal consumption matters more and more the more money and the more power that you have, like political and cultural power. And so, for myself, if I chose to walk to this interview instead of driving, that doesn't really have a big impact in the world. But if I'm the CEO of a large company and I choose to lobby the government in favor of a climate regulation then that could have massive economy transforming impacts. Or conversely, if I'm that same powerful person and I use my platform to obstruct climate legislation and then fly on my private jet 10 times in a week, obviously, the climate impacts of that are exponentially larger than anything you or I would cause in the world.

Matt Jordan: I'm often puzzled by the-- I'll say it this way, one of the things we know about the incentives driving the news system is that they like explosions, they like blood, they like sensation, sensational coverage works. And there's been a lot of climate change sensation. California right now is in the middle of yet another atmospheric river that is causing mudslides. Half of Canada burned last year.

These are big events with big real-world implications for people. What do you think is keeping those messages from getting home in average everyday people? Or is it-- or do everyday average people know that climate change is bad and that the government's just way far off of what everyday people believe?

Geoff Dembicki: I think because of those disasters and the media coverage around them, there is a much greater awareness and fear of climate change than even existed like 5 or 10 years ago. But what media isn't doing is they're not linking those huge news events enough to climate change. And so sometimes they'll say, this is consistent with higher global temperatures, and this is what climate scientists predict. So that's happening more and more but the connection that those media outlets really need to make in order to spur government action and shift the politics is to link the disaster to rising emissions, which are then caused by the burning of fossil fuels. And then if they wanted to go one step further, they could say that those same companies studied and predicted these impacts decades and decades ago. So, I think once you have that full chain of understanding, then it's obvious to people that we need to do something.

Matt Jordan: What are big solutions being offered right now that you would like to see more coverage of?

Geoff Dembicki: I mean despite all of the negative news about climate change, we're actually at a really interesting kind of inflection point for global action. So, as you mentioned in China, they might reach peak emissions and not a very long time. And China is also spending massively on renewable energy along with coal and everything else. They're kind of doing it all at the same time. But in addition to China, you have the Biden administration continuing to spend money through the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a massive economy changing piece of legislation. And then in the European Union, they have something called the Green Deal, which is a similarly large green stimulus package. And so basically, you have the EU, United, States and China all committed in one way or another to a huge low carbon energy transition and that's going to massively restructure the entire global economy. But even myself as someone who studies this all the time, I don't even have a good grasp on what that looks like and I'm rarely reading about that. And so, I think the more people were aware of how much money and interest and momentum and employment and kind of hope in some sense is actually happening now, I think that would shift a lot of people's thinking positively.

Matt Jordan: You came to Penn State with the Sustainability Institute here and clearly, that word sustainability has become something of a common sense. No matter what your field right now, you want to claim that you're sustainable. Do you think that this notion of climate change should be brought and sustainability should be brought into any number of issues? So as to say that everything, every issue somehow could have a climate investigative journalist perspective on it?

Geoff Dembicki: It could to an extent because climate change is something that impacts so much of our lives and is also directly related to so many of the things we can do. So, there is a way to have a climate perspective on a lot of things. There could be way more journalism, linking food production, for example, to climate change. And actually, there's a similar dynamic there too with oil and gas. A lot of the big meat and dairy companies have also sponsored climate change denial over the years and are engaged in sophisticated digital media disinformation strategies right now. Like paying influencers to promote beef on TikTok. And there's not really much journalism done about any of that these days. So yeah, I agree. There's any other number of issues that have sort of strong-- you could tell strong climate stories about them.

Matt Jordan: Yeah, it was one of the things that I've been reading about a lot. The favorite topic of the year is artificial intelligence, that ChatGPT and all these large language learning models are going to take over journalism and everything else. But one of the angles that I haven't read very much on is how incredibly unsustainable this kind of artificial intelligence, the energy consumption that-- not to mention the human labor exploitation but the energy consumption just to train one of these large language models that it's-- at every time you ask ChatGPT a stupid question, it's actually burning enormous amounts of energy. So, the companies that are trying to make us dependent on this technology are talking about creating nuclear power plants and such like that to fuel their AI. So, this is a whole--

Geoff Dembicki: I didn't know about that.

Matt Jordan: A whole angle of discussion that I just haven't seen very much of in relation to artificial intelligence, is just the demand that it requires and just in terms of electricity.

Geoff Dembicki: That's super fascinating and I'm just learning about that right here. So maybe that's something to write a story about.

Leah Dajches: In 2022, The Washington Post named your book, The Petroleum Papers, as one of the best books of the year. And so, I'm wondering, what's next for you?

Geoff Dembicki: So, I'm currently working with this media outlet called DeSmog. And they focus a lot on exposing climate disinformation. And so, I'm kind of building on all of the history I learned about in my book and trying to figure out what the current disinformation strategies are now and how they're adapting to digital media. And so, for an example, one of the most prominent climate crisis deniers in the world right now is Jordan Peterson. And he has a podcast on YouTube that potentially can reach more people than many legacy media outlets in the US. So essentially, people like Jordan Peterson and also organizations like Prager University and The Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro, that effectively is mainstream media now. And they're not encumbered by any of the same sort of fact checking or editorial standards that outlets like The Washington Post have. And so that's now where you're seeing massive, massive amounts of really dumb climate information and it has the potential to reach millions of people especially younger Americans too. So that's where I'm focusing a lot of my attention on now sort of new digital media and kind of this rising group of anti-climate influencers.

Matt Jordan: Which is incredibly lucrative. I just read that Joe Rogan who has Jordan Peterson on I think every other episode or something like that, just inked a $250 million contract, which could pay for 1,000 newspapers in America right now that are being shut down. So that seems to be that kind of denialist titillation or whatever you could call that type of content. I don't know what it is, it's like kicking the scientist or something like that sadistic side of something. I'm not sure what the appeal is of that because all of these people who are nominally conservative like Jordan Peterson, you'd think they would want to conserve the environment, that would be something, but they don't.

Geoff Dembicki: Yeah, you would think that, but it's been remarkable to watch Jordan Peterson's evolution in particular. Over the last year, he's used his podcast to host kind of the more older school climate deniers who for many years weren't able to get interviewed in mainstream media anymore. And so, they were sort of just toiling away obscurely. And then someone like Peterson comes along and he's like come on my podcast and they can do a two-hour interview and it will get 2 million views.

Matt Jordan: That's right. Yeah, it's interesting, when we study the rise of talk radio and things like this, their first 30 years are about railing against the mainstream. That was the source of their appeal was that they weren't the square, staid, mainstream journalists who were so boring. That they were the people who would say what it's like, but I think you're right. That that is now the mainstream. This kind of contrarian position about everything and it just also happens to get in the way of any public opinion or consensus about how to solve problems we face emerging in the media ecosystem.

Geoff Dembicki: Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of what makes it scary too. And I saw this really interesting study that just came out I think last week, that showed globally if you look at Gen Zers and millennials, younger women are getting more progressive than ever and more aware of environmental issues, and young males are going in this reactionary conservative direction. And people are all trying to come up with different explanations for that, but I think the rise of contrarian media figures like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro plays a big role in that.

Matt Jordan: So, for our audience who might be interested in kind of following better news about climate change, who would you say is doing good work right now or what would be places that they could find it?

Geoff Dembicki: Well, I should give a shout out to DeSmog because they're some of the originals. They've been doing this disinformation work for decades now. I would also say there's great journalists like Amy Westervelt, for example. She has The Drilled podcast and she's really told the history of oil sponsored climate denial in podcasting form. And there really are like amazing climate journalists all over the place and some of them are working with outlets like Grist or Inside Climate News. Others, are working independently, but even as newsrooms like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, lay off hundreds of workers and cut their climate departments, it's sort of a paradox that there's more and better climate journalism being produced today than ever I would say.

Leah Dajches: Well, on that note, I think we'll wrap it up. Thanks for being here, Geoff.

Geoff Dembicki: Yeah, and thanks for the conversation.

Leah Dajches: Wow. We just covered a lot of ground and something that's really standing out to me is that it's fascinating to learn that the fossil fuel companies are the original climate experts, but that they use that knowledge to do bad. What stood out for you, Matt?

Matt Jordan: I was thinking as he was talking about the ways in which the fossil fuel companies managed to use the tendency of the news against them like they knew exactly how to infiltrate it and hopefully, some of the lessons from his book will help people figure out what some of the fault lines are and some of the weaknesses are in our new system.

Leah Dajches: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Geoff Dembicki, an investigative climate journalist based in New York City. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Leah Dajches.

Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.

Leah Dajches: Until next time, stay well and well-informed.

Matt Jordan: News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.

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