Drilling into Fossil Fuel Industry Influence With Amy Westervelt

This episode features a conversation with award-winning investigative climate journalist, Amy Westervelt. It was recorded in June 2025.

Amy has been on the climate beat for more than 20 years, reporting for a wide range of outlets including Inside Climate News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, The Intercept, NPR, and many more. 

In the past 10 years, Amy has worked extensively in the audio realm, most notably with Drilled, a true crime podcast about climate denial.

What was planned to be a single limited-run audio series was an absolute hit, and has now grown into an ongoing investigative reporting project digging into the various forces obstructing action on climate.

Despite her successes in audio though, Amy continues to write regularly for a wide range of publications. In 2023 she was named one of Covering Climate Now’s Journalist of the Year and her work has previously received Murrow, ONA, SEJ, Rachel Carson, and Folio awards, as well as a Peabody nomination.

Amongst other things, Amy and I discussed the structural influence the fossil fuel industry has carefully crafted over our information ecosystem; the magic that narrative injects into climate journalism; and the need for more of us to don our tin-foil hats a bit more often, because things are frequently way wackier than we’d maybe like to believe.

Additional links

Drilled: https://drilled.media/

Amy’s 5 petroganda narratives: https://drilled.media/news/petroganda-narratives

Ben Franta’s paper on weaponising economics: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2021.1947636

The Media Matters bubble graph: https://www.mediamatters.org/google/right-dominates-online-media-ecosystem-seeping-sports-comedy-and-other-supposedly

The Black Thread: https://communicatingclimatechange.com/the-black-thread