Welcome to "The Spill," Our New Weekly Newscast

Alleen Brown (0:06)

PUSHKIN.

Amy Westervelt (0:21)

Hello, welcome to Drilled, I'm Amy Westervelt, and this is a new segment we're doing, hopefully every week, in between narrative seasons, called The Spill. Alleen and Nina, introduce yourselves.

Nina Lakhani (0:34)

NINA LAKHANI Hi, I'm Nina Lakhani, I am the Global Climate Justice Reporter for Drilled, and now The Spill.

Alleen Brown (0:40)

ALINE BROWN And I'm Alleen Brown, I'm a Senior Editor at Drilled, and really excited to be talking to The Spill today.

Amy Westervelt (0:47)

Yay, awesome. So yeah, we'll be talking amongst ourselves about current news, things that are happening in media, and then also using this as a place to interview other reporters, writers, experts, all the stuff that has been a bit of a hodgepodge of the bonus episodes of Drilled, now organized into weekly episodes in your feed. Okay, so let's talk about some of the current climate news. There's been a lot of stuff happening, not necessarily a lot of news covering it. What are the things that you guys are paying attention to on the climate beat right now? What's happening all around us at the moment?

Nina Lakhani (1:27)

I mean, I think we're, you know, this year, like every year for the last few years, has shown us that we are now full force in climate breakdown. You know, this isn't something that's going to happen. It's happening now. And it's happening at a really terrifying speed, at a scale which even, you know, the worst case scenario models were not forecasting to be happening so quickly, you know. So this catastrophic breaking of the glacier in the Himalayas, you know, which caused this unbelievable, I mean, like terrifying floods at the Nepal-Tibet border, confirmed so far 1200 dead, with thousands more still missing. And I think this piece of this glacier broke off, and the force at which it landed recorded at more than five on the Richter scale, on the earthquake Richter cell, you know. And, you know, this area of the Himalayas is really poorly studied, partly because it's hard to reach, but partly because, you know, the whole world hasn't taken responsibility of monitoring what's happening at all of these glaciers, right? But, you know, when I've been reading some of the coverage, like this last week or so, you know, I mean, 75% of the glaciers in the Himalaya region could all be gone by the end of this century.

And we're already seeing, like, far more glacier lakes. The lakes are bigger, they're deeper, you know, and all of this means what, like, much more catastrophic flooding, sea level rise, all the things that we're seeing in communities around the world, you know, from Mexico to India and Bangladesh to Australia. And so I think just the images of what's happened at the Nepal to Red border have been, like, horrifying, you know.

Amy Westervelt (3:02)

Yeah.

Nina Lakhani (3:03)

Yeah, terrifying, yeah. And, you know, and, like, at the same time, you know, we're seeing record-breaking profits from the fossil fuel companies, right? And I think that we absolutely can't forget that, you know, that there is a clear line of responsibility here, right? They're sort of raking in billions of dollars, right? Well, we've got these catastrophic floods.

Amy Westervelt (3:21)

They're negotiating, like, how to drill more in the Arctic while we have these catastrophic floods. Well, yeah.

Alleen Brown (3:28)

And, you know, the war in Iran is directly contributing to those profits. You know, we're seeing the affordability of gas and daily essentials skyrocket while the oil and gas industry is seeing, again, record profits directly tied to the same war that is changing everyday people's ability to live.

Amy Westervelt (3:51)

Yeah.

Nina Lakhani (3:51)

Yeah. The Guardian, my former employer, did a really good analysis recently. And in the first three months after the illegal sort of invasion of Iran, eight of the biggest oil companies amassed profits of more than $90 billion in three months, in three months, right? So as fuel prices rose spectacularly for everybody, more than $90 billion in just the first three months after the Iran invasion.

Alleen Brown (4:19)

Right. And that was double what they brought in the year before. So you can see that direct relationship and the way that profits are just going up. And this isn't something new, but I think it's something that's just getting so much less focus in the media and in conversations more broadly. But these catastrophes that we're talking about, we're talking about some of the largest scale ones like in Nepal. But no matter where you live, you're being impacted directly by the actions of the fossil fuel industry. There's the question of affordability, but also I was visiting family in Minneapolis this summer. And right as I was there, the boundary waters, this wilderness area in Northern Minnesota was on fire. There were these really catastrophic fires taking place. That's an area that's beloved by so many people in the region. People go canoe there. And it's like a water area. It's a bunch of interconnected waterways.