Hello and welcome back to Drilled. We've been on a little bit of a break this summer,

but we're back and we'll be bringing you weekly episodes for the rest of the year.

Today I have with me Jesse Coleman. He's a senior investigator with documented.

They're a watchdog group that looks at corporate influence on policy. So as you might imagine,

the oil and gas industry shows up on their radar quite a bit. This past week, a documented investigation

into a totally innocuous sounding group of state treasures, turned up a whole lot of information

about how Republicans and dark money groups are trying to use the power of state treasures

to push back against ESG, environmental, social, and governance guidelines in the finance industry.

This is a group of policies that govern climate disclosures in the financial space and has gone

pretty much unchallenged for the past decade or so. Banks have been okay with it, investment funds

have been okay with it. Oil and gas companies have said that they like the idea of climate disclosure,

but as Jesse found out, all of a sudden a year or two ago, that started to shift.

There was a noticeable shift in tone and a sudden pushback happening. The folks that documented

noticed this and wanted to look into it and what they found was a really surprising strategy

that's gone pretty much unnoticed for the past couple of years. There was a piece in the New York Times

about this this past week documented has put all of the documents related to the investigation

on their website and Jesse's here to walk us through all of it. That's coming up right after this

quick break. Tell me a little bit about the backstory of this investigation. What made you start

looking at state treasures and this particular group that wound up being central to this?

Yes, sure. We follow the oil and gas industry very closely.

At documented, our role is to unveil corporate power over society and politics.

The oil and gas industry is definitely a big piece of that. Over the last couple of years,

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