Welcome back to Trilled. I'm Amy Westervalt. Today I'm joined by investigative journalist Jeff

Dembycky to talk about his new book, The Petroleum Papers. It's a really interesting read. It gets into how the American founders of the Tar Sands industry in Alberta, Canada helped to orchestrate climate denial and various other tactics to stop action on climate change.

He traces his all the way back to the late 1950s through to this seminal conference that the Koch brothers helped to orchestrate in the US in 1991.

And to today, where a lot of the same talking points and strategies that those folks helped to architect are still alive and well today and working quite well.

Jeff also writes frequently for Vice News. He's had a bunch of really amazing stories up there in the last year or so. So we're going to talk about that a bit as well. That's coming up after this quick break.

My name is Jeff Dembycky and I am an investigative climate change journalist living in New York right now, but I'm originally from Canada and specifically the province of Alberta, which is home to the Canadian Tar Sands.

And I have a new book out now called The Petroleum Papers inside the far right conspiracy to cover up climate change.

What prompted you to think, oh, this might be a book. What did you start to dig into and what did you find?

So I was really fascinated a few years ago reading all the reporting that came out around what Exxon knew about climate change and how Exxon had researched it internally.

And then had hid the findings from the public, distorted the findings, and essentially created this like fucked up situation with climate change that we're now in where we've wasted all this time debating whether it's even real.

And so most of the reporting concerned what was happening in the US, but you know, being from Canada and Alberta, I knew that Exxon was heavily involved in the Canadian Tar Sands and so were a bunch of other major oil companies.

And so I wondered, you know, is there more to this climate denial story that's happened north of the border and in a lot of ways the border doesn't even really matter because the vast majority of all of this Tar Sands oil is flowing into the US.

So that was sort of the starting point or the question I asked myself when I started researching this book.

So it was so interesting and I don't want to have you spoil the book for people, but to the extent that you can, can we share a little bit about what you found on that front.

So I think this story really begins in 1959.

And that's when there was this hundreds birthday celebration for the oil and gas industry at Columbia University in New York. So it was a big deal.

So all these oil and gas executives were there. They were keynote speeches and everything. And one of the people, this was reported in a story in the Guardian, one of the people who spoke there was Edward Teller, who was one of the inventors of the atomic bomb.

And Edward Teller goes up in front of the room of executives. They're all, you know, giddy about all the money they're going to make from oil and gas over the next century.

And Edward Teller is like, you know, I've been looking into this new global threat that might even be a bigger deal for the world than nuclear war.

It's this thing called the greenhouse gas effect. And then Edward Teller leads the room through sort of the basics of how global warming happens.

He's like, when you pull oil and gas from the ground, you burn it releases emissions into the atmosphere, just warms the climate.

And then he says, which I found quite shocking, you know, in 1959, this could potentially melt the polar ice caps, flood a bunch of the world's coastal cities. And New York, like where we're having this birthday party could one day be underwater.

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