This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the hired hit that took Berta Cáceres’s life and robbed both the Honduran and global environmental movements of a uniquely effective leader. Cáceres was targeted by a dam company, with an assist from the police, military, government officials and international banks because of her effective organizing on behalf of her people, the Lenca. Nina Lakhani literally wrote the book on Cáceres’s killing, and in this episode she walks us through what happened then, what’s happening now, the role the U.S. played in all of it, and what Americans can learn from the way Honduran activists continue to show up in the face of violent repression.

Read Nina’s story 

Read Nina’s book

Check out Berta’s organization, Copinh

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Last June, journalist Mario Guevara was arrested while covering an anti-ICE protest in Georgia, transferred to ICE detention, and locked up by the federal government for more than 100 days. But Mario is not the kind of ICE-criticizing reporter you might be picturing. He was a Trump-supporting, Republican-identifying, law-and-order-sympathizing immigration hawk, who knew ICE well and had covered them favorably for years. Why did the Trump administration still go after him? In this special two-part series from Question Everything, Brian Reed looks into. Mario Guevara. This is part one. Find part two, and more from Question Everything, wherever you get podcasts.

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Fernanda Hopenhaym, member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights walks Drilled senior global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani through the many legal pitfalls companies getting involved in the United States seizure of the Venezuelan oil industry might be facing.

Check out the longer story on our website.

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It's easy to feel like climate "doesn't matter" as the United States descends into fascism, as if climate and democracy are somehow separate issues. Researcher Oscar Berglund and Amy Westervelt connect the dots between the global backlash to climate protest and the broader repression we're seeing in supposedly democratic countries around the world.

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In More and More and More, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz shows that the human history of energy is one of accumulation, not substitution. Here, he talks to reporter Adam Lowenstein about how the "energy transition" frame got so entrenched, why clean-energy innovation is not the same thing as decarbonization, how the fossil fuel industry helped launder pipe dreams of dysfunctional technologies into mainstream climate “solutions”, and much more (and more and more).

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When activists Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya take drastic measures to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, they have no idea that a shadowy private security contractor called TigerSwan has them in its sights. 

Special thanks to:

Alleen Brown and The Intercept (https://theintercept.com/2018/12/30/tigerswan-infiltrator-dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock/)

You Strike A Match by Julia Shipley (https://grist.org/protest/dakota-access-pipeline-activists-property-destruction/)

Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/)

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Wildfires are becoming more intense, frequent, and destructive as the climate heats up. Drilled reporter Royce Kurmelovs and Canadian author John Vallaint, author of Fire Weather, discuss the climate-fire nexus.

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In this bonus episode of The Black Thread, we examine a single legal case that distilles the Norwegian paradox perfectly: the planned electrification of the Melkøya gas processing plant. It's a key conflict site where Norway's net zero transformation clashes with its fossil fuel industry, Indigenous rights, youth climate activism, worker safety, and even criticism from the United Nation.

Additional resources:
Communicating Climate Change

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Despite growing repression worldwide, climate activists continue to stick it to obstructionists and drive change. In this season's finale, Jennie Stephens (University of Ireland Maynooth) and Sharon Yadin (University of Haifa) share the effective strategies that activists can use to push back against the forces that block climate action.

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It's bleak out there and while climate obstruction can feel overwhelming, there are efforts being made to fight back against it. One of them is litigation and holding corporations legally accountable. Joana Setzer (London School of Economics) speaks to how climate litigation is being used to challenge companies, enforce climate commitments, and push for climate action globally.

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More than a decade ago—when wind and solar power were far more expensive than they are today—Uruguay, long plagued by droughts and energy shortages, transitioned its entire economy such that 98% of its electricity now comes from renewable sources. They did it in just two years, and used the savings to slash the country's poverty rate from 40% into the single digits.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata covers Uruguay's transformation in her book, Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe. Hakimi Zapata shares how activists and policymakers can learn from Uruguay's transformation and why progressive movements should confidently articulate the economic benefits of renewable energy.

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