S5, Ep7 | The Linchpin

S5 Ep7 The Linchpin

[00:00:00] Before we get started today, a quick note about another show I know you probably care about climate change if you're listening to this podcast. So I want to recommend another one that's sharing some of the most powerful ideas about the climate crisis. It's called Countdown, and it's part of Ted's Global Initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. Turning ideas into action with talks from Prince William, decarbonization strategist Monica Araya, environmental activist, seven Cullis Suzuki and many, many more. You can check out Countdown wherever you listen to podcasts and stick around after this episode to hear a clip from the show on why climate justice can't happen without racial justice.

[00:00:48] You were watching ABC seven News at 11, two activists spearheading a landmark class action lawsuit against Chevron are receiving the world's most prestigious environmental honor today. Pablo Fajardo and Louisianans are accepting the Goldman Prize in San Francisco today. It is for their efforts to make Chevron clean up what some environmentalists call the world's worst oil related disaster.

[00:01:13] This is a clip from the documentary Crude The Real Price of Oil, about the Chevron litigation in Ecuador. This particular scene shows what happened when Ecuadorian attorney Pablo Hado and activist Lewis Younes came to San Francisco to accept the Goldman Environmental Prize. Remember, we mentioned this a couple episodes back tonight.

[00:01:34] Chevron is fighting the claim and the two men who they say have made up their story for their own financial gain.

[00:01:40] They're frankly a group of and have put one past the Goldmans and have been putting them, putting it past the media for quite some time now to consider and investigate that.

[00:01:51] Pablo Picasso, if you deem so, please, to investigate the life of Pablo Picasso, invested in the relationship with him and investigate what Chevron's life is. As you well know, Gupta is investigating the that I think I mean the gutter. Once you investigate, you'll see who is lying in this case.

[00:02:11] We mentioned last time that one of the many subpoenas that Chevron's attorney, Randy Mastro, filed when Chevron brought on his firm, Gibson Dunn, to help with their defense, was for outtakes from this film Crude.

[00:02:24] It was a big moment in the case. And today we're going to dig into it in detail with the documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger.

[00:02:32] Berlinger is a pioneering documentary filmmaker who's made several groundbreaking films both before and since crude, including Paradise Lost Brother's Keeper, Metallica, Some Kind Of Monster, and more recently, Conversations with a Killer, the Ted Bundy Tapes and Jeffrey Epstein, filthy rich both for Netflix.

[00:02:54] Hey, Bob, I, I can I call you later? I know you're wishing you happy birthday, but I'm in the middle of a podcast. Is it your birthday today? It is my birthday. God, happy birthday.

[00:03:06] I started bugging Berlinguer to talk to us for this season months ago, and it took a lot of convincing, but ultimately he agreed to do it and on his birthday, no less.

[00:03:16] It's no wonder he was hesitant. Mastro and his team made Berlinguer his life hell for a couple of years when they subpoenaed his outtakes, Berlinguer for it as an independent documentarian, he figured he had First Amendment protections and journalistic privilege, and he didn't want to set a bad precedent for his industry or for journalists in general. He paid a heavy price for that fight, literally and figuratively. That story coming up right after this quick break.

[00:04:05] Welcome back to Drilled Season five, La Lucha en la Jungla. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today we're talking to documentary film director Joe Berlinger and we're digging into the ramp up to this RICO case that was filed just before the verdict came out in Ecuador. We talked about that a bit at the end of the last episode. Here's Berlinger describing how he started to make this film in the first place.

[00:04:31] One of the ironies of this film, having had such a deep impact on my life, is I never wanted to make it in the first place.

[00:04:38] In order to get outtakes from crude, Randy Mastro had to show that Berlinguer was neither independent nor a journalist. He did that with two key accusations. First, that the film was solicited by the plaintiffs attorneys. And second, that the plaintiffs attorneys had editorial input. Here's Berlinguer.

[00:04:58] Steven Donziger, the plaintiff's lawyer, had a mutual friend who knew me and Steven Donziger came to my office in New York in, I think, 2005 and pitched me on the idea of making a film, but obviously not pitching me to work for them. They knew I was an independent journalist and they just, you know, so believed in the story that they wanted a filmmaker of my stature to to take a look at the story. And initially, I was very hesitant.

[00:05:30] Now, keep in mind, this was 2005. Streaming was not really a thing. Netflix was still mostly just mailing people DVD and documentaries were gaining in popularity. But this more recent boom was nowhere in sight. It was hard to sell a documentary at the time, much less one in Spanish, about an environmental issue in a country far away from the US.

[00:05:52] They were just pitching me. They thought this would make a great film. It was an interesting period to step into the case. The trial had started in Ecuador in 2003 and had kind of petered out and they were waiting for these judicial field inspections to start in the coming year. And so pitched me several times about about it. And I was a little reluctant. And Donziger said to me, look, let me take you down and show you the region, the famous Toxi tour that so many people have taken.

[00:06:22] You might remember us mentioning the Toxi tour a few episodes back when we met Donald Moncayo. It was a tour the plaintiffs took many journalists and politicians on over the years of the various oil pits Texaco had left in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

[00:06:37] And he was very persistent. You know, they really thought I was the right guy because I had made two well-known criminal justice films, Paradise Lost and Brother's Keeper. And initially I was just reluctant. And Donziger was was somewhat relentless in trying to win me over to come down and take toxic tour. And so several months after that first meeting, he called again and said, I really want to show you the region. And I said, look, I will go down and check it out. It sounds like an interesting personal experience, but, you know, I don't want to mismanage your expectations. I have lots of hesitation and doubt about whether or not I want to make this film. I have other projects happening. I think this one will be a difficult one to raise money for. But I will take the Toxi tour, although it wasn't called that then to me. But I will go down and take the take the tour of the region. As long as you understand that, I'm not promising you that I'm going to commit to making a film about it.

[00:07:44] So he went and when he got to the Amazon in Ecuador, Berlinguer says he was shocked by what he saw.

[00:07:50] [00:07:50]I was just blown away by the devastation. I mean, here we are in a pristine or what was supposed to be this pristine region of the world that everyone talks about, the Amazon being so special and magical. [13.3s]

[00:08:04] [00:08:04]And all I saw was gas flares out of, you know, oil, oil refineries, these pits, these online pits all over the landscape. People living in over over these pits, people dying of cancer. It was I was horrified. It was kind of my my wake up call. And I remember in particular the moment that I just felt like I had to make this film as we were paddling by canoe to Durango, which is the ancestral land of the Cofan, where prior to Texaco's arrival, there were about fifteen thousand Cofan and and now there were just hundreds of Cofan living on their ancestral lands. And as we pulled up, we were going to have a meeting with some of the tribal leaders. And as we pulled up to to the shore to get out, I looked to my left and there was a family, several families sitting around a fire eating canned tuna fish out of these giant imagine, you know, these big industrial kind of vats of tuna that that a restaurant might buy at whatever the Ecuadorian equivalent of Costco would be. [81.7s]

[00:09:26] [00:09:26]And here we were in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, you know, with water based people, the Cofan and these these families were eating canned tuna fish because there was no there was no fish in there in the rivers. And I just I just felt like, you know, something's got to be done. [19.1s]

[00:09:53] He didn't know I was going to do it, but Berlinguer couldn't shake the feeling that this film needed to be made and that he needed to be the one to make it.

[00:10:01] I got home and I went upstairs and tucked my child into bed and went to the tap and took a drink of water and looked at the glass of water and thought to myself, you know, these luxuries that we take for granted, these poor people, these water based people have polluted water. You know, they use water for transportation, for drinking, for bathing, for cleaning. And I just I just felt like the universe tapping me on the shoulder, saying, you know, you for whatever reason, you're the guy who has to make this movie and don't worry about fundraising. And in fact, I started the movie with my own resources because I just I just felt like somebody had to tell this story because I was just I could not believe what I saw. It was it was horrifying.

[00:10:50] Berlinguer says the legal proceedings provided some narrative structure and drama to the story, but he was never really interested in making a film about a lawsuit or siding with one side or the other.

[00:11:01] You know, my style of filmmaking is to show both sides of the story and let the viewer decide. And the plaintiffs actually, when they saw the movie at Sundance, were kind of shocked at how much Chevron's point of view was in the film.

[00:11:13] I actually had a much more 30000 foot view of the situation, which was as much as I admire the historic nature of this case, as much as it as this David and Goliath story was impressive cinematically. And as impressive as it is that indigenous people were actually holding Chevron to account for the actions of Texaco in this historic lawsuit, my interest in this case was a little different. And it's why I show both sides in the movie.

[00:11:51] It's true. You hear from a lot of different attorneys and scientists and other kinds of experts throughout the film. Here's an example where Berlinger interviewed Ricardo Re's Vega, the longtime Chevron attorney in Ecuador. You've heard his name come up a few times this season.

[00:12:11] My name is Ricardo Reyes Vega being with the company for 30 years, practicing law in different countries and jurisdictions. My involvement with Ecuador started in 1991 when our concession was about to expire. We try really to get an extension for another 10 years, so we proposed an additional investment in Ecuador, the government at the time basically thought that they didn't want to do that. And they said to them, well, we want to have 100 percent ownership of the consortium oilfields. It's known that the Petroecuador has had a very poor operational record.

[00:12:56] I mean, the movie is actually quite balanced because for me, there is something deeply disturbing about an environmental calamity of this magnitude. The area the size of Rhode Island, more oil dumped than, you know, 30 times more oil, as I understand it, dumped than the Exxon Valdez incident. And why is it that this environmental calamity is being held hostage to a protracted legal proceeding?

[00:13:29] If this was, you know, the BP oil spill or the spill outside of Santa Barbara, this was on the shores of the United States or a European country, there would be immediate environmental remediation and then the legal proceedings would figure out who's responsible, as happened in this country many times. Meanwhile, these poor people have been held hostage for 30 years to this case. And that really that was the point of the film. That's why I show both sides.

[00:14:01] I let each side have their say. But to me, there's something even more fundamentally wrong that the world you know, we know how important the Amazon is to the Earth's ecosystem and we are destroying the Amazon, as we all know.

[00:14:17] And oil extraction is a dirty, messy business. And if this if this incident had happened anywhere where white people live, it would have been cleaned up, you know, and then they would have figured out the culpability later. My point of view was, look, I am not smart enough to tell you whether or not Chevron has wrapped itself up in enough legal arguments to be legally correct in this situation. But there is a moral issue here with such devastation. Why are we not cleaning it up now and figuring out the legal responsibility later? That's really is the point of view of the movie. And why the irony that I was castigated as a shill and a propagandist for the plaintiffs is just so fundamentally wrong.

[00:15:18] One of the strategies Gibson Dunn took to try to undermine the case in Ecuador was to pit the plaintiffs attorneys against each other. We're going to get into that strategy and a bit more detail in the next episode. But Berlinguer had a bird's eye view of some of the natural tensions between the Ecuadorian and American attorneys, things that would have been easy for a master litigator like Mastro to exploit.

[00:15:40] I mean, from a cinematic standpoint, you couldn't have asked for a better pairing of Pablo and Steven Donziger. Pablo is a very impressive guy. I mean, you know, he grew up in that region. He worked in the oil fields. He was impoverished. He self educated lawyer, finding himself at the center of one of the most historic and biggest environmental lawsuits in history.

[00:16:04] We spoke with Pablo for this season and unfortunately, we were talking to Pablo over the Internet and the connection wasn't great. So the recording hasn't turned out that well. So instead, I'm going to play another clip from Crude because it shows you kind of how Pablo interacted with the plaintiffs, what he was doing on the ground in Ecuador. This is a scene where Fajardo is speaking with members of the Sequoyah tribe. That's the tribe that just, you know, Piqua. He is a leader of.

[00:16:31] We've heard from him a couple of times this season when a company does a premium integration for the U.S. policy.

[00:16:39] He says, first of all, thank you for the welcome. Thank you for having us.

[00:16:45] I mean, granted, I was given the vote is Ebola case on Monday in London.

[00:16:50] Thanks also to the Sequoyah Village that signed on to the lawsuit.

[00:16:54] Say you are confident we'll fire extinguisher and that you lost anything.

[00:16:59] All of these contributions have allowed the trial to move forward.

[00:17:04] Paired with Donziger is a big guy, big in many ways, he has a big presence, he's physically lards. And so Donziger was a very large presence and Pablo was a very quiet but commanding presence.

[00:17:20] I mean, he has he just had this natural charisma, a quietness to him. But it's hard to explain. But he just he just oozed with morality and somebody on a mission. And the two of them together were quite an interesting pair. You know, this quiet, serious, committed.

[00:17:43] Che Guevara kind of figure who is a man of the people who is not motivated by finances, who really is a hero, in my opinion, whether you believe in the cases merits or not, he is a hero. And Donziger, you know, also is heroic, but I think is a much more complicated figure, wrong and dynamic presence. Who drove the case forward? There would have been no case without him, but he's a package. And there was you know, there was some stuff that I think rubbed the Ecuadorians the wrong way. And it was a very complicated relationship that I observed, you know, not the least of which is something that's not Danziger's fault, but this whole white white savior thing in a country that was trying to throw off the yoke of imperialism. Yeah, totally near you here.

[00:18:37] You had this big, tall, aggressive white guy telling them what to do.

[00:18:44] And on the one hand, they needed that counsel. But on the other hand, I think it rubbed people the wrong way as well. But there would have been no case without Donziger.

[00:18:54] Mastro argued that there would have been no documentary without Donziger either. And Donziger did pitch Berlinguer the idea of doing a documentary, and he did show him around in Ecuador.

[00:19:06] But importantly, Berlinguer says he paid his own way for that initial Toxi to a trip that convinced him to make the film.

[00:19:15] And also this whole thing of someone pitching you a story and then encouraging you to go check it out more.

[00:19:21] It's extremely common. People pitch me stories all the time.

[00:19:24] They look me up with sources or information. Whistleblowers have leaked documents to me. Former Exxon scientists have had me over to talk to them at length.

[00:19:34] None of that means that I work for any of these people or that covering a story that I get pitched somehow erodes my First Amendment rights as a journalist in my court papers where I lost my subpena battle, they deemed I was not a journalist because Donziger solicited the movie from me and used verbiage to make it seem like somehow they paid for the movie or they hired me to do the movie. But the court disregarded the fact that I had a DGA deal memo that said I have final cut.

[00:20:07] The DGA is the Directors Guild of America. That's the labor union for a film and TV directors.

[00:20:13] I had a DGA deal memo that said I have final cut that the release that Steven Donziger and all the other plaintiffs signed gave me final cut of the movie. They had no editorial rights to the film. They did not pay me to make the film. It was an independently financed film.

[00:20:33] The court ignored the deal memo with respect to the other argument and Mastro's subpoena request to that. The plaintiffs attorneys had editorial input on the film. That argument was made on the basis of one key thing. Here's Mastro.

[00:20:49] So Joe Berlinger produced this crude and it's shown on the festival circuit. And then it comes out on Netflix and a curious thing was picked up by the Chevron team. There was a change in scenes from the film festival version to the Netflix version. And the the scene that had been changed or deleted was a scene that showed someone supposedly working as an independent expert for Cabrera was in fact, meeting with the plaintiffs lawyers and their clients at a session that Joe Berlinger was Steve Donziger in attendance with the Joe Berlinger film. And then by the time it came out on Netflix, that scene had been deleted. So you could so you could still hear the audio because the audio was one of the lawyers. In Ecuador, who was working with Donziger, doing the speaking on Donziger, doing the speaking. But the image of Cabrera's assistant there at that meeting when he's supposed to be operating objectively and independently and meeting with the plaintiffs lawyers and Donziger and what appeared to be their clients, that seeing that video was deleted, that is largely true, but it lacks context.

[00:22:31] Berlinger argued this point in court as well.

[00:22:33] When you go to Sundance, often a film is not quite finished. You get in great. They tell you by Thanksgiving, you rush, you finish the film. Of course, you're showing a finished film.

[00:22:43] So just to be clear, you find out at Thanksgiving at the end of November, if your film has made it into Sundance and Sundance is in January, which means you have just a few weeks really to lock your film in before doing all of the sort of post-production things that are required to finish a film and show it at the festival.

[00:23:04] It often is not the final version of the film. Brother's Keeper was premiered at Sundance and, you know, sitting with an audience we realized needed some changes and it was 20 minutes too long. So the final version of Brother's Keeper differed from the Sundance version. In fact, virtually every film I have brought to Sundance, we make tweaks afterwards. So we showed the movie at Sundance. Chevron was invited to come to Sundance and they declined.

[00:23:32] The plaintiffs came and Donziger at some point sent me a 10 12 page memo with all the things he didn't like about the film.

[00:23:45] So this tracks with our interactions with Donziger for this podcast, too. You know, he's a guy who likes to control the story. And that's not uncommon, especially when you're covering a contentious legal case, lawyers in particular, and in this case, Donziger, because he's had so much personal blowback from this case, I find it useful to make their case in the press. And Berlinguer was used to dealing with that. He had made two other films focused on legal cases.

[00:24:11] Here's Berlinguer again explaining how this one change did happen and ninety nine percent of his suggestion, in fact, ninety nine point five percent of his suggestions. I disregard it, you know, but Pablo in particular was concerned that the condensation of chronology, you know, which is what I was told by Donziger and by four Hado that the condensation of chronology in my film made it appear that somebody who shouldn't have been in a scene was in a scene. And would I consider removing two cutaways? That's the thing people had. You know, the implication is that I edited the film and changed scenes.

[00:25:05] I mean, literally two cutaways that included the guy from a Acción Ecologic, I believe, you know, an NGO who later became part of Cabrera's independent team, who was at a meeting.

[00:25:21] And this person is sitting in the background. He's not a character in the film. Nobody knows who he is with regard to the film. It's so inside baseball as to whether or not he belongs at this place at this time.

[00:25:41] And admittedly, I didn't fully understand the issues. And and so I removed and I feel like this is such inside baseball that people may not even understand it I'm talking about.

[00:25:52] But I removed two cutaways.

[00:25:54] It was one of about I can't even I can't even give you a number that was probably 60 or 70 notes about what to change in my film alarm over how much Chevron is in the movie, all sorts of notes that I was given that I'm like, Hey, dude, this is my film and I'm not doing these changes. I will make that one change. And I think I made one other change. That was an accuracy issue.

[00:26:18] Ultimately, those changes and the fact that Donziger had pitched Berlinguer the film in the first place outweighed the context with this full explanation that I gave to the court that a, I have final cut.

[00:26:30] Here's all the paperwork to prove I had final cut. B, here's the ten page memo from Donziger and what she's asking me to make a zillion changes. And I didn't make those changes and wrote him a terse email in response saying, hey, I'm not making these changes, I'm the filmmaker, I have final cut. All of that could have outweighed, you know, this idea that somehow because I made a change, I wasn't a journalist, you know?

[00:26:58] In hindsight, it should have been a more of a red flag, but at the time it just seemed like such a such a trivial detail. The irony is that that little trivial detail of removing three, two second cutaways or maybe was two or three cutaways, one or the other, but literally we're talking about six seconds of footage, the fight over those six seconds and how they defined Berlinguer. His relationship with the plaintiffs dragged on for years and really punished Berlinguer on several occasions as my kids were getting off the bus, a private detective or seemingly so somebody in a flashy red BMW being as conspicuous as possible would screech would screech up to our driveway and take photographs of my kids getting off the bus and walking up the driveway. Now, this was during my court proceeding.

[00:27:53] Can I say Chevron was responsible for it? No. Can I say Gibson? Dunn was responsible for it? No, but it happened. There were times where I felt my phone was being tapped. I heard the distinct clicks on my phone that just didn't sound right. I was investigated by Kroll, a corporate investigator.

[00:28:13] Documentarians and investigative journalists are somewhat prepared for this sort of thing. We carry expensive specialty insurance policies, for example, and we have lawyers who look things over for us.

[00:28:24] But this was way beyond anything Berlinguer ever thought he'd be up against because it became extremely costly beyond anything I could have ever imagined. My footage was subpoenaed. I fought, lost, appealed, lost. And then after the footage was turned over, at some point, they then went after my computer. I lost, appealed, lost and had to turn the contents of my computer over as well.

[00:28:51] And then in addition to that, because [00:28:53]and this is where the pressure tactics come in, Chevron attorneys were intimidating to my attorneys that they might seek criminal action against me. [12.6s]

[00:29:06] [00:29:06]OK, so this is really worth paying attention to. Berlinguer wasn't being accused of fraud himself or of libel or various other crimes, but Chevron was hinting that they could use misprision. When you observe a fraud, you're supposed to have sort of a legal responsibility to report it. And if you don't, that's called misprision the idea that a documentary filmmaker could be guilty of this crime simply by filming other people who may or may not be engaging in some kind of fraudulent activity is pretty scary when you think about it. [38.9s]

[00:29:46] [00:29:46]So their theory of the Donziger case and the plaintiff's case was that it was fraudulent, it was a fraudulent case, that the cancer claims were fraudulent, that the that the that the entire basis for the case was fraudulent. And so I as a documentarian who by definition is an observer, so that I as a documentarian observing fraud, was therefore a party to fraud, that's something that could really undermine quite a bit of investigative documentary filmmaking or journalism. You know, you have one of the largest corporations in America threatening to bring criminal charges against you or intimating, I should say, you know, it was scary [46.5s] and luckily that didn't go anywhere. But I remember turning to my wife at one point and saying, you know, if something doesn't turn around, we could lose everything. Again, I wasn't being sued for libel or defamation. I wasn't being sued for wrongdoing. I was defending the turning over of my footage to an interested party in somebody else's litigation. And, you know, it took a lot out of me.

[00:31:02] Ultimately, the courts didn't think Ballinger's deal memo or the fact that he had ignored the vast majority of Danziger's notes outweighed the fact that he had changed this one scene and that Donziger had initially pitched him the story. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that he had to hand over his outtakes, although he was able to narrow that request down a little bit.

[00:31:22] He had to hand over his computer to I mean, here's an example that just still makes my head spin. After I lost the footage case, they then use the footage to justify getting my laptop, the contents of my computer. And so these discovery and I lost I you know, I appeal. I lost. And, you know, these discovery experts walked into my office, you know, wearing skinny black ties like men in black. It was just really bizarre. I had to hit me and several others on the team had to hand over our computers where they suck down the entire contents of my laptop.

[00:32:01] The court had approved about 100 key search terms, but some of them were very vague, like, for example, because one of the experts who had worked on the case in Ecuador was named Charles Calm Baker. Charles was the search term. Well, Burlington's financial account was with Charles Schwab, and he didn't want Chevron to have access to all of his financial files. So he had to make something called a privileged log, which meant he had to pay lawyers lots of money to go through all of the documents on all of his devices and prove to the court that things like bank statements and love letters to his wife and various other personal items should not be handed over to Chevron as part of this case.

[00:32:44] And I had to pay my lawyers lots of money to go through all the things that were captured by these search terms and prove to the court why those are privileged communications or irrelevant communications that shouldn't be turned over to Chevron. I mean, it was it was an insane process.

[00:33:05] The cost of that kind of litigation is just not something most journalists or filmmakers can afford. Just to put this in perspective, the movie Crude cost about one point two million dollars to make and crewed. The lawsuit ended up costing an estimated one point three dollars million. So this kind of thing can be crushing financially. And keep in mind, Berlinguer wasn't even really the focus of this RICO case. He wasn't being accused of doing anything himself. He just didn't want to hand over his footage to be used in someone else's case, this type of scorched earth strategy. It was exactly the sort of thing that the lawyers and the PR experts had been brought on by Chevron to do. Even just having these sort of army of lawyers, you need to scour footage and notice a six second difference between the Sundance and Netflix versions of the film requires pretty deep pockets.

[00:34:03] I mean, I give the Chevron lawyers a lot of credit for noticing it because it's like astounding to me that they did. But it ended up being the linchpin that turned this case, meaning my case about having to turn all my footage over because they used that fact quite successfully to discredit me as a journalist, which in turn made me not protected as a journalist under the journalist privilege.

[00:34:33] That's the thing. Berlinda doesn't even necessarily blame Mastro or Gibson Dunn for what they did. They were doing what they were hired to do. But he says these kinds of aggressive tactics only underscore why he felt he needed to make this documentary in the first place.

[00:34:50] [00:34:50]Look, they did everything that they should do to defend their client, but it's once again, it's illustrative of, you know, the focus was change from the underlying pollution to demonizing anybody who had anything to do with the plaintiffs and to take the eye off of the central question of the the damage and that we have a system of justice where deep pockets prevail. [27.3s]

[00:35:34] These outtakes were used to compel all sorts of additional materials from Donziger and the rest of the team, including weeks worth of depositions, and again, this was all happening before the verdict came out in Ecuador.

[00:35:47] It formed the basis of this racketeering or RICO suit that was filed against the plaintiffs and their attorneys just a couple of weeks before they won their case in Ecuador.

[00:36:07] We're going to get into the details of that next time, I think if I had it to do over, I would advise my client to completely protest the trial. And unfortunately, Stephen didn't have that option because Steven lives in New York and he's subject to the jurisdiction of the court and he has to defend the case. But my client did have that option, and that was not a card we chose to play.

[00:36:42] Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast network. The show was created, reported and written by me, Amy Westervelt, my co reporter. This season is Karen Savage. Our editor is Julia Ritchie. The show's editorial consultant is Rekha Murthy Mixing and Mastering by Mark Lush. Original score by B.. Themen Fact Checking by Wootten Yahn. Our artwork for this season was done by these super talented Matt Flemyng. Special thanks to Trevor Gowan and Emily Gert's If You Are a Patriot subscriber. Thank you. Your money is helping to make this season and as a special thank you to Patriot members who providing a variety of benefits, including bonus content and early access to episodes in this season. If that sounds appealing to you or you just want to support our work, go over to Petrea on Dotcom Drilled and sign up. We also have some merch associated with that. You can find stories, documents and photos related to this season on our Web site at Drilled News.com. That's it for this time. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next week.

[00:38:18] It's Amy again, here's David Lammy, Labor MP of Tottenham, England, on why climate justice can't happen without racial justice. You can find more episodes like this one on Ted's podcast Countdown wherever you listen.

[00:38:34] My parents home country of Guyana is one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth to the effects of climate change.

[00:38:42] So far, Guyan has contributed relatively little to the climate emergency, but it's one of the countries facing the most serious threats from it. While the annual carbon dioxide emissions per head in the United States is a staggering sixteen point five metric tons in Guyana. It's just two point six. It is a pattern repeated across the globe. Those countries that have contributed least to the climate breakdown, mainly in the global south, will suffer the most from floods, droughts and rising temperatures. This is a pattern of suffering with a long history. The exploitation of our planet's natural resources have always been tied to the exploitation of people of color. The logic of colonization was to extract valuable resources from our planet through force, paying no attention to its secondary effects. The climate crisis is, in a way, colonialism. Its natural conclusion. The solution is to build a new coalition made up of all the groups most affected by this emergency, black people in American cities who are already protesting that they cannot breathe people of color in Guyana watching sea levels rise to the point where many of their homes become uninhabitable. Young people in places like Tottenham, London, afraid of the world that they will grow older and progressive allies from all nations of all races, religions, creeds and ages on their side, all demanding recognition that climate justice is linked to racial justice, social justice and intergenerational justice to.