Drilled

Fossil-fueled Fascism

The U.S. invasions of Venezuela and Iran are more of the same imperialism in service of oil majors. As the climate crisis makes its presence more urgently felt, fossil fascism dictates a doubling-down on extraction and colonialism, and the vilification of those who oppose or stand in the way of that plan. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

On Petromasculinity and Protest

Repression of protest has ramped up in the U.S., but everything that's happening now began with the backlash to the Standing Rock protest back in 2016. In today's episode we look at the connections between fossil fascism, petromasculinity, and protest. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Never Let a War Go to Waste

Lots of people are talking about the similarities between Iraq and Iran, but in this episode we place the two in the context of another war—World War I—and the historical arc of fossil fascism. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Drilling Deep: Karen Hao on How Big AI Is Gambling with the Planet’s Chips

What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to the liking of the billionaire class? A way to replace needy human workers with machines? Perhaps it’s all of that—and more. In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743569/empire-of-ai-by-karen-hao/], award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues [https://drilled.media/news/network-state] in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Hao says, is not just corporate power but imperial power. They are building empires. And as history shows, empires are built on resource extraction, particularly the old-fashioned kind: of labor, energy, minerals, land, water. Seemingly overnight, tech elites’ feel-good climate promises have evaporated [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/climate/tech-companies-climate-goals.html], having been seamlessly swapped for slippery promises that so-called “artificial general intelligence” will save the planet for us. Never mind that AGI is a fantastical concept that has no agreed-upon definition [https://prospect.org/2025/12/09/artifice-age-of-artificial-intelligence-silverman-morris-review/], or that, more fundamentally, it appears nowhere close to existing. In Big Tech’s frenzied pursuit of the “hyperscale” AI dominance that evangelists claim will unlock AGI, as well as its expanding [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-nvidia-uae-ai-chips-cf8491b6] alliances [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/technology/saudi-arabia-ai-exporter.html] with fossil fuel-backed petrostates and authoritarian political movements, the industry has become an increasingly central [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-power-ai-climate] contributor [https://www.citizen.org/article/reining-in-big-tech-policy-solutions-to-address-the-data-center-buildout/] to the climate crisis. In an October conversation with Drilled, Hao discussed how Silicon Valley giants appear to be following the oil and gas industry’s playbook of disinformation and deceit; how Altman and OpenAI’s secrecy and disingenuous rhetoric transformed the field of AI research into corporate PR; and why the destructive trajectory of AI scale and commercialization is not inevitable—no matter what its power-hungry proponents would have you believe. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

10 Years After Berta Cáceres’s Murder, Why Is Honduras Still So Dangerous for Environmentalists?

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 [https://drilled.media/news/berta]  Read Nina’s book [https://www.versobooks.com/products/790-who-killed-berta-caceres?srsltid=AfmBOorpFiSw1Fs5YU0TZy70o_w6SYPMlKfbReDbyQpDTWSGZ_0CZhTU] Check out Berta’s organization, Copinh [https://copinh.org/en/] See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.