Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Again, this season we are making

our way through a huge collection of all the peer-reviewed research we have so far on climate

obstruction and how it works globally. It's called climate obstruction, a global survey. It comes to you

from the climate Social Science Network.

And in each episode of this season, we're talking to the lead authors of a different chapter,

focus on a different area of this research, who are walking us through what we know so far about how this stuff works.

As one of the editors of this volume, Timmins Roberts said in our first episode

of this season, for a really long time, people who wanted climate policy had no idea what

they were up against in terms of the organized and very well-funded efforts to block climate

policy. Sometimes inaction on climate or the sort of stalled

spot that we're at so far gets chalked up to, you know, bad policy making or bad messaging from

the climate movement. And while any or all of those things could very well be true, you can't

discount the impact that the large, extremely well-funded,

very consistent global decades-long effort to obstruct climate policy has had on our ability

to make progress on this issue. Last week, we talked about what climate obstruction looks like

in the global south. Today,

we look at local obstruction. So in a lot of cases, local governments can be really helpful

in climate policy, even when the national or federal or international negotiations are going badly. Sometimes a mayor or a governor

can get climate policy going at the local level. But the opposite is also true. It's a real

double-edged sword. Local governments can also block the implementation of national or international efforts.

Joining me today to talk about how that works in both directions are Rebecca Bromley Trujillo

from Christopher Newport University and Joshua Bessetches from Tulane University.

...