This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com

and by Drilled, a true crime podcast about climate change. You may often wonder why oil companies

spend so much money producing fuel-good ads unrelated to what the companies actually do.

On Drilled's new mini-series, Urb, host Amy Westerville tells the story of Urb Schmerz,

the mobile VP who got the oil guys into the corporate free speech business back in the 1970s.

Amyen covers how Urb's work influenced all this nefarious fuel-good messaging from oil companies

today, and explores mobile's role in setting the legal foundation for the expansion of corporate

free speech and Supreme Court cases from Balotti to Citizens United. If you like the Dig Presents,

you might also like Drilled. Listen to Drilled wherever you get podcasts.

Hello, and welcome to the fifth episode of The Dig Presents. It's a really hot summer.

You've probably noticed. It's clearer than ever that we need to decarbonize our economy

and fast. With that in mind, people in some states are fighting to make their electricity systems

publicly owned, meaning they would have no profit motive and could be governed directly

instead of just regulated. One example, the Build Public Renewables Act in New York,

which recently passed, will require the state's public power provider to generate all of its

electricity from carbon-free energy by 2030, helping the state meet its climate targets.

But there's one public power project in the US that's been around for a while.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, which is almost a hundred years old.

Reporter Darnan Nore has this story about the TVA. Past and present, good and bad,

and what lessons we can learn from it. Before we get this story started, though,

there are a few basic models for funding a podcast. You can pay while episodes.

You can sell ads to deep-pocketed internet mattress companies. Or, at least all recently,

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