In 2017, Amy Westervelt pitched the idea of a true crime-style narrative climate podcast to numerous production shops and was met with disinterest. No one believed it would attract enough listeners to justify the necessary budget. So she raised $30,000 in grant funding to independently produce the first season of “Drilled” with the help of an audio engineer/composer and a supportive husband.

“I taped all the voice tracks for that first season in my car at night in my driveway,” Westervelt said of the podcast’s humble beginnings.

That didn’t last long. “Drilled” surpassed 1 million downloads in its first year as a self-distributed show and has since become a long-running and award-winning narrative climate podcast that remains self-distributed.

“I was just going to do [‘Drilled’] as a limited-run series, but it did well enough to basically become all I do,” Westervelt said.

But now even she’s having difficulty raising money, and the constant calls for value justification persist. I can commiserate. Over the past four years, I’ve had to learn how to create budgets, raise money, and write grant applications with little to no institutional support. My remedial math teacher in college would be impressed. 

I left my job as a CNN producer a few years ago to create and host the first season of “Hazard NJ,” a limited-series podcast that explores the impacts of climate change on hazardous Superfund sites, with NJ Spotlight News, the news division of NJ PBS. It was the outlet’s first podcast and a dream come true for me. If I had to create a dating profile, it would read something like, “Enjoys long walks through historic cemeteries, horror movies with heart, and visiting toxic places.” 

The main reason I left CNN was that every time I pitched a climate-related episode, my boss told me that the audience didn’t care about climate change. I felt “Hazard NJ” proved them wrong. The show’s first season garnered more than 200,000 downloads from listeners on every continent (except Antarctica, which I’m still working on), as well as in all 50 states. We won awards and got a second season. But earlier this year, our wealthy donors abandoned us.

Simultaneously, I served as the executive producer of “Fumed,” an investigative climate change podcast produced by the nonprofit news organization Public Health Watch. The podcast, a first for the outlet, focused on environmental health threats in Channelview, a small, unincorporated town near Houston. 

Based on an investigation into high benzene emissions, “Fumed” is the sort of story that shines as a podcast. The citizens of Channelview we interviewed for the show were too compelling to relegate to quotes. Plus, they’ve got these big Texas accents, and listeners fell in love with them, just like we did. Despite getting downloaded over 250,000 times, the show’s fate now hangs in the balance. “Fumed” was fueled by grant funding, and if that grant isn’t renewed or replaced, the show could cease to exist.

Investigations like these address significant structural issues and require public records requests, archives, and data analysis. Challenging powerful people and systems takes skills such as persistence and resources such as time; thus, creating narrative climate podcasts requires funding. And for good reason.