About
Antonia Juhasz is a leading energy and climate author, analyst, and investigative journalist. She is the Senior Researcher on Fossil Fuels in the Environment and Human Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. An award-winning writer, her bylines include Rolling Stone, WIRED, Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, CNN, The Nation, Ms., The Advocate, The Guardian, and Sierra Magazine.
Antonia is the author of three books: Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill (2011), The Tyranny of Oil (2008), and The Bush Agenda (2006). She has contributed chapters and essays to nine additional books, including, “Defeating the Fossil Fuel Industry,” in Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua’s Not Too Late:Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (2023); “Spill” in Fueling Culture: Energy, History, Politics (2017); “Oil and Water,” in Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker’s Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (2013); “Global Water Wars” in Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization (2006); and as a coauthor of Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible (2004).
Antonia’s research and investigations follow the trail of oil as it seeps into virtually every corner of human existence from climate change to human rights, public health to the environment, politics to economics, and from war to peace. Reporting from the frontlines of fossil fuels and the climate crisis, her investigations have taken her a mile below the ocean surface in the Gulf of Mexico to the rainforests of the Ecuadoran Amazon, from the deserts of Afghanistan to the fracking fields of North Dakota, from the Alaskan Arctic to the oiled beaches of Santa Barbara, and many more places in between. Antonia’s photographs regularly accompany her articles.
For Human Rights Watch, her year-long investigation and 98-page report, “‘We’re Dying Here:’ The Fight for Life In a Louisiana Fossil Fuel Sacrifice Zone,” (January 2024) documents the human rights toll of fossil fuel and petrochemical industry in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley and has been featured on Good Morning America, PBS NewsHour, The Hill, Democracy Now!, NPR, and The Guardian, among other outlets.
For WIRED magazine, she wrote the 2022 feature article, “The Quest to Defuse Guyana’s Carbon Bomb,” traveling to Guyana to investigate a historic legal battle waged by Guyanese lawyer Melinda Janki against ExxonMobil. She has written a dozen articles for Rolling Stone, investigating fossil fuels, corporate malfeasance, and the environmental and climate justice movements. Her 15-month investigation, “Death on the Dakota Access,” ran as a 12-page print feature in Pacific Standard Magazine, part of a series of articles reporting from Standing Rock on the Dakota Access Pipeline. She wrote a six-part series articles for Newsweek on the historic United Nation’s COP15 climate talks in Paris, reporting from Alaska, North Dakota and Paris.
Antonia was an adjunct lecturer at Tulane University in New Orleans where she received the Monroe Fellowship from the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. She is a 2020-2021 Bertha Fellow in Investigative Journalism, joining a team of international journalists investigating climate change, fossil fuels, and corporate power. Antonia is a 2019-2020 Ted Scripps Fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder, a 2017 Yale University Poynter Fellow in Journalism, and a 2013 Investigative Journalism Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Georgetown University and a Bachelors Degree in Public Policy from Brown University.
Her Harper’s Magazine feature article, “30 Million Gallons Under the Sea,” was a finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award and appears in The Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology and the The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing by The University Press of Florida. Her Advocate Magazine cover article,“What’s Wrong with Exxon?” was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award, Outstanding Magazine Article.
As an Investigative Journalism Fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program (a working news room at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley) Antonia traveled to Afghanistan and Tajikistan, investigating the role of oil and natural gas in the Afghanistan war, reporting for The Atlantic and Harper’s Magazine.
Antonia is the author of BLACK TIDE: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill (Wiley 2011), a searing look at the human face of BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf. An in-depth investigation into the causes and consequences of the largest offshore drilling oil spill in world history. It uncovers the public policy choices that enabled the disaster and the obstacles that have prevented the best policy responses from occurring. In addition to first-hand interviews with key actors in government, industry, and advocacy organizations, Juhasz reports from the front lines where she was embedded in those communities most impacted by the disaster.
“It’s hard to imagine a better person to turn loose on this epochal disaster than Antonia Juhasz, with her compassionate heart, vivid prose, and rich expertise in both oil and economic policy… It’s not just a book about disaster: it’s a series of encounters with real people, from oceanographers to oyster shuckers, striving to make things right. Black Tide is riveting, infuriating, and incredibly important to understand the places, politics, and people who survived the Gulf oil disaster.” –Rebecca Solnit.
“These remarkable stories—of loss, heroism, and culpability—are a vivid reminder that this catastrophe will be with us for decades.” -Naomi Klein.
“Masterfully reported.” -Ms. Magazine. “Both engaging and informative.” -Mother Jones.
Antonia is the author of THE TYRANNY OF OIL: the World’s Most Powerful Industry–And What We Must Do To Stop It (HarperCollins 2008), for which she received the 2009 San Francisco Library Laureate Award. Described as “A worthy successor to ‘The Prize’… A riveting read with a bold blueprint for ending the madness,” by former California EPA Secretary, Terry Tamminen, Tyranny provides the hardest-hitting exposé of the oil industry in decades, answering today’s most pressing energy questions. Juhasz blends history, original investigative research and reporting, candid interviews with key insiders, and a unique focus on activism with a host of real-world policy solutions. Juhasz “reminds us that those who don’t learn the lessons of history are fated to repeat its mistakes.” – USA Today. “Part homage to 150 years of anti-monopoly muckraking and trust-busting and part signpost to where the leading edge of the environmental and social activist movements are headed.” – The Toronto Star. “A brave, groundbreaking case study…. A good first step toward true energy independence is to read this insightful book.” – The Christian Science Monitor. “Well-written…. presciently criticizes the weak oversight of the oil futures market.” – The Washington Post.
Antonia is the author of THE BUSH AGENDA: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time (HarperCollins 2006). The Bush Agenda exposes the Bush administration’s use of corporate globalization policy as a weapon of war. Juhasz uncovers the history and key role of U.S. corporations in the creation of the Bush agenda, focusing on Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Halliburton. Presenting the Iraq War as the most brutal application of the Bush agenda, Juhasz reveals the “oil time-line” driving the war, and the costs and consequences of the administration’s attempt to fundamentally transform Iraq’s economy. Juhasz concludes with specific achievable alternatives for a more peaceful and sustainable course.”A meticulous expose of corporate America’s intentions in the Gulf.” – The Organizer-India. “One of the crispest, most insightful books yet to expose the Bush regime.” – The Georgia Straight, Canada. “Lucid, fact-filled and non-rhetorical.” – The North Bay Bohemian. “Spine tingling.” – The Ecologist Magazine.
Antonia is a frequent media commentator. She is a “Big Thinker” featured in the second season of National Geographic’s hit TV series, MARS, executive produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, featured in the Smithsonian Channel documentary, “Ten Steps to Disaster — Deepwater Horizon,” and in the CNBC documentary, “The Hunt for Black Gold,” among others. She has appeared on TV programs, including NBC Today, BBC Breakfast and World News, Fox Business Hour, C-Span Book-TV and Washington Journal, TVOntario Allen Gregg in Conversation, CBC The Hour, on regional, state, and local television news programs for ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, among others, and has appeared dozens of times as a regular guest on Democracy Now!
Podcast appearances include: Hot Take, Drilled, Los Angeles Review of Books 55 Voices, and A Matter of Degrees. She was interviewed by Jane Fonda on Fire Drill Fridays. National radio programs include: Bloomberg Radio News, BBC’s World News, Wake up to Money, News Hour, and Today Programme; NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin, The Diane Rehm Show, and Marketplace; CBC As It Happens; ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Regional and local radio programs include CBS, ABC, BBC, CBC, Pacifica, and NPR’s WWNO Louisiana Considered, WBEZ World View, WNYC All Of It, KQED Forum, KUOW Weekday, KALW Your Call, KCRW To the Point; and Antonia had the unique honor to co-host KPFA’s UpFront, filling in while Cat Brooks ran for public office.
Antonia regularly provides talks and lectures at public fora across the U.S. and around the world on topics including climate change, fossil fuels and energy, human rights, and investigative and environmental journalism. For over a decade, she has provided a twice-yearly lecture on “The Political Economy of Oil” to the International Honors Program, School for International Training Abroad Climate Change Program.
Antonia is a Board Member of Amazon Watch, a non-profit organization devoted to preserving the Amazon Rainforest and advocating for the rights of the Indigenous peoples who live in the Amazon Basin. Amazon Watch works to partner with Indigenous and environmental organizations to campaign for “human rights, corporate accountability, and the preservation of the Amazon’s ecological systems.”
Antonia served on the National Advisory Committee of Iraq Veterans Against the War, as an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, and as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus. She founded the Energy Program at Global Exchange, a human rights non-profit organization, and directed the program from 2009 to 2011. She was the Project Director of the International Forum on Globalization, called “One of the most serious and respected groups of experts dedicated to analyzing and generating alternative proposals to the prevailing economic model promoted by international financial agencies,” by La Jornada of Mexico. She worked as a Legislative Assistant in Washington, D.C. for U.S. Members of Congress, John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD).
Antonia was proud to provide testimony at the Iraq Veterans Against the War–Winter Soldier:Iraq & Afghanistan in 2008; at the Citizens Hearing on the Legality of U.S. Actions in Iraq in support of Lt. Ehren Watada in Tacoma, Washington in 2007; and to the New York Session of the World Tribunal on the Iraq War in 2004.
New Jersey Peace Action awarded Antonia the Lou Kousin Award for “Dedication to Peace.” Peace Action named Antonia to the Women Peacemakers Honor Roll, “For women who have made a unique and lasting contribution to work for peace and justice in the world.” She was awarded “The Sentinel” by the Nevada Alliance for Workers Rights “For those who have engaged in a lifelong activism.”