For the past two years, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and his congressional team, have been scrutinizing a gigantic pile of internal company communications to suss out how fossil fuel corporations intent on promoting lies about climate change and their commitments to doing something about it used extensive academic connections to assist in their propagandizing. In a 65-page report on the documents released Tuesday, congressional investigators said they found that the industry has engaged in “an elaborate campaign of deception and doublespeak” to throw up obstacles to climate action. That assessment is not news, but the report adds a ton of detail that shows these companies in a still more unflattering light.
Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of the Senate’s fiercest climate hawks and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has invited Raskin, among others, to testify on the documents Wednesday morning. The hearing is titled “Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.” The huge collection of a wide range of memoranda, emails and other private correspondence, as well as presentations from top executives at BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will be the focus.
In a statement, Raskin said, “The evidence uncovered by Oversight Committee Democrats shows that Big Oil has run campaigns to confuse and mislead the public while working unceasingly to lock down a fossil fuel future. [...] Big Oil continues to conceal the facts about their business model and obscure the actual dangers of fossil fuels, including natural gas, in order to block the climate action we need. Despite knowing about the devastating effects of their oil and gas products on the planet for decades, the industry has always prioritized its bottom line and chosen low-road PR tactics over a high-road commitment to addressing the crisis.”
Exxon spokesperson Erin Szeligowski said: “These are tired allegations that have already been publicly addressed through previous Congressional hearings on the same topic and litigation in the courts,. As we have said time and time again, climate change is real, and we have an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions — both our own and others.”
The bullshit never ends. Previously disclosed ExxonMobil documents showed that after nearly 30 years of knowingly lying in its denials that climate change was happening, the company finally issued a statement in 2006 that climate change is real and burning fossil fuels is part of the cause.
But in the wake of that public acknowledgment, Rex Tillerson, the company’s CEO from 2006 to 2016, and other top executives continued to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about climate change. Tillerson told a leading Exxon researcher in 2011 that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warning about dire prospects in the absence of serious action was “not credible,” and said he was “dissatisfied” with the media’s take on worst-case climate scenarios. And, according to a Wall Street Journal article in September 2023, before the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, Tillerson told directors at a company board meeting that the treaty’s goal of keeping the global average temperature rise “well-below” 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) amounted to “something magical.” He added, “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough?” About which current ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told the Journal, “When taken out of context, it seems bad.”
Since the context is doing everything possible to keep the oil, gas, and profits flowing deep into the 22nd Century, yeah, it does seem bad.
Of Tuesday’s report House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky sneered at Democrats for “resuscitating their failed investigation from last Congress in an attempt to distract from the Biden Administration’s radical climate agenda.” That last meme is something the Republicans would like to enshrine alongside “tax-and-spend Democrats.” In fact, while the Democrats’ climate push is unprecedentedly large, it’s far from radical. The question that should be asked is whether it’s adequate to the task.
Here’s some points from the Executive Summary of the report:
Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science. In fall 2015, blockbuster reporting by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Big Oil companies such as Exxon knew that burning fossil fuels was a major contributor to climate change. Companies publicly rejected the reporting at the time, but new documents corroborate the reporting and show that fossil fuel companies internally did not dispute the findings but tried to dismiss them as “hyperbolic” and “journalistic malpractice.
”Big Oil’s deception campaign evolved from explicit denial of the basic scienceunderlying climate change to deception, disinformation, and doublespeak. The fossil fuel industry evolved from denying climate science to spreading disinformation and perpetuating doublespeak about the safety of natural gas and its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. [...]
The fossil fuel industry relies on trade associations to spread confusing and misleading narratives and to lobby against climate action. Fossil fuel companies use trade associations, think tanks, and other nonprofits to influence public policy proposals and messaging, including API and the Chamber, as well as the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, Natural Gas Supply Association, and Western States Petroleum Association. New emails between fossil fuel executives and these groups demonstrate how the companies influenced and leveraged the associations and other organizations to control their messaging and use them to lobby for unpopular proposals that they do not want to be associated with.
The fossil fuel industry strategically partners with universities to lend an aura of credibility to its deception campaigns while also silencing opposition voices. Fossil fuel companies establish funded partnerships with academic institutions to enhance their credibility, shape academic research programs to provide studies supportive of a prolonged life for oil and gas, leverage the resulting research to their advantage, and bolster access to policymakers. New documents reveal previously unknown funding levels and show how companies condition their funding on academics’ cooperation and alignment with companies’ business needs. Additional documents demonstrate that companies actively tracked individuals and organizations critical of the industry and monitored their social media.
All six entities—Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, API, and the Chamber—obstructed and delayed the Committees’ investigation. Despite valid subpoenas, the entities refused to fully comply with the investigation, making baseless legal arguments and flouting longstanding congressional practices and norms for investigations. The companies further obstructed the investigation by significantly redacting or entirely withholding more than 4,000 documents without any valid basis