A recently completed Senate investigation brought internal Oil company emails to light, proving at least, that at one time, Oil Barons had the decency to be ashamed of their plans for Terracide.
More recently, it seems they’ve been working on themselves, and been able to accept, acknowledge, and fully integrate their inner bloodthirsty xenomorphs.
Recent public statements be like, “Fuck yeah, we’re killing the planet. What are you gonna do about it?”
The tranche of subpoenaed communications were unveiled on Tuesday morning by Democrats on the House oversight committee before a Wednesday hearing.
“For decades, the fossil-fuel industry has known about the economic and climate harms of its products but has deceived the American public to keep collecting more than $600bn each year in subsidies while raking in record-breaking profits,” said Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, who chairs the committee.
The documents are part of an investigation launched in 2021 by the House committee on oversight and accountability, which disbanded when Republicans took control of the chamber in 2022.
“The evidence uncovered by oversight committee Democrats shows that big oil has run campaigns to confuse and mislead the public,” said Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, ranking member on the committee. “Today’s joint report demonstrates that big oil continues to conceal the facts about their business model and obscure the actual dangers of fossil fuels.”
The documents, summarized in a committee report, come from big oil firms Exxon, Shell, BP and Chevron, as well the lobbying organizations the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the US Chamber of Commerce. They date back to 30 November 2015 – just weeks before the signing of the Paris climate accord.
Most previous public documents illustrating big oil’s climate deception are from the 1960s and 1970s, said Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami associate professor who studies fossil-fuel industry messaging and will testify at Wednesday’s hearing.
“This is our best post-Paris agreement look at these companies’ ongoing duplicity,” he said.
The new revelations build on 2015 reporting from Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, which found that Exxon was for decades aware of the dangers of the climate crisis, yet hid that from the public.
At the time, Exxon publicly rejected the journalists’ findings outright, calling them “inaccurate and deliberately misleading.” And when questioned by the House oversight committee in 2021, Exxon chief executive Darren Woods said he did “not agree that there was an inconsistency” between what Exxon told the public and what Exxon scientists were warning privately.
But in internal communications, Exxon confirmed the validity of the reporting. In a December 2015 email about a potential public response to the investigative reporting, Exxon communications advisor Pamela Kevelson admitted the company did not “dispute much of what these stories report”.
Discussing a draft opinion piece the following year, Exxon again confirmed the reporters’ findings. “It’s true that Inside Climate News originally accused us of working against science but ultimately modified their accusation to working against policies meant to stop climate change,” Alan Jeffers, then a spokesperson for Exxon, wrote in a 2016 email to Kevelson. “I’m OK either way, since they were both true at one time or another.”
More recently, seems like Oil execs have been doing some kind of primal therapy and acknowledged their inner bloodthirsty xenomorph.
To some, it felt like the oil executive blurted the quiet part out loud.
“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” said Amin Nasser, head of what is, by far, the world’s biggest oil producer, Saudi Aramco.
The energy transition was “visibly failing,” he added, saying that predictions of impending peak oil and gas demand were flatly wrong. The room, full of representatives of the fossil-fuel industry at a conference in Houston, greeted the statement with applause.
Mr. Nasser’s comments spoke to the starkly divergent visions of what role fossil fuels will play in the global economy over the coming decades. The burning of fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change.
The oil industry maintains that its products, namely petroleum and natural gas, will play a dominant role for decades to come. And it is investing in new development, particularly in gas, with that in mind.
On the other hand, the International Energy Agency, regarded as one of the foremost authorities on that question, projects that oil and gas demand will peak by 2030 as renewable energy and electric vehicle sales grow exponentially, spurred by incentives and subsidies. Just a few months ago, at the biggest annual climate summit, negotiators from nearly all the world’s nations agreed to transition “away from fossil fuels.”
In an interview with the Times last year, Fatih Birol, the I.E.A.’s executive director, said he thought the likes of Mr. Nasser weren’t seeing the whole picture. “I have a gentle suggestion to oil executives, they only talk among themselves,” he said. “They should talk to car manufacturers, to the heat pump industry, to the renewable industry, to investors, and see what they all think the future of energy looks like.”
However Mr. Nasser, in his Texas speech this week, suggested that the I.E.A. was the one misreading the markets by focusing too heavily on rich countries and ignoring the enormous surge in demand for energy expected across countries in Asia and Africa that are just beginning to industrialize.
His retort was, essentially, to ask if the I.E.A. thought oil and gas companies were throwing their money away by collectively investing trillions of dollars in increasing exploration, drilling and infrastructure. “Peak oil and gas are unlikely for sometime to come, let alone 2030,” said Mr. Nasser, speaking at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference. “It seems no one is betting the farm on that.”
While they spoke less bluntly at the conference, the C.E.O.s of Shell, Exxon Mobil and Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, echoed Mr. Nasser’s points. In an interview with the Times earlier this month, Petrobras’ C.E.O., Jean Paul Prates, said he saw Brazil’s oil production increasing for decades to come.
Shell’s C.E.O., Wael Sawan, said his predictions hinged on rapidly growing Asian markets. That same analysis underpins projections made last year by OPEC, the global oil cartel, that oil demand wouldn’t peak until 2045 at the earliest.
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 science
underlying 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.
Exxon is one of a number of companies in one of a number of countries that works at extracting a commodity that is absolutely essential to civilization. It’s not its job to put itself out of business. And what exactly did it know that governments spending billions and billions with the backing of politicians, environmental NGOs and international busybody controller wannabes don’t?
Exactly!
People whining about my very profitable chain of meth labs should keep their hands off my private, job-creating, politician-buying business!