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    Exxon CEO accused of lying about climate science to congressional panel

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    Climate crimesEnvironmentExxon CEO accused of lying about climate science to congressional panelCongresswoman Carolyn Maloney likens oil company bosses’ responses to those of tobacco industry at historic hearing Supported byAbout this contentChris McGrealThu 28 Oct 2021 17.05 EDTFirst published on Thu 28 Oct 2021 16.33 EDTThe chief executive of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, was accused of lying to Congress on Thursday after he denied that the company covered up its own research about oil’s contribution to the climate crisis.For the first time, Woods and the heads of three other major petroleum companies were questioned under oath at a congressional hearing into the industry’s long campaign to discredit and deny the evidence that burning fossil fuels drove global heating. When pressed to make specific pledges or to stop lobbying against climate initiatives, all four executives declined.Joe Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coalRead moreThe chair of the House oversight committee, Representative Carolyn Maloney, pressed Woods about statements by his predecessor, Exxon CEO Lee Raymond, who in the 1990s said the scientific evidence for climate change was “inconclusive” and that “the case for global warming is far from air tight”. In 2002, Exxon ran advertisements in the New York Times calling climate science “unsettled”.Malone put it to Woods that Exxon’s own scientists had repeatedly warned the company about the threat from burning fossil fuels as far back as the 1970s.“There is a clear conflict between what Exxon CEO told the public and what Exxon scientists were warning privately for years,” she said.Woods denied that Raymond or Exxon misled anyone.“I do not agree that there was an inconsistency,” he said.Maloney said the response reminded her of “another hearing that we had with the tobacco industry”.“They said they did not believe that nicotine was addictive. Well, it came out that they lied. Tobacco nicotine was very addictive. And now I’m hearing from you that the science that was reported publicly, where your executives were denying climate change, we know that your scientists internally were saying that it’s a reality,” she said.“So I was hoping that you would not be like the tobacco industry was and lie about this.”The heads of the American operations of the other oil companies – Shell, Chevron and BP – were also firm in resisting pressure to admit they misrepresented climate science or deceived the public.They each said that they recognised global heating was a reality and a major challenge. But the executives did not accept that their companies had failed to take it seriously or that they were undermining attempts to cut greenhouse gases by funding trade groups pouring millions of dollars into lobbying Congress against tighter environmental laws.“We accept the scientific consensus,” said Michael Wirth, the CEO of Chevron. “Climate change is real. Any suggestion that Chevron is engaged in disinformation and to mislead the public on these complex issues is simply wrong.”But Maloney accused the oil companies of continuing the cover-up, including by hiding documents. She said she would take the unusual step of issuing subpoenas to force the firms to reveal what they knew.“We need to get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign and with these subpoenas we will,” she said.The oil and gas industry, which spent about $100m on political lobbying last year, was strongly backed by a number of Republicans on the committee who sought to distract by denouncing Joe Biden’s energy policies.Republicans called their own witness, Neal Crabtree, who said he lost his job as a welder within three hours of Biden being sworn in as president because the Keystone pipeline was cancelled. Crabtree was used to portray Biden as colluding with China and Russia against America’s oil industry.The highest-ranking Republican on the committee, Representative James Comer, questioned the legitimacy of the investigation. He said the committee would be better off spending its time investigating the White House’s handling of inflation, illegal immigration and the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan.In a hearing meant to focus on climate misinformation, several Republican members openly questioned the urgency of the climate crisis. Representative Clay Higgins called the hearing “a threat from within” because the American way of life was built on oil.Another Republican member said Maloney owed the oil executives an apology for intruding on their right to free speech by pressing them to make a commitment that their firms will “no longer spend any money, either directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change”.None of the executives would make a direct commitment.Maloney showed the hearing a video secretly recorded by Greenpeace earlier this year of an Exxon lobbyist describing the oil giant’s backing for a carbon tax as a public relations ploy intended to stall more serious measures to combat the climate crisis.“How did Exxon respond?” asked Maloney. “Did they come clean about this shocking conduct? No. Mr Woods called Mr McCoy’s comments inaccurate and then they fired him. And they are obviously lying like the tobacco executives were.”While the oil executives largely maintained a united front, Representative Ro Khanna, a leading critic of the petroleum industry on the committee, drew out testimony that showed the European companies, Shell and BP, were working to cut production while the US firms, Exxon and Chevron, intended to increase drilling in the coming years.Wirth said that his company would raise oil production while cutting carbon admissions.The hearing also questioned the leaders of two powerful lobby groups accused of acting as front organisations for big oil, the American Petroleum Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce.Khanna noted that API was heavily funded by oil company money as it resisted the expansion of infrastructure for electric vehicles and opposed a methane fee backed by Biden, including flooding Facebook with advertisements in recent months.Khanna challenged each of the oil executives in turn to resign from API over its position on electric vehicles or to tell it to stop its opposition to a methane fee. All of them declined to do so.TopicsEnvironmentClimate crimesExxonMobilBPRoyal Dutch ShellChevronOil and gas companiesOilnewsReuse this content More

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      Oil executives face ‘turning point’ US congressional hearing on climate crisis

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      Climate crimesUS CongressOil executives face ‘turning point’ US congressional hearing on climate crisisThe heads of top US oil companies will answer accusations that their firms have spent years lying about the climate crisis Supported byAbout this contentChris McGrealThu 28 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 28 Oct 2021 03.01 EDTThe heads of major oil companies will make a historic appearance before Congress on Thursday to answer accusations that their firms have spent years lying about the climate crisis.For the first time, the top executives from the US’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, as well as Shell, Chevron and BP will be questioned under oath about the industry’s long campaign to discredit and deny the evidence that burning fossil fuels drove global heating.The dirty dozen: meet America’s top climate villainsRead moreA leading critic of the petroleum industry behind the hearing by the House oversight committee, Representative Ro Khanna, said the executives’ testimony has the potential to be as significant as the 1994 congressional hearing at which the heads of the big tobacco companies were confronted with the question of whether they knew nicotine was addictive.They denied it and that lie opened the door to years of litigation which resulted in a $206bn settlement against the cigarette makers.Khanna told the Guardian that the oil company chiefs face a similar moment of reckoning.“They’ve got a very tricky balance. They either have to admit certain wrongdoing or they run the risk of lying under oath. If I were them, I would come in with more of a mea culpa approach and acknowledge what they’ve done wrong,” he said.“It’ll be a turning point for them. It could be the big tobacco moment. We’ve never had a situation where the big oil executives have to answer under oath for their company’s behaviour.”Khanna said that he wanted Americans to take away the message from the hearing that the oil companies “knew they lied” about the climate emergency.The CEOs, who have opted to testify by video, are Darren Woods of Exxon, David Lawler of BP American, Michael Wirth of Chevron and the president of Shell, Gretchen Watkins.The leaders of two powerful lobby groups accused of acting as front organisations for big oil, the American Petroleum Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce, will also testify.Khanna said the oil chiefs will be confronted with evidence of a persistent and coordinated cover-up, including documents that have not been made public before.“The documents confirm the misinformation and deception that they’ve engaged in in the past explicitly, and that they continue to engage in through third parties,” he said. “The record is so clear that they will be risking perjuring themselves if they deny the record.”But the hearing will also be a test for whether the oil industry’s critics can back up their claims of a sprawling conspiracy by the fossil fuel companies to block action on the climate emergency – an accusation also made in dozens of lawsuits by US states, municipalities and private organisations.Geoffrey Supran, a research associate at Harvard’s department of history of science and co-author of a groundbreaking study of Exxon’s communications on the climate crisis, said the oil executives are well-practiced at sidestepping responsibility.“This will be a challenging hearing. This is a situation where the historical record is incontrovertible but the climate denial machine has been like a sprawling, well-oiled, well-funded network for decades,” he said. “Given the range of actors and tactics involved, asking the right questions at the right time, having the right documents at your fingertips to pin them into a corner is tricky.”The hearings follow the release of a growing body of evidence that the oil industry knew about and covered up the growing threat from burning fossil fuels for decades. That includes a raft of Exxon documents held at the University of Texas, and uncovered by the Columbia Journalism School and the Los Angeles Times in 2015.In 1979, a study by Exxon’s own scientists concluded that burning fossil fuels “will cause dramatic environmental effects” in the coming decades. It called the issue “great and urgent”.Exxon’s response to that and similar warnings was to shut down research into global heating and to go on a public relations offensive to discredit climate science as no more than a theory, and to shift responsibility on to consumers.In 2019, Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, told a congressional hearing that his climate modelling for Exxon in the 1980s showed that burning fossil fuels was “increasingly having a perceptible influence on Earth’s climate”.Meanwhile the company was pushing a different narrative.“Exxon was publicly promoting views that its own scientists knew were wrong, and we knew that because we were the major group working on this. This was immoral and has greatly set back efforts to address climate change,” said Hoffert.Other oil firms face similar accusations alongside trade groups and thinktanks they funded to deny climate science.This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate storyTopicsUS CongressClimate crimesExxonMobilRoyal Dutch ShellChevronBPOilUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him

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      Climate crimesClimate crisisA US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him The mayor of Imperial Beach, California, says big oil wants him to drop the lawsuit demanding the industry pay for the climate crisisSupported byAbout this contentChris McGreal in Imperial BeachSat 16 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTSerge Dedina is a surfer, environmentalist and mayor of Imperial Beach, a small working-class city on the California coast.He is also, if the fossil fuel industry is to be believed, at the heart of a conspiracy to shake down big oil for hundreds of millions of dollars.Imperial Beach, CaliforniaExxonMobil and its allies have accused Dedina of colluding with other public officials across California to extort money from the fossil-fuel industry. Lawyers even searched his phone and computer for evidence he plotted with officials from Santa Cruz, a city located nearly 500 miles north of Imperial Beach.The problem is, Dedina had never heard of a Santa Cruz conspiracy. Few people had.“The only thing from Santa Cruz on my phone was videos of my kids surfing there,” Dedina said. “I love the fact that some lawyer in a really expensive suit, sitting in some horrible office trying to find evidence that we were in some kind of conspiracy with Santa Cruz, had to look at videos of my kids surfing.”That’s where the laughter stopped.The lawyers found no evidence to back up their claim. But that did not stop the industry from continuing to use its legal muscle to try to intimidate Dedina, who leads one of the poorest small cities in the region.The mayor became a target after Imperial Beach filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and more than 30 other fossil-fuel companies demanding they pay the huge costs of defending the city from rising seas caused by the climate crisis.Imperial Beach’s lawsuit alleges the oil giants committed fraud by covering up research showing that burning fossil fuels destroys the environment. The industry then lied about the evidence for climate change for decades, deliberately delaying efforts to curb carbon emissions.The city’s lawsuit was among the first of a wave of litigation filed by two dozen municipalities and states across the US that could cost the fossil-fuel industry billions of dollars in compensation for the environmental devastation and the deception.Dedina says his minority majority community of about 27,000 cannot begin to afford the tens of millions of dollars it will cost to keep at bay the waters bordering three sides of his financially strapped city. The worst of recent storms have turned Imperial Beach into an island.One assessment calculated that, without expensive mitigation measures, rising sea levels will eventually swamp some of the city’s neighbourhoods, routinely flood its two schools and overwhelm its drainage system.Imperial Beach’s annual budget is $20m. Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, was paid more than $15m last year.“We don’t have a pot to piss in in this city. So why not go after the oil companies?” he said. “The lawsuit is a pragmatic approach to making the people that caused sea level rise pay for the impacts it has on our city.”InteractiveThat’s not how Exxon, the US’s largest oil company, saw it. Its lawyers noted that Imperial Beach filed its case in July 2017, at the same time as two California counties, Marin and San Mateo. The county and city of Santa Cruz followed six months later with similar suits seeking compensation to cope with increasing wildfires and drought caused by global heating.Exxon alleged that the sudden burst of litigation, and the fact that the municipalities shared a law firm specialising in environmental cases, Sher Edling, was evidence of collusion.Exxon filed lawsuits claiming the municipalities conspired to extort money from the company by following a strategy developed during an environmental conference at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, 25 miles north of Imperial Beach, nine years ago.The meeting, organised by the Climate Accountability Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists, produced a report outlining how legal strategies used by US states against the tobacco industry in the 1990s could be applied to cases against fossil fuel companies.Dedina was also targeted by one of the US’s biggest business groups at the forefront of industry resistance to increased regulation to reduce greenhouse gases, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a rightwing thinktank, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.The manufacturing trade group was behind the efforts to obtain data from Dedina’s phone and documents in 2018. In its public disclosure request to the mayor’s office, NAM called Imperial Beach’s lawsuit “litigation based on political or ideological objections more appropriately addressed through the political process”.Exxon is attempting to use a Texas law that allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence by questioning individuals under oath even before any legal action is filed against them. The company is trying to force Dedina, two other members of Imperial Beach’s government, and officials from other jurisdictions, to submit to questioning on the grounds they were joined in a conspiracy against the oil industry.“A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change,” the oil firm claimed. “ExxonMobil finds itself directly in that conspiracy’s crosshairs.”How cities and states could finally hold fossil fuel companies accountableRead moreA Texas district judge approved the request to depose Dedina, but then a court of appeals overturned the decision last year. The state supreme court is considering whether to take up the case.The target on Dedina is part of a wider pattern of retaliation against those suing Exxon and other oil companies.In an unusual move in 2016, Exxon persuaded a Texas judge to order the attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to travel to Dallas to be deposed about her motives for investigating the company for alleged fraud for suppressing evidence on climate change. The judge also ordered that New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, be “available” in Dallas on the same day in case Exxon wanted to question him about a similar investigation.Healey accused Exxon of trying to “squash the prerogative of state attorneys general to do their jobs”. The judge reversed the deposition order a month later and Healey filed a lawsuit against the company in 2019, which is still awaiting trial.But similar tactics persuaded the US Virgin Islands attorney general to shut down his investigation of the oil giant.Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, said the attempt to question Dedina and other officials is part of a broader strategy by the oil industry to counter lawsuits with its own litigation.“These cases are frivolous and vexatious. Intimidation is the goal. Just making it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon. They think that if they make the case painful enough, Imperial Beach will quit,” he said.If the intent is to kill off the litigation against the oil industry, it’s not working. Officials from other municipalities have called Exxon’s move “repugnant”, “a sham” and “outrageous”, and have vowed to press on with their lawsuits.Dedina described the action as a “bullying tactic” by the oil industry to avoid accountability.“The only conspiracy is [that] a bunch of suits and fossil-fuel companies decided to pollute the earth and make climate change worse, and then lie about it,” he said. “They make more money than our entire city has in a year.”The city’s lawsuit claims it faces a “significant and dangerous sea-level rise” through the rest of this century that threatens its existence. Imperial Beach commissioned an analysis of its vulnerability to rising sea levels which concluded that nearly 700 homes and businesses were threatened at a cost of more than $100m. It said that flooding will hit about 40% of the city’s roads, including some that will be under water for long periods. Two elementary schools will have to be moved. The city’s beach, regarded as one of the best sites for surfing on the California coast, is being eroded by about a foot a year.Imperial Beach sits at the southern end of San Diego bay. Under one worst-case scenario, the bay could merge with the Tijuana River estuary to the south and permanently submerge much of the city’s housing and roads.The city has received some help with creating natural climate barriers. The Fish and Wildlife Service restored 400 acres of wetland next to the city as a national wildlife refuge which also acts as a barrier to flooding, and is expected to restore other wetlands together with the Port of San Diego. A grant is paying for improved equipment to warn of floods.But that still leaves the huge costs of building new schools and drainage systems, and adapting other infrastructure. Dedina said that without the oil companies stumping up, it won’t happen.“People ask, how did you go against the world’s largest fossil fuel companies? Isn’t that scary? No. What’s scary is coastal flooding and the idea that whole cities would be under water,” said the mayor.“Honestly, bring it on. I can’t wait to make our case. I can’t wait to take the fight to them because we have nothing to lose.”This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate storyTopicsClimate crisisClimate crimesCaliforniaUS politicsExxonMobilOil and gas companiesFossil fuelsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Exxon and BP called to testify on climate after ‘troubling’ new documents

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      Climate crimesExxonMobilExxon and BP called to testify on climate after ‘troubling’ new documentsCongressman calls documents related to the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to discredit climate science ‘very concerning’ Supported byAbout this contentChris McGrealThu 16 Sep 2021 11.13 EDTLast modified on Thu 16 Sep 2021 14.59 EDTUS congressional investigators say they have uncovered “very concerning” new documents about ExxonMobil’s disinformation campaign to discredit climate science.Representative Ro Khanna, a leading critic of the petroleum industry on the House oversight committee, said the documents came to light ahead of a hearing next month to question the heads of large oil companies about their industry’s long history of undermining the evidence that burning fossil fuels drove global heating.Khanna declined to discuss the information beyond describing it as “very troubling facts and some very concerning documents”.On Thursday, the House oversight committee sent out letters summoning the heads of four firms – Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP – to testify on 28 October.The letter to Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, said the “fossil fuel industry has reaped massive profits” while devastating communities, ravaging the natural world and costing taxpayers billions of dollars.“We are also concerned that to protect those profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change,” the letter said.The hearings follow a secret recording of an Exxon lobbyist earlier this year describing the oil giant’s backing for a carbon tax as a public relations ploy intended to stall more serious measures to combat the climate crisis.“The big oil companies owe the American people an explanation,” said Khanna, a California Democrat who chairs the environmental subcommittee. “They need to admit what they’ve done on climate misinformation in the past, they need to acknowledge what they’re currently doing in terms of spending dark money, and they need to commit 100% that they’re going to stop any climate disinformation campaign.”The congressman said it was “unbelievable” that oil industry leaders have yet to face questioning by Congress about the climate crisis. He likened the hearings to the groundbreaking appearance of seven tobacco company chiefs before Congress in 1994 to expose what the cigarette companies knew about the hazards of smoking. He said the oversight committee is currently being advised by some of those involved in those hearings.Khanna said he wants to hear from the leaders of the oil giants not only about past actions but their continued funding of front groups and thinktanks spreading disinformation about climate science, the covert funding of denialist advertising and the use of lobby groups to oppose green legislation.“The magnifying glass is particularly important now so that they don’t interfere with the Congress’s agenda to get all kinds of legislation. We will not tackle the climate crisis successfully if we don’t first put an end to climate disinformation,” he said.The committee is also requesting that the heads of two major trade groups closely aligned with the oil industry, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the US Chamber of Commerce, answer questions about their role in the coverup.Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, is suing API, alleging that it “engaged in a public-relations campaign that was not only false, but also highly effective” to undermine climate science.Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse told the Guardian earlier this year that API was acting as a front for the industry by allowing oil firms to claim they were committed to addressing climate change while API lobbied against green policies in Congress. Whitehouse accused API of “lying on a massive industrial scale”.In 1998, after countries signed the Kyoto Protocol to help curb carbon emissions, API drew up a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to ensure that “climate change becomes a non-issue”. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.Similarly, the US Chamber of Commerce has helped downplay the climate crisis and oppose legislation to curb greenhouse emissions.In 2015, the Columbia Journalism School and the Los Angeles Times uncovered a raft of Exxon documents held at the University of Texas that showed the company worked to undermine climate science by promoting denialism.Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate”.This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate storyTopicsExxonMobilClimate crimesBPRoyal Dutch ShellChevronOilUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More