On the last day of June, an entire village in Canada was engulfed in a wildfire after the country recorded its highest temperature ever. That same day, Greenpeace UK's investigative team published a striking tape of two Exxon senior employees' candid accounts of the fossil fuel industry's surreptitious lobbying efforts to undermine climate action.
ExxonMobil and other major oil and gas companies have long been deceiving the public about the catastrophic dangers of their products in order to undermine international and national climate policy and maintain their social license. This latest tape is a significant contribution to mounting evidence of the industry's ongoing disinformation campaign in the service of protecting its highly lucrative and planet-destroying business, particularly at this pivotal moment.
On the tape, the lobbyists detail how the industry is currently applying its deceptive tactics to wipe climate initiatives out of President Joe Biden's original $2 trillion infrastructure proposal. Although many suspected such interference, we now have first-hand confirmation from an industry insider who is apparently playing a leading role in the effort. (In response to the interviews, ExxonMobil posted a statement on its website denying that the lobbyists' comments represented the company's "position on a variety of issues, including climate policy.")
The lobbyists' accounts deconstruct the industry's deceptive tactics to pollute public discourse with disinformation about the climate emergency and the appropriate response. They can — and must — inform and empower our response going forward.
How so? Let's look at a recent example of the industry's purported climate initiatives in light of the insight into its disinformation tactics provided by Keith McCoy, a senior lobbyist for Exxon, and Dan Easley, the company's chief White House lobbyist during the Obama and Trump administrations. (Easley left Exxon in January.)
At the end of June, the American Petroleum Institute (API), the largest U.S. oil and gas trade association — and the mouthpiece for oil and gas companies — announced what it characterized as "the next step in its efforts to accelerate climate solutions."
In the interview, McCoy pointed to another one of the industry's purported climate initiatives: recent support for a carbon tax. "Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans," he said, "and the cynical side of me says, 'Yeah, we kind of know that,' but it gives us a talking point that we can say, 'Well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we're for a carbon tax.' "
API's latest "climate solution" is similarly fossil fuel industry code for: "Real climate solutions might be in the works, so let's throw a wrench into the process by claiming we're doing something about it." What's the wrench this time? A "voluntary" template for oil and gas companies to report their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
API's template leaves out "Scope 3" emissions, which result from combustion of a company's fossil fuel products (by, for example, using air conditioners in life-threatening heat waves of a climate-disrupted world). Instead, API's template holds oil and gas companies responsible only for emissions caused by fossil fuel emissions resulting from their operations. In this misleading frame, the industry is just one of many consumers of fossil fuel products — not the supplier of them that it in fact is. Notably, the World Resources Institute offers a template designed to "help companies prepare a GHG inventory that represents a true and fair account of their emissions," and it includes Scope 3 emissions.
It's no surprise that Exxon and other major fossil fuel companies would want to provide a false account of their emissions, as it allows them to obscure their role in fueling the climate crisis. Their Scope 3 emissions account for 85 to 95 percent of their total emissions. As Richard Heede, director of the Climate Accountability Institute, found in his groundbreaking report on the issue, the top four investor-owned firms — Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Shell — are responsible for 11 percent of total global emissions from 1965 to 2018. Exxon — the second-ranking investor-owned company on Heede's list — is alone responsible for 3 percent of global emissions.
"These companies and their products are substantially responsible for the climate emergency, have collectively delayed national and global action for decades, and can no longer hide behind the smokescreen that consumers are the responsible parties," Heede concluded.
What would laws that hold fossil fuel companies responsible for "a true and fair account of their emissions" as the fossil fuel suppliers that they are look like? They would impose strong supply-side measures to accelerate the transition to clean energy, including prohibiting new fossil fuel projects and abolishing government subsidies to the industry. In other words, precisely the sort of legislative measures that, as McCoy indicated, the industry has long sought to derail using shadow groups and associations like the API. After all, strong supply-side measures, as former Exxon lobbyist Easley said, "will be difficult for oil and gas" companies because they would "accelerate the transition to the extent that, I think, four years from now it's going to be difficult to unwind that."
Strong supply-side measures are, of course, exactly what we need if we're going to have any hope of living in our new climate reality.
Unlike the law, we can't unwind a disrupted climate. We may be able to mitigate the disruption to improve our chance of adapting to a new climate reality, but only if we act now to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. As horrifying heatwaves and wildfires make painfully clear, attempts by the industry and its political backers to prevent these life-saving measures with ongoing dissemination of disinformation is nothing short of cruel.
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Karen Sokol | July 22, 2021
On the last day of June, an entire village in Canada was engulfed in a wildfire after the country recorded its highest temperature ever. That same day, Greenpeace UK's investigative team published a striking tape of two Exxon senior employees' candid accounts of the fossil fuel industry's surreptitious lobbying efforts to undermine climate action.
Joel A. Mintz | July 22, 2021
Recent events have dramatized the urgent need for prompt and bold action to respond to climate change. Raging rivers in Germany and Belgium, unheard of "heat domes" over large sections of North America, and uncontrolled wildfires and flooding around the globe, have made it absolutely clear that humankind must quickly limit the emission of greenhouse gases and adapt to the increasingly calamitous consequences of climate disruption. In view of this situation, what is and ought to be the substance of environmental leadership?
James Goodwin | July 21, 2021
The Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently seeking public input on its efforts to revamp an important Clean Air Act program called the Risk Management Plan (RMP) rule for facilities that produce, store, or use large amounts of dangerous chemicals. It is meant to prevent catastrophes -- like the 2017 Arkema explosion in Crosby, Texas -- which not only put human lives and health in danger (especially for the communities of color that are disproportionately overrepresented in the shadows of these facilities), but also cause costly disruption for local economies.
David Driesen | July 20, 2021
Environmentalists have complained for years about presidential control of the administrative agencies charged with protecting the environment, seeing it as a way of thwarting proper administration of environmentally protective laws. But the U.S. Supreme Court in two recent decisions -- Seila Law v. CFPB and Collins v. Yellen -- made presidential control over administrative agencies a constitutional requirement (with limited and unstable exceptions) by embracing the unitary executive theory, which views administrative agencies as presidential lackeys. My new book, The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power, shows that the unitary executive theory is not only bad for environmental policy, but a threat to democracy’s survival, upon which environmental policy and all other sensible policy depends.
Colin Hughes | July 19, 2021
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan recently announced that $50 million from the American Rescue Plan will go toward environmental justice programs at the agency. This award will be accompanied by another $50 million to enhance air quality monitoring to target health disparities. This funding will double the amount of grant dollars for EPA’s environmental justice programs by adding $16.7 million in grants and funding for other programs such as school bus electrification, expanded environmental enforcement, and drinking water safety improvements.
Alina Gonzalez, Minor Sinclair | July 15, 2021
President Joe Biden is breaking the status quo: He has pledged to write a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change. Unlike any other president, he has outlined specific and aggressive targets to reduce carbon emissions and has backed them up with a $2 trillion plan to fight climate change. In the meantime, our climate continues to change rapidly and dramatically, raising the ever more urgent question: Will the politics of climate change shift in time to curb its worst effects, including in states like Georgia? We think it will.
Karen Sokol | July 13, 2021
"When you are at the verge of the abyss, you must be very careful about your next step, because if the next step is in the wrong direction, you will fall." So warned United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in a recent interview on NBC Nightly News. He was calling on the world's wealthiest nations to meet their obligations under the Paris climate accords to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and to help developing countries to transition and to adapt to threats that can no longer be averted. Wealthy nations simply must meet these obligations to achieve the Paris goal of holding global temperature rise to a sustainable level.
Minor Sinclair | July 8, 2021
Executive Director Minor Sinclair welcomes three new board members to the Center for Progressive Reform and highlights their diverse, critical voices and perspectives.
Darya Minovi, David Flores | July 7, 2021
Four years ago, Hurricane Harvey slammed into the coast of Texas, causing severe flooding in the Houston area and leading to a loss of electrical power throughout the region. During the blackout, a local chemical plant lost its ability to keep volatile chemicals stored onsite cool, and a secondary disaster ensued: A series of explosions endangered the lives of workers and first responders and spurred mass evacuations of nearby residents. This infamous incident was a classic "double disaster" — a natural disaster, like a storm or earthquake, followed by a technical disaster, like a chemical release or explosion. These events pose a severe and growing threat to public and environmental health — and to workers in particular, who are hurt "first and worst." Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been injured, killed, or forced to shelter in place or evacuate in the wake of such disasters in recent decades, and countless others have been needlessly exposed to toxic pollution. Today, the Center for Progressive Reform published a policy brief with Earthjustice and the Union of Concerned Scientists, which contains recommendations to EPA on how to address this problem.
