Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Sparks

The Best Idea From Today’s Big Oil Hearing

Stealing a page from the Big Tobacco playbook.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

It was always a fantasy to think that the Senate Committee on the Budget’s hearing on oil disinformation would actually be about oil disinformation. It was still shocking, though, how far off the rails things ran.

The hearing concerned a report released Tuesday by the committee along with Democrats in the House documenting “the extensive efforts undertaken by fossil fuel companies to deceive the public and investors about their knowledge of the effects of their products on climate change and to undermine efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.” This builds on the already extensive literature documenting the fossil fuel industry’s deliberate dissemination of lies about climate change and its role in causing it, including the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt and a 2015 Pulitzer Prize-nominated series from Inside Climate News on Exxon’s climate denial PR machine. But more, of course, is more.

The new stuff in the joint congressional report includes evidence that fossil fuel companies accepted the validity of climate research internally while publicly attacking it, and that they hailed technologies like carbon capture and algae-based fuels while privately doubting they would ever achieve meaningful scale. The report also details how all six entities it investigated — fossil fuel companies Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP, plus the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — slow-walked the investigation, providing redacted documents in response to subpoenas and withholding others altogether.

“If the companies had fully complied in good faith,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the House committee’s ranking Democrat, in his prepared remarks, “who knows what else we might have uncovered?”

The thing about these kinds of political exercises is that, well, they’re political. While there is indisputable value in investigating and recording the industry’s misdeeds, a congressional hearing is no venue for the earnest pursuit of truth.

The various members of the Senate Budget Committee took turns yanking Raskin off-message — and that included the Democrats. Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, went into full denial mode, speaking of “climate change alarmism” and concluding that “there’s literally nothing we can do about this other than adapt.” When Sen. Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, had his turn, however, he subjected Raskin to volleys of questions about forest fires and plastics, neither of which were a subject of the (to be clear, extensive) committee report.

My personal favorite moment in the hearing came after the break, when Raskin gave way to a panel of energy policy and disinformation experts including Sharon Eubanks, who led the Department of Justice case against Big Tobacco. In her opening statement, Eubanks stated plainly and clearly an idea she and others (both outside and inside the federal government) have been propounding for years.

“The similarities between the conduct of the tobacco industry and the petroleum industry form a solid and appropriate basis for investigating the petroleum industry,” she read into the congressional record. “Furthermore, we should not waste any more time wringing our hands about what can be done. There exists solid evidentiary basis to move forward with a request to the Department of Justice to investigate the actions of the fossil fuel industry.”

But that’s not even the good part.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was midway through a line of questioning about how such a prosecution might go down when he stumbled a bit asking about the damages paid in the tobacco case. “I don’t remember exactly what the settlement for tobacco was — it was huge,” he said, when Eubanks cut in.

"It wasn’t a settlement. I won,” she told Sanders. “The companies were forced to change the way they do business." And that, she went on to say, is the point of all this — not extracting money, although that’s nice too, but rather to force companies to operate in a more open and honest fashion.

The companies, for their part, are unsurprisingly unruffled by this latest demonstration of their deceitful behavior. “These are tired allegations that have already been publicly addressed through previous Congressional hearings on the same topic and litigation in the courts,” an Exxon spokesperson told Bloomberg yesterday. “As we have said time and time again, climate change is real.”

In one thing, at least, Exxon isn’t wrong: These allegations are tired. I myself am not a lawyer, of course, but it might be time to listen to Eubanks. She seems to know what she’s talking about.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Sparks

Exclusive: New York’s $32 Million Induction Stove Contest Has a Winner

Berkeley-based Copper was selected to supply 10,000 stoves to the New York City Housing Authority.

A Copper stove.
Heatmap Illustration/Copper

Last year, New York City went shopping for 10,000 induction stoves so it could ditch gas in its public housing. Now it's ready to make a purchase.

The New York Power Authority and NYC Housing Authority have selected Copper, a Berkeley, California-based startup that was formerly known as Channing Street Copper Company, as the winner of their Induction Stove Challenge, Heatmap has learned. The agencies are planning to award the company a $32 million, seven-year contract to design, prototype, test, and install its stoves in apartments throughout the city.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Sparks

SCOTUS Says Biden’s Power Plant Rules Can Stay — For Now

They may not survive a full challenge, though.

The Supreme Court.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.

The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

What Happens to a Landfill in a Hurricane?

The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.

A hurricane and a landfill.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?

No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”

Keep reading...Show less
Blue