Climate: US oil giants under fire from elected Democrats

Published on : 10/29/2021 – 07:56

ExxonMobil, Chevron or BP: the American oil giants found themselves in the hot seat Thursday, October 28 in Washington in the face of Democratic parliamentarians accusing them of having long sought to hide the effects of their activities on the climate and wondering about the sincerity of their efforts to reduce emissions.

“Some of us are going to have to live in the world you are setting on fire,” said the popular New York elected, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “We don’t have the privilege or the luxury of sticking to lobbyists’ communication.”

ExxonMobil and Chevron bosses, as well as Shell and BP representatives in the United States, defended their positions for six hours.

The public statements of their leaders have evolved as scientific advances on the subject, they asserted. And they have stepped up investments in alternative energies in recent years.

But they also did not want to commit to cutting ties with the powerful federation of the API sector, which is active to counter certain environmental measures. Or, in the case of ExxonMobil and Chevron, cut back on their oil and gas production.

Statements that do not convince

“ExxonMobil has long recognized that climate change is real and poses serious risks, but there are no easy answers,” said Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil.

“The undeniable reality is that oil and gas are still necessary to meet energy needs,” said Michael Wirth, head of Chevron.

Those responses did not seem to satisfy Democratic representatives, who compared this hearing to that of tobacco industry bosses in the 1990s, who at the time refused to acknowledge that nicotine was addictive.

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Certainly the oil giants recognize “finally” the reality of climate change and the urgency to act, underlined the president of the commission at the origin of the hearing, Carolyn Maloney.

But it is “disappointing” that the leaders “refuse to take responsibility for a disinformation campaign (…) which has lasted for decades” and “refuse to stop funding” groups like the API, a- she added. It issued injunctions to force the oil majors to release certain documents.

Republican elected officials, for their part, mainly attacked the measures taken by US President Joe Biden in favor of the environment, such as the abandonment of the Keystone XL pipeline project, linking them to the recent rise in oil prices. energy or accusing them of destroying jobs.

Lobbying

According to a memo prepared for the occasion by Democrats, oil groups are spending only a fraction of their lobbying on climate change, even though they officially claim to have made it a priority.

They mostly seem to be making these statements “to strengthen their public image while continuing to produce billions of barrels of fossil fuels and invest in new oil and gas extractions,” the report says.

The hearing was in part organized following the release by the NGO Greenpeace in June of a video showing an ExxonMobil official claiming that it was easy for the company to publicly support a carbon tax as it was unlikely to be truly adopted.

According to the report, less than 0.4% of official interventions by oil lobbyists in the United States over the past decade were related to carbon pricing. More than half were intended to reduce their taxes.

The document also finds that companies tend to overdo their efforts to reduce their emissions.

Faced with growing pressure from public opinion and investors demanding more frank action, the majors have in fact stepped up their investments in less polluting energies, first in Europe and then in the United States.

But the investments proposed in September by Chevron represent, for example, less than 10% of the expenses that the group plans to make each year to develop.

During the hearing, the elected Democrat Ro Khanna pointed out the efforts made by the API federation to counter certain environmental measures such as a tax on methane emissions or aid to electric vehicles.

He called on officials present to denounce these actions or to leave the organization, as the French group Total did in January. None have committed to it.

With AFP