Remember who the bad guys are

It's the oil and gas companies.

Life is simple in my six-year-old daughter’s media universe.  There are good guys and bad guys, and it’s not hard to tell which is which.

In the real world, of course, things are more complicated.  But in a confused American moment, in which many influential voices seem to be confusing irritation, ignorance, and stupidity with actual malevolence, let’s remember that there are still some bad guys out there.

Oil companies.

This fact is newly relevant amid reports that Donald Trump has promised oil executives—in exchange for a mere $1 billion in donations—to completely roll back Joe Biden’s climate initiatives, from support for electric vehicles to a pause on new liquified natural gas facilities, and everything else in between.

Less widely reported was the April 30 publication of a report by the Senate Budget Committee and Democrats on the House Oversight Committee showing that oil and gas companies have known the truth about climate change for years, have continued to pay for massive campaigns to lie about it, and have said different things in public and in private. (The investigation focused on Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Chamber of Commerce.)

These companies, and their executives, are liars, and unlike rank-and-file conservatives who are just believing what everyone they trust is saying, they know they are lying. We’ve known this since a blockbuster pair of articles published in 2015 by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News. For sixty years, as those reports showed in exhaustive detail, Big Oil’s own scientists made clear that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and that the dire predictions of looming crisis were all based in sound science.

Yet the oil and gas industry continued to lie about it, first denying that climate change was even happening, and then, when that became impossible, denying responsibility or investing in fake “new technologies” to solve it or claiming that, in fact, Big Oil was on the side of and progress, when the opposite was the case.

Can you imagine being one of these people? 

According to the World Health Organization, the climate crisis will kill around 250,000 people per year starting in 2030, mostly in the form of malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress  -- and that’s not counting the mass migrations of up to a billion climate refugees.  At 2 degrees of warming, between 1 and 3 billion people will experience water scarcity.  We’re already seeing species die-offs, off-the-charts numbers of extreme weather events, decreases in global agricultural productivity, melting glaciers, coral bleaching, and “mass tree mortality.” 

And again – oil executives know all this. These are the bad guys.

(The AI prompt was “greedy oil executive happily enjoys a cigar while the world burns and children starve.” I guess Midjourney wanted to go easy on us.)

“Big Oil has run campaigns to confuse and mislead the public while working unceasingly to lock down a fossil fuel future,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin. “ Big Oil continues to conceal the facts about their business model and obscure the actual dangers of fossil fuels, including natural gas, in order to block the climate action we need. Despite knowing about the devastating effects of their oil and gas products on the planet for decades, the industry has always prioritized its bottom line.”

Here are a few choice examples: