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.
“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:
When those 2015 articles came out, Big Oil hotly disputed them in public. Newly revealed emails now show that, in private, they knew them to be true. They knew full well that they’d lied for 60 years — and then they lied about the lying.
Big Oil continues to lobby against climate action on all levels. To take but one example, BP spent between $5 million and $7.5 to fight a single 2018 initiative in the state of Washington.
Oil companies fund and influence university research projects. For example, Shell sought to “embed Shell scientists” at UC Berkeley, where it funds the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkley to the tune of $25 million.
Big Oil lies about natural gas in particular. (
just did an excellent deep dive into this.) In 2016, BP was warned by Princeton University researchers that climate change would cause “mass extinctions and unprecedented famine” and that BP’s own exploitation of shale gas would accelerate the tragedy. Newly released emails show that BP admitted internally that “gas doesn’t support climate goals” but outwardly, they pretended that natural gas was part of the solution rather than part of the problem, launching a marketing campaign to “advance and protect the role of gas—and BP—in the energy transition.” (Natural gas emits less CO2 than coal, but extracting it leaks methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas.) As recently as 2023, BP described natural gas as “secure, affordable and lower carbon energy.”The targets of the now-complete congressional investigation all obstructed and delayed it. The committees issued numerous subpoenas, and even then many documents were redacted.
That’s just a smattering – check out Desmog’s reporting on the investigation and on the natural gas lie for more. Oh, and sign up for Desmog’s emails while you’re at it. They cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of the climate crisis and industry efforts to obstruct solutions to it.
The greenwashing is perhaps the most galling, though not the most destructive, of the oil industry’s efforts. According to the report, Exxon spent $175 million marketing algae-based biofuels, even though they knew the technology was unproven, and even though their own internal reports said the technology would take billions of dollars to develop. After spending a mere $350 million, Exxon abandoned the idea in 2023.
And then there’s the revolving door of Republican public officials and Big Oil hacks. Another nugget from Desmog: In Colorado this year, several GOP-led counties with high ozone layers hired fossil-fuel-industry-linked lobbyists to fight new bills meant to protect air quality. That’s right – these counties hired the people making their own air dirtier… to help make sure the air stays dirty. (Fun fact: In Colorado, which many of us associate with beautiful mountain ranges and clean air, 80% of residents live in a place with unhealthy air, compared with 39% nationwide.)
On the national level, fracking magnate Harold Hamm (net worth: $20 billion) is now one of Trump’s leading fundraisers — while he had initially distanced himself from Trump after January 6, he is now all in, and was the lead organizer of the dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump offered is billion-dollar “deal.” Trump apparently considered him for the job of Secretary of Energy. Now-Congressman Ryan Zinke was forced out at the Department of Interior because of scandals, but the real scandal was his close dealings and sweetheart deals with mining and fossil fuel industries. The list goes on and on.
Trump, for his part, has repeated the mantra, without any evidence of course, that climate change is a ”hoax.”
I don’t really know what to do with this variety of evil. I understand that, in some sense, it’s capitalism that’s to blame, as oil executives are maximizing shareholder return, which is there job. I also understand that, as Upton Sinclair said in 1934, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But these executives, politicians, and lobbyists are smart men [SIC]. They know that the science is clear, because they’re men of science, since fossil fuel development takes a whole lot of it. And they know that millions of people will likely die as a result of their actions, barring some meteorological or technological miracle.
Meanwhile, as
writes, people are choosing not to have kids because of their realistic fears of our climate-altered future. We’ve had nearly a year of consecutive monthly heat records. Over 99% of peer-reviewed scientific articles affirm the reality of climate change (up from 97% a few years ago, by the way).I suppose I should be used to Americans living in disparate factual universes by now. Election denial, Covid denial, climate denial – what Masha Gessen warned us about years ago has come true: we are living in a post-truth world, in which facts are relative and consensus reality disappears. We are living in the Age of Putin.
But it’s still hard to wrap my head around the fact that I go to bed some nights anxious about the climate-devastated world my kid is going to live in, while people who know the same facts just dismiss them (perhaps the science is wrong, perhaps we’ll just fix it, perhaps we can adapt, perhaps I’ll just have another drink) and continue to make things worse. Again, these people aren’t in psychological denial; they know what’s coming, and still they lie about it. They’re knaves, not dupes.
It’s like, imagine if the coronavirus had a rich cadre of billionaires promoting it, pushing it, fighting any effort to contain it.
I’ll end with this. If America elects Donald Trump, it will be the worst act of ecocide in the world’s history. We will erase all our climate progress and accelerate the catastrophe. And those of us who could have stopped this will be to blame, for prioritizing other issues, or focusing on other things, or treating voting like a purity test instead of a practical choice, or engaging in denial ourselves. It will be on us.
So, if phones/computers/embedded microchips still function thirty years from now, I hope someone— maybe even my thirty-six-year-old daughter—will read this. And to you, future reader, I say: a lot of us did care, and did devote some of our time to fighting these assholes. We knew what was happening, but we weren’t strong or smart enough to stop it, and the bad guys won. I’m sorry. I’m sorry we failed you. I know it doesn’t matter to you to hear this, but I feel really bad about that.
Hello, readers. Thanks for the kind and fulsome responses to last week’s newsletter, about my coming to terms with my own denial around having recurrent/chronic Lyme. I’m happy to say that, at present, I’m at full capacity and feeling good.
This week’s Article About the Conflict is about how (surprise) neither the Left nor the Right is accurately presenting the tragedy in Gaza.
Meanwhile, I’m really happy to share this video of my conversation with Professor Noah Feldman about “Jewish Crises and Counter-Theologies” recorded last February. This was one of the highlights of my recent book tour and I’m really happy to share it here.
Thanks for your continued support!