Jamie Raskin Drops The Hammer On Big Oil’s ‘Pattern Of Lying’: ‘Set The Country Back Decades’

4 months ago

During a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) testified about the oil industry’s deception and lack of accountability for their involvement in climate change.

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Transcript

00:00 And I now turn to our first panel, which features just one witness, a very distinguished one.

00:06 Congressman Jamie Raskin needs no introduction.

00:09 Representing Maryland's 8th Congressional District in the House of Representatives,

00:13 Congressman Raskin serves as the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

00:18 During the 117th Congress, Representative Raskin served as Chairman of the Subcommittee

00:22 on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Oversight Committee.

00:26 He was also a member of the Judiciary Committee, the Committee on House Administration, the

00:30 Rules Committee, the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, and the Select Committee

00:36 to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

00:41 Prior to his election to the House, Congressman Raskin was a constitutional law professor

00:44 at American University Washington College of Law for over 25 years, co-founding and

00:49 directing the LLM Program on Law and Government.

00:53 Mr. Raskin, thank you very much for taking time for your busy day to be here.

00:57 You may proceed for 10 minutes.

00:58 Well, and thank you, Chairman Whitehouse, and thank you, Senator Grassley, for your

01:03 remarks and distinguished members of the committee.

01:06 In 2019, we called a hearing in House Oversight on what the oil and gas companies knew about

01:12 climate change and when they knew it.

01:16 Industry scientists and experts testified that the companies knew the burning of fossil

01:20 fuels caused climate change as early as 1959, the year the first Barbie doll appeared in

01:27 the United States, the year that Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union.

01:31 By the 1960s, before Neil Armstrong even walked on the moon, the science of global warming

01:37 was well understood by big oil.

01:41 Instead of telling the world about the perils of global warming and changing their business

01:45 model, the companies deliberately suppressed relevant scientific findings for decades and

01:50 then challenged and dismissed urgent calls by scientists to take climate change seriously.

01:57 Instead of acting like Paul Revere and sounding the alarm about climate change, they acted

02:02 like Maleficent the Evil Fairy in Sleeping Beauty and cursed everyone to try to go to

02:07 sleep for 100 years.

02:09 As the experts told us, big oil's pattern of lying and cover-up set the country back

02:14 decades in our ability to seriously address the problem.

02:19 For three years, the House Oversight Committee has investigated big oil's six decades of

02:24 climate deception.

02:26 On September 16, 2021, we sent investigative letters to Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron, the

02:33 American Petroleum Institute, and the Chamber of Commerce.

02:37 Just yesterday, with your committee, we released our final report.

02:41 Your investigation uncovered compelling evidence of aggressive industry deceit, which continued

02:48 long after big oil gave up on its outright climate denialism.

02:53 The joint report and documents we discovered show how time and again the biggest oil and

02:59 gas companies have talked a good game for purposes of public consumption but have acted

03:08 in a completely reckless way to protect their long-term profits in the carbon industry.

03:15 Company officials admit the terrifying reality of their business model behind closed doors

03:20 but always manage to say something deceptive, false, and soothing to the public about climate

03:26 change.

03:27 Our investigation reveals big oil's denial, disinformation, and doublespeak, all to lull

03:33 the public into complacency about the enormous climate emergency we are in and the role that

03:39 big oil has played in bringing it about.

03:43 We learned the fossil fuel companies made public pledges to support the Paris Agreement

03:48 and achieve net zero emissions while internally recognizing that their actual practices would

03:54 never allow them to achieve these goals.

03:56 We found the company's PR tactics mutated from simply denying climate science to spreading

04:02 disinformation about the safety of natural gas and engaging in propaganda about their

04:08 commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

04:12 We learned they publicly broadcast and advertised their interest in low-carbon technologies

04:17 like carbon capture and algae-based biofuels while internally acknowledging that these

04:23 pie-in-the-sky technologies are expensive, difficult to scale, and simply not ready for

04:28 commercial development.

04:30 We consistently found that the oil and gas companies relied on trade associations like

04:35 the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce to spread misleading narratives

04:39 to the public and to lobby politically against effective climate solutions that they pretended

04:45 to favor.

04:47 We found they pumped $700 million into universities and academic research programs to influence

04:53 pro-natural gas studies and findings over renewable energy solutions.

04:59 The companies paid lip service to global environmental goals but dismissed them as basically meaningless

05:05 behind the scenes.

05:07 BP's website states that it supports the goals of the 2015 Paris Accord, but our investigation

05:14 uncovered an email revealing that BP trivialized the Paris Agreement, stating that "no one

05:20 is committed to anything other than to stay in the game."

05:23 So instead of BP choosing to take the actual steps needed to reduce its vast contribution

05:29 to carbon pollution, BP is instead "staying in the game" of fossil fuels and carbon pollution.

05:37 Spinning a fairy tale about their commitment to renewable energy, fossil fuel companies

05:41 have often advertised their commitment to low-carbon technologies, like Exxon's vaunted

05:47 algae biofuels program.

05:50 From 2009 to 2023, Exxon spent nearly half as much on advertising algae as a climate

05:56 solution as it spent on actually researching and developing it.

06:02 Our investigation revealed that Exxon's own employees raised concerns that the company's

06:07 beautiful ads might mistakenly imply that "the technology is live today."

06:14 But it was never live, and indeed Exxon ended up pulling up stakes on the whole project

06:19 before it ever produced any energy.

06:21 When you compare the actual investments in low-carbon technologies to the company's overall

06:26 expenditures, you see exactly what kind of priority this really is.

06:30 Shell, for example, spent just 11% of its total capital expenditures on lower-carbon

06:36 technologies, and Exxon and Chevron spent even less, at 6% and 4% respectively.

06:42 We learned all of these damning facts despite the company setting up huge roadblocks to

06:47 our investigation.

06:49 In response to the committee's initial letters in 2021, the company's only provided trivial

06:54 and publicly available documents, so we sent them subpoenas.

06:58 And even after being subpoenaed, the companies continued to block our investigation.

07:03 They heavily redacted or withheld entire documents based on erroneous privilege claims.

07:10 More than 4,000 documents came back to us substantially redacted.

07:14 They also used a "paper blizzard" tactic by producing hundreds of thousands of generic

07:20 and non-responsive documents, of the more than 280,000 produced, more than 125,000,

07:26 nearly half, were mass emails, newsletters, and other fluff documents.

07:31 If the companies had actually complied in good faith, who knows what else we might have

07:36 discovered.

07:37 During our probe, I've been struck by the parallels between Big Oil's aggressive denialism

07:42 about climate change and the tobacco industry's suppression of the truth about tobacco addiction

07:49 and the carcinogenic effects of smoking.

07:51 More than 20 years ago, the DOJ brought a precedent-shattering case against the cigarette

07:56 companies.

07:58 We learned about the massive, decades-long disinformation campaign waged by Big Tobacco,

08:04 and the companies were ordered to cease and desist their propaganda and to start telling

08:08 the truth.

08:10 Governments and people around the world mobilized the facts found to battle the tobacco industry

08:15 effectively for restitution and for investment in the public health.

08:19 As a result of holding the tobacco industry accountable to the truth, rates of cigarette

08:25 smoking in our country have plummeted, particularly among young people, and rates of cancer, emphysema,

08:32 and other lung diseases have fallen.

08:34 Since the tobacco master settlement in 1998, cigarette smoking among high schoolers has

08:38 fallen from 35% to less than 4% in 2021.

08:44 Just insisting upon the truth has saved millions of lives.

08:48 We're beginning to see comparable efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for its own industrial

08:52 sabotage of the truth and accountability.

08:55 State AGs across America, along with dozens of municipalities and tribal governments,

09:00 have brought lawsuits against the companies and their trade associations to recover huge

09:05 public damages allegedly caused by injuries made possible by their alleged deceptive trade

09:12 practices, fraud, public nuisance, and civil conspiracy, to name just a few causes of action

09:18 we've identified.

09:20 Every citizen in America, everyone on Earth, has a vested interest in addressing the climate

09:25 emergency.

09:26 Scientific research shows that the result of 1.5 Celsius degree of warming will be more

09:31 extreme heat waves, more massive flooding, record drought, recurring food scarcity, and

09:37 dramatic sea level rise.

09:39 My watery home state of Maryland, with more than 7,000 miles of ocean and bay coastline,

09:44 is strikingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and the rising sea.

09:48 Anne Arundel County, where our state capital is, faces potential damage of more than $4

09:53 billion to its public infrastructure if sea level rises by just five feet.

09:59 If we were to rebuild the seawall, which has been recommended to protect us from an anticipated

10:05 five foot rise in ocean levels, it would cost our state $27 billion.

10:12 How can we do that?

10:13 In his acclaimed book, Collapse, Jared Diamond studied the collapse of human societies in

10:18 history.

10:19 He identified five factors that precipitate collapse, three of which relate to the environment.

10:24 Climate change, environmental degradation, and the third, the political inability to

10:29 respond effectively to environmental threats.

10:32 Diamond says that a leading cause of a society's inability to respond to environmental emergency

10:37 is the capture of political and social power by a narrow subset of society which is committed

10:43 to its own power and profit rather than the common good of the whole society, and therefore

10:48 refuses to take the steps necessary for survival.

10:51 Fossil fuel companies publicly claim to be partners, if not leaders, in fashioning climate

10:56 solutions, but our investigation exposed that as a fraud.

11:00 Pacific Oil is not addressing the climate crisis, but profiting from it and using a

11:04 lot of its mammoth resources on continuing campaigns to insulate its carbon-based business

11:10 model.

11:11 For more than a half century, they've suppressed the truth about how carbon emissions destabilize

11:16 the climate and what we need to do to protect ourselves from calamity.

11:21 The era of denial and deceit must come to an end.

11:26 Thank you for your attention, Mr. Chairman.

11:28 Committee members, I yield back.

Jamie Raskin Drops The Hammer On Big Oil’s ‘Pattern Of Lying’: ‘Set The Country Back Decades’

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