Are the Dems Finally Ready to Stand Up to Big Oil?

Wednesday’s Senate Budget Committee hearings were wrapping up as I wrote this; they marked one more important step in the decades-long effort to hold Big Oil accountable for the fact that it is wrecking the one planet we’ve got.

The ostensible purpose of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) hearing, and one it effectively accomplished, was to get on the record a boatload of documents showing that the oil companies and their trade groups continue to lie about climate change. Many of the documents were obtained by the House Oversight Committee in the last Congress, back when it was controlled by Democrats—that’s why the first witness was Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), there to describe the trove of new papers and tapes demonstrating the industry’s ongoing fecklessness.

But the hearing also sent a deeper signal—which is that the power balance, at least as long as Democrats remain in power, is slowly shifting against what was long the country’s most powerful industry.

All the skirmishing that really matters is about gas—it’s the one thing the industry relies on to blunt the rise of its mortal foe, actual clean energy in the form of wind, solar, and batteries.

Raskin, for instance, told the tragicomical story of ExxonMobil’s efforts to promote itself as an algae company—including literally spending half as much money on ads as on research before scrapping the whole program as impossible. (You can read my account of this fiasco here).

But then Raskin went much further, explaining the far more serious deception around natural gas that’s at the heart of Big Oil’s current efforts to prolong the energy transition.

Natural gas, he said, “isn’t green and it isn’t clean.” Indeed, explained Whitehouse, the industry’s master plan is to “disguise natural gas as renewable, to lock their fossil fuels into our energy future.”

This is an incredibly important point for senior Democrats to be making, because natural gas has always been the Democratic vice. Coal was obviously filthy, but natural gas, when you burn it, produces half as much carbon. Therefore it became the Democratic pathway to reducing emissions while not really offending the fossil fuel industry. Go back and look at former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses—nearly every one contains a paean to the rise of fracked gas.

Sadly, of course, scientists soon found that natural gas production leaked large quantities of methane, which both Raskin and Whitehouse took pains to point traps 80 times more heat than CO2. Now that we know that, it becomes clear that the efforts to replace coal with gas barely reduced America’s total greenhouse gas emissions at all.

The fossil fuel industry desperately wants to lock in more dependence on fracked gas while they still can—that’s why they reacted with such white-hot anger to the Biden administration’s pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export facilities earlier this year. But the hope raised by today’s hearing is that—if President Joe Biden wins re-election—that pause may become permanent, and the expansion of natural gas will finally be halted, recognized for the deep peril that it is. All the skirmishing that really matters is about gas—it’s the one thing the industry relies on to blunt the rise of its mortal foe, actual clean energy in the form of wind, solar, and batteries. And since California this spring is decisively showing that a modern economy can support itself on that trinity, the battle is growing ever more desperate for Big Oil. So far the Biden administration has been far more focused on aiding clean energy than hindering the dirty stuff (and yet more good news on that front this week). But we’re getting to the point where it may be politically possible to actually take on the bad guys.

Indeed, the hearing also gave some hints to a couple of possible end games.

When he had his turn to “ask questions,” Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen used his senatorial privilege to deliver a little tutorial on the Polluter Pays climate superfund bill that I’ve been writing about recently. “If you broke it, you pay for it,” he said—and then cited the essentially impossible cost of protecting Maryland, with its 7,000 miles of inlets and bays, from sea-level rise. “It’s the tragedy of the commons,” Raskin said. “Big oil profits from using the sky, they’re the ones who’ve profited from it, but they’re not asked to pay the costs of climate destabilization.” A carbon tax would have been a straightforward way to make them pay those costs, but Big Oil has made sure it could never get through Congress—so this effort, at the state level, might do the trick, exerting enough pressure to make them reach a deal.

Or maybe it will come through a slightly different route. The panel of experts that followed Raskin had the indefatigable Geoff Supran, now a professor at the University of Miami, to follow up on the climate deception angle. But it also had Sharon Eubanks, who led much of the tobacco litigation for the Department of Justice, forcing the settlement that has driven cigarette smoking to the margins of our society. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked her the key question: Should the Department of Justice consider using the RICO statutes to hold Big Oil accountable? Yes it should, she said.

Again, this is a signal of what a second-term Biden administration might be willing and able to accomplish. The Democrats are unlikely to hold the Senate—this kind of hearing might be on the House side next year, with Whitehouse heading over to be a witness—but if the White House itself remains in Biden’s hands then, freed of reelection pressures, he may be ready to move.

Especially since the Republicans have… not much. Louisiana’s John Kennedy, increasingly the Senate point man for the hydrocarbon industry, tried to embarrass Raskin with a bunch of questions about boreal forest fires—wouldn’t their carbon emissions somehow overwhelm any efforts to cut back on fossil fuels? Happily Whitehouse had the data on hand to show that against coal, oil, and gas burning forests remain a small source of emissions, and Oregon’s Jeff Merkley pointed out the real issue: The reason boreal forests are on fire is precisely because we keep heating up the planet. Wisconsin’s low-wattage Ron Johnson wanted to talk about some climate declaration signed by “scientists” that says global warming isn’t a threat; “Yeah, whatev” was essentially Raskin’s reply. The defense of fossil fuels at this point is intellectually impossible, and the ever-hotter temperatures will provide a political opening.

But that only matters if there’s someone there to seize the opening. If the Republicans win the fall elections, the fossil fuel strategy will have prevailed.