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exxonknew
The Killer CEOs of Big Oil
Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week it's horrifying to look out and see the world they are creating for the rest of us.
Jan 11, 2025
Public Citizen would like you to know that there are killers among us.
They wear $2,000 suits and travel in private jets, unbothered by the TSA or the teeming masses. Their children attend the finest universities in the world, and they vacation on private islands and yachts. Many “earn” more in a day than most Americans take home in a year; their positions ensure their heirs will never have to work a day in their lives.
Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week they’re arguably responsible, in part, for billions of dollars in losses, numerous deaths, and thousands of shattered lives in Southern California.
Illegitimate president-elect Trump is trying his best to cover for them, claiming that the fires ripping through the Los Angeles area are the fault of California’s Democratic governor, calling Gavin Newsome by a childish name to draw more attention to Trump’s efforts on behalf of the Republican Party’s most generous donors.
Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.
Mainstream media is largely going along with Trump’s charade, choosing not to even mention — in the vast majority of their reports on the crisis — the role of climate change in the fires. And never, G-d forbid, mentioning the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate change that has turned these fires from an annual nuisance into a hellscape.
It’s as frankly absurd as a TV news person reporting on a plane crash and, instead of asking aviation experts what caused it, simply lifting their collective shoulders with a helpless “shit happens” shrug.
But these fires — and the droughts and changing weather patterns that made them so severe — aren’t something that just happens by random happenstance, any more than an airliner crash.
And the oil industry has known for decades this day was coming.
In November, 1959, the famous scientist Edward Teller — the “Father of the H-Bomb” — was the keynote speaker at a conference on “The Energy of the Future” in New York, organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. The news he conveyed to the assembled oil industry executives was stark:
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect ...
“It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
This shocking news apparently provoked a scramble in the oil industry, probably similar to when the asbestos industry learned in the 1930s that their product caused lung cancer (the mesothelioma that killed my father), or in 1939 when the tobacco industry learned that smoking also killed people.
They set out to determine if Teller’s prediction was true. He’d predicted that CO2 levels would reach the point where they’d begin to seriously melt the polar and Greenland ice caps and alter weather patterns within a few decades, telling the oil executives at that 1959 meeting:
“At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the [heat] radiation leaving the earth.”
For the next decade, industry scientists went to work along with studies commissioned by major universities. One of the most well-known was a 1968 report the American Petroleum Institute hired the Stanford Research Institute to conduct. Its findings corroborated Teller’s prediction:
“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. ... there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. ... pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”
It was the first of dozens of studies the industry paid for or knew about, all predicting pretty much exactly what’s happening right now in Los Angeles, including major reports in 1979, 1982, and 1991.
And then the “climate denial” began.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their oil companies funded think tanks to promote skepticism, pushed frontmen onto radio and TV to claim that climate scientists and people like Al Gore were “in it for the money,” and began funding the campaigns of politicians willing to exchange the future habitability of the planet for a few decades of power and wealth.
In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented decades of internal industry memos and strategy sessions that were organizing, funding, and detailing roughly three decades of lies foisted on the American Public. The industry and its executives’ efforts were all, apparently, in the service of preserving their income stream and avoiding any liability for the deaths they knew would one day come as a result of their product poisoning our atmosphere.
And now that day is here. Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.
Two-thirds of voters, according to a 2024 poll, believe the fossil fuel industry and its pampered executives should be held civilly responsible for the damage climate change is causing, and a plurality want them to face criminal charges.
Public Citizen published a 2023 report titled “Charging Big Oil with Climate Homicide,” including legal rationales and possible strategies for holding the killers in suits accountable by state and local prosecutors.
Will Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or California Attorney General Rob Bonta have the courage to hold these companies and/or their executives accountable for the lies and deceptions they’ve funded that this week are killing Angelinos?
Will enough people call their members of Congress at 202-224-3121 to provoke investigations that could lead to congressional action?
Will our media ever begin to call out Trump and the alleged climate lies and deceptions of the industry that owns him?
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ExxonMobil Plans to Keep an Entire Generation on the Hook for Its Climate Destruction
Public pensions must exit Exxon to protect workers' savings and retirement.
Nov 22, 2024
It is no secret that ExxonMobil poses some of the most powerful opposition to climate action at every level of government. Environmentalists have long pointed out that Exxon Knew about climate change, and instead of pivoting their business model to a more sustainable energy future, buried the evidence and began a decades-long disinformation campaign.
Leaders across the country have wisened up to the oil major's dirty politics, which is why the House Oversight Committee has been investigating Exxon and its peers, and state attorneys general have sued the company for damages. Most recently, California AG Rob Bonta, alongside environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, sued the company for lying to the public about the recyclability of plastics.
If the tide is turning against Exxon, why haven't investors caught on?
Unrestricted funding for companies engaged in fossil fuel expansion threatens workers' right to dignified retirement safety, a right that unions have fought hard to win.
ExxonMobil sparked headlines and investor outrage this spring when the company sued its own shareholders over a climate-related shareholder resolution. Public pensions representing trillions in worker savings across the country pushed back and mounted a vote-no effort against CEO Darren Woods and Director Joseph Hooley, but Wall Street asset managers watered down their efforts instead offering unwavering support of Exxon.
To add insult to injury, Woods made an appearance at the Council of Institutional Investors—a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for the investor rights of public, union, and private employee benefit funds—in September. There, he promised to continue to crack down on "extreme" investors who are concerned that the company's business model has loaded the economy with systemic financial risks and instability. Never mind that such a definition of extreme would describe many of the institutions present, which represent over 15 million workers and $5 trillion in assets under management.
But perhaps most indicative of ExxonMobil's commitment to business-as-usual pollution is the bonds they've issued this fall, with a maturity date of 2074.
These long-dated bonds represent unrestricted funds for ExxonMobil to continue to pursue fossil fuel expansion and plastic pollution well past most of the world's—and investors'—Net Zero by 2050 goals. This is an especially risky gamble for investors with long-term obligations, including public pension funds that manage millions of workers' retirement savings.
Not only is the future of oil and gas uncertain, but prolonged pollution wrought by disinformation and investor cash increases economy-wide systemic risks. Investors—and the everyday people who rely on institutions to manage their savings—will be left holding the purse strings as climate change wreaks havoc. Moreover, bond ownership does not come with the shareholder rights investors hope to use to influence company behavior. This gives Exxon complete freedom to use the funds however it wishes, even if that's out of alignment with investor interests.
This increasing risk is why we joined California Common Good and pension beneficiaries to testify during a recent CalPERS Board meeting to ask CalPERS to issue a moratorium on purchasing Exxon bonds.
The Sierra Club represents millions of members, many of whom are saving for retirement in the face of an uncertain future and working tirelessly to protect the communities and places they love. Whether relying on a public pension plan or a private asset manager, our members rely on investment professionals to keep their futures in mind. Unrestricted funding for companies engaged in fossil fuel expansion threatens workers' right to dignified retirement safety, a right that unions have fought hard to win. That's why we call on investors, particularly public pension funds, to refuse to participate in Exxon's bond issuances.
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It’s Not Enough to Blame ‘Climate Change’ for Disasters Like Helene and Milton
Decades of lies from big oil and gas companies created the climate emergency and are still fueling it today.
Oct 15, 2024
For years, linking climate change to the growing destructive power of hurricanes was off limits for mainstream media. Now the connection is undeniable. Massive in size, rapidly intensifying, loaded with unprecedented rainfall, and firing off fatal tornadoes, the link between a warmer world and monster hurricanes like Helene and Milton is impossible to ignore—though too much coverage still does.
But even when news stories tell us that “climate change” is causing these rapidly intensifying storms, they are only telling us half the story. Climate change is not just the fuel for these disasters, it is also the result of the decades of lies from big oil and gas companies that created the climate emergency and are still fueling it today.
Scientists from ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel majors told executives decades ago that unabated use of their products could cause “catastrophic” climate disasters. Instead of sounding the alarm, the oil and gas industry launched the most consequential campaign of lies in human history, on a scale far worse and more damaging than anything before. They funded junk science, polluted our politics, and ran massive advertising campaigns all with the goal of stopping any action that could threaten their bottom line. Our climate crisis is the result of that deception, as are the super-charged hurricanes, deadly heatwaves, and mega wildfires that we now face because Big Oil stole decades from humanity that we can never get back.
The problem with only blaming “climate change” for killer weather events is that it leaves out how exactly we got into this mess—and who is responsible.
If we talk only about “climate change” during these disasters, we forgo a critical teaching moment when millions are open to learning about an issue that typically commands almost no attention at all. As painful as they are, the moments when deadly storms have our attention are precisely the times we need to talk about the elephant in the room: the fossil fuel industry. The longer we avoid the issue, the more violent these storms will become, because the industry has not stopped lying and is doubling down on the products fueling the crisis. Now that climate change is everywhere, fossil fuel companies don’t so much deny the problem as they promote “solutions” they know are bogus, like “natural gas,” which is roughly as bad for the climate as coal, or carbon capture, which is laughable as a solution in the timeframe and scale that is needed, not to mention that to date it has been used primarily to extract even more oil.
The problem with only blaming “climate change” for killer weather events is that it leaves out how exactly we got into this mess—and who is responsible. Climate change doesn’t have lobbyists, doesn’t have executives making decisions, cannot be investigated, and cannot be held accountable in the courts. As long as climate change is seen as the cause of all extreme weather destruction, the oil industry can continue pretending to be part of the solution.
It was the oil and gas industry, not climate change, that created widespread climate denial and turned climate action into a partisan political issue. It was the oil and gas industry, not climate change, that successfully blocked ratification of the Kyoto Treaty in 1998, killed Waxman-Markey in 2009, and watered down the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, ensuring the law would not place limits on climate pollution or in any way slow the expansion of the U.S. oil and gas industry.
This focus on a causal agent that can never be held accountable spawns a spectrum of negative consequences. It shields the true cause, the lying oil and gas majors, from any form of accountability. Instead of the oil and gas majors being forced to pay their fair share for disaster recovery, we hear calls for more FEMA funding, which is merely taxpayers footing the bill. And instead of reckoning with the fact that some of those who died would very likely still be alive were these storms not radically amplified by fossil fuel emissions made possible by companies who have lied about just about every aspect of their role in causing the problem, we act as if there can be no accountability for these deaths.
The question is not, “Did climate change make these two hurricanes more destructive?” We already know that along with climate change comes more powerful and deadly storms. The question is, who and what caused climate change? The answer to that question is right before us.
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