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High-level government participation in an oil and gas industry conference shows official disdain for the public interest; it’s time to make fossil fuels politically toxic.
From March 18 to 22, 2024, the oil and gas industry held its major annual conference, CERAWeek, in Houston, Texas.
The conference speakers included the usual rogues’ gallery of fossil fuel CEOs from the U.S. and worldwide, including the heads of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, Saudi Aramco, and Total. These corporations have covered up their responsibility for climate change, poisoned communities, and violated human rights in collusion with repressive governments, from the U.S. to Ecuador to Uganda and beyond.
But the egregious social, environmental, and human rights record of Big Oil did not deter high-level officials from the federal government and some state governments, from both major political parties, from attending and speaking at this event, giving it a stamp of official approval and legitimacy it didn’t deserve.
Our public officials need to get the message that the fossil fuel industry is politically toxic as well as literally toxic—and that they will pay a price for associating with the industry, taking its money, and serving its agenda.
CERAWeek 2024 speakers from the federal executive branch included U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, who heads the lead energy policy agency of the U.S. government; John Podesta, senior adviser to the president for international climate policy, who will be the public face of the U.S. in international climate negotiations; and John Kerry, who held Podesta’s position until recently.
Speakers also included Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). At least one governor, Mike Dunleavy of Alaska, was a speaker as well, as were other senior officials with the White House and the Department of Energy.
It’s bad enough that they went, but the content of some of their speeches was even worse. Senators Manchin and Sullivan criticized the modest recent step by the Biden administration to pause new export licenses for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in order to complete a new set of criteria for determining public interest.
Meanwhile, Secretary Granholm appeared to undermine her own agency’s review of the public interest test for LNG exports, by characterizing the review as a routine study (instead of an extraordinary study necessitated by the climate crisis), and saying the pause would be “in the rearview mirror” within a year. If the study has any integrity, an outcome that would end the pause and resume exports (implied by Granholm’s phrasing) should be far from assured.
On the contrary, a study aligned with the global scientific consensus, shared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Energy Agency, the United Nations Environment Program, and others, would conclude that there should be no more expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, period, and that the pause should be permanent. Granholm’s statements raise serious questions about whether the Department of Energy can be trusted to do this study.
If the U.S. were really concerned about the long-term energy security of lower income countries who import U.S. LNG, such as Bangladesh, Colombia, and Jamaica, we would be paying our fair share for climate mitigation and a just transition from fossil fuels in these countries instead of selling them our poisons.
The only real beneficiaries of LNG exports are the oil and gas industry. LNG exports are the main driver of growth in U.S. natural gas production, since domestic demand is growing only very slowly. According to government data, U.S. gas production grew about 96% between 2008 (the approximate start year of the shale gas, or “fracking,” boom) and 2023. Over the same period, U.S. gas exports grew by a whopping 690% while consumption grew by less than 40%. Clearly, the gas industry is looking at exports as their growth engine.
While industry makes its profits, communities are left to face serious climate change impacts, such as the recent Texas wildfires. Communities in the vicinity of the gas production supply chain, from fracking to pipelines to export terminals—disproportionately Indigenous, Black, brown, or low-income white communities—pay the price for industry’s profits with serious air and water pollution, as well as fire and explosion risks.
Another group harmed by LNG exports are U.S. utility consumers writ large, who face higher gas bills and become more vulnerable to price volatility as a consequence of increased exports.
What of the destination countries for U.S. LNG exports? Many of the leading importers of U.S. LNG, such as the Netherlands, U.K., France, Japan, and Germany, are affluent countries who can very well afford to transition their electric generation, home heating, and other sectors to renewables and electrification.
If the U.S. were really concerned about the long-term energy security of lower income countries who import U.S. LNG, such as Bangladesh, Colombia, and Jamaica, we would be paying our fair share for climate mitigation and a just transition from fossil fuels in these countries instead of selling them our poisons. Concern for “global energy security,” often cited as a justification for LNG exports, is a smokescreen for facilitating fossil fuel profits.
Since LNG exports benefit no one but an irresponsible, polluting industry, why are public officials so eager to cozy up to them?
For some, the answer is obvious. Sen. Manchin (who isn’t running for reelection) received more campaign money from the fossil fuel industry in the previous election cycle than any other candidate for federal office, and owns a coal company himself. Sen. Sullivan has also received sizable campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.
In other words, they have been bribed and have obvious conflicts of interest that motivate them to side with polluters over people.
In her comments at CERAWeek, Granholm said that “the world will need secure supplies of both traditional and new energy for the foreseeable future,” underscoring the administration’s outdated thinking on energy policy.
With executive branch officials such as Secretary Granholm and John Podesta, the motive is a little less obvious, but can be discerned regardless. Their participation in CERAWeek is certainly consistent with the Biden administration’s record, which is likely being driven by a number of powerful appointees with industry ties in key positions.
Under Biden, the Department of the Interior has issued more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands than under former President Donald Trump, including a deeply unpopular “carbon bomb” oil drilling project in Alaska. The Department of Energy has issued export licenses to a number of controversial LNG terminals in Alaska and on the Gulf Coast.
These backwards actions are being driven by flawed thinking. In her comments at CERAWeek, Granholm said that “the world will need secure supplies of both traditional and new energy for the foreseeable future,” underscoring the administration’s outdated thinking on energy policy. This is merely a restatement of the Obama administration’s infamous “all of the above” energy policy, and is in direct conflict with the global scientific consensus that we need a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels.
Our public officials need to get the message that the fossil fuel industry is politically toxic as well as literally toxic—and that they will pay a price for associating with the industry, taking its money, and serving its agenda.
To do that successfully, our movements need to deepen popular understanding of the malfeasance of this industry, escalate our messaging against it, and make it clear to public officials that we are monitoring their ties with the industry closely. Cutting the ties between fossil fuels and the government will be immensely helpful in shifting U.S. government policy on climate and energy in a positive direction.
"Podesta needs to take the baton from Kerry and lead the U.S. on a furious sprint to end oil and gas expansion while we still have time to prevent the worst climate catastrophes," said one campaigner.
Senior White House adviser John Podesta has been tapped to replace outgoing U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
According to the Post, Podesta—who is currently in charge of implementing the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act—will have the title of "senior adviser to the president for international climate policy" and will work out of the White House instead of the State Department, where Kerry was based.
"We need to keep meeting the gravity of this moment, and there is no one better than John Podesta to make sure we do," White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said in a statement. "John has—and will continue to be—at the helm of driving the implementation of the most significant climate law in history."
NBC Newsreported that Kerry—a former secretary of state and the 2004 Democratic nominee for president—will shift to supporting President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.
In a statement, Center for Biological Diversity’s Energy Justice program director Jean Su underscored the imperative of building on the limited yet important climate progress achieved by the Biden administration.
"The recent pause on gas exports has positioned Podesta to lead the fossil fuel phaseout and the clean energy expansion we desperately need," Su said. "In his final act as climate envoy, John Kerry agreed to a global transition away from fossil fuels and urged a far more ambitious scale and timeline."
"Podesta needs to take the baton from Kerry and lead the U.S. on a furious sprint to end oil and gas expansion while we still have time to prevent the worst climate catastrophes," she added.
Every day Big Oil resists investing their obscene profits in truly innovative green energy technology is a day they come closer to future financial ruin.
A recent opinion poll rocked the world of the Big Oil lobbyists in their proverbial thousand-dollar suits and alligator shoes. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress, and another 34% put it among their highest priorities, even if they didn’t rank it first. Companies like ExxonMobil and countries like Saudi Arabia have tried since the 1990s to gaslight the public into thinking climate change was either a total fantasy or that the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum wasn’t causing it. Having lost that battle, the fossil-fuel lobbyists have now fallen back on Plan B. They want to convince you that Big Oil is itself swinging into action in a major way to transition to — yes! — green energy.
The hosting of the recent COP28 climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading petroleum exporters, exemplified exactly this puffery and, sadly enough, it’s just one instance of this greenwashing world of ours. Everywhere you look, you’ll note other versions, but it certainly was a classic example. Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber served as president of the Dubai-based 28th Conference of Parties — countries that had signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While his green bona fides include his role as chairman of the board of the UAE’s green energy firm Masdar, controversy swirled around him because he’s also the CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s national petroleum company. Worse yet, he’s committed to expanding the oil and gas production of his postage-stamp-sized nation of one million citizens (and eight million guest workers) in a big-time fashion. He wants ADNOC to increase its daily oil production from its present four million barrels a day to five million by 2027, even though climate scientists stress that global fossil-fuel production must be reduced by 3% annually through 2050 if the world is to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.
Meanwhile, since COP28 was held in the heart of the petroleum-producing Middle East, it also platformed bad actors like Saudi Arabia, which led the charge to stop the conference from committing to ending the use of fossil fuels by a specific date. The awarding of COP28 to the Emirates by the UNFCCC Secretariat allowed a whole country, perhaps a whole region, to be greenwashed, a genuinely shocking decision that ought to be investigated by the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. (And next year, it looks like COP29 will be hosted by another significant oil producer. In other words, the oil countries seem to be on a hot streak!)
Imaginary Algae
Mind you, those Gulf oil states are anything but the only major greenwashers on this planet. After all, the private sector has outdone itself in this arena. A congressional investigation into the major oil companies produced a long report and an appendix that came out last year, including internal corporate emails showing repeated and systemic bad faith on the subject of climate change. ExxonMobil executives, for instance, had publicly committed their company to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep the increase in the average surface temperature of the earth to no more than 1.5° Centigrade (2.7° Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era. Although a 1.5-degree increase might sound small, keep in mind that, as a global average, it includes the cold oceans of the higher latitudes, the North and South Poles, and the Himalayas. In already hot climates like South Asia and the Middle East, that means over time it might translate into a stunning 10- to 15-degree increase that could make some places literally unlivable.
Scientists worry that exceeding that level could throw the world’s climate system into full-scale chaos, producing mega-storms, substantial sea level rise, ravaging wildfires, and deadly heat and drought over large parts of the earth’s surface. Still, despite his public commitment to it in 2019, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, asked an oil industry lobbying group to delete a reference to the 2015 Paris climate agreement from the draft of a statement on sustainability it had prepared. That mention, Woods said, “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals.” So much for oil company pledges!
In a similar fashion, in 2020, executives of the London-based Shell PLC asked public relations employees to highlight that the company’s vow to reach zero net carbon emissions by 2050 was “a collective ambition for the world,” rather than a “Shell goal or target.” As a company executive admitted all too bluntly, “Shell has no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years.” (Oh, and in case you missed this, the profits of the major fossil-fuel outfits have in recent years gone through the roof.)
Nor is corporate greenwashing simply a matter of public pronouncements by oil company executives. ExxonMobil has run a multi-million-dollar campaign of television and streaming advertising attempting to pull the wool over people’s eyes about what it’s doing. In one instance, it paid the New York Times to run an extended commercial gussied up as if it were a news article, a shameful procedure to which the Times acquiesced. Studies show that most readers miss disclaimers about such pieces actually being paid advertisements. It was entitled, “grand plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future.” The advertisement was extremely misleading. As Chris Wells, an associate professor of emerging media studies at Boston University’s College of Communication, told BU Today last February, “Exxon is doing a lot of advertising around its investments in algae-based biofuels. But these technologies are not yet viable, and there is a lot of skepticism that they ever will be.”
In fact, about a month after Wells gave that interview, ExxonMobil admitted publicly that it had pulled out of algae biofuels research entirely at the end of 2022, having invested about $29 million a year over 12 years. It spent more millions, however, in advertising to give the public the impression that this paltry investment outweighed the company’s multi-billion-dollar efforts to bring ever more petroleum online.
The environmentalist group Client Earth notes that ExxonMobil spends between $20 billion and $25 billion annually looking for — yes, of course! — new oil fields and is committed to doing so through at least 2025. The company had a net profit of $55.7 billion in 2022. In other words, it’s still devoting nearly half of its annual profits to looking for more petroleum when, of course, it could be using them to launch its transition to sustainable forms of energy. Such — to put it politely — inertia is clearly unwise. New electric vehicle sales in the U.S. soared to about a million this year alone, and EVs will have avoided using 1.8 million barrels of oil in 2023. Better yet, the cost of battery packs for the vehicles fell 14% and is expected to keep heading down, guaranteeing that EVs will be ever more affordable over time. Moreover, in significant parts of the rest of the world, as the New York Timesreported recently, electric-powered two- and three-wheeled vehicles are beginning to give the giant oil companies a run for their money. In the decades to come, ExxonMobil’s inflexibility and refusal to innovate will undoubtedly doom the company, but the question remains: In the process, will it doom the rest of us, too?
A Deceptive Greenwashing Marketing Campaign
In another, better world, the courts could punish the oil majors for their greenwashing. That misleading paid ad in the New York Times forms but one cornerstone of a wide-ranging lawsuit against ExxonMobil by the state of Massachusetts, initiated in 2019, which has so far survived that company’s legal challenges. As the office of Attorney General, Andrea Campbell explains, it is “alleging that the company violates Massachusetts law through a deceptive ‘greenwashing’ marketing campaign that misleadingly presents Exxon as a leader in cutting-edge clean energy research and climate action… and… its products as ‘green’ while the company is massively ramping up fossil fuel production and spending only about one-half of 1% of revenues on developing clean energy.” Campbell, an African-American born in Boston, is keenly aware that climate change is an equity issue, since its deleterious effects will initially be felt most strongly among the less privileged. (Of course, given our present Supreme Court, don’t hold your breath on this one.)
In its complaint, the state points to marketing campaigns like those featured on ExxonMobil’s YouTube channel, which still shows an ad produced eight years ago, “Making the World’s Energy go Further,” that, in just 30 seconds, presents a medley of greenwashing’s greatest early hits — algae biofuel, “new technology for capturing CO2 emissions,” and cars twice as efficient in their gas mileage. Algae biofuels, however, have by now bitten the dust; there is no affordable and safe method of capturing and storing carbon dioxide; and electric cars are between “2.6 to 4.8 times more efficient at traveling a mile compared to a gasoline internal combustion engine,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The biggest fault in such commercials, however, is that the oil company’s ad makers were trying to convince the public that ExxonMobil was putting major resources into sustainable alternatives. As the state of Massachusetts points out, in reality “ExxonMobil has ramped up production and reportedly is now the most active driller in the Permian Basin, the shale oil field located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico that yields low-cost oil in months, rather than the years required for larger offshore projects to begin producing crude… ExxonMobil has invested billions of dollars into the development of massive Canadian oil sands projects, which are among the costliest and most polluting oil extraction projects in the world.”
Carbon Capture and Lake Nyos
An even more dangerous scam than algae biofuels (implausible but not life-threatening) is the idea of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Remind me: Why would we try to store billions of tons of a poisonous gas? On August 21, 1986, subterranean carbon dioxide deposits bubbled up through Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing nearly 2,000 people, thousands of cattle and other animals, and in the process turned four local villages into graveyards. Some scientists fear similar underground carbon dioxide storage elsewhere could set off earthquakes. And what if such quakes in turn release the gas? Honestly, since I still remember the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster where 11 million gallons of oil, spilled into the waters off Alaska, wrecked hundreds of miles of shoreline and killed unknown numbers of sea creatures and birds, I’d just as soon not have ExxonMobil store carbon dioxide in my neighborhood.
Worse yet, most of the CO2 harvested by oil companies so far has been injected into drill sites to help bring in — yes, you guessed it! — more petroleum. Worse yet, studies have shown that carbon-capture technology itself emits a lot of carbon dioxide, that it can only capture a fraction of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels, and that just shutting down coal, fossil gas, and petroleum production and substituting wind, solar, hydro, and batteries is far safer, cheaper, and better for the environment.
Carbon capture is, however, a favorite greenwashing tool of Big Oil, since company executives can pretend that a technological breakthrough somewhere on the horizon justifies continuing to spew out record quantities of CO2 in the present moment. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wasted billions of taxpayer dollars by including provisions for CCS research and development in Joe Biden’s otherwise admirable Inflation Reduction Act. In the process, he managed to insert a key greenwashing technique into even the most progressive climate legislation ever passed by an industrialized hydrocarbon state.
As for Sultan Al-Jaber, the head of COP28, he let his mask slip in November in a testy exchange with former Irish President Mary Robinson, who had invited him to an online discussion of how women’s lives could be improved if the climate crisis were effectively addressed. When she urged him to act as president of COP28, he exploded: “I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.” He was pushing back against the goal advocated by scientists and many diplomats of quickly phasing hydrocarbons out. He claims to advocate phasing them down, not presumably eliminating them. He added, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Al-Jaber was posturing, since he surely knows that the International Energy Agency has issued just such a roadmap, which does indeed require rapid reductions in fossil fuel use. Oh, and if he has his way, it’s quite conceivable that, somewhere down the road, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, could become too hot to be livable.
Given the plummeting cost of green energy, it’s clear that moving quickly and completely away from fossil fuels will improve the quality of life for people globally while making energy cheaper. In the end, COP28 could only issue an anodyne call for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Despite al-Jaber’s globe-straddling greenwashing at the climate summit, however, there is no realistic alternative to phasing fossil fuels not just down but out, and on an accelerated timeline, if our planet’s climate isn’t to turn into a Frankenstein’s monster. After all, 2023 has already proved a unique year for heat — with month after month of record-setting warmth across the globe. And sadly, as fossil-fuel production only continues to increase, that’s just the beginning, not the end, when it comes to potentially broiling this planet.
Admittedly, under the best of circumstances, this transition would be challenging and, according to the United Nations, will certainly require more investments than the countries of the world are now making, but it still appears eminently achievable. As for ExxonMobil and other oil majors, every day they resist investing their obscene profits in truly innovative green energy technology is a day they come closer to future financial ruin. In the meantime, they are, of course, wreaking historically unprecedented harm on the planet, as was all too apparent with the serial climate disasters of 2023, now believed to be the hottest of the last 125,000 years.