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public citizen
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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Watchdogs Call Out Trump AG Pick Pam Bondi's Corporate Lobbying
One democracy advocate urged senators "to carefully scrutinize Bondi's lobbying record and ask what she will do when the interests of her lobbying clients again clash with the Department of Justice she now wants to lead."
Jan 08, 2025
When President-elect Donald Trump in mid-November decided to tap former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to succeed former Congressman Matt Gaetz as his pick for U.S. attorney general, details about Bondi's career, including her time as a corporate lobbyist, began to surface.
On Wednesday, two watchdog groups released reports that delve into Bondi's time as a lobbyist and say that their findings raise concerns about Bondi's fitness to serve as head of the Department of Justice.
The first report was published by the group Public Citizen and looks at federal lobbying disclosures and Foreign Agents Registration Act reports filed by Bondi and Ballard Partners, the lobbying outlet where Bondi worked as a registered federal lobbyist for the past five years. Ballard Partners also employed Susie Wiles, Trump's pick for White House chief of staff.
The other report, from the group Accountable.US, also looks at Bondi's time at Ballard Partners and reports that at least five of Bondi's major lobbying clients have "faced DOJ fines, investigations, or related scrutiny that could pose serious conflicts if she is confirmed as AG." The Public Citizen report also details DOJ scrutiny on some of these companies.
Jon Golinger, the author of the Public Citizen report, wrote in a statement Wednesday that "the U.S. attorney general should be the American people's lawyer—not a lobbyist for big corporations and foreign governments."
"As they evaluate this nomination, we urge senators to carefully scrutinize Bondi's lobbying record and ask what she will do when the interests of her lobbying clients again clash with the Department of Justice she now wants to lead," he added.
According to Public Citizen's report, Bondi was registered to lobby the federal government on behalf of 30 different clients—a list that included the government of Qatar, large corporations, and government contractors—between 2019 and 2024.
The report details that her corporate clients have included the car service Uber; the large private prison company the Geo Group; the waste management company Republic Services; the e-commerce giant Amazon.com; and others, according to the report.
The watchdog found that lobbying reports filed in 2020 reveal that Bondi's firm was paid $120,000 that year by Uber to lobby federal offices on "issues related to sharing economy, surface transportation measures, foreign regulation of data management, regulatory relief, and legislative measures for Covid-19." Offices lobbied included the White House, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Department of Transportation, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of the Treasury, and the Small Business Administration.
Public Citizen reported that Bondi also retained two clients through 2024: the Florida Sheriffs Association and the Florida Sheriffs Risk Management Fund.
Both reports also detail that many of these companies have come under scrutiny from the agency that Bondi is tapped to lead.
Accountable.US highlights, for example, that in 2023 the DOJ imposed a $25 million civil penalty on Amazon to resolve allegations that its Alexa service illegally retained recordings of children's voices. Another former client, General Motors—who Bondi had as a client in 2020 and 2021—reached a settlement with the DOJ in 2023 to resolve the DOJ's determination that the company imposed a "discriminatory barrier" against lawful permanent residents in its hiring processes.
"Pam Bondi's career lobbying for corporate clients that had run-ins with the DOJ now poses potential conflicts of interest and serious questions whether she will put her personal interests ahead of the American people," said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk in a statement Wednesday. "People are tired of this same, old insider game."
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New Tracker Spotlights Corporate Criminals Trump Could Let Off the Hook
Out of nearly 200 companies currently facing federal investigations and cases, a third of them have connections to President-elect Donald Trump, according to a Public Citizen analysis.
Jan 08, 2025
The progressive advocacy group Public Citizen on Tuesday launched a new project aimed at tracking the incoming Trump administration's approach to corporate crime, an effort the watchdog said is particularly urgent given that many of the companies currently under federal investigation have connections to the president-elect.
Public Citizen found that of 192 individual corporations currently facing federal probes or cases, a third "have known ties with the Trump administration."
"They or their executives have either contributed to his inauguration, or Trump has nominated their former employees, investors, and lobbyists," the group noted.
Public Citizen said its new Corporate Enforcement Tracker will serve as "a resource for watchdogging ongoing federal investigations and cases against alleged corporate wrongdoing that are at risk of being dropped, weakened, or otherwise modified by the incoming Trump administration."
Corporate prosecutions plummeted to a 25-year low during Trump's first term, and Public Citizen's Rick Claypool—who is heading the new project—predicted that "it's likely Trump's second term will see a similar or worse dropoff in enforcement."
"Corporate crime enforcement fell during Trump's first term," Claypool noted, "even as his administration pursued 'tough' policies against immigrants, protestors, and low-level offenders."
"The five corporations with the most federal investigations or cases against them are Tesla (7), Amazon (6), Pfizer (5), Wells Fargo (4), and SpaceX (4)."
Four of the companies listed on Public Citizen's tracker—Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X—are helmed by billionaire Elon Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's presidential campaign and is set to co-lead a new advisory commission tasked with identifying spending and regulations to eliminate.
Tesla is facing investigations by the Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other agencies—probes that could be shut down by the incoming administration, which is set to be packed with lobbyists and billionaires.
Reutersreported last week that "Musk's potential to have extraordinary clout with the new administration raises questions about the fate of federal investigations and regulatory actions affecting his business empire, of which at least 20 are ongoing, according to three sources familiar with SpaceX and Tesla operations and the companies' interaction with the U.S. government, as well as five current and former officials who have direct knowledge of individual probes into Musk's companies."
"The inquiries include examinations of the alleged securities violations; questions over the safety of Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems; potential animal-welfare violations in Neuralink's brain-chip experiments; and alleged pollution, hiring-discrimination, and licensing problems at SpaceX," the outlet noted.
Public Citizen also highlighted 16 companies that have donated to Trump's inaugural fund as they face federal investigations or enforcement actions: Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Coinbase, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Kraken, Meta, OpenAI, Pfizer, Ripple, Robinhood, Stanley Black & Decker, Toyota, and Uber.
"The five corporations with the most federal investigations or cases against them are Tesla (7), Amazon (6), Pfizer (5), Wells Fargo (4), and SpaceX (4)," the group said in a statement.
Concerns about the fate of investigations into major U.S. companies were amplified by Trump's choice to lead the Justice Department. Public Citizen noted Tuesday that Amazon and Republic Services, two lobbying clients previously represented by Trump attorney general pick Pam Bondi, are among the corporations currently facing federal cases or investigations.
In a separate report published Wednesday, Public Citizen said that Bondi's record as a lobbyist raises "serious questions about potential conflicts of interest" and provides "sufficient grounds for senators to deny her confirmation."
"We depend on the DOJ to vigorously enforce our laws, hold corporate wrongdoers accountable, and protect the rule of law," said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert. "Pam Bondi is simply inappropriate for this post."
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