Big Oil in the Hot Seat - and Everyone Wins?

After decades of practice, the oil and gas industry continues to flood media with green spin, but hearings aiming to stop this propaganda fuel both factions in the climate fight.

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Once in awhile congressional hearings, through subpoenas and the risk of perjury, result in revelations impossible to achieve by other means.

But all too often these days, they are a form of theater - actually two completely distinct, simulcast parallel-universe dramas, each playing to a starkly different audience.

Last Thursday, Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a six-hour hearing billed by supporters as Big Oil's "Tobacco Moment."

This was the first time executives leading all of the major U.S. oil and gas companies, along with the American Petroleum Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, were sworn in to face questions on fossil fuel lobbying and deceptive public relations under oath.

The hope of the lawmakers and allies is that this and followup hearings will mark a turning point for a giant industry caught in climate lies revealed by Greenpeace-stung lobbyists. The prime goal was to aim the brightest spotlight yet at the most recent decade of petro-propaganda using green sheen to mask deadly risks related to an addictive product.

Democrats tried their best to pressure some of the corporate titans to apologize for their predecessors' climate misdeeds or pledge to end funding for today's propaganda machine. For the most part, they were stonewalled.

Rep. Ro Khanna, the California Democrat and environment subcommittee chairman spearheading the hearings, has worked hard to build echoes with the 1994 tobacco hearings where executives, down the line, denied nicotine is addictive. Those companies ended up the focus of a Justice Department perjury probe and ultimately a vast settlement.

But the oil hearing, in contrast, was sapped of TV-friendly drama given that the "Slippery Six," as environmentalists dubbed the oil executives and their allies, used the continuing pandemic as an excuse to attend virtually. Each was isolated in a digital box, with the wide views of the hall conveying anything but intensity.

The Democrats harvested plenty of soundbites and tweetable moments, including one in which Rep. Katie Porter of California came on live from her driveway decanting M&Ms from one jar to another to show the tiny size of Shell's clean-energy investments compared to its fossil spending.

(I'd love to know what you think of that live-action infographic. I was under-impressed.)

But at the same time, Fox Business was tweeting: "As gas prices surge, Big Oil climate change hearing tone-deaf."

That's because the Oversight Committee Republicans were, in essence, holding a completely distinct hearing, feeding their audience a diet of big-government outrage and economic fear.

In his opening statement, Rep. Ralph Norman, a Republican of South Carolina, showed a poster of Washington Post economics correspondent Heather Long's tweet of how inflation was raising prices of everything from electricity to apples.

The Oversight Republicans made this stinging point on Twitter: "House Democrats, in a hearing right now, are asking the largest energy producers to reduce supply. At the same time, @POTUS is urging them to increase operations to meet demand." President Biden was cast as anti-American on energy by the ranking Republican, James Comer of Kentucky.

As the hearing wrapped, the Oversight Committee chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, announced that she planned to issue subpoenas to seek industry documents that were not among the mass of material the companies and lobbies had provided so far.

I checked in with Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard historian and climate activist who’s been probing industry climate communications with colleagues including Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes (the co-author of Merchants of Doubt). Oreskes is widely credited with helping build the research strategy that led to the "#ExxonKnew" revelations about the disconnect between Exxon's public statements on climate risk and its internal expertise.

For all the skeletons we’ve already found in Big Oil’s closet, the reality is we’ve only been looking through the keyhole at a few hundred key documents - Geoffrey Supran

"For all the skeletons we’ve already found in Big Oil’s closet, the reality is we’ve only been looking through the keyhole at a few hundred key documents, uncovered by tenacious journalists and scholars in archives around the world," Supran wrote by email. "Yet the climate denial and delay machine is a sprawling network of fossil fuel companies, trade associations, think tanks, PR firms, media companies, politicians, and so on. I believe the American public deserve to know the truth – and see the receipts – of the full extent oil industry’s deeds and dealings that have already led to deaths, destruction, and the injustices of a collapsing climate. This is where congressional authority to demand documents comes in, and why, as with the tobacco hearings of the 1990s, this hearing and its announcement of subpoenas could be a watershed moment, blowing that closet door wide open and exposing thousands - if not millions - of damning documents that will likely bring more skeletons tumbling out.”

Supran may turn out right and something more may come of this process beyond keeping lawyers and journalists busy for years to come.

But I have doubts, if the hope is to produce real change in the ways information produces action, or inaction, in a system in which the First Amendment (combined with the "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision) plays such a foundational role.

So does Amy Westervelt, who has dug deeper into oil-industry lobbying and public relations history than just about any journalist. In a Rolling Stone story published ahead of the hearing, she said the far bigger issue is corporate disinformation writ large.

The headline and deck on her article really say it all: "Democrats Are Coming After Big Oil Over the Industry’s Endless Climate Bullshit. But there won’t be a real reckoning — or real solutions to our biggest problems — unless we take on 'Big Disinformation.'”

Westervelt sees the tobacco hearings and investigations not as a victory, but as a case study in the limits of government power against corporate giants. "[T]he Congressional and Department of Justice investigations of the tobacco industry, and even the massive master settlement did not put a stop to corporate disinformation, tobacco-related or otherwise," Westervelt wrote.

And of course they didn't blunt tobacco industry growth, either. The industry is heading toward a trillion-dollar-a-year market by 2030, even as public health studies project a 21st-century toll of one billion premature deaths.

Please read Westervelt's story for more.

She'll be on my Sustain What webcast on Monday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern to discuss the information wars around climate change in a wider conversation on paths to media progress on climate with Max Boykoff, a communications professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who runs the Media and Climate Change Observatory. Join us on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube:

For further insight, I reached out to Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College who wrote an op-ed article for The New York Times back in 2015 on "The Limits of the ‘Tobacco Strategy’ on Climate Change."

At the time, he wrote, "While this tactic helped tobacco opponents win over regulators and the public, it may be a less effective approach to addressing political opposition to climate change — an issue on which both elites and the public are deeply divided."

Much has changed since then, of course, in both the country's social media landscape and politics. On Friday, Nyhan said he hadn't had time to watch the new Big Oil hearing, but offered a wide-angle view of the "tobacco moment" thesis.

Basically, he sees so much happening through activism and direct climate impacts on communities that hearings could end up something of a side show:

"I would say the Exxon-style lawsuit strategy has seemed to be less effective than activism within and outside the party system and the obvious and increasingly undeniable effects of climate change that are already taking place," Nyhan wrote in an email. "Tobacco hearings seemed to work well but that issue was never as partisan as climate. In general, I worry about formats that reinforce partisan divisions over the issue - the way the issue has become entrenched in that framework is obviously one of the key challenges we face. We have seen greater acceptance of anthropogenic climate change in recent years but the public opinion data suggests that a lot of the gains in belief are coming from consolidation of support among Democrats (which will top out soon) rather than increases among Republican or independents."

He concluded: "It’s not impossible that the legal discovery or Congressional hearings process could generate revelations that would create a tobacco-style backlash against the industry, but so far there’s no evidence of that to my knowledge."

Why oil is not tobacco

I have a theory related to the lack of such a societal backlash. For one thing, we all benefit directly or indirectly from petroleum-derived goods and services every day, even as only a shrinking fraction of society smokes or vapes.

In my recent story explaining why my former employer, The New York Times, should stop making advertising content for oil and gas companies, I offered more:

"There is an enormous difference between companies extracting fossil fuels and those selling tobacco. With tobacco, there is no public good and, as the World Health Organization warns, there is a horrific current toll of more than 8 million deaths a year and a projected death toll in this century of up to 1 billion people, with most of those losses in lower-income countries....

As I've been writing since my first cover story on global warming in 1988 (which had a cigarette ad on the back), greenhouse-gas pollution, mostly from fossil fuel burning, is heating the planet and contributing to a host of environmental and societal harms. Bad practices in oil and gas extraction, production and transport have and can create terrible impacts, and those impacts (along with old-fashioned toxic pollution) often harm communities of color most. No one has made that case better with data than the sociologist Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University.

But fossil fuels have provided enormous societal benefits (from fertilizer to refrigeration to mass electrification to mobility to...) that have to be considered along with the substantial costs and risks, including those attending an unmitigated buildup of greenhouse gases."

Please read the rest here.

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As a parting shot, here's a photo I shot of the "Fossil of the Day" award "ceremony" at the climate treaty talks in Montreal back in 2005.