Democrats see climate 'gaslighting' by oil sector

ExxonMobil, Chevron and other oil companies are misleading the public about the scale of their climate change ambitions, according to an investigation by Democrats in the US House of Representatives.

Internal emails obtained through a congressional subpoena show company officials heavily promoting their pledges to cut emissions, while parsing language internally to keep a major role for oil and gas, Democrats say. The companies are "gaslighting" the public on their climate goals, according to an investigative memo by the House Oversight Committee.

"Put simply, these documents show that Big Oil is still not taking its responsibility to curb emissions seriously," committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) said.

The committee last year subpoenaed ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Shell for emails and documents on what they said was a "long-running campaign" by the oil industry to spread disinformation about its contribution toward climate change. The new investigative materials released Wednesday draw from hundreds of thousands of documents.

Among their findings are ExxonMobil emails highlighting a "tension" between the $68mn it spent in 2017-19 on an advertising campaign focused on its research on algae-based biofuels, versus the capabilities of a technology it only spent $300mn researching since 2009. ExxonMobil at the time of the campaign told investors the algae technology was still "decades away from the scale we need."

"We probably won't see it in our lifetime," Maloney said. "And yet they were promoting it."

ExxonMobil said certain groups were seeking to misrepresent its positions and its support for effective policy by "recasting genuine policy debates as a disinformation campaign." The company said those accusations were "baseless and any suggestion to the contrary is false."

Emails obtained from Shell show a strategy to sell its most carbon-intensive assets to other companies, Democrats said, citing a 2021 email from an employee saying that the "days in the Shell Family are probably numbered" for assets that are major emitters, particularly in regions "sensitive" to greenhouse gasses. Another top Shell employee in 2019 wished a climate group touring the US "the very best" and also "bedbugs," Democrats said.

Shell said of nearly 500,000 pages it provided to the committee, the "small handful" released were evidence of efforts to set aggressive climate goals and meaningfully participate in the energy transition. The documents include "challenging internal and external discussions that signal Shell's intent" to be a net-zero energy business, the company said.

An email exchange in 2017 with senior executives at BP show they were "mocking" news of record-breaking temperatures and sea level rise, Democrats said, including a joke about buying a "hot toddy" as a final round of drinks before temperatures led them to burn up.

BP some emails, out of the hundreds of thousands of documents, made "inartful attempts at humor that do not reflect the value of BP and should not distract from our actions." BP said it has set near-term climate targets consistent with becoming a net-zero company by 2050 or earlier.

Republicans criticized the long-running Democratic probe into the oil companies. The investigation is part of a "war on American energy producers" by Democrats who support "radical climate policies" that increasing energy prices, committee ranking member James Comer (R-Kentucky) said.

By Chris Knight