Climate-Science Deniers, Right-Wing Think Tanks, and Fossil Fuel Shills Are Plotting Against the Clean Energy Transition

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Original article by Rebecca Burns republished from DeSmog.

Inside the conspiracy to take down wind and solar power.

Block Island Wind Farm was the first U.S. offshore wind farm. Credit: Dennis Schroeder/National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL)CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED

This article by Sierra is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

LAST JULY, a small group of rabble-rousers boarded a trio of powerboats, banners and bullhorns in hand. They were headed for the massive floating construction site of an offshore wind farm 35 miles from the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. As the boats motored through the swells, the self-styled activists broke into a chorus of pleas for the wind farm construction to cease—chants likely intended less for the still-faraway workers than for the camera there to capture footage. “Hear this message: We’re here to save the whales!” called out a man in a black polo shirt. “If you were a fossil fuel project, you would have been shut down long ago.”

That apparent conservation activist was, in fact, an infamous climate change disinformation artist: Marc Morano, who’s done more than perhaps any other person to manufacture doubt about global warming. From his perch at Climate Depot, the blog he’s run since 2009, Morano has elevated fake climate experts, encouraged the harassment of real climate scientists, and promoted the myth of “global cooling.”

More recently, Morano has been talking about whales—specifically, the idea that the higher-than-usual number of dead ones washing ashore along the East Coast is the result of President Joe Biden’s push to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade. In fact, the spate of whale strandings began in January 2016, before most survey activity for ocean turbines had even begun. Federal agencies are still investigating “unusual mortality events” for three whale species, but regulators and academic researchers say there’s no evidence of a link to wind development. Since 2019, hundreds of gray whales have also washed up dead on the West Coast, where offshore wind development is only now getting underway. The clearest common factor is rising ocean temperatures, which are disrupting whales’ feeding and migration patterns. In other words, climate change. But no matter—video of Morano’s boat protest landed on Fox News and spread like a ripple through the social media groups that have sprouted to oppose offshore wind.

Morano and company’s mission failed, as construction continued on the 12 turbines that now compose one of the largest offshore wind farms built to date in the United States. In December, New York flipped the switch on South Fork Wind, which will deliver renewable power to some 70,000 homes in the state. But figures like Morano may be gaining ground in a larger mission: twisting public opinion against renewable energy in other would-be host communities.

Marc Morano, a prominent climate change denier, spoke at the Heartland Institute’s “America First Energy Conference” in 2018. Credit: Heartland Institute via YouTube

Morano works at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, part of a sprawling climate-denial machine assembled with funding from fossil fuel interests like ExxonMobil and the Charles Koch Foundation and dark-money groups like DonorsTrust. Between 1998 and 2014, ExxonMobil and its foundation gave more than half a million dollars to the committee, which did not respond to a request for comment. DonorsTrust gave the group nearly $8 million between 2008 and 2017, according to federal tax data. Today, as both the science and the tangible effects of a warming planet become irrefutable, it’s increasingly rare to encounter the kind of outright climate denial these groups pioneered. Instead, it’s being replaced by what misinformation experts call “climate delayism”—a coordinated campaign to undermine climate solutions.

For fossil fuel ideologues, sowing misinformation about wind and solar power is proving to be an effective stall tactic. Public opinion surveys show that renewable energy remains popular with a bipartisan majority of Americans; in a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, seven out of 10 people said they’d be comfortable with a wind farm in their own community. But in New Jersey—where Morano’s group has gone so far as to buy billboards reading “Save Whales Stop Windmills”—nearly half of all the state’s residents now believe that such a connection probably exists, according to an August poll from Monmouth University.

“There is absolutely zero evidence that any of the offshore wind activity has been involved in any of those strandings,” says Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. Claims that noise from offshore wind surveys are driving whales into harm’s way don’t hold water, according to Nowacek—and it bears noting that seismic surveys for oil and gas are far louder. Many of the dead whales have borne signs of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear.

Yet in lawsuits challenging offshore wind projects, opponents continue to routinely cite alleged threats to whales. Two separate groups of plaintiffs retained an attorney, David Hubbard, who also represents Morano’s group. (Citing attorney-client privilege, Hubbard declined to discuss the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.) Courts have rejected such challenges to date. But coupled with high interest rates and supply-chain disruptions, such lawsuits could delay the offshore wind sector’s development.

It’s not just offshore wind at risk either. In order for the Biden administration to hit its goal of a 100 percent clean power grid by 2035, the nation needs to rapidly increase the rate of new wind and solar power installations. Hard-won federal policies like the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act put that target within reach. But at the local level, challenges are mounting. A report from Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law identified nearly 230 local measures across 35 states that have been enacted to restrict renewable energy development. Matthew Eisenson, the report’s author, said these could amount to a “serious obstacle” to achieving US climate goals.

Many such measures bear the finger­prints of “wind warriors” who have reemerged in dozens of local fights to stymie the energy transition at key points. For more than a decade, climate deniers and fossil fuel interests have quietly cultivated ties with these activists, equipping them with talking points, legal muscle, model ordinances, and other tools to try to subvert renewable energy adoption. Now, from coastal hamlets in New York to rural farming towns in Ohio, residents supporting wind and solar in their communities are running up against the same barrier: a chorus of disinformation, much of it tied to, or even circulated directly by, fossil-fuel-backed groups waging an existential fight to preserve the status quo.


IN THEIR BOOK Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway detail how Big Oil took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook to stoke the embers of the climate-denial movement. The longer industry groups could “keep the controversy alive” by creating the appearance of scientific debate, the longer they could continue to stall regulations and rake in profits. Oreskes and Conway even spotted overlap in the operatives carrying out this strategy, as figures like tobacco lobbyist Steven Milloy made a seamless transition from denying the health impacts of secondhand smoke to smearing climate scientists. Today, Milloy can be found attacking renewable energy—such as in a bizarre 2023 tweet in which he claimed that “wind power made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possible.”

While slick public relations operatives were once the go-to for industry spin, today scrappy antagonists working through social media can be highly effective, according to Joshua Fergen, a sociologist who has studied how online groups opposing wind energy stoked local conflict over its development in Ohio. Deepening political polarization, fueled by social media, has helped transform renewable energy into a culture-war issue—and extended the reach of its most ardent opponents.

As both the science and the tangible effects of a warming planet become irrefutable, it’s increasingly rare to encounter outright climate denial. Instead, it’s being replaced by what misinformation experts call “climate delayism.”

Fergen emphasizes that valid concerns arise about how renewable developers engage communities and choose project locations. But browse the myriad local Facebook groups dedicated to opposing renewable energy and you’ll see a different set of themes repeat. Along with AI-generated images of whales washed ashore in front of wind turbines, there are memes of the Grim Reaper holding a turbine in place of a scythe. In 2021, a viral post blaming Texas’s deadly winter blackout on iced-over wind turbines used an image from Sweden—and originated from a prominent oil and gas consultant, as USA Today reported.

Certain names also pop up over and over—many of them tied to a 2012 anti-wind confab in Washington, DC. Fergen says that the seeds of today’s online wind wars were in a draft public relations strategy that circulated the same year; a leaked document outlined how wind warriors can “create so much confusion, so many opinions on this, that you don’t really want to step in it,” he says.

One of those names is John Droz. He is a retired real-estate investor who has been involved in an impressive array of local energy fights over the past 15 years. It was Droz who convened the 2012 meeting that brought together staff from groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow with local wind opponents. Droz also edited the PR document that put forth tactics including a meme campaign, a “dummy business” to go into communities considering wind development, and youth science fairs “with preset parameters that cause students to steer away from wind.” The watchdog group Checks and Balances Project, which obtained documents from the conference, told The Guardian that it marked “the first time that local NIMBY anti-wind groups are coordinating and working with national fossil-fuel-funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry,” referring to “not in my backyard” anti-wind groups that proliferated during the mid-aughts.

Droz, who once worked at General Electric and describes himself as an “independent physicist,” has links to some of the key organs of the Right. He has been a guest speaker at the infamous climate-denial conferences hosted by the Heartland Institute. But Droz has achieved much of his impact through fastidious networking in communities with planned renewable energy projects. On his website, the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions, he provides a menu of wind ordinance templates. The ordinances often focus on “setback” rules, which mandate how far wind turbines must be located from neighboring properties. In one strategy document, Droz explains that the point of setbacks should be to make them “so restrictive that the cost of the project becomes prohibitive and the developer leaves.”

Droz denies that his ordinances have had this effect; he also says that he does not keep track of how many have passed. But his name has turned up in the local meeting minutes of towns like Richland, New York, which enacted restrictive setbacks in 2018. In the nearby town of Worth, where dozens of residents turned out to try to stop the passage of a similar measure, documents filed with the state utility regulator show that the town board consulted Droz as an “independent wind expert.”

Many such local regulations act as de facto wind farm bans, according to Columbia University’s Eisenson. Local governments extend six-month moratoriums indefinitely, or set caps on the acreage renewables can occupy. “If you have a one-mile setback from roads, you essentially need to have a property that’s at least four square miles in order to have a single wind turbine,” Eisenson says.

Dave Anderson, a policy analyst at the pro-renewables Energy and Policy Institute, has watched figures like Droz reappear perennially. The upshot, he says, is that while local anti-renewable groups may not have been started by the fossil fuel industry, “very quickly, they began to coordinate and get a lot of their information from think tanks and front groups” for the industry.

For more than a decade, Anderson’s group has chronicled this kind of coordination in purportedly grassroots campaigns. That included a yearslong, nationwide assault on state renewable energy mandates led by the State Policy Network, a 50-state group of Koch-affiliated think tanks. Network members turned up to testify on behalf of cut-and-paste legislation rolling back the renewable requirements—sometimes citing debunked studies from other Koch-backed groups. In Ohio, which froze its requirements in 2014, conservative think tanks and utility lobbyists cultivated ties with local wind opponents to stage public meetings featuring a David and Goliath narrative about the invasion of “Big Wind.”

In August 2021, a press conference staged on the steps of the Massachusetts State House seemed to repeat the same formula. After two Nantucket residents announced plans to file suit against a planned offshore wind project, a man with a shock of white hair and a smart blue suit stepped forward. Homeowners fighting wind turbines “need help,” he said, which is why he had traveled from Delaware to announce a new coalition “pairing think tanks like ours from various states with beach community groups.”

The speaker was David Stevenson, a former DuPont executive and adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 transition team. The think tank he was referring to is the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Delaware affiliate of the State Policy Network, where Stevenson works. At least five State Policy Network groups now work within the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, the new anti-wind umbrella group Stevenson announced. The coalition hadn’t received any Koch money to date, Stevenson told reporters at the statehouse press conference. He then added, “Not that we wouldn’t take it.”

Stevenson said in an email that the coalition has provided organizational but not financial support to local offshore-wind opponents. The dollar amount raised by the Caesar Rodney Institute for its Ocean Environment Legal Defense Fund is confidential, he said, “but it is substantial.”


A WOMAN DRESSED in a full-body whale costume sat in the front row of a school gymnasium in Rhode Island last March, holding a sign that read “Save Me.”

The event was an info session about planned offshore wind projects with a panel of experts including Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies at Brown University. The woman, Mary Chalke, was one of the Nantucket homeowners from Stevenson’s press conference. Roberts had first encountered affiliated local wind opponents earlier that year, when they began publishing a series of over-the-top warnings. One said that just as chemical dispersants had intensified the environmental damage from the 2010 Gulf oil spill, so, too, could offshore wind prove to be a cure worse than the disease of climate change. “The claims were so unsupported by the evidence and so sensationalized, and they really seemed to be just playing on people’s fears,” Roberts says.

A few years ago, Roberts was part of a team that modeled possible pathways to decarbonization in Rhode Island and found that nearly two-thirds of its electricity could be supplied by offshore wind, the most viable option in the densely populated state. After watching wind misinformation mount, Roberts switched gears and, with his students, produced a report analyzing opponents’ tactics. The report found that while wind foes circulated voluminous studies, white papers, and regulatory comments that gave the impression of rigor, they relied on fake experts and cherry-picked or misrepresented data—mainstays of the larger climate-denial movement.

Take the evolution of the narrative that wind turbines are killing whales. Conservative tabloids in Britain began falsely reporting a link more than a decade ago, sometimes referencing findings from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. In 2011, one of the university’s researchers protested when The Daily Telegraph cited his study linking naval exercises to whale strandings—in order to claim that wind farms “posed an even greater threat” to whales. The newspaper issued a correction, but the same claim, with the same citation, continued circulating nonetheless. In 2016, it was picked up by Paul Driessen, head of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Driessen’s blog post on whale deaths, citing the debunked article, is now marshaled as evidence by US opponents of offshore wind.

University of Rhode Island marine scientist Robert Kenney tried to correct the record in 2017, when a Daily Caller article linked the death of a humpback whale to the first US offshore wind farm. “Whales themselves are louder than turbines”—unlike ultraloud naval sonar—Kenney and a colleague explained in a published response. Plus, the Daily Caller piece had misstated the start of a series of humpback strandings to make the whales’ death rate appear three times as high. “The only thing in the whole article that was true was that there was a dead whale,” Kenney says.

Kenney’s research has tracked the decline of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. Since 2011, the whales’ deaths—largely from ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear—have outpaced births. The most effective protections would involve stricter regulations on commercial fishing, according to Kenney. But, he says, “the fishing industry fights tooth and nail every step of the way.”

It’s suspicious, then, that the fishing industry is now one of the loudest voices decrying the supposed dangers that offshore wind poses to right whales. In 2021, six commercial fishing associations sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, alleging that its approval of a wind farm off the coast of Nantucket violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The legal muscle behind the case was provided free of charge by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank. The group, which does not comment on its donors, has received at least $4 million from fossil fuel interests.

Amplified by fossil-fuel-backed groups and Fox News, the claims about whale deaths have derailed support for offshore wind in communities like Long Beach, New York, where many residents thought their community would welcome a proposed wind farm. Long Beach sits on a thin strip of land on the south shore of Long Island, an area devastated by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. In the storm’s aftermath, the city came out in staunch opposition to a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal off its coastline. Residents packed public meetings and staged beachfront rallies. When then-governor Andrew Cuomo arrived in the city in 2015 to announce his veto of the gas project, a crowd of 200 people burst into applause.

During the past year, a vocal group of locals mounted a mirror-image campaign against a proposed offshore wind farm whose under­water cable would make landfall in Long Beach before carrying power to some 1 million New York homes. “I’m all for green energy, believe me. I recycle every little thing I can,” said one area resident at a public hearing before New York’s utility regulator last October. Then she continued, “I am vehemently opposed to this entire project. The whales washing up that never used to wash up before.”

Conservative think tanks and utility lobbyists cultivated ties with local wind opponents to stage public meetings featuring a David and Goliath narrative.

Wind opponents began showing up to nearly every city council meeting. “There weren’t that many of them, but they were very organized, and very loud,” says Ellen Gluck Feldman, an environmental planner who has lived in Long Beach for almost four decades. She watched in dismay as the city council came out in formal opposition to the project last summer, leaving its path forward uncertain.

Gluck Feldman had thought that renewable energy would be a relatively easy sell in a community intimately familiar with climate calamity. “We should be the first ones to step up and do it because of what happened with Sandy,” she says. “We should be the first ones to say yes, we’re on board. And instead, we said no. It just boggles the mind.”


IN MANY PARTS of the country, the tactics honed by anti-wind campaigners are now being deployed against solar.

In late November, residents of Knox County, Ohio, packed a 1,000-seat theater to enjoy snacks and free alcohol and learn about a solar project proposed for their area. The catered town hall was hosted by Knox Smart Development, an anonymously funded LLC incorporated less than three weeks earlier. The speakers included Steve Goreham, a policy adviser for the Heartland Institute whose latest book forecasts a “coming renewable energy failure.” Attendees were instructed on how they could voice their opposition to the state regulator now reviewing the solar project.

Kathy Gamble attended the town hall to pass out information on behalf of Knox County for Responsible Solar, a group she founded to support residents’ rights to use their land as they choose, including for renewable energy development. The solar scare tactics are straining local relationships to the breaking point, she says. “Landowners are afraid to admit that they have land in the project.”

A mostly rural area outside of Columbus, Knox County happens to be home to the Ariel Corporation, a major manufacturer of methane gas compressors. Gamble suspects that its CEO, Republican mega­donor Karen Buchwald Wright, is behind the new anti-renewables group. Around the same time as the town hall, according to Gamble, residents began receiving copies of Goreham’s book with a hand­written note from Buchwald Wright. (Neither Knox Smart Development nor the Ariel Corporation responded to a request for comment.)

Gamble is unfazed by these tactics. The dark-money group in Knox County is just the latest of its kind to pop up in Ohio, where fossil fuel and utility companies have launched some of their most brazen attacks on renewable energy. Last year, the Empowerment Alliance, a separate group linked to Buchwald Wright that runs ads attacking wind and solar, successfully lobbied for state legislation categorizing methane gas as green energy. In 2019, Ohioans weathered a $9.5 million advertising blitz in favor of another disastrous energy law. The pressure campaign had been orchestrated by a front group for FirstEnergy, a bankrupt utility at the center of the state’s largest-ever corruption scandal. The utility company built a sprawling network of dark-money groups—and spent some $60 million on outright bribes—to grease the way for the state’s bailout of two aging nuclear plants. The 2019 legislation also gutted renewable energy standards and left taxpayers on the hook for ongoing coal subsidies benefiting FirstEnergy that will total nearly $2 billion by the end of this decade.

While the corruption at the heart of Ohio’s disastrous energy policy has been uncovered, the shadow it cast over the state’s climate future remains. Ohio utilities rank among the worst in the nation for the amount of electricity generated by renewables, and the state’s setback requirements for wind turbines are 10 times greater than those for oil and gas wells. Large-scale solar projects like the one in Knox County could provide a path forward—but only if they can make it through an approval process that’s increasingly stacked against renewables.

Three years ago, legislation cosponsored by Republican state representative Bill Seitz handed counties the power to veto renewable energy projects—and to proclaim themselves off-limits to wind and solar altogether. Communities lack any equivalent power to reject new fossil fuel projects. At least 10 counties in the state have since enacted such bans. And even in counties that haven’t passed such measures, the Ohio Power Siting Board has nonetheless begun rejecting new renewable projects, citing the presence of community opposition as evidence that they don’t adequately serve the public interest.

That’s a stark departure from precedent, according to Karin Nordstrom, an attorney for the nonprofit Ohio Environmental Council. In 2019, the board approved a controversial methane gas pipeline over the protest of communities in its path. Treating community opposition as a sufficient basis for denial appears to be a standard applied only to renewable energy, Nordstrom says. It’s “inappropriate” not to consider a project’s impact on climate change as part of the public interest.

Fossil fuel interests have a history of covert intervention in Ohio’s renewable energy siting. In one now-infamous example, coal producer Murray Energy was unmasked in 2018 as the money behind a yearslong lawsuit against a proposed Lake Erie wind farm. That was after an apparent front group for the coal industry—going by the name of Campaign for Affordable and Reliable Energy—tried unsuccessfully to intervene directly in several renewable energy siting cases. Murray Energy was also a major backer of the corruption-tainted 2019 nuclear and coal bailout.

Even after the astroturf anti-wind scheme was exposed in local media, an attorney for Murray Energy, John Stock, continued to represent groups fighting renewable energy projects until the coal company’s 2019 bankruptcy. At least two of Stock’s cases were then taken over by Jack Van Kley, a Columbus attorney who has since helped accelerate denials of renewable projects in Ohio. In the past four years, Van Kley has helped kill at least three other renewable energy projects, and he’s currently representing intervenors in four solar cases before the siting board. Last summer, The Plain Dealer spotted a reference to an “independent individual” chipping in $10,000 toward Van Kley’s fee in the meeting minutes of one of the townships he’s representing.

Van Kley said in an email that he has never represented or been paid by fossil fuel companies; his clients pay his fees. Other than the support they get from landowners who benefit financially, according to Van Kley, the projects “are almost universally opposed.”

In Madison County, Ohio, a solar proponent named John Boeckl has tried to counter that narrative. Boeckl researches photovoltaics for the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and his land is a few hundred yards from the proposed site of the Oak Run Solar Project, which could become one of the largest solar projects built to date nationwide. With the help of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center, Boeckl filed testimony on behalf of the project. He says that the objections he has heard from area residents boil down to scare tactics: “They’re taking away all our farmland, and we’re going to be eating soy.” The rhetoric echoes lines about the loss of farmland circulated by new fossil-fuel-linked groups like the Empowerment Alliance, as well as older ones like the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. In fact, Oak Run Solar could break new ground in agrovoltaics, the practice of co-locating crops and solar panels, which can increase some crop yields and reduce the amount of water needed for irrigation.

Local opponents have also raised concerns about the waste generated by solar panels; last year, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Colorado School of Mines warned that such claims may be slowing solar deployment, even though decarbonization “represents a substantial reduction in mass and toxicity of waste.” At present, they found, as much toxic coal ash is generated globally in one month as solar panels are expected to produce in the next 35 years.

Van Kley is also representing residents seeking to intervene in the solar case in Knox County, which banned large wind farms in 2022 and is now considering a solar ban. Knox Smart Development has more town halls planned and is circulating information from the Buckeye Institute, the Ohio affiliate of the Koch-backed State Policy Network.

In the face of well-financed opposition, Gamble feels outgunned. “You can hardly turn on a computer in this area without seeing their ads,” she says. But she’ll keep having conversations with her neighbors, and she plans to make her opinions known at siting board meetings when hearings get underway this spring. “I plan to get up and say my piece there,” she says, no matter the size of the opposition. “I do know that I just plan to keep on doing what I do.”

This article was published in partnership with The American Prospect.

Original article by Rebecca Burns republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingClimate-Science Deniers, Right-Wing Think Tanks, and Fossil Fuel Shills Are Plotting Against the Clean Energy Transition

When the Big Oil CEO Blames You for the Climate Crisis His Industry Created

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https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/exxonmobil-ceo-blames-public-for-climate Despite being published on Common Dreams it’s not under a CC licence so it’s only an excerpt.

Exxon CEO Darren Woods speaks at an international energy conference on March 7, 2023. (Photo: Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images)

We simply “waited too long,” said ExxonMobil’s top executive last week. But never mind, the important thing is that we made “above-average returns.”

[L]ast week the CEO of Exxon gave an interview that amounts to an attempt to pawn off the climate crisis on everyone else, and also to map out the road he sees ahead—a road that involves wasting huge amounts of money subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. Darren Woods was talking to Fortune magazine reporter Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray, who began by explaining that Exxon was a group of charming “Texas tough boys” before teeing up one of the classic softball questions of all time. Some people, he said, were thinking that perhaps Exxon wasn’t entirely “serious about addressing climate change. Tell me why they’re wrong.”

Well, Woods explains, Exxon is a molecule company, by which he means it’s interested in transforming molecules—’and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules’—to ‘address the needs of our society.’ What he’s saying, quite explicitly, is that Exxon is not an electron company, i.e. a company interested in building out wind or solar power. And when Fortune asks him why not, he lets slip the basic truth of our moment: “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders.”

For everyone who’s ever asked themselves, why isn’t Exxon (and Chevron and the rest) leading the charge to renewable energy, there’s the answer: you can make money doing it, but not as much as they’ve made traditionally. That’s because the sun and the wind deliver the energy for free, and all you need is some equipment to turn it into electrons. But Exxon controls the molecules—that’s what oil and gas reserves are. And that control means they can make outsize profits—as long as they can persuade the world to keep burning stuff.

And it’s the story of that persuasion where Woods’ words go from galling to really really gross. Because he explains to his nodding interlocutors that the world “waited too long” to start developing renewables. Or, in his particular brand of corporate speak: “we’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society.”

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/exxonmobil-ceo-blames-public-for-climate

Continue ReadingWhen the Big Oil CEO Blames You for the Climate Crisis His Industry Created

Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures

Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, last year. Photograph: Gavin John/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame, Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has claimed – prompting a backlash from climate experts.

As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily responsible for the climate crisis.

The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.” *

Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back as the 1970s, but forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about the climate crisis and stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. The revelations have inspired litigation against Exxon across the US.

“What they’re really trying to do is to whitewash their own history, to make it invisible,” said Robert Brulle, an environment policy expert at Brown University who has researched climate disinformation spread by the fossil-fuel industry.

A 2021 analysis also demonstrated that Exxon had downplayed its own role in the climate crisis for decades in public-facing messaging.

“The playbook is this: sell consumers a product that you know is dangerous, while publicly denying or downplaying those dangers. Then, when the dangers are no longer deniable, deny responsibility and blame the consumer,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science and co-author of the 2021 paper.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures

* No, ultimately how you solve the problem is that you don’t create emissions through using sustainable, renewable energy. It’s also not accepted that renewable energy is any more expensive. I’d say that you’re just an evil climate destroyer for profit and fossil fuel BSter.

Continue ReadingFury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures

Chicago Joins ‘Historic Wave of Lawsuits’ Against Big Oil

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republiahed from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Environmental activists march during the Global Climate Strike in downtown Chicago, Illinois, on September 15, 2023.  (Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images)

The city alleges the industry “funded, conceived, planned, and carried out a sustained and widespread campaign of denial and disinformation about the existence of climate change and their products’ contribution to it.”

Chicago on Tuesday joined the growing list of U.S. cities and states suing Big Oil for lying to the public about how burning fossil fuels causes and exacerbates the climate emergency.

The administration of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and the industry lobby American Petroleum Institute, which “funded, conceived, planned, and carried out a sustained and widespread campaign of denial and disinformation about the existence of climate change and their products’ contribution to it.”

“The climate change impacts that Chicago has faced and will continue to face—including more frequent and intense storms, flooding, droughts, extreme heat events, and shoreline erosion—are felt throughout every part of the city and disproportionately in low-income communities,” the suit contends.

In a statement, Johnson said that “there is no justice without accountability.”

“From the unprecedented poor air quality that we experienced last summer to the basement floodings that our residents on the West Side experienced, the consequences of this crisis are severe, as are the costs of surviving them,” he added. “That is why we are seeking to hold these defendants accountable.”

https://twitter.com/climatecosts/status/1760043981432619269?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1760043981432619269%7Ctwgr%5E8b38b723510420040ed227ade1f1ed4f7162abc2%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fclimate-lawsuit-2667326559

Climate campaigners welcomed the lawsuit.

“Big Oil has lied to the American people for decades about the catastrophic climate risks of their products, and now Chicago and communities across the country are rightfully insisting they pay for the damage they’ve caused,” Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles said in a statement.

“With Chicago, the nation’s third largest city, joining the fray, there is no doubt that we are witnessing a historic wave of lawsuits that could finally hold Big Oil accountable for the climate crisis they knowingly caused,” he added.

Chicago joins eight U.S. states plus the District of Columbia and numerous municipalities across the country that have sued to hold Big Oil accountable for deceiving the public about its role in the climate emergency.

“To date, eight federal appeals courts and dozens of federal district courts have unanimously ruled against the fossil fuel industry’s arguments to prevent these lawsuits from moving forward in state courts,” noted the Center for Climate Integrity. “In 2023, the U.S. Justice Department added its support for the communities. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied Big Oil petitions to consider the industry’s appeals of those lower court rulings three separate times, most recently in January.”

Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability officer, told the Chicago Sun-Times that “the fossil fuel industry should be able to pay for the damage they’ve caused.”

“We have to see accountability for the climate crisis,” she added.

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republiahed from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingChicago Joins ‘Historic Wave of Lawsuits’ Against Big Oil

With $280 Billion in Profits, Oil Giants Are ‘Main Winners of the War in Ukraine’

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Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A protester pretends to celebrate outside Shell’s London headquarters. (Photo: Greenpeace U.K./X)

“They have amassed untold wealth off the back of death, destruction, and spiraling energy prices,” a Global Witness investigator said of a new analysis.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches its second anniversary, one group has clearly benefited: the five biggest U.S. and European oil and gas companies.

BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies have made more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in profits since the war began, according to an analysis published by Global Witness on Monday.

“This analysis shows that regardless of what happens on the front lines, the fossil fuel majors are the main winners of the war in Ukraine,” Global Witness senior fossil fuels investigator Patrick Galey said in a statement. “They have amassed untold wealth off the back of death, destruction, and spiraling energy prices.”

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Big Oil’s profits were fueled in part by high wholesale gas prices, which were already elevated before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022 and skyrocketed afterward. All five companies covered by the analysis reported record profits for 2022.

This bonanza came as the conflict killed more than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been devastating for millions of people, from ordinary Ukrainians living under the shadow of war, to the households across Europe struggling to heat their homes,” Galey said.

During 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden accused Big Oil of “war profiteering.”

Global Witness calculated that BP and Shell have raked in enough since the war began—at £75 billion—to pay all British household electricity bills through July 2025. Chevron and ExxonMobil have made a combined $136 billion while Total has netted $50.4 billion.

These massive profits also come as the climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, continues to escalate. 2023 was the hottest year on record, and likely the hottest in 125,000 years. Yet instead of using their record profits to invest in renewable energy technology, the five major oil companies have cut back on their climate initiatives and handed massive payouts to shareholders.

“This is yet another way in which the fossil fuel industry is failing customers and the planet.”

Of the more than $280 billion the five companies have brought in since the war began, they returned what Global Witness said was an “unprecedented” $200 billion to shareholders. At the same time, Shell rescinded a promise to curb oil production by 2030 and said it would fire around 200 people employed by its green jobs division. BP, meanwhile, slashed its emissions reduction target from 35-40% of 2019 levels by 2030 to 20-30%.

The money paid to shareholders is also money that could have been paid to help communities adapt to the climate crisis or recover from the damage it has already caused. The $111 billion that the five companies paid to shareholders in 2023 alone is 158 times more than the money pledged to climate-vulnerable nations at COP28, and the €15 billion that TotalEnergies rewarded shareholders with was more than the €10 billion that France needed to recover from droughts and storms in 2022.

Galey said the companies were now “spending their gains on investor handouts and ever more oil and gas production, which Europe doesn’t need and the climate cannot take.”

“This is yet another way in which the fossil fuel industry is failing customers and the planet,” Galey said.

Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Rishi Sunak offers huge fossil fuel subsidies to develop fossil fuel extraction in UK.
Rishi Sunak offers huge fossil fuel subsidies to develop fossil fuel extraction in UK.

Investigating the so-called ‘windfall tax’

Continue ReadingWith $280 Billion in Profits, Oil Giants Are ‘Main Winners of the War in Ukraine’

Big Oil, Plastics Industry Led ‘Campaign of Deception’ to Push Recycling Fraud

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Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

More than 90% of plastics disposed of between 1950 and 2015 were not recycled. (Photo: Laura Lezza/Getty Images)

“The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” one advocate said.

The petrochemical industry—including major oil companies like ExxonMobil—knew for decades that recycling was not a sustainable solution to the problem of plastic waste, yet continued to promote it in order to avoid regulation and deceive consumers into continuing to buy and use their products, a report released Thursday by the Center for Climate Integrity reveals.

The report, titled The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry Deceived the Public for Decades and Caused the Plastic Waste Crisis, includes newly disclosed industry documents proving that companies and trade groups knew that plastics could not be recycled indefinitely in the 1980s and 90s even as they launched a massive public relations campaign to sell voters and policymakers on the process.

“This evidence shows that many of the same fossil fuel companies that knew and lied for decades about how their products cause climate change have also known and lied to the public about plastic recycling,” Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) president Richard Wiles said in a statement. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history.”

Plastic pollution is a major environmental and public health crisis. If current trends continue, plastics are expected to outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050, and the toxic fumes from plastic production facilities and incineration are a major environmental justice hazard for frontline communities. Humans in general also ingest an estimated credit-card’s worth of plastic each week, with unknown but potentially serious health impacts.

Recycling is often touted as a solution for keeping plastic out of the environment, but this has proven to be ineffective and insufficient: More than 90% of the plastics disposed of between 1950 and 2015 were either burnt, sent to landfills, or dumped into the environment. There are several technical and economic reasons why plastic recycling doesn’t work at scale. Plastics lose quality as they are recycled and can only really be reused once or potentially twice. The decline in quality also means that recycled plastics are more likely to leach toxins added during production or picked up from other waste items. Economically, it is cheaper to produce new plastics than recycle older ones, and only two types of plastic—PET and HDPE—actually attract markets that will recycle them.

The industry has long been aware of these limitations. In 1969, the American Chemical Society declared, “It is always possible that scientists and engineers will learn to recycle or dispose of wastes at a profit, but that does not seem likely to happen soon on a broad basis.”

“We are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

Despite this, petrochemical companies and their trade groups began to push plastic recycling in the 1980s and 90s as a response to growing public concern over plastic waste, and the threat that this would lead to bans on plastic products.

“No doubt about it, legislation is the single most important reason why we are looking at recycling,” Wayne Pearson, the executive director of industry front group the Plastics Recycling Foundation and a DuPont marketing director, said in 1988.

The plastics industry used various strategies to sell the public on recycling, according to the report. These included:

  1. Funding front groups to promote recycling;
  2. Running ad and PR campaigns;
  3. Investing in recycling research to convince the public that it was taking action;
  4. Setting unrealistic internal recycling goals;
  5. Writing educational material promoting recycling to school children;
  6. Advocating for “advanced recycling,” a term for breaking plastics down to chemical components that can theoretically be reused but are not in practice; and
  7. Claiming, against evidence, that recycling can be part of a “circular economy.”

CCI provides new evidence that, while the industry was employing these strategies, it was simultaneously aware of recycling’s limitations.

For example, a report from the Vinyl Institute trade group concluded in 1986 that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution, as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

In 1994, Exxon Chemical Vice President Irwin Levowitz told employees of the American Plastics Council that “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

CCI argued that the petrochemical industry should face legal consequences for its “campaign of deception” similar to suits brought against tobacco and opioid companies.

“When corporations and trade groups know that their products pose grave risks to society, and then lie to the public and policymakers about it, they must be held accountable,” Wiles said. “Accountability means stopping the lying, telling the truth, and paying for the damage they’ve caused.”

CCI vice president of legal and general counsel Alyssa Johl added: “Big Oil and the plastics industry’s decades-long campaign to deceive the public about plastic recycling has likely violated laws designed to protect consumers and the public from corporate misconduct and pollution.”

“Attorneys general and other officials should carefully consider the evidence that these companies defrauded the public and take appropriate action to hold them accountable,” Johl said.

Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingBig Oil, Plastics Industry Led ‘Campaign of Deception’ to Push Recycling Fraud

Congressman: DOJ Investigation of Big Oil Is Now “Even More Urgent” Following Shell Revelations

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Original article by Emily Sanders, ExxonKnews republished from DeSmog.

Credit: Tess Abbot/ExxonKnews

With more proof of Shell’s climate deception, Rep. Ted Lieu is once again urging the Department of Justice to look into whether fossil fuel companies broke the law.

After new evidence emerged last week showing that oil major Shell internally acknowledged the dangers of their fossil fuel products decades ago, a member of Congress is renewing his previous call for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Shell and other Big Oil companies’ “alleged campaigns of climate deception” may have violated federal law.

The company documents, first unearthed by Dutch researcher Vatan Hüzeir and reported last week by DeSmog and Follow the Money, reveal Shell executives and employees predicting “major adverse changes” to the climate from fossil fuel emissions — and admitting Shell’s role in causing the problem. “Global warming could challenge the very fabric of the world’s ecological and economic systems,” warned Shell executive Ged Davis in one newly uncovered document from 1989. 

“This new set of documents further demonstrates that Shell privately knew about the dangers its products would cause to the environment yet continued to deceive the public in pursuit of company profits. This is wrong and potentially illegal,” said U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), who along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) led 20 members of Congress in a letter last year urging the Department of Justice to look deeper into evidence that Shell, ExxonMobil, and other fossil fuel majors “lied — and continue to lie — to the public about their central role in exacerbating the climate crisis.” 

“These new documents provide additional evidence and make our calls for an investigation even more urgent,” Lieu told ExxonKnews in response to the latest Shell revelations. 

The lawmakers’ July 25 letter cited an initial batch of internal Shell documents released by Hüzeir last March. The evidence, they wrote, should inspire the DOJ to “investigate Exxon, Shell, and other members of the fossil fuel industry to determine whether they violated RICO, consumer protection, truth in advertising, public health, or other laws.” 

A separate letter from U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Ed Markey (D-OR) urged the DOJ to go even further and “bring suits against the fossil fuel industry for its longstanding and carefully coordinated campaign to mislead consumers and discredit climate science in pursuit of massive profits.”

The latest documents add to an abundance of proof that Shell was well aware of the harm its products would cause — and acknowledged its culpability for the damage.

“If a product is used, as indicated by Shell, and annoying consequences nevertheless arise, Shell feels partly responsible,” representatives from Shell told researchers from the Dutch University of Leiden in 1970.

Those “annoying consequences” — which turned out to be more catastrophic and deadly than just annoying — were plainly elucidated by the company in the years to follow. In a 1985 journal article, Shell employee T.G. Wilkinson observed that the burning of fossil fuels has “upset the balance” of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and “will cause major adverse changes to some areas.” 

“The dilemma therefore remains as to whether to encourage the continued use of fossil fuels with the potential enormous effects on the world’s climate,” Wilkinson wrote.

Two years later, an internal Shell report titled “Air Pollution: an Oil Industry Perspective” noted that a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere “could lead to a higher average surface temperature on Earth, which could have far-reaching environmental, social and economic consequences.”

In 1989, Shell executive Davis warned that “Two groups who could bear particularly heavy costs will be: Future generations who would have to live with the costs of adaptation, and…Those in countries yet to industrialise who would face constraints on energy use.”

Davis is now executive chair of world energy scenarios at the World Energy Council.

Armed with the information it needed to steer the world toward cleaner sources of energy, Shell embarked on a campaign to undermine climate action instead. 

The same year Davis made his prediction in the OECD report, Shell helped found the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an oil industry lobbying group that worked to spread disinformation about climate science. 

A year later, in an internal publication, Shell admitted the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and embrace alternative sources of energy — but stated that “by the time the enhanced greenhouse effect has been conclusively proven, it may be too late to do anything about it.”

Shell went on to promote the idea that climate science was uncertain and downplayed the role of fossil fuels in the years to come. “It is very difficult to aportion [sic] the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations to any particular cause,” read one paper published by the company in 1992. 

When Shell left the GCC, citing its opposition to the Kyoto climate agreement, it explained in a 1998 report that “The Shell view is that prudent precautionary measures are called for.”

Hüzeir, the researcher who unearthed these reports, told DeSmog that documents like this could help litigators make the case against Shell in a growing wave of lawsuits seeking to hold the company accountable for knowingly fueling climate chaos. “Shell’s deepening embrace of the precautionary principle, as revealed in this document, shows that Shell was well aware of the crisis ahead,” he said. “What else did they know?”

The documents add to a heap of evidence that could spur the country’s most powerful public interest law firm to investigate Big Oil.

“If the allegations against ExxonMobil, Shell, and other major fossil fuel companies are true, their coordinated efforts to deceive Americans constitute the most consequential deception campaign in history, with potentially existential consequences for our planet,” Lieu and other members of Congress wrote in their July letter to the DOJ. “We respectfully request that the DOJ investigate whether these actions violated federal law.”

Since that letter was sent last year, more state and local governments have taken the companies to court for that deception. California — the most populous state in the nation and one of the world’s largest economies — sued Shell and other fossil fuel majors for climate damages and consumer fraud. Two Indigenous tribal governments in Washington State, forced to spend millions relocating their communities due to rising seas, filed their own lawsuit against oil giants. Honolulu’s climate accountability lawsuit cleared motions to dismiss the case by fossil fuel defendants, putting it on a path to be the first case of its kind to go to trial. 

The stakes of these legal efforts are only getting higher, as climate disasters continue to batter many of the same communities awaiting their day in court. The DOJ threw its support behind the plaintiffs in a U.S. Supreme Court brief the agency filed last March, but it hasn’t yet taken independent action against the fossil fuel industry.

“It’s time to hold polluters accountable for their lies, which could have existential consequences for our planet,” Lieu said.

Original article by Emily Sanders, ExxonKnews republished from DeSmog.

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Continue ReadingCongressman: DOJ Investigation of Big Oil Is Now “Even More Urgent” Following Shell Revelations

Supreme Court Rejects Bid by API, Exxon, and Koch to Kill Climate Case

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Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

An oil and petroleum refinery is shown in St. Paul Park, Minnesota. (Photo: jferrer/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

“Big Oil companies will continue fighting to escape justice, but for the third time in a year, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied their desperate pleas,” said one campaigner.

For the third time in less than a year, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed a key case against the fossil fuel industry to proceed in state court, delivering a win for the movement to make polluters pay for driving the climate emergency.

“This decision is another step forward for Minnesota’s efforts to hold fossil fuel giants accountable for their climate lies and the harm they’ve caused,” said Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles, pointing to the previous denials of other cases last April and May.

“Big Oil companies will continue fighting to escape justice, but for the third time in a year, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied their desperate pleas to overturn the unanimous rulings of every single court to consider this issue,” he continued.

“It’s time for these polluters to give up their failed arguments to escape state courts.”

As legal leaders of dozens of U.S. states and municipalities have launched climate lawsuits in recent years, the fossil fuel industry has attempted to evade accountability by shifting the cases to federal court—a strategy that’s proven unsuccessful.

Wiles argued that “after three strikes, it’s time for these polluters to give up their failed arguments to escape state courts and prepare to face the evidence of their climate deception at trial.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Monday decision came in a case filed in 2020 by Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute (API), based on the state’s consumer protection laws.

“The fraud, deceptive advertising, and other violations of Minnesota state law and common law that the lawsuit shows they perpetrated have harmed Minnesotans’ health and our state’s environment, infrastructure, and economy,” Ellison said at the time.

The justices declined Big Oil’s request to review the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ March decision that the case belongs in state court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of former GOP President Donald Trump, would have taken the case, in line with his position last year.

“I appreciate the court’s consideration and decision,” Ellison said in a statement Monday. “It aligns with 25 federal court decisions across the country, all of which have found that cases like ours rest on these defendants’ failures to warn and their campaigns of deception around their products’ contributions to the climate crisis. The court’s decision confirms these cases are properly filed in state courts.”

“Taken together, the defendants’ behavior has delayed the transition to alternative energy sources and a lower-carbon economy, resulting in dire impacts on Minnesota’s environment and enormous costs to Minnesotans and the world,” he stressed. “Now, the case can move forward in state court, where it was properly filed, and we can begin to hold these companies accountable for their wrongful conduct.”

Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for Fossil Free Media and the Make Polluters Pay campaign, declared Monday that “today’s decision is an important step forward for accountability and justice.”

“The Supreme Court has now laid out an unmistakable path forward,” she added, “for not only Minnesota’s consumer protection case against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and API, but the dozens of cases against the fossil fuel industry popping up across the county.”

This post has been updated with comment from Keith Ellison.

Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingSupreme Court Rejects Bid by API, Exxon, and Koch to Kill Climate Case

Fossil Fuel Giants to Lavish Shareholders With Record Paydays as Climate Crisis Deepens

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Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London.  (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)

“The global energy crisis has been a giant cash grab for fossil fuel firms,” said one campaigner. “And instead of investing their record profits in clean energy, these companies are doubling down on oil, gas, and shareholder payouts.”

The year 2023 was marked by weather events that made it increasingly clear that the Earth has entered what United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called the “era of global boiling,” with wildfires and prolonged heatwaves impacting millions of people and scientists confirming their suffering was the direct result of fossil fuel extraction and planetary heating.

But for the world’s five largest oil giants, the year marked record profits and the approval of several major new fossil fuel projects, allowing the companies to lavish their shareholders with payouts that are expected to exceed $100 billion—signaling that executives have little anxiety that demand for their products will fall, said one economist.

The companies—BP, Shell, Chevron,ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies—spent $104 billion on shareholder payouts in 2022, and are expected to reward investors with even more in buybacks and dividends for 2023, The Guardian reported.

Shell announced plans in November to pay investors at least $23 billion—more than six times the amount it planned to spend on renewable energy projects—while BP promised shareholders a 10% raise in dividends and Chevron could exceed the $75 billion stock buyback it announced early last year.

Alice Harrison, a campaigner for Global Witness, noted that fossil fuel shareholders will be enjoying their paydays as households across Europe struggle with fuel poverty and the world faces the rising threat of climate disasters brought on by the industry.

“The global energy crisis has been a giant cash grab for fossil fuel firms,” Harrison told The Guardian. “And instead of investing their record profits in clean energy, these companies are doubling down on oil, gas, and shareholder payouts. Yet again millions of families won’t be able to afford to heat their homes this winter, and countries around the world will continue to suffer the extreme weather events of climate collapse. This is the fossil fuel economy, and it’s rigged in favor of the rich.”

In 2023 campaigners intensified their demands for accountability from the oil, gas, and coal industries, and as of last month had successfully pressured more than 1,600 universities, pension funds, and other institutions to divest from fossil fuels. In the U.S., provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been touted as the “largest investment in climate and energy in American history,” went into effect.

But Dieter Helm, a professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, The Guardian that if the industry were truly fearful of policymakers phasing out fossil fuel extraction and expediting a transition to renewable sources, they would be spending far less on new projects and shareholder payouts.

“For this to be the case you would have to believe that the energy transition is happening, and that demand for fossil fuels is going to fall,” Helm told The Guardian.

In 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden infuriated climate campaigners by approving the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, which could lead to roughly 280 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions. His administration also included in a debt limit deal language that would expedite the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which could emit the equivalent of more than 89 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, while the U.K. government greenlit a massive oil drilling field in the North Sea and French company TotalEnergies continued to construct the 900-mile-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which would transport up to 230,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

“These companies are investing a huge amount in new projects, and they’re handing out bigger dividends because they are confident that they’re going to make big returns,” Helm said. “And when we look at the state of our current climate progress, who’s to say they’re wrong?”

Climate campaigner Vanessa Nakate pointed out that the shareholder paydays are expected following a deal on a loss and damage fund at the 28th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, aimed at helping developing countries to fight the climate emergency. That fund was hailed as “historic” and included a commitment of $700 million from wealthy countries—a sum that is expected to be dwarfed by fossil fuel investors’ profits.

“They have picked people’s pockets, fueled inflation and pollution, and deepened poverty,” U.K. House of Lords member and Tax Justice Network co-founder Prem Sikka said of the oil giants. “Governments do nothing to end their monopolistic control. Need to break-up this cartel.”

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingFossil Fuel Giants to Lavish Shareholders With Record Paydays as Climate Crisis Deepens

What does it mean to be a climate denier?

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In the ‘coming soon’ notice announcing this article I said that “[t]here aren’t any real climate deniers anymore”. I was mistaken and there are a very few people like Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers Corbyn. I’ve only met and spoken with him once but I’m satisfied that he’s genuine in his beliefs despite them being misguided. He and others like him have the right to believe whatever they like and he’s harmless enough – while he may persuade a few people the vast majority will understand that he’s mistaken and wrong.

Image of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reads 1% RICHEST 100% CLIMATE DENIER
Image of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reads 1% RICHEST 100% CLIMATE DENIER

So apart from Piers Corbyn and a few similar people, there is no such thing as a climate denier nowadays. The Capitalists profiting from climate destruction have known for 60 years of more that they were profiting from destroying the planet and were forcing future generations to endure intolerable climate conditions, annihilating many thousands of species of plants and animals and generally totally fekking everything.

Governments are controlled, directed, owned by a very few extremely rich and powerful people, the very people that are profiting and maintaining their wealth, power and influence from destroying the planet. According to this perspective we do not exist in a democracy and it is instead a pretence hiding the influence of the rich and powerful. We exist in a plutocracy – we have a wealthy ruling class that politicians serve.

It cannot be accepted that politicians like UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak or our expected next Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the like are mistaken true believers like Piers Corbyn believes. Rather they are climate deniers in the sense of the fossil fuel industries – Exxon, Shell and BP – who know fully well that they are destroying the planet but deceive and mislead to continue making a filthy profit. It’s obvious to see that these politician cnuts serve this rich elite’s interests – Tory and Labour UK governments have answered to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, sucking up to him, grateful to accept his orders.

Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil's You May Find Yourself... art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.

Sunak, despite being fully aware of the climate crisis is continuing to destroy the planet. Announcing the go-ahead for the Rosebank oil field he said that he intends to get every last drop of North Sea oil.

All the media companies attacking climate activists – GB News, the Mail, Express, etc – represent filthy rich interests profiting from climate destruction.

Continue ReadingWhat does it mean to be a climate denier?