Climatologist Says Oil CEOs Lied About Their Plot to Block Climate Action

Top executives of ExxonMobil and other oil giants lied to Congress yesterday, denying that they spread disinformation about climate change. Democrats immediately challenged the oil executives, accusing them of engaging in a 30-year, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming.

“They are obviously lying like the tobacco executives were,″ said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee. She was referring to a 1994 hearing with tobacco executives who famously testified that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive.

Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist, called out the lies by the oil companies. Mann is the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Remarks by Michael Mann in the video:

Exxon Mobil made projections in the early 1980s by a team of scientists from the world’s largest, publicly-traded fossil fuel company. As a result, Exxon mobile successfully predicted the warming that we would see by now back in 1982.

Did they talk about what we could do to avert this crisis? No, they doubled down in a campaign to deny the threat of climate change. They spent tens of millions of dollars attacking climate scientists, like myself, trying to undermine public confidence in the science of climate change. And as a result of decades of inaction mainly due to the efforts by Exxon Mobil and other fossil fuel companies to prevent action, we have a much greater challenge on our hands.

But what decades of inaction have bought us is a much steeper trip down this slope. You’re a skier. We’ve gone from a bunny slope to a black double diamond slope. That’s what we need to do. Now. If we are to avert warming of one and a half degrees Celsius and the impacts as we’ve already heard here today, they’re not subtle anymore.

Hottest day on record

Every summer, we see new record-breaking temperatures around the world, in the US and Europe, unprecedented heat waves. Last year, we set the warmest, the record for the warmest temperature ever reliable. But, measured on this planet, not far from where you are in death valley, California, to be precise, it wasn’t 130 degrees.

It was 129.9 degrees Fahrenheit. And that was the highest reliably measured temperature on record. That was last year. We just beat that record. We had the new record for the warmest temperature ever reliably measured on the planet. Again, the same location is not far from you in death valley this year, not 129.9, but 130 degrees.

We have not acted because there has been a campaign waged by fossil fuel interests for decades to discredit the science to hire front groups and experts who will advocate against taking action attacking renewable energy.

Fossil fuel companies help elect politicians, almost always on the Republican side of the aisle, politicians who are willing to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry rather than what’s right for the people they’re supposed to represent. And we’ve called that the climate wars. Four years ago, I testified to a House committee hearing.

This was a hearing of the house science committee chaired by Lamar Smith. Again, the Republicans controlled both the house and the Senate at that time. Lamar Smith was the Republican chair of that committee from Texas, a climate change denier, one of the largest recipients of fossil fuel money in the US House of Representatives. There were three climate change contrarians invited by the majority: the Republicans and one witness for the Democrats. That was me.

The thing is, four years later, the evidence becomes so obvious that politicians like Lamar Smith can no longer claim that climate change is a hoax. Of course, that’s not happening, but they’re still advocating for the fossil fuel industry, doing everything they can to prevent us from moving on from moving away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy.

Denial and deflection

and It’s about the tactics that they’re now using: soft denial. “Well, we’re not denying that climate change is happening. We just don’t think it’s nearly as bad as those scientists are saying.”

There’s a whole sort of coterie now of individuals who pct as promoters of this sort of soft denialism. “Yeah. Climate change, we accept the science but don’t call us climate change deniers. We accept the science, but the impacts aren’t going to be a problem. We can just adapt to them,” they say.

The problem isn’t technology, it’s having the political will. It’s the political solution to this problem. So we can solve the problem.

The fossil fuel companies use denial and deflection. This series of words begin with “D” and describe the different tactics in the new climate war deflection.

We can have policies like carbon pricing, incentives, renewable energy, and blocking new fossil fuel infrastructure. They didn’t want to — any of those things that would hurt their profits. So once again, they’ve tried to convince us that the problem is us. It’s just a matter of individual lifestyle change.

We have a crisis on our hands, but we can do something about it. The climate crisis is more deadly than the COVID-19 crisis.

The climate crisis is already more deadly than the coronavirus crisis. Far more lives will be lost due to climate inaction than were lost due to the pandemic if we fail to take meaningful action.

We need politicians once again who are willing to do what’s right for us. These days, that’s almost the Democratic party. There’s only one party in this country that recognizes the climate crisis. So you’ve got to vote for Democrats, and you’ve got to help the Pima county Democrats and Arizona Democrats because this is truly a battleground state.

So we have to accelerate the transition that’s already underway, and that means policies. That means carbon pricing. That means renewable energy standards, as Democrats are arguing, need to be in this new stimulus package. This infrastructure package means blocking new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s up to us. And this truly is our moment.