TO new report from the House Oversight Committee’s Democrats and the Senate’s Committee on the Budget says that major American oil companies have been lying for decades about their role in climate change.
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“Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science, ” the report says.
After the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News laid out evidence In 2015 that Big Oil had purposely misled the public about the root causes behind climate change, the Congressional report says that the “companies publicly rejected the reporting at the time,” but “internally did not dispute the findings but tried to dismiss them as’ hyperbolic’ and ‘journalistic malpractice.’”
Oil companies frequently proclaim that they are working to reduce climate change. In its most recent “Advancing Climate Solutions” report that it said laid out its “resolve to drive meaningful change,” ExxonMobil wrote that “[i]f you were to make a list of the biggest challenges facing humankind right now, addressing poverty and climate change would be at the top.”
Although Exxon is arguably a major contributor to that challenge — by its own calculations, it was responsible for nearly 2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions in 2020 — it also positions itself as uniquely able to take it on. “At the same time,” its report says, “if you were to make a list of the companies that have a credible chance of improving access to affordable energy and other products that are critical to improving living standards and reducing emissions, ExxonMobil would also “be at the top.”
But when climate activists attempted to bring up a shareholder vote asking them to take a bigger role in fighting climate change, Exxon sued them.
