Deny, minimize, hide, deceive.
They are all terms put together, by one report presented at a United States Senate hearing, to the behavior of the companies over the years main Oil & Gas companies in the country in an attempt to continue doing business thanks to oil, gas or coal despite the impact, for example in terms of climate-changing emissions, on life on the planet.
Pages of documents, the result of journalistic investigations and academic reports, which show how “Deception, misinformation and double language” have been at the heart of the fossil fuel industry’s practices for decades in an attempt to minimize the dangers associated with the combustion of crude oil and gas.
The Capitol Hill revelations show how oil companies have worked to green their image while simultaneously fighting climate policy behind the scenes.
“Time after time the largest oil and gas corporations say one thing for the purposes of public consumption, but do something completely different to protect their profits,” he said. Democrat Jamie Raskin – Company officials will admit the terrifying reality of their business model behind closed doors, but they will tell the public something completely different, false and reassuring».
The problem – the Democrats point out – is that while Oil & Gas companies have continued to collect profits, the impacts of the climate crisis have worsened, which is why some senators have gone out of their way to say that “the industry should pay damages for fueling the crisis”.
“In my opinion, it should not be the state government or the federal government that should pick up the bill,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said, for example. “I think it’s time to ask the people who caused that problem, who lied about that situation, to pay the bill.”
Accusations that Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee pushed backrecalling how it is “undeniable that fossil fuels are fundamental to our energy security”, said for example Chuck Grassley, Republican senator from Iowa, while others such as Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson defended the current energy model and of Oil & Gas business explaining that “I am not a climate change denier, I am simply not a climate change alarmist”.
The report presented on Capitol Hill was drafted by the Democrats of House Oversight Committee in the United States and points the finger at many oil giants, among which ExxonMobil, Shell, BP And Chevronexplicitly speaking of “a campaign aimed at defending the interests of the sector”, all at the obvious expense of the “health of citizens and the Planet”.
“Big oil companies continue to hide the facts about their business model and obscure the real dangers of fossil fuels, including natural gas, in order to block the climate action we need,” said Jamie Raskin, co-author of report along with Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
The report shows how for decades some scientists and researchers in the oil industry have warned about the impact of emissions related to combustion and the resulting possible climate changes. These warnings, however – according to the report – would have been “put aside”, instead favoring communications from the sector that they emphasized the apparent uncertainty around climate science.
The committee also claims that leaders of big oil companies have continued to “deny climate science” and to “spread misinformation and perpetuate ambiguous discourse about the safety of natural gas and the industry’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Also relevant is the position, shown by the documents, of some Oil & Gas companies which in public they supported the famous (and controversial) carbon capture and storage technology as a solution, while in private they defined it as too expensive.
She also ended up in the crosshairs of Democratic accusations L’American Petroleum Institute (API) which they said would defend the sector’s balance between environmental and economic priorities.
“For decades, the fossil fuel industry has known about the economic and climate damage of its products, but has deceived the American public into continuing to collect more than $600 billion in subsidies each year, reaping record profits,” Whitehouse said.
According to US media reports, the documents contained in the report come directly from the main oil companies or lobbies and some of these date back to before the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Even then, for example, journalists from Inside Climate News they discovered that Exxon had been “aware of the dangers of the climate crisis for decades, yet had hidden that knowledge from the public.”
Exxonlike other oil companies, has rejected all accusations, often speaking of “inaccurate and deliberately misleading” information.
What is surprising, according to the information shown by the Democrats, is above all the double face of the companies. A communication from is cited as an example BP that while in 2020 he announced in public big plans for become a zero-emission society in 2050in private he wrote emails (among the managers) in which he doubted whether it was possible.
In recent years the role of the big Oil & Gas companies, including the Italian one Eni, has been increasingly at the center of criticism linked to the harmful emissions of an industry that earns gigantic extra profits. In the world All sorts of lawsuits have sprung up to try to shed light on the impact of multinational corporations on the climate crisis.
In the United States, according to Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integritythe beginning of a path in the Senate that highlights the inconsistencies and responsibilities of oil and gas companies “is the most important thing Congress is doing right now regarding climate change”.
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