To see Big Oil’s future, look at its lobbying record
New evidence reveals the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaigns to stall the growth of clean energy tech.
Emily Sanders is senior reporter at ExxonKnews.
Shell announced this week that it will once again scale back its stated climate targets. The oil giant now plans to lower the “carbon intensity” of its fossil fuel emissions from 20% to a less strict 15-20% by 2030, after reaping billions in profits last year and defending its intention to keep doubling down on oil and gas production.
As fossil fuel companies steadily backslide on their already-questionable climate and clean energy promises, governments, shareholders, and international agencies have continued to plead with the industry to step up its investments in a renewable energy transition. “What we need are company chief executives, looking to the future and investing in that future and accelerating the transition to that future," former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said in July when oil majors dropped their climate plans in favor of more fossil fuels.
But if you ask Dario Kenner, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, governments and advocates should be looking at why our economies are so heavily dependent on fossil fuels — not pressuring oil companies to be part of the transition or debating the details of their climate plans. In new research first reported by The Guardian last week, Kenner documented a trove of evidence showing that the fossil fuel industry has systematically lobbied to block the transition to clean energy.
Trying to get the industry to change its business model is “ridiculous” and “very likely to be a massive waste of time,” said Kenner. “They are the same industry that’s clearly tried to kill green technology for decades.”
Kenner combed through public statements from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and European oil and gas trade association FuelsEurope dating back to the 1960s and found a pattern of industry trade associations battling government support of wind, solar, and EV technologies on both sides of the Atlantic.
That dossier of evidence, reviewed by ExxonKnews, included repeated instances of the trade groups lobbying against tax credits and other forms of support for electric vehicles, wind, and solar panels, clean air and auto emissions standards, and government backing of research into green technologies.
In 1973, API — along with staff from member companies Shell and Exxon — pressured Congress to weaken auto emission standards that would have favored electric vehicles, arguing that it would impact “the oil industry’s continuing ability to meet its share of the Nation’s growing energy needs, not only for gasoline, but also for other petroleum products.”
Nearly a half a century later in 2018, the largest U.S. oil and gas trade group lobbied against tax credits for electric vehicles, claiming government support for EVs would “distort the free market and ultimately increase consumer costs,” and maintaining that “API opposes government intervention in the markets to pick winners and losers because it creates an un-level playing field.” API still uses free market talking points to fight clean energy today.
As The Guardian points out, fossil fuel companies have benefited from hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies each year while fighting action to address climate change.
“The market’s already rigged in favor of fossil fuels,” said Kenner, yet the industry embarked on a longstanding effort to “destroy the conditions under which renewables would have flourished.”
Today, the fossil fuel industry claims that renewable energy simply can’t supply the world’s energy needs on its own. Wind, solar, and electric vehicles are “not sufficient” to meet society’s energy demand despite climate concerns, said Exxon CEO Darren Woods in his recent interview with Fortune, claiming that society has “waited too long” to fund technology that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and “today’s technology will not solve this problem.” API chief executive Mike Sommers recently said he rejects the term “energy transition” because it “suggests we’re going to be moving from one thing to another — and very rarely has that happened in the history of energy.”
Those comments intentionally “hide the decades of lobbying they’ve done to shape the consumption options for the majority of the population and shape society’s needs to be based around fossil fuels,” said Kenner.
At the same time, major oil companies are promoting themselves as capable of leading the development of “low-carbon technologies” — as long as they don’t challenge the continued production of fossil fuels. “At our heart, we’re a technology company,” Woods told Fortune before touting the company’s carbon capture projects.
Exxon and other oil companies have invested heavily in carbon capture projects and expansion plans, claiming they’ll reduce carbon emissions without necessitating a shift away from their core business in fossil fuels. But experts and advocates have called CCS a “dangerous distraction” that’s eating up tax dollars (like Exxon’s 2021 ask of the federal government to help fund its $100 billion carbon capture hub in Texas) and heading us down the path of more oil and gas. According to a 2021 analysis by the Center for International Environmental Law, more than 80% of existing carbon capture technology has been used for “enhanced oil recovery” — or using captured carbon to extract otherwise inaccessible crude oil.
“Carbon capture and storage is, at its core, a technology for producing more oil,” wrote former Exxon scientist and whistleblower Lindsey Gulden in a recent LinkedIn post. “It requires more carbon to be expended to inject #co2 at pressure than it keeps out of the atmosphere. It is not and will not be a viable solution to climate change.”
Documents obtained by a House Oversight Committee investigation in 2022 show that major oil companies view carbon capture as a way to help them maintain their existing business models and social license to operate — and thus support government help in getting the technology off the ground. “API supports policy reforms to infrastructure permitting and development for CCUS [carbon capture use and storage] as well as research, development, and deployment funding to support technology breakthrough,” according to one internal document. “API also supports federal tax provisions incentivizing CCUS investment and deployment.”
“They’re against technology and progress when it’s a rival technology, and very happy to be leading technology companies in their own fossil fuel technologies,” said Kenner. “They’d like time to stop, and [for society] to just carry on using oil and gas. But you can’t stop time.”
The fossil fuel industry is guilty of genocide.
Let’s take that to its logical conclusion; the fossil fuel industry CEOs with their greed and lust for power are leading us quickly to EXTINCTION OF LIFE ON 🌍 .