El secuestro del presidente venezolano Nicolás Maduro por parte de la administración Trump con el fin de “hacer que el petróleo fluya” es como un ladrón que roba videograbadoras: está asumiendo un gran riesgo por un artículo cuyo valor es cada vez menor. En este caso, la tecnología obsoleta es el petróleo y el riesgo no lo asume el ladrón, sino el pueblo venezolano, los contribuyentes estadounidenses y el clima mundial.

Horas después del secuestro de Maduro el 3 de enero, el presidente Trump declaró en una conferencia de prensa que “las grandes empresas petroleras estadounidenses” invertirían miles de millones de dólares para reconstruir la industria petrolera de Venezuela. Después de haber luchado ferozmente contra la rendición de cuentas por su rol en el cambio climático, es posible que la industria del petróleo y el gas crea que gozará de protección e impunidad al alinearse cada vez más con nuestro presidente autoritario.

Pero este ataque, el cual según los expertos es ilegal de acuerdo con el derecho nacional e internacional, pone en peligro a las personas en Estados Unidos y en todo el mundo, evidentemente en beneficio de una sola industria. La expansión de la infraestructura del petróleo y el gas, así como el aumento en la explotación de los recursos de petróleo y gas de Venezuela, agravarán los riesgos políticos, económicos y ambientales de un sistema de energía enfocado en los combustibles fósiles.

Y probablemente no enriquecerán a nadie más que a los aliados más cercanos de Trump.

Esta agresión más reciente de Estados Unidos en América Latina es otra manifestación de los vínculos profundos que tiene la administración Trump con las grandes empresas petroleras y su descarada priorización de las ganancias privadas y los intereses corporativos por encima del interés público. Es una combinación tóxica y peligrosa: una administración que desprecia las obligaciones legales y un presidente que se cree por encima de la ley y que ataca a otro país en nombre de una industria que ha operado prácticamente con impunidad y que está cabildeando activamente para librarse de responsabilidad por los daños que causa.

Los planes de la administración para el futuro de Venezuela siguen siendo muy preocupantes, aunque poco precisos: el presidente confirmó que Estados Unidos podría permanecer en Venezuela “durante años”. No importa que el director general de ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, y otros ejecutivos petroleros hayan expresado su escepticismo después de reunirse recientemente con el presidente en la Casa Blanca. Tampoco está claro qué papel pretende desempeñar el Congreso con el debate sobre la resolución de los poderes bélicos que se va a realizar en el Senado.

El imperialismo estadounidense, la historia de Venezuela y la doctrina “Donroe”

Venezuela tiene las mayores reservas comprobadas de petróleo en el mundo, pero solo extrae un pequeño porcentaje de ese petróleo. Muchas empresas petroleras con sede en Estados Unidos operaban en Venezuela, pero las relaciones con el gobierno de ese país se tensaron después de que sus líderes crearan la empresa petrolera nacional Petróleos de Venezuela SA en 1976.

Cuando el expresidente Hugo Chávez nacionalizó de forma más amplia la industria del petróleo y el gas en el 2007, ExxonMobil y ConocoPhillips rechazaron los términos de los nuevos contratos y Chávez expropió los activos de dichas empresas. Ambas compañías presentaron denuncias contra Venezuela ante tribunales internacionales, mismos que eventualmente les concedieron indemnizaciones por miles de millones de dólares que Venezuela no ha pagado.

Estados Unidos impuso sanciones a Venezuela relacionadas con el tráfico de drogas por primera vez en el 2005, pero la primera administración del presidente Trump amplió dichas sanciones al ámbito financiero. Hoy en día, Chevron es la única empresa petrolera estadounidense que opera en Venezuela bajo una exención de sanciones concedida por el Departamento del Tesoro de Estados Unidos. Varias empresas chinas, rusas, italianas y españolas también tienen presencia en Venezuela.

Las sanciones agravaron la presión en la economía venezolana, lo que impidió que el país mantuviera su infraestructura petrolera y redujo considerablemente las exportaciones. El presidente Trump afirma que los conocimientos técnicos de las empresas estadounidenses y la inversión de las grandes petroleras pueden reconstruir esa infraestructura y permitir el aprovechamiento de las riquezas petroleras, una afirmación con la que los expertos no están de acuerdo.

La operación que se llevó a cabo en Venezuela es un ejemplo clásico de imperialismo, en el cual los países con ejércitos más grandes toman el control de países más pequeños bajo un pretexto de seguridad nacional con el fin de controlar sus recursos naturales. Muchos estudios que se han realizado sobre este patrón demuestran que los beneficios del extractivismo pocas veces llegan a la población del país donde se encuentran los recursos.

Como escribí cuando Rusia atacó a Ucrania en el 2022, “hay suficiente evidencia en todo el mundo de que las naciones cuyas economías dependen en gran medida de la extracción de petróleo y gas son menos seguras y menos estables que aquellas que dependen menos de los recursos fósiles. La ‘maldición de los recursos’ afecta a las economías extractivas con una desigualdad profundamente arraigada y una gobernanza antidemocrática”.

A pesar de la retórica del presidente Trump, es poco probable que el pueblo venezolano que actualmente está sufriendo se beneficie si la intervención estadounidense genera un aumento de la extracción de petróleo y gas en el país.

Según el ex director general de una empresa de combustibles fósiles y actual secretario de Energía, Chris Wright, Estados Unidos tiene la intención de vender el petróleo venezolano “indefinidamente” y los ingresos se “depositarán en cuentas controladas por el Gobierno de Estados Unidos”, pero luego “regresarán a Venezuela para beneficiar al pueblo venezolano”.

El senador Chris Murphy de Connecticut comentó a POLITICO: “Es un plan descabellado. Están proponiendo robar indefinidamente el petróleo de Venezuela a punta de pistola y aprovecharse para gobernar al país”.

La incursión en Venezuela podría ser el primero de varios intentos por tomar el control de países de Sudamérica bajo la “Doctrina Donroe” reimaginada por el presidente Trump (un corolario de la Doctrina Monroe y el Destino Manifiesto del siglo XIX, los cuales sentaron las bases de las pretensiones imperialistas de Estados Unidos en las Américas), con el objetivo de dar a Estados Unidos el control de más del 40% del petróleo mundial y la capacidad de controlar los precios de las materias primas.

ExxonMobil y otras empresas estadounidenses están obteniendo cuantiosos ingresos y utilidades de la producción de petróleo en Guyana, país vecino de Venezuela, además de que están muy interesadas en conservar el acceso a los recursos terrestres y marítimos (a pesar de que ExxonMobil se enfrenta a varias demandas ambientales por sus operaciones de perforación en alta mar). Venezuela y Guyana llevan años enfrascadas en una disputa territorial por su región fronteriza rica en petróleo y se informa que embarcaciones militares venezolanas han amenazado a los buques petroleros de ExxonMobil.

El petróleo venezolano también es uno de los más intensivos en carbono a nivel mundial, lo que significa que sería devastador para el clima si se aumentara su producción.

El presidente Trump ha amenazado a Colombia, Cuba y México. Y cabe señalar que esta incursión militar estadounidense se realizó pocos meses antes del inicio de la Primera Conferencia Internacional sobre la Transición Justa para Abandonar los Combustibles Fósiles en Colombia, la cual fue anunciada después de que más de 80 países pidieran una hoja de ruta para abandonar los combustibles fósiles durante las conversaciones internacionales sobre el clima (COP30) que se realizaron el año pasado en Brasil. Las acciones ilegales del presidente Trump demuestran que es necesaria una eliminación justa y rápida de los combustibles fósiles para la seguridad en las Américas y en todo el mundo.

Las grandes petroleras se benefician y se congracian

El presidente Trump ha dedicado una gran parte de su agenda a suprimir las energías renovables en Estados Unidos y a nivel internacional, además de inflar el mercado de los combustibles fósiles. La cancelación de proyectos eólicos en alta mar meses antes de su puesta en marcha; la terminación de los incentivos fiscales para los vehículos eléctricos; la apertura de terrenos federales para la perforación y retirar a Estados Unidos de los organismos internacionales sobre el clima: todas estas son acciones destinadas a regresar a una época en la que no existía la energía limpia, además de que son incongruentes con la realidad de la crisis climática que se agrava rápidamente.

El presidente Trump cambió la política nacional e internacional de Estados Unidos con la expectativa de contar con el apoyo de la industria más poderosa del país. Su presunta reunión con varios líderes de la industria durante la campaña electoral para solicitar mil millones de dólares en contribuciones, así como las donaciones récord provenientes de la industria, revelan que dicha industria está estrechamente relacionada con la política de la administración Trump, independientemente de que intente mantener su distancia de manera pública. (Desde hace tiempo, ExxonMobil tiene una postura de aseverar su independencia, mientras se beneficia enormemente de su influencia sobre los políticos y las políticas estadounidenses.

Su ex director general, Lee Raymond, no podría haberlo dicho con mayor claridad: “No soy una empresa estadounidense y no tomo decisiones basadas en lo que es bueno para Estados Unidos”). Sin embargo, se reporta que algunos líderes de la industria fueron consultados ante el Congreso respecto a la incursión militar estadounidense en Venezuela y los altos ejecutivos se reunieron con el presidente el viernes pasado.

Es costoso extraer y procesar el crudo pesado de Venezuela, por lo que las empresas petroleras con sede en Estados Unidos podrían tardar algún tiempo en obtener ganancias sustanciales. El petróleo venezolano también es uno de los más intensivos en carbono a nivel mundial, lo que significa que sería devastador para el clima si se aumentara su producción.

Chevron podría estar mejor posicionada para aprovechar la situación y seguir operando con impunidad, como lo hizo en el Amazonas ecuatoriano, mientras que ExxonMobil y ConocoPhillips pueden presentar sus demandas multimillonarias contra el Gobierno venezolano. Y si deciden regresar al país, el ejército estadounidense podría proporcionarles seguridad a costa de los contribuyentes estadounidenses.

Marathon, ExxonMobil y Citgo son propietarios de algunas de las refinerías más importantes en la costa del Golfo que pueden refinar el petróleo de Venezuela. Pero mientras las refinerías estadounidenses esperan beneficiarse del crudo pesado que produce Venezuela, los daños para la salud y el medio ambiente empeorarían en las comunidades de la costa del Golfo de Louisiana y Texas, mismas que ya sufren de racismo ambiental.

Además, Paul Singer, un multimillonario fundador de Elliott Investment y partidario de Trump, adquirió Citgo unos días antes de la invasión, lo que plantea dudas sobre el uso de información privilegiada.

El presidente Trump y su red corrupta intentan consolidar su poder político antes de las elecciones de mitad de mandato. Esta demostración de fuerza ilegal complementa la intensificación de los ataques contra la sociedad civil estadounidense, el cabildeo de la industria de los combustibles fósiles para obtener inmunidad ante su responsabilidad por los daños causados por el cambio climático y los esfuerzos para que la Corte Suprema rechace las demandas por dicha responsabilidad.

A medida que la administración Trump retira a Estados Unidos del principal tratado internacional para combatir el cambio climático y de la fuente de información más confiable sobre la ciencia del clima, se apoya en las tácticas de desinformación utilizadas por la industria de los combustibles fósiles e intenta socavar la sólida ciencia de atribución que sustenta las reclamaciones de responsabilidad ambiental.

La apropiación del petróleo es una medida típica autoritaria

Las evidencias obtenidas en todo el mundo lamentablemente demuestran que el autoritarismo favorece más los intereses de la industria del petróleo y el gas que la democracia. Además, los daños causados por la industria de los combustibles fósiles afectan de manera desproporcionada a las personas históricamente marginadas, especialmente en el sur global.

Las empresas transnacionales de petróleo y gas, sus filiales, empresas conjuntas y socios comerciales, suelen establecer buenas relaciones con los regímenes militares y apoyarse en facciones políticas locales o mercenarios para recibir protección, lo que a menudo da lugar a terribles abusos contra los derechos humanos y el medio ambiente (algunos ejemplos: Shell en Nigeria, Occidental en Colombia, Chevron en Ecuador y Birmania/Myanmar, ExxonMobil en Guinea Ecuatorial).

Las acciones y los planes de la administración Trump van en contra de las opiniones consultivas sobre el cambio climático emitidas el año pasado por la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos y la Corte Internacional de Justicia, las cuales dejaron en claro que la falta de acción climática es una violación del derecho internacional, reconocieron que el cambio climático es una cuestión de derechos humanos y aclararon que las naciones tienen la obligación de regular a las empresas de combustibles fósiles bajo su jurisdicción.

Al pasar por alto el derecho internacional y los límites constitucionales en su ataque a Venezuela, la administración Trump no solo está intensificando el riesgo geopolítico, sino que está haciendo que Venezuela sea un entorno menos viable para la inversión responsable y las operaciones de negocios a largo plazo. Las acciones militares sin una base jurídica clara socavan la previsibilidad, la estabilidad de los tratados y las garantías del estado de derecho en las que se basan las empresas al tomar decisiones multimillonarias sobre infraestructura, financiamiento y seguros. En vez de “abrir” Venezuela a la inversión, este enfoque genera volatilidad, incertidumbre jurídica y riesgos para la reputación de las empresas.

Una apuesta perdida por las grandes petroleras

A pesar de sus mejores esfuerzos, el presidente Trump no puede detener la transición hacia la energía limpia. Los líderes y los mercados a nivel mundial saben que actualmente la energía renovable es más económica, más saludable, más accesible y más confiable que los combustibles fósiles.

Se prevé que la oferta mundial de petróleo supere la demanda en más de 2 millones de barriles diarios en el 2026, y actualmente los precios del petróleo se encuentran en su nivel más bajo en cuatro años. Eso significa que las inversiones en Venezuela no serían rentables de inmediato para poder mantener los precios bajos, tal como le gustaría hacer al presidente Trump para apaciguar a los consumidores, especialmente con la incertidumbre política que existe.

Pero las finanzas no son la única razón por la que la postura radical de la administración Trump con respecto al petróleo es una apuesta perdida. La producción y el uso continuo de combustibles fósiles amenazan nuestro clima, la salud pública y los derechos humanos. La quema de combustibles fósiles es la principal causa del calentamiento global, el cual tiene un costo para nuestro país de miles de millones de dólares cada año, a pesar de los intentos de esta administración por enterrar la ciencia climática. Además, las inquietudes respecto a la incursión en Venezuela ilustran perfectamente cómo un sistema energético basado en los combustibles fósiles agrava las desigualdades económicas, sociales y políticas.

La adicción del presidente Trump a los combustibles fósiles no hará que los estadounidenses estén más seguros ni tengan una mayor riqueza. De hecho, sucederá lo contrario: nos arrastrará a una aventura imperialista al estilo del siglo XIX que impondrá altos costos a todos los habitantes del planeta. Esta apropiación ilegal e imperialista del petróleo es otra razón más por la que todos debemos alzarnos en una protesta pública, sostenida y no violenta, además de recurrir a la resistencia civil.

Esta es una traducción del artículo publicado en inglés el día 13 de enero.

Hours after Maduro’s January 3 kidnapping, President Trump declared at a press conference that “our very large US oil companies” would spend billions of dollars to rebuild Venezuela’s oil industry. Having viciously fought accountability for its role in climate change, the oil and gas industry may believe that aligning itself ever closer with our authoritarian strongman president will offer protection—and impunity. But this attack, which experts agree is illegal under domestic and international law, endangers people in the United States and around the world, ostensibly for the benefit of a single industry. Expanding oil and gas infrastructure and increasing exploitation of Venezuela’s oil and gas resources will exacerbate the political, economic, and environmental dangers of a fossil fuel–centric energy system.

And it probably won’t enrich anyone but the closest Trump allies.

This latest US aggression in Latin America is another manifestation of the Trump administration’s deep ties to Big Oil and its naked prioritization of private profit and corporate interests over the public interest. It’s a toxic, dangerous combination: an administration that flouts legal obligations and a president who believes he’s above the law attacking another country on behalf of an industry that has largely operated with impunity and is actively lobbying for immunity from liability for the damage it causes.

The administration’s plans for what comes next remain deeply concerning, if vague: the President has confirmed that the United States could stay in Venezuela “for years.” Never mind that ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and other oil executives expressed skepticism after their recent White House meeting with the President. Also unclear is what role Congress intends to play with a War Powers resolution debate coming to the Senate floor.

US imperialism, Venezuelan history, and the “Donroe” Doctrine collide

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, but pumps only a tiny percentage of that oil. Many US-based oil companies once operated in Venezuela, but relations with the government became strained after leaders created the national oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA in 1976. When former President Hugo Chávez further nationalized the oil and gas sector in 2007, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused the terms of the new contracts, and Chávez seized the companies’ assets. Both companies filed complaints against Venezuela with international tribunals, which eventually awarded the companies billions that Venezuela has not paid.

The United States first targeted Venezuela with sanctions related to drug trafficking in 2005, but the first Trump administration expanded them into the financial realm. Chevron is now the only US-based oil company operating in Venezuela, operating under a sanctions exemption from the US Treasury Department. Chinese, Russian, Italian, and Spanish companies also have a presence in Venezuela. The sanctions compounded strains on Venezuela’s economy, preventing the country from maintaining its oil infrastructure and slowing exports to a trickle. President Trump claims US know-how and Big Oil investment can rebuild that infrastructure and unleash petroleum riches, an assertion experts dispute.

The Venezuela operation is a classic example of imperialism, where countries with larger militaries take control of smaller countries under national security pretenses in order to gain control of their natural resources. Many studies of this pattern show that the benefits of extractivism rarely go to the people of the country where the resources are located. (As I wrote when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, “there’s ample evidence from around the globe that nations whose economies rely heavily on oil and gas extraction are less secure and less stable than those that are less dependent on fossil fuel resources. The ‘resource curse’ plagues extractive economies with deep-seated inequity and undemocratic governance.”) Despite President Trump’s rhetoric, the people of Venezuela are unlikely to benefit if US intervention leads to increased oil and gas extraction in the country.—and for now, they are suffering.

According to former fossil fuel CEO and current Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, the United States intends to sell Venezuelan oil “indefinitely,” with proceeds “deposited into accounts controlled by the US government,” but then, “flow[ing] back into Venezuela to benefit the Venezuelan people.”

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut commented to POLITICO, “It’s an insane plan. They are proposing to steal Venezuela’s oil at gunpoint forever and use that leverage to run the country.”

Venezuela could be first in a series of attempted South American takeovers under President Trump’s reimagined “Donroe Doctrine,” (a corollary to the 19^th century Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny establishing US imperialist claims over the Americas)—aiming to give the US control over more than 40% of the world’s oil and the ability to control commodity prices. ExxonMobil and other US-based corporations are deriving massive revenues and profits from oil production in Guyana, Venezuela’s neighbor, and are anxious to preserve access to onshore and offshore resources (even as ExxonMobil faces multiple environmental lawsuits over its offshore drilling operations). Venezuela and Guyana have been locked in a territorial dispute over their oil-rich border region for years, and Venezuelan military boats have reportedly threatened ExxonMobil tankers.

President Trump has already rattled his saber at Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. And it’s worth noting that this US military incursion comes just months before the First International Conference on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels kicks off in Colombia, announced after more than 80 countries called for a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s international climate talks (COP30) in Brazil. President Trump’s illegal actions illustrate that a fair, fast phaseout of fossil fuels is necessary for security in the Americas and around the world.

Big Oil cashing in and currying favor

President Trump has devoted a large part of his agenda to suppressing renewable energy in the United States and internationally while inflating the market for fossil fuels. Killing offshore wind projects months before launch; ending tax incentives for electric vehicles; opening up federal lands to drilling, and withdrawing from international climate bodies: All are efforts to turn back the clock to a time when cleaner energy didn’t exist—and at odds with the reality of the rapidly worsening climate crisis.

President Trump has shifted US domestic and international policy with the expectation that the country’s most powerful industry will support him. His reported meeting with industry leaders during his campaign to solicit $1 billion in contributions—and the industry’s record donations—means the industry is closely associated with Trump administration policy, regardless of whether it tries to maintain a distance publicly. (ExxonMobil has a long-established posture of asserting its independence while benefiting enormously from its influence over US politicians and policies. Former CEO Lee Raymond couldn’t have said it more clearly: “I’m not a US company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the US.”) Yet some industry leaders were reportedly consulted before Congress about the US military incursion into Venezuela and top executives met with the President last Friday.

Venezuela’s heavy oil is expensive to extract and process, so it could take time for US-based oil companies to reap substantial profits. Venezuelan oil is also among the world’s most carbon-intensive, which means that increasing production would be devastating for the climate. Chevron may be best positioned to capitalize—and operate with impunity, as it did in the Ecuadorian Amazon—while ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips can pursue their multibillion-dollar claims against the Venezuelan government. And if they decide to go back in, the US military may provide security, on the US taxpayers’ dime. Marathon, ExxonMobil, and Citgo are among the owners of major refineries on the Gulf Coast that can refine Venezuela’s oil. But as US refineries look forward to benefiting from the heavy grade of crude oil Venezuela produces, health and environmental harms would worsen in communities along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas that are already suffering from environmental racism. Furthermore, Elliott Investment billionaire and Trump supporter Paul Singer acquired Citgo days before the invasion, raising questions about insider trading.

President Trump and his corrupt network are attempting to consolidate political power ahead of the midterm elections. This illegal show of force complements stepped-up attacks on US civil society, fossil fuel industry lobbying for immunity from liability for climate change harms, and efforts to get the Supreme Court to throw out climate accountability lawsuits. As the Trump administration pulls the US out of the bedrock international treaty to tackle climate change and the world’s most trusted source of climate science, it relies on fossil fuel industry disinformation tactics while attempting to undermine robust attribution science that underpins climate liability claims.

Oil grabs are a move from the authoritarian playbook

Unfortunately, evidence from around the world shows that authoritarianism is more favorable to the oil and gas industry’s interests than democracy. And the harms caused by the fossil fuel industry disproportionately affect people who have been historically disenfranchised, particularly in the Global South. Transnational oil and gas corporations, their subsidiaries, joint ventures, and business partners have a history of cozying up to military regimes and leaning on local political factions or mercenaries for protection, often leading to horrific human rights and environmental abuses (Examples: Shell in Nigeria, Occidental in Colombia, Chevron in Ecuador and Burma/Myanmar, ExxonMobil in Equatorial Guinea).

The Trump administration’s actions and plans fly in the face of last year’s advisory opinions on climate change by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice, which made it clear that climate inaction is a violation of international law, recognized climate change as a human rights issue, and clarified that nations have an obligation to regulate fossil fuel corporations under their jurisdiction.

By disregarding international law and constitutional limits in its attack on Venezuela, the Trump administration is not only escalating geopolitical risk but also making Venezuela a less viable environment for responsible investment and long-term business operations. Military action without a clear legal basis undermines the predictability, treaty stability, and rule-of-law assurances that companies rely on when making multibillion dollar decisions about infrastructure, financing, and insurance. Rather than “opening” Venezuela to investment, this approach injects volatility, legal uncertainty, and reputational risks for companies.

A losing bet on Big Oil

Despite his best efforts, President Trump cannot stop the clean energy transition. World leaders and markets know that renewable energy today is cheaper, healthier, more available, and more reliable than fossil fuels. 

Worldwide oil supplies are expected to exceed demand by more than 2 million barrels a day in 2026, and oil prices are currently the lowest in four years. That means keeping prices down—as President Trump might like to do to placate consumers—would mean investment in Venezuela would not be immediately profitable, especially with the uncertain political climate.

But finance is not the only reason the Trump administration’s all-in position on oil is a losing bet. The continued production and use of fossil fuels threatens our climate, public health, and human rights. Burning fossil fuels is the main cause of the global warming that costs our country billions of dollars each year, despite this administration’s attempts to bury climate science. And the concerns surrounding the Venezuela incursion perfectly illustrate how a fossil fuel-based energy system compounds economic, social, and political inequalities.

President Trump’s addiction to fossil fuels will not make people in the United States safer or richer. In fact, it will do the opposite by dragging us into a 19^th-century-style imperial adventure that will impose high costs for everyone on the planet. This illegal imperial oil grab is yet another reason we must all rise up in sustained, public, nonviolent protest and civil resistance.

Laura Peterson co-authored this post.

Despite the commitment made two years ago at COP28 in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels, the 2025 Production Gap Report shows that nations’ fossil fuel production plans are on track to be twice as much in 2030 as would be consistent with a 1.5° C pathway. And the annual Emissions Gap Report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) found that none of the more than 60 countries that have submitted pledges to reduce heat-trapping emissions have included targets to reduce oil and gas production or phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.

Fossil fuel industry obstruction is one key explanation for this glaring omission. Just as the tobacco industry has a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interest with public health policymaking, the fossil fuel industry has a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interest with the development and implementation of public policies intended to limit fossil fuel-driven climate change and accelerate the transition to clean renewable energy.

What would it look like if the nations of the world came together to prevent the fossil fuel industry from obstructing science-informed public policy and its implementation? I decided to imagine what a COP free from fossil fuel industry influence would look like.

Safeguards against conflicts of interest

Since 2023, when COP delegates were first required to disclose their affiliations, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition has counted thousands of fossil fuel lobbyists granted access to the negotiations. The industry’s presence has outnumbered the size of delegations of most nations—and eclipsed the representation of the most climate-vulnerable nations.

CEOs and lobbyists from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other major fossil fuel corporations have no place at the table where climate goals are being set and the transition to clean energy is being planned. An important new study underscores Big Oil’s conflict of interest: the largest 250 oil and gas companies only own about 1.42% of the global renewable energy capacity in operation, and may only produce 0.1% of their primary energy from renewable sources. The bottom line: these companies’ actual investment in clean energy is negligible compared to their massive fossil fuel extraction.

In a COP safeguarded against conflicts of interest, the nations most affected by extreme heat, sea level rise, and other climate impacts would not have to worry about their voices being drowned out by lobbyists from the industry primarily responsible for destructive and deadly climate change.

Science-informed decisionmaking

COP relies on science, including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to inform its decisions. Even as the latest IPCC plenary meeting stalled on some key issues, the science is clear: climate action is far off track.

Of particular relevance to holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the climate crisis is attribution science, which is rapidly advancing—despite attacks from climate science deniers tied to fossil fuel interests. Here are a few recent examples:

• A peer-reviewed study led by my former UCS colleague Dr. Shaina Sadai built on and extended earlier research by quantifying not only the historical but also the long-term future contributions of major fossil fuel companies to sea level rise.
• A new study published in Nature presents the first systematic attribution of extreme heat events to the emissions of 180 fossil fuel and cement producers. Analyzing 213 major heatwaves that occurred between 2000 and 2023, the authors found that emissions traced to the major carbon producers account for roughly half of the observed increase in heatwave intensity since preindustrial times.
• Another 2025 Nature study provides a robust scientific basis for climate liability claims. Using an “end-to-end” attribution framework, the researchers link emissions from individual fossil fuel companies to specific economic harms caused by extreme heat between 1991 and 2020. For example, emissions traced to Chevron are associated with between $791 billion and $3.6 trillion in global heat-related losses.

Attribution science is showing how specific emissions have driven today’s climate impacts. In a fossil-free COP, this evidence would help shape policies rooted in evidence and fairness, not industry influence.

Polluter pays principle

Finance for cutting emissions, adaptation, and loss and damage remains a central issue in the COP process. Last year’s COP in Baku, Azerbaijan, failed to deliver an ambitious and much-needed climate finance commitment from richer nations for lower income countries.

Fossil fuel interests permeated COP29, and their push to maintain massive profits from oil and gas showed in the flawed final outcome. The final COP29 finance text made no explicit reference to the “polluter pays principle,” phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, or cutting investment flows to fossil fuels.

According to the 2025 report of the Lancet countdown on health and climate change, the health threats of climate change have reached unprecedented levels and “The escalating economic costs of climate change are becoming ever more visible, with profound implications for human health and societal stability.” To rebuild trust, wealthy nations that have built their economic power on fossil fuels must demonstrate their commitment to climate justice—which includes stepping up climate finance and making fossil fuel polluters pay an equitable share of the costs of:

• climate damages;
• climate adaptation; and
• the environmental, social, and systemic impacts of fossil fuel products and production.

This is the first COP after two landmark international court rulings that affirmed the right to a healthy climate and clarified that climate inaction is a violation of international law and that nations must regulate fossil fuel companies.

Climate justice means nations should ensure access to judicial remedies, including for extraterritorial climate impacts resulting from actions that occur within their borders or under their jurisdiction. Survivors of Super Typhoon Rai (locally known as Odette), which struck the Philippines in 2021, have announced legal action in the United Kingdom against Shell, seeking compensation for deaths and damages linked to the company’s role in driving the climate crisis. The survivors argue that Shell violated the Philippine constitutional right to a healthy environment and continued expanding fossil fuel operations despite internal documents acknowledging the catastrophic risks of climate change.

International cooperation for climate justice and accountability is especially vital now as the fossil fuel industry wields its influence with the Trump administration and the US Congress to lobby for a shield from liability for the harm caused by its products and business model.

Transparency and fair accounting

Disclosure and transparency are essential to the development, implementation, and enforcement of effective climate policies at all levels, from subnational to international. Seizing the advantage of a friendly US administration and Congress, fossil fuel corporations and their surrogates are attacking climate disclosure rules and attempting to shift how global warming emissions are calculated in an effort to dodge responsibility.

ExxonMobil, for example, lobbied aggressively against the European Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, a landmark law aimed at holding corporations accountable for human rights violations, environmental harms, and climate impacts in global supply chains. CEO Darren Woods has now leveraged his access to President Trump in an effort to defang the law before it takes effect.

At the same time, ExxonMobil is suing to block California’s agenda-setting climate disclosure laws, as my colleague Laura Peterson writes in her latest blog. Enacted in 2023, California’s laws require, among other provisions, disclosure of Scope 3 emissions.

Woods and ExxonMobil have also undertaken a crusade to change how Scope 3 emissions are calculated. Scope 3 encompasses emissions up and down a company’s value chain, including those produced from burning the company’s products—around 90% of the total for an oil and gas company. (The Trump administration is going a step farther, proposing a rule that would eliminate requirements for measuring and reporting carbon emissions for the vast majority of US industries, including fossil fuel producers and refiners).

Heading into COP30, ExxonMobil and the International Chamber of Commerce are among those kicking off a campaign to change carbon accounting. This system is favored by the oil and gas industry because it would shift responsibility for emissions from sold products from companies to consumers.

Information integrity

In the absence of transparency, disinformation can flourish. That’s why putting information integrity on the agenda at international climate meetings this year is a major breakthrough, as my colleague Kate Cell explains. November 12 is an official thematic day on information integrity, a cross-cutting objective on the Action Agenda of COP30.

The fossil fuel industry has been a key driver and beneficiary of disinformation and delayed climate action, as documented in the latest report by my team at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Decades of Deceit: The Case Against Major Fossil Fuel Companies for Climate Fraud and Damages.

Another compelling new resource is Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment, which brought together nearly one hundred scholars and experts to advance our understanding of efforts by organized interests to slow or block policies on climate change. To equip actors to better recognize, anticipate, and respond to efforts that could undermine climate ambition, the Climate Social Science Network has published a policy brief on Climate Obstruction in the UN FCCC.

An international commitment to information integrity can support implementation and enforcement at the national level. Climate advocates are already seeing some success through litigation against greenwashing:

• Advocates in New Zealand recently secured a public apology from Z Energy after legal action. The petroleum retailer took out full-page ads in newspapers apologizing for “any confusion” caused by a greenwashing 2022 PR campaign that misrepresented its focus on alternative fuels and emissions reductions.
• A French court ruled that TotalEnergies misled the public with false claims about its path to carbon neutrality, marking the first use of France’s anti-greenwashing law against an energy company. The decision requires the company to remove misleading statements from its website and pay damages to the environmental groups that brought the case, signaling growing legal scrutiny of corporate climate claims in Europe.

Unfortunately, the COP30 hosts have hired a public relations firm that represents fossil fuel companies—and not for the first time. With this conflict of interest baked in, there is a real risk that the fossil fuel industry’s role in the climate crisis could be whitewashed—and the results of COP30 negotiations could be greenwashed.

Holding the line in Belém

On its own, a fossil-free COP process won’t solve the climate crisis or secure a people-centered just transition to a future rooted in rights, fairness, equity and solidarity. National and subnational policymakers, litigators, investors, business partners, communities, workers, Indigenous Peoples, consumers, and (of course) scientists all have key roles to play.

But COP30 is an opportunity for world leaders to increase pressure on the fossil fuel industry to stop lying, get out of the way of science-informed public policy, pay an equitable share of the costs they’ve imposed on all of us, and act to accelerate a fair and fast phaseout of fossil fuels. My colleagues in Belém and I will be watching closely over the next two weeks, urging the nations of the world to stand firm against the corrupting influence of the fossil fuel industry.

Hundreds of experts submitted comments exposing the report’s misleading use of data and cherry-picked conclusions. The American Meteorological Society issued a powerful statement identifying five foundational flaws that place the report at odds with scientific principles and practices. Texas A&M University climate scientist Andy Dessler worked with 85 experts and compiled a 459-page response to the report, exposing fundamental errors that misrepresent the overwhelming evidence of human-caused climate change. UCS filed comments underscoring the ways this deeply flawed DOE-commissioned document distorts science, delays action, and undermines public understanding of the crisis we are facing. 

Together with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), UCS is suing to enforce federal legal requirements that apply to the committee that wrote the report. The lawsuit—against the DOE and Secretary Christopher Wright in his official capacity as head of that department, the EPA and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in his official capacity as head of that agency, and the Climate Working Group—argues that the establishment and use of the Climate Working Group violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which requires fairly balanced viewpoints, public participation and transparency for committees like this one that advise the federal government on policy. On September 17, the court granted partial summary judgment as sought by UCS and EDF, ruling that the Climate Working Group is not exempt from FACA under an exception the government had argued should apply. The case is ongoing. 

The scientific critiques are extensive and compelling, and they prompted me to scrutinize the authors behind the report. Who wrote it, and what do their records tell us about why the science they produced was so deeply flawed? Not surprisingly, these scientists’ names and viewpoints were familiar from previous research by UCS and others, congressional testimony, and other public appearances.   

John Christy: Winning fossil fuel friends by distorting climate data to minimize warming 

John Christy, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has repeatedly advanced analyses of atmospheric data that independent researchers have shown to be flawed. Even after corrections brought those records into line with surface temperatures and model projections, Christy has continued promoting outdated interpretations. 

At the same time, Christy has been a familiar presence in fossil fuel industry-funded circles including the Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Independent Institute, Global Warming Policy Foundation, and George C. Marshall Institute. He was even recommended for a federal climate role by ExxonMobil’s top lobbyist in the early 2000s.  

As noted by Inside Climate News, he has frequently been invited to testify before Congress  by “Republican lawmakers looking to cast doubt on the science of human-caused climate change.” In 2013, for example, Christy testified before the House Science Committee, chaired by then-Representative Lamar Smith. Smith, a recipient of significant fossil fuel industry campaign contributions, surrounded himself with staff tied to industry lobbying and PR firms. Under Smith’s leadership, the House Science Committee even subpoenaed UCS as part of an effort to intimidate scientists and accountability advocates. 

Christy’s role in the Climate Working Group’s report likely ensured that long-debunked science was presented as if it were credible dissent. 

Steven Koonin: Emphasizing doubt and serving fossil fuel interests   

Steve Koonin has become known for portraying climate science as “unsettled.” His arguments consistently highlight uncertainty while downplaying the weight of evidence that climate change—caused primarily by burning oil, gas, and coal—is happening. This framing—promoted by ExxonMobil in a notorious 2000 New York Times advertorial—has been widely criticized by Koonin’s scientific peers for misrepresenting the state of knowledge.  

Koonin’s career also links directly to fossil fuels. He was BP’s Chief Scientist for five years and later joined think tanks such as the Hoover Institution, which received $430,000 from ExxonMobil from 1998-2019, and the American Enterprise Institute, which has received millions of dollars in funding from ExxonMobil and over $2 million from Koch-related foundations. The selective way Koonin treats evidence aligns neatly with the interests of polluting industries.  

Roy Spencer: Analytic errors and fossil fuel ties  

Roy Spencer, another researcher at the University of Alabama, has co-authored analyses that independent scientists found contained serious errors. For example, a paper he co-wrote was so flawed that the journal editor resigned, acknowledging it should not have been published. Spencer was a signatory of the 2017 petition organized by retired MIT professor Richard Lindzen of the Cato Institute urging President Trump to pull out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The claims in the petition were debunked by UCS. 

Spencer also has close ties to networks that deny climate science, including the Cornwall Alliance, which the Guardian says “essentially believes God wouldn’t let damaging climate change happen,” and which, according to DeSmog, “claims environmentalism is ‘one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.’” Spencer was also formerly a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.  

According to PR Watch, in 2016 Spencer was listed as a creditor of Peabody Energy (at the time the world’s largest private-sector, publicly traded coal company) in its bankruptcy filings along with other figures from the network of climate denial and disinformation (such as Willie Soon, whose fossil fuel industry-funded contrarian climate science research was exposed in UCS’s 2015 Climate Deception Dossiers). PR Watch notes that Spencer was paid $4,000 to serve as an expert witness for Peabody Energy in an administrative hearing on the social cost of carbon in Minnesota. 

Judith Curry: Cashing in on doubt  

Judith Curry, professor emerita at  the Georgia Institute of Technology (and who resigned from the university in 2017 citing the “craziness in the field of climate science”), has built a post-academic career critiquing mainstream climate assessments as overstating risks.  

Her record includes  notable instances where her work did not stand up to scrutiny. In Held v. State of Montana, a landmark climate case brought by young people, Curry was hired as an expert witness for the state. She charged at least $30,000 for her report, yet admitted in her deposition that she had never conducted research on Montana’s climate. The state ultimately excluded her testimony. 

Curry’s consulting firm works with utilities, insurers, and fossil fuel companies, which has raised concerns about potential undue influence of commercial interests over her public positions. Her involvement with groups such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Heartland Institute reinforces the picture of a climate skeptic,  whose skepticism is consistently aligned with industry agendas. 

Ross McKitrick: Economics that excuse pollution  

Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, has repeatedly advanced arguments that downplay the costs of fossil fuel pollution. His work often isolates narrow aspects of environmental economics while ignoring broader scientific evidence on climate risks, leading to conclusions that are inconsistent with mainstream climate science. In a public response to the Climate Working Group report, leading environmental and climate economists commented that its findings are “woefully out of date” and rely on “an array of fallacies.” 

As the University of Oxford’s Ben Franta has observed, the role of some economists in opposing climate policies has received less attention than the role of physical scientists. In a 2021 study focused on an influential group of economists hired by the petroleum industry whose work played a key role in undermining numerous major climate policy initiatives in the US over a span of decades, Franta concluded that “further attention is needed on the role of economists and particular economic paradigms, doctrines, and models within climate politics and the perpetuation of fossil fuels.” 

McKitrick is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, which has received funding from fossil fuel interests including  the Charles Koch Foundation. He has endorsed denialist declarations, collaborating with groups like the Heartland Institute and CO2 Coalition that spread climate science disinformation. In 2023, a month after the publication of a peer-reviewed study led by my UCS colleagues linking worsening forest fires across the western United States to fossil fuel companies, McKitrick wrote that “science tells us” forest fires aren’t becoming more common. In fact, there is a growing body of evidence highlighting the dangerous connections between heat-trapping emissions and wildfires. 

A web of contrarian science and fossil fuel industry influence 

Each of these authors has a record of disputed or selective analyses that deny or downplay the severity of the climate crisis, and each has ties to fossil fuel–funded institutions or front groups that benefit from such narratives. The Trump Administration’s choice to elevate these five voices is not a neutral decision: it reflects a political choice to prioritize contrarianism embraced by a tiny minority of scientific voices over credible, peer-reviewed research that represents the overwhelming scientific consensus. 

The problem isn’t just who funds or amplifies these contrarian voices. Their science itself is bad, built on errors, cherry-picked data, and arguments that have been repeatedly rejected by the broader scientific community. When flawed science and fossil fuel influence reinforce each other, the result is a dangerous distortion of public understanding and obstruction of science-based policymaking. 

To reveal the extent of fossil fuel industry influence on the proposed rollback of the endangerment finding—based in part on the Climate Working Group’s deeply flawed report—Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has launched an investigation, requesting documents from dozens of fossil fuel companies, trade associations, and polluter-backed groups by September 30. 

The sham Climate Working Group report follows a disinformation playbook that UCS has long documented, through which industry-backed actors create the illusion of legitimate debate, exploit uncertainty, and delay action. Big Tobacco was among the first to deploy these tactics and networks, and the fossil fuel industry continues to unleash and hone them, as my team at UCS showed in our latest report, Decades of Deceit. 

The flood of expert comments on the Climate Working Group report demonstrates that the scientific community is pushing back hard against these tactics. But this debacle underscores the urgent need for stronger, more consistent safeguards against political and corporate interference in public policy in the face of Trump administration efforts to weaken scientific integrity policies across federal agencies—read more in this blog by my colleague Jules Barbati-Dajches. Fortunately, science-based law and policy is holding its own globally: my colleague Delta Merner explains that international legal bodies are affirming the connections between science, responsibility, and justice.  

Public policy must be grounded in independent science, not in fatally flawed analyses advanced by people with deep ties to polluting industries. 

Delta Merner and Hannah Poor contributed to this post. 

96 percent of the US population faced at least one extreme weather alert in the first month of this summer’s “danger season” alone—the warm months when climate-driven weather extremes in the US tend to concentrate and do greatest harm. 

Simultaneously, during June’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach urged Congress to rewrite the Clean Air Act to block states from regulating fossil fuel emissions.

Kobach also joined a group of 16 state attorneys general on a letter to US Attorney General Pam Bondi asking the Department of Justice to create a “liability shield” exempting fossil fuel companies from being held accountable for their deliberate climate deception and the worsening climate crisis.

All signees are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, to which the American Petroleum Institute is a top 10 donor.

These blatant attempts to grant polluters nationwide immunity show just how far some officials will go to deny communities their day in court. In recent years, dozens of climate cases have been filed in the US, as litigation has become an increasingly important pathway for holding the fossil fuel industry accountable. 

As climate accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, I have spent years documenting Big Oil’s “Decades of Deceit,” which is the title of our May report.

Currently, one in four people in the US resides in a city, state or Tribal Nation suing fossil fuel companies for climate deceit, disinformation or damages. These cases threaten the fossil fuel industry’s business model, and Big Oil knows it. That’s why they are seeking to undercut the judicial system and evade legal responsibility. 

This isn’t the first time fossil fuel companies and their allies have sought legal immunity, but the stakes are higher than ever, given their undue influence within Congress and the White House, as well as the number of active climate accountability lawsuits across the country.

President Trump’s recent executive order attacking states’ power to protect their residents from the climate crisis is a troubling development, as are Justice Department lawsuits preemptively seeking to block climate litigation or roll back four states’ Superfund-style laws. 

Our Decades of Deceit report underscores why fossil fuel companies fear legal accountability and have used procedural tactics to delay these lawsuits for years. 

The report paints a damning portrait of corporate malfeasance and emphasizes the need for Congress and the Trump administration to preserve state-level policymaking and protect access to justice through state courts for those harmed by fossil fuel industry misconduct.  

Dozens of lawsuits cite our organization’s analyses in arguing to hold companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron accountable for climate disinformation and ensuing damages.

Underpinning these cases is robust evidence highlighted in our report, which reveals the extent to which major fossil fuel companies have misled people and sowed doubt about relevant science to delay climate action while continuing to profit at the public’s expense. 

By the early 1980s, these companies understood climate change impacts could be catastrophic. They knew to a high degree of accuracy the danger their products posed to people and the planet.  

For example, a confidential 1988 Shell report warned that “By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.” 

Instead of changing course, these companies planned, funded and continued to engage in deliberate disinformation campaigns. In 2021, former ExxonMobil Senior Director of Government Affairs Keith McCoy admitted the company used front groups to “aggressively fight” against climate science.  

Now, as people and communities seek accountability, the industry is pleading for an escape hatch. 

Big Oil doesn’t want this damning evidence to be presented in court. That’s why it is seeking help from several states’ highest law enforcement officials, who are attempting to create an extrajudicial avenue for their allies while sacrificing their own constituents’ ability to access justice.

As our work illustrates, these companies cannot be trusted to do the right thing. Just as the US needs laws to protect public health, it needs to be able to enforce laws when corporations knowingly cause harm. 

Given dangerous backtracking by the Trump administration and delayed, insufficient climate action by Congress, the courts are an increasingly important avenue for communities seeking redress for damages caused by climate disinformation.

Our elected representatives must stand strong against liability waivers and preserve the rights of states and communities to make polluters pay.  

Much evidence has surfaced about the tactics to which fossil fuel companies have resorted to distort the facts, intimidate their opponents, and block climate action that might hurt their bottom lines.  

One still-developing criminal conspiracy case seems to take such underhanded activities to new heights, however. The alleged scheme involved hacking into the email accounts of staff members at UCS and several other public interest organizations, all of whom were working to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their role in climate change. Court documents and related reporting suggest that the US government possesses evidence that the criminal scheme was indirectly paid for by ExxonMobil and that one of its lobbying firms, the Washington, DC-based DCI Group, provided a list of “targets” to a middleman linked to the hackers and sent the fruits of the hacking to the oil and gas company. The hacking, occurring between 2015 and 2018, targeted at least 128 individuals.  

One of the hackers who carried out this scheme, Aviram Azari, an Israeli private detective, was arrested in 2019 and pleaded guilty in US district court in 2023 to three counts: conspiracy to commit computer hacking, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. According to the US government’s sentencing memo, clients of Azari’s firm paid him approximately $4.8 million from November 2014 through his arrest in September 2019 for managing intelligence-gathering and multiple hacking campaigns (including the attack on UCS) (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2023). Azari was sentenced to over six years in prison for his part in the conspiracy but was released from prison on January 3, 2025, after serving only a portion of his sentence. 

More recently, however, a court filing in Britain has revealed critical new allegations about the hacking scheme and who was behind it. A US government filing in Britain’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court requested the extradition from Britain to the United States of another Israeli citizen named Amit Forlit, who is being held in custody in London (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b). Forlit’s hearing in British court began on January 22, 2025, and continued with court dates in early February, early March, and on April 30, 2025, when the extradition was granted (John 2025). 

The filing reveals that a multiyear investigation by the US Department of Justice and conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation led to a sealed grand jury indictment of Forlit for his alleged involvement in several criminal hacking schemes, as well as a US warrant for his arrest. To support the government’s case that Forlit should be extradited to the United States to face trial, the document publicly reveals many new details about the hacking scheme alleged by the US government. According to court filings and related reporting, the US government’s allegations include: 

• Forlit’s clients included a consulting firm in Washington, DC, later identified by Forlit’s attorney in a court filing as the DCI Group, which has a long history of working for ExxonMobil (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b). (ExxonMobil reportedly ended its contract with the DCI Group in 2020. This was after the hacking investigation became public [Matthews, Strasburg, and Hope 2024]). 

• The DC-based lobbying group paid Forlit’s multiple firms a total of $16 million between 2013 and 2018 (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b). 

• For one of its projects, the DC-based lobbying group “acted on behalf of one of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, centred in Irving, Texas, in relation to ongoing climate change litigation being brought against it” (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b). Forlit’s attorney stated in a January filing that the corporation in question is ExxonMobil (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025a). 

Both ExxonMobil and the DCI Group have so far publicly denied involvement in the hacking scheme. At the time of Azari’s sentencing, an ExxonMobil spokesperson said that the company “has no knowledge of Azari, had no involvement in any hacking activities and has not been accused of any wrongdoing” (Matthews 2023). In subsequent media reports, ExxonMobil has said it “has not been involved in or aware of any hacking activities,” while DCI Group has said: “We direct all our employees and consultants to comply with the law” (Satter and Bing 2024).  

But the US government’s recent filing suggests it is in possession of evidence to the contrary against DCI Group. According to the extradition filing, the US government’s evidence includes:  

“(i) dozens of email accounts, including four used by [Forlit], obtained via judicially authorised search warrants; (ii) financial and business records; (iii) the product of the searches of Azari’s two mobile telephones.” (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b) 

The extradition filing claims that the US government possesses evidence that Forlit met in person with the DC-based lobbying group (which, per Forlit’s attorney, is DCI Group), that the perpetrators referred to the hacking scheme as “Operation Fox Hunt,” and that it included at least 128 individual hacking targets (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b).  

The extradition filing claims that the US government possesses email evidence of a November 2015 memo between “the D.C. Lobbying Group” (revealed as the DCI Group) and “the oil and gas corporation” (revealed as ExxonMobil), forwarded by the group’s managing partner to Forlit. The memo explicitly refers to “going on the offense” after what it calls “attacks” on the oil and gas corporation “over climate change” (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b). According to the filing, this November 2015 memo specifically references some of the victims of the hacking that would subsequently take place. The filing also alleges the US government has a record of the lobbying firm’s payments Forlit received for the job, which he deposited into US bank accounts controlled by him and his companies. 

Furthermore, the filing states that prosecutors possess evidence that hacked materials were subsequently published: “From early 2016, shortly after the hacking, emails show the D.C. Lobbying Group  sent the fruits of the hacking to the oil and gas corporation and it was published” (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b). The US government’s sentencing memo for Azari stated that the published articles about the stolen and leaked documents appeared designed to undermine the integrity of investigations by state attorneys general into ExxonMobil or of individual victims of the hacking scheme, and were incorporated into ExxonMobil’s court filings litigating against the state investigations (United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2023). According to reporting by Reuters and NPR, DCI Group allegedly shared some of the stolen material with ExxonMobil before leaking it to the media, and an executive at the DC-based lobbying group is also alleged to have emailed a published article featuring a private memo belonging to an environmental lawyer to colleagues with the subject line “BOOM” (Satter and Bing 2024; Copley 2025). 

As the filing concludes, its “summary of the evidence provided by the USA, taken with the financial records, presents a compelling case” for Forlit’s extradition. The evidence was sufficient to have convinced a New York grand jury in 2022 to indict Forlit on three counts, including conspiracy to commit computer hacking, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and wire fraud. It was also sufficient for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to find probable cause to issue a warrant for Forlit’s arrest. The maximum sentences Forlit would face if found guilty are 5, 20, and 20 years’ imprisonment, respectively.  

Much was previously known about the hacking scheme, thanks in part to the work of the Citizen Lab, a Canadian cybersecurity group based at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The group issued a detailed report on the case in 2020, calling it a “massive hack-for-hire operation” (Scott-Railton et al 2020).  

By identifying several telltale “cyber fingerprints,” the Citizen Lab determined with high confidence that the hackers had, between 2015 and 2018, attempted to infiltrate the email accounts of key staff members of at least 10 nonprofits, including UCS, 350.org, the Climate Investigations Center, Greenpeace, and the Rockefeller Family Fund. Notably, all of these groups are involved in work aiming to hold ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel companies accountable for their deception about climate science and their efforts to block climate action.  

Between 2015 and 2018, several senior staff members at UCS had their email accounts hacked through a sophisticated phishing campaign that indicated the perpetrator had a good deal of knowledge about these individuals’ interests and contacts. After conducting an internal investigation, UCS found that, while no fundraising files or member or donor accounts had been breached, the perpetrators nevertheless had likely gained access to sensitive UCS emails and strategic planning documents. 

It was also previously known, from court testimony and documents in Azari’s case, that he was paid to orchestrate the cyber espionage, that he contracted with a hacking group in India to carry it out, and that the hackers in India emailed him to say they had successfully infiltrated the targets. Azari pled guilty to facts that he undertook espionage campaigns under contract from corporate clients in Europe and the United States (Copley and Brady 2023).  

Court documents have revealed previously undisclosed allegations by the US government regarding the genesis of a coordinated scheme to hack into the email accounts of staff members at UCS and other public interest organizations working to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their role in climate change.  

The court filing alleges that the US government possesses evidence that a “D.C. Lobbying Firm” (likely referring to longtime ExxonMobil lobbyist the DCI Group) paid a middleman at least $16 million between 2013 and 2018, that co-conspirators referred to one of multiple hacking schemes as “Operation Fox Hunt,” and that this scheme included at least 128 individual targets. The US government also claims to possess email evidence linking “one of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, centred in Irving, Texas” (likely referring to ExxonMobil, which was previously headquartered there) to what the government calls “the fruits of the hacking” scheme.  

(United States District Court, Southern District of New York 2025b; read the US government filing at https://legacy.www.documentcloud.org/documents/25501845-250113-usa-v-forlit/.) 

As previously mentioned, those in the hacking scheme’s list of targets were also involved in work at nonprofit groups to hold ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies accountable. The cyberattacks occurred at a key moment, when pressure was building against ExxonMobil in particular. For example, when UCS email accounts were infiltrated in 2017, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was preparing to file a lawsuit against ExxonMobil for deceiving its shareholders about the realities of climate change. At the time, other attorneys general across the country were considering lawsuits as well, and UCS was in contact with some of their offices, providing information about specific examples of climate deception.  

During the period noted in the legal filing, the previously mentioned fossil fuel industry–backed news site Energy in Depth published disinformation citing former UCS Science and Policy Director Peter Frumhoff by name and spuriously accusing him and the organization of having “conspired” against ExxonMobil. The site even quoted language from Frumhoff’s work-related emails (Energy in Depth 2017). 

An excerpt from a private email sent to Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, similarly found its way into an article from The Wall Street Journal. That article subsequently was published by the right-wing Washington Beacon newspaper, Energy in Depth, and later on ExxonMobil’s website, on a dedicated page about the #ExxonKnew allegations that has since been taken down. Wasserman recently told The Wall Street Journal that ExxonMobil used his private emails to try to “develop a convoluted and completely false story” of a conspiracy against the company. He likened ExxonMobil’s effort to “arsonists trying to pin blame on the firefighters” (Matthews 2023). The same stolen document was submitted as evidence of the “conspiracy” against ExxonMobil in court proceedings in New York state, Massachusetts, and other venues (Copley and Brady 2023). 

Until now we haven’t seen public court evidence linking ExxonMobil and its then-lobbying firm, the DCI Group, to the hacking conspiracy. 

This blog is an excerpt from the UCS Report ‘Decades of Deceit,’ which Kathy Mulvey coauthored with Delta Merner, Laura Peterson, and Seth Shulman. Read the full report here. 

Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a new report, Decades of Deceit: The Case Against Major Fossil Fuel Companies for Climate Fraud and Damages , that lays out just how strong the case is against these companies. The report draws on dozens of internal fossil fuel industry documents obtained through investigative research, lawsuits, congressional subpoenas, publicly available reports, and industry testimony. It provides a decades-long review of what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change, when they knew it, and the extreme steps they took to deceive the public to protect their profits at the expense of people and the planet. I think you’ll be surprised just how strong the case is, but you don’t have to take my word for it. UCS is providing links to more than a dozen internal documents, company reports, and other key pieces of evidence so you can assess them yourself. 

Perhaps the first step in assessing the strength of the case against the major fossil fuel companies is to consider these facts: research has traced more than 94 percent of all industrial carbon dioxide emissions since 1959 to just 122 oil, gas, coal, and cement companies—including those named above. Equally important, those same 122 companies are responsible for 75 percent of all industrial carbon dioxide emissions since 1981.  

That date is important because there is now overwhelming evidence to show that, by the early 1980s, the companies above—and many of the others—had amassed a remarkably detailed understanding of the calamity their products were bringing upon people and the planet. And yet, rather than take steps to forestall the catastrophe they saw that they were causing, these companies continue—to this day—to work actively, and often underhandedly, behind the scenes to confuse the public, block needed policy changes to curb our dependence on fossil fuels, and maintain the status quo that continues to destroy our planet while reaping them billions of dollars in annual profits. 

Little wonder dozens of cities, counties, states and tribes across the United States and its territories—from Massachusetts to Hawai’i and Charleston, South Carolina to Oakland, California—are suing these companies, seeking to hold them responsible for deceiving consumers and investors and harming communities through climate change impacts.  

UCS Documents and Reports on Fossil Fuel Industry Climate Deception 

To compile this latest analysis, I teamed up with former UCS Editorial Director Seth Shulman and my current UCS colleagues Dr. Delta Merner and Laura Peterson. Ten years ago, Seth and I coauthored a UCS report called The Climate Deception Dossiers that has been cited by many of the legal cases that have been brought to date against the fossil fuel industry for fraud, climate damages, or racketeering. Since then, thanks to the diligent efforts of many social scientists, investigative journalists, litigators, members of Congress and researchers on congressional committees, the evidence of fossil fuel industry duplicity and lies has grown significantly. 

I urge everyone to read this new report and gauge for themselves these companies’ culpability for the massive damage caused by their products and business practices. There is strong evidence here, and I hope you will share it widely and join UCS in taking action to finally hold major fossil fuel corporations including BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell accountable for their enormous role in driving the global climate crisis.  

Fossil Fuel Companies Clearly Understood that the Consequences of Climate Change Could Be Catastrophic and Urgent Action Was Needed 

What did the companies know about climate change and when did they know it? The story starts decades ago. Consider these findings from the new report:  

In 1959, renowned nuclear physicist (and Manhattan Project scientist) Edward Teller keynoted an event in New York City organized by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the nation’s largest oil industry trade association. In his address, Teller discussed the problem of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels and warned the audience of high-level oil industry executives that “a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 [percent] increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge . . . all the coastal cities [emphasis added].” 

In February 1980, API hosted a meeting for industry leaders with Stanford climate scientist John Laurmann, who offered a technical discussion of global warming. Participants included representatives of Exxon and oil companies that are now subsidiaries of BP and Chevron, and notes from the meeting were distributed to all the major API member companies. Laurmann told the task force that there was “strong empirical evidence that [the carbon dioxide] rise [was] caused by anthropogenic release of CO₂, mainly from fossil fuel burning.” Unless fossil fuel production and use were controlled, he said, the planet could expect an increase in global average temperature of 2.5°C by 2038 that would bring “major economic consequences,” as well as the prospect of a 5°C increase by 2067, with “globally catastrophic effects.” Laurmann warned that there was “no leeway” regarding the “time for action.”  

In August 1981, Roger Cohen, then Exxon’s director of theoretical and mathematical sciences, wrote a brief memo reviewing the company’s emerging understanding of the severity of potential climate risks. In it, Cohen took issue with an internal corporate document that had described projected climate change impacts by 2030 as “of a magnitude well short of catastrophic.” Cohen called that assessment “too reassuring;” he told top company executives that it was “distinctly possible that the CPD [corporate planning department] scenario will likely produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population) [emphasis added].” According to 2019 congressional testimony by former Exxon staff scientist Martin Hoffert, during the 1980s he recognized that the company was deceiving the public and publicly promoting views that its own scientists knew were wrong. 

Fossil Fuel Companies Developed—and Continue to Carry Out—Highly Deceptive Public Relations and Lobbying Campaigns to Stall Climate Action 

An equally important part of the story is much more recent, revealing the fossil fuel industry’s campaign of deception, diversion, and delay that continues to this day. We’ve seen companies deploy many of the strategies and tactics laid out in the API’s infamous 1998 “Roadmap” memo (described in detail in The Climate Deception Dossiers) which stated that “Victory will be achieved when average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science”—a tactic of sowing doubt that borrowed heavily from the tobacco industry’s playbook. 

In the report you’ll find:  

• confessions by a former ExxonMobil lobbyist that the corporation used front groups to “aggressively fight against… the science”;  

• a fossil fuel industry-funded website that attacks climate accountability experts while promoting false claims about oil, fossil gas, and environmental and economic issues;  

• a fossil fuel industry lobbying effort that set up fake grassroots groups with misleading names to attack climate and clean energy policies;  

• an oil and gas industry policy briefing book that targets corporate climate disclosure rules for elimination; and even 

• court documents and related reporting suggesting that the US government possesses evidence that an alleged criminal scheme to hack into the email accounts of staff at UCS and other public interest organizations in an effort to thwart climate accountability litigation was indirectly paid for by ExxonMobil and that one of its lobbying firms, the Washington, DC-based DCI Group, provided a list of “targets” to a middleman linked to the hackers and sent the fruits of the hacking to the oil and gas company. 

By expanding their oil and gas production and increasing global warming emissions, while deploying delays, diversionary tactics, and calculated disinformation, fossil fuel corporations have lost the public trust as good-faith actors. Like the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry deserves to have its immense power and social license curtailed. Fossil fuel corporations need to be held accountable for their actions and for the climate destruction they have contributed to. Their continued malfeasance is all the more dangerous at a time when the US federal government is backsliding on climate action. 

A Call to Action: Pressure the Fossil Fuel Industry 

UCS is ratcheting up our demands to the fossil fuel industry—calling for a massive increase in pressure on these corporations from affected communities, experts, consumers, public prosecutors, litigators, investors, financiers, business partners, regulators, and policymakers. 

1. First and foremost, we demand that major fossil fuel corporations cease disinformation and greenwashing on climate science, public policy, and corporate actions.  

Fossil fuel companies must end their greenwashing campaigns, their attempts to downplay the severity of the climate crisis, and their diversionary tactics that distract from the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels. They must admit and publicly renounce past wrongdoing and issue corrective statements similar to those required of the tobacco industry after a federal court ruled that major US tobacco corporations had violated civil racketeering laws and engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to deceive the public.  

2. We also insist that major fossil fuel corporations stop obstructing science-informed public policy and its implementation. 

Just as the tobacco industry has a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interest with public health policymaking, the fossil fuel industry has a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interest with the development and implementation of public policies intended to limit fossil fuel-driven climate change and accelerate the transition to clean renewable energy. We must force them to finally stop spending their shareholders’ money on anti-climate lobbying, front groups, and misleading public relations campaigns. 

3. It is past time for fossil fuel corporations to pay an equitable share of the costs of climate damages; climate adaptation; and the environmental, social, and systemic impacts of fossil fuel products and production.  

For too long, fossil fuel corporations have privatized the profits of oil, gas, and coal while socializing the massive costs they could have prevented society from incurring. All of us are living with the effects of extreme heat, stronger hurricanes, extreme flooding, more devastating wildfires, and other climate impacts. These mounting climate impacts take a huge toll on our lives, well-being, and our cultural heritage and they impose an enormous economic burden. Environmental racism compounds the harm for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities in the United States and across the Global South.  

UCS’s new report highlights how we must use levers including investment, litigation, public exposure, and policymaking to also compel fossil fuel corporations to:  

4. Fully disclose, and regularly and publicly report on, risks and impacts to the climate, communities, and the economy; 

5. Accelerate actions, investment, and business planning for a fair and fast phaseout of fossil fuels worldwide;  

6. Stop violating civil rights, human rights, and the rights of Indigenous peoples.   

The rollbacks and reversals at the federal level in the United States make these changes all the more urgent and shine a key spotlight on the legal cases moving toward courts across the country—as well as the court of public opinion. As I wrote recently, it is looking increasingly possible that the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress may try to give the fossil fuel industry what it wants most of all: immunity from liability for the enormous damages these corporations have knowingly caused to people and the planet. Congress must resist such efforts and protect the ability of states, municipalities, and others harmed by fossil fuel-driven climate change to hold polluters accountable through litigation and legislation. The industry has gotten away with denial and deception for far too long. It’s time for all of us to make sure the major fossil fuel corporations are held to account. 

Congress refusing to shield the fossil fuel industry from facing consequences for its deception and the massive resulting harm would be a signal that the message of Decades of Deceit has gotten through. 

Please read the report and take action today. You can start by writing to your governor and state attorney general to let them know you support efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its climate deception and the resulting damage to local communities. 

Last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) joined with nearly 200 other groups in signing a letter calling on Congressional Democrats to “proactively and affirmatively reject” potential efforts aimed at shielding the fossil fuel industry from legal liability. Here are six reasons major fossil fuel corporations fear being held accountable for decades of deceit and the resulting harm to people and the planet.  

1) People are feeling the impacts of climate change and footing the bill 

The impending arrival of “Danger Season” is a stark reminder that climate change impacts are already devastating communities worldwide, intensifying many kinds of extreme weather events, driving sea level rise, and harming human health. 

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tracked extreme weather and climate-related disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and floods. According to NOAA data, 2024 saw 27 confirmed weather and climate disaster events that each caused damages amounting to $1 billion or more. The cost and deadly effects of climate change fall disproportionately on people and communities on the front lines of those impacts, many of them historically disadvantaged and under-resourced. 

The Trump Administration’s plan to end climate research at NOAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would be disastrous, as my colleague Dr. Marc Alessi writes. And hiding data and stopping research will do nothing to slow the climate crisis. On the contrary, burying our heads in the sand will only put more lives at risk and increase costs to our economy. 

2) Robust attribution science traces climate impacts to fossil fuel corporations   

Advances in climate attribution science, which quantifies the extent to which human activities are responsible for observed changes in the climate system, show it is indisputable that the primary driver of these escalating harms is the burning of fossil fuels. 

A key link in quantifying the contributions of major fossil fuel companies to cumulative global emissions is the Carbon Majors database, now run by the UK-based global nonprofit thinktank InfluenceMap. 

UCS has been a leader in peer-reviewed scientific research linking climate impacts to emissions that trace directly to fossil fuel companies. Research teams led by UCS climate scientists and joined by a variety of top academic expert collaborators have published a series of pathbreaking studies quantifying how emissions traced to major fossil fuel companies have driven increases in global temperatures, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and damage from wildfires. 

Most recently, a study led by former UCS science fellow Dr. Shaina Sadai underscores how emissions traced to the world’s major carbon polluters have all but guaranteed sea level rise for generations to come. Multiple scenarios demonstrate how avoided emissions could have saved lives if polluters had taken action when they first understood the impacts of their products, or when there was general global understanding of climate change.  

3) Climate-related financial risk is real 

Instead of addressing the many ways climate change threatens the country’s financial stability, the Trump administration is pulling back safeguards in order to reward his Big Oil donors, as my colleague Laura Peterson writes (Heads in the sand, part B). 

Major fossil fuel companies have fought hard to block mandatory and standardized corporate climate disclosures, long demanded by investors. In March 2024, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finalized a regulation that would compel publicly traded companies to assess and report on how climate change will affect their bottom lines and, by extension, investors and the public. The fossil fuel industry and its allies had lobbied against the rule, weakening the final version to the point that companies are essentially allowed to decide what climate-related risks they disclose to investors. 

Nevertheless, fossil fuel industry proxies immediately filed lawsuits against the rule. Through the US Chamber of Commerce, the industry is also suing to block two California laws passed in 2023 to strengthen corporate climate disclosures—one of which requires large public and private US-based corporations that do business in California and have annual revenues greater than $1 billion to disclose their global warming emissions all along the value chain. For companies in the oil and gas sector, 80 to 90 percent of carbon emissions result from the use of their fossil fuel products. 

The SEC rule was targeted for elimination by a major oil and gas industry trade association. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, the SEC asked the court to pause the lawsuits, and in March 2025 the commission voted to withdraw its defense of the rule altogether. 

4) Evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated deception campaign continues to pile up 

A mounting body of evidence—reinforced by recently released internal corporate documents—demonstrates that major fossil fuel companies have known for decades that the continued extraction, production, promotion, and sale of their products would lead to catastrophic consequences, and that action to ward off the crisis would threaten their business model and bottom lines. 

Instead of acting responsibly, they engaged in a long-term, deliberate disinformation campaign to sow public doubt, block climate action, and continue profiting from fossil fuel extraction at the expense of people and the planet. These companies have not only failed to take responsibility for their role in the climate crisis but also actively obstructed efforts to transition to a clean energy future. Many of the tactics they used—often following the playbook of the tobacco industry—are still being deployed today.  

Take, for example, a confidential internal Shell report from 1998 that outlines a scenario set in 2010 in which a series of violent storms devastate the US east coast, prompting public outrage over the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate change. In this scenario, insurers deny liability and a fierce debate erupts over who should pay the costs. A coalition of environmental nonprofit groups brings a class action lawsuit against the US government and fossil fuel companies, on the basis that they had long failed to act on warnings from scientists (including the companies’ own) that something must be done. The scenario continues:  

“A social reaction to the use of fossil fuels grows, and individuals become ‘vigilante environmentalists’ in the same way, a generation earlier, they had become fiercely anti-tobacco. Direct-action campaigns against companies escalate. Young consumers, especially, demand action.” 

The timing of this confidential Shell report is notable. In 1998, I was working at Corporate Accountability on its tobacco campaign. Starting in 1994, US states had begun suing Big Tobacco to recover the costs of treating people with tobacco-related illness. By 1998, Minnesota’s lawsuit went to trial, and the tobacco industry sought to settle the litigation. Ultimately, the Master Settlement Agreement with the attorneys general of 52 states and territories required the four largest US tobacco corporations to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs; end certain advertising, promotion and marketing practices; close its lobbying arm and fraudulent science arm; and release millions of pages of internal documents. 

It seems Shell has long been acutely aware of the threat of legal accountability for the harms caused by its products. 

5) Climate accountability lawsuits and legislation are advancing at the state level 

Today, informed by overwhelming physical and social science evidence, legal action against the fossil fuel industry is advancing in courts around the world, part of a growing global movement for climate justice. 

One in four people in the United States currently live in a state, territory, or municipality that is suing major fossil fuel corporations to hold them accountable for fraud, climate damages, or racketeering. The lawsuits contend that—much like the tobacco industry in its deception about the dangers of cigarettes—fossil fuel companies have long understood the harm their products cause and chose to prioritize profit over people and the planet.  

Separately, a growing number of US state legislatures are considering so-called climate superfund laws, which would require the corporations responsible for the most heat-trapping emissions to help pay for the growing costs to protect public infrastructure from climate-driven damages. Two states—Vermont and New York—have passed climate superfund legislation. 

The fossil fuel industry has fiercely attacked climate lawsuits and legislative efforts in court, delaying justice in climate litigation for years with meritless procedural hurdles and unfounded claims of preemption. But earlier this year, the US Supreme Court denied two petitions by the fossil fuel industry and its allies seeking to halt cases by Honolulu and five states, affirming their right to seek justice in state courts.  

The fossil fuel industry has employed aggressive tactics to rebuff these advances for accountability and cash in on political favors. A fossil fuel industry lobby group launched a public campaign opposing climate accountability lawsuits, and CEOs of major oil and gas corporations including Chevron and ExxonMobil reportedly met with President Trump to ask for his help fighting both climate litigation and climate superfund legislation. Just weeks later, Trump signed an Executive Order targeting states’ rights. 

6) Climate accountability advocates are not backing down 

The Trump administration’s attacks on climate and environmental justice programs and advocates are a signal to the fossil fuel industry and its surrogates that bullying and intimidation are the order of the day. 

Last month, a North Dakota jury ruled in favor of Energy Transfer in its long-running meritless Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) against Greenpeace, finding the group liable for more than $660 million in damages for supporting Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. 

Yet corporate accountability campaigners remain steadfast. 

Greenpeace entities in the United States have announced their intention to appeal, and Greenpeace International has filed an anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Energy Transfer in a Dutch court, seeking to recover all damages and costs resulting from the corporation’s meritless litigation. 

Meanwhile, UCS and other targets of a criminal scheme to hack into email accounts of staff at public interest organizations seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in climate change continue to push for justice.  

We have known for several years that ExxonMobil repeatedly used material stolen through the hack in its defense against climate accountability lawsuits in several US states. A longtime ExxonMobil lobbying firm, DCI Group, is reportedly being investigated in connection with the scheme, and allegedly shared information stolen through the hacking operation with ExxonMobil before leaking it to the media. ExxonMobil and the DCI Group have so far publicly denied involvement in the hacking scheme, and there is no indication that the US government intends to bring criminal charges against the DCI Group or ExxonMobil. 

UCS continues to press for accountability for the perpetrators of the criminal hacking scheme. 

And given the mounting human and financial toll of climate change and the mountain of evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s deliberate campaign of disinformation, obstruction, and intimidation, no US Senator or Representative should vote to shield this industry from facing consequences for its deception and the massive resulting harm. 

In a cynical effort to please climate-conscious investors, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods may choose to keep climate science deniers like DOE nominee Chris Wright at arm’s length. But with global temperatures rising, the carbon budget dwindling, and climate-driven disasters affecting people and communities around the world, we cannot afford to accept ExxonMobil, Shell, or other major fossil fuel corporations as the lesser evil—or even worse, as integral to climate solutions.

President-elect Trump reignites overt climate denial

During his campaign, President-elect Trump sought $1 billion from oil and gas CEOs in exchange for a pledge to reverse environmental regulations and prevent new policies from being enacted. Since Trump’s election to a second term, fossil fuel industry interests have published their wish lists—and patrons have been rewarded with appointments to key posts in the administration. And we’ve already seen a resurgence of outright climate science denial.

Chris Wright, President-elect Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, has denied the well-established connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Liberty Energy, the fracking corporation he heads, describes its Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) focus as delivering secure, reliable, affordable access to energy. Its ESG report downplays the urgency of the climate crisis and misrepresents the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This deliberate distortion of ESG builds on years of anti-ESG efforts by far-right activists including Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed by President-elect Trump to partner with fellow billionaire Elon Musk in weakening federal regulations and slashing government spending (notably, oil and gas subsidies are not on the chopping block).

Congressional allies pump up oil and gas

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the House Judiciary Committee has continued its attack on ESG investing, most recently in an unhinged report that rallies behind ExxonMobil against an alleged “cartel” of climate-conscious investors. The committee seems to be living in an alternate reality in which investors using market tools to influence corporate strategy is somehow illicit, while fossil fuel companies colluding to fix prices is not. The Judiciary Committee’s upside-down world is detached from reality, ignoring both record-high US oil and gas production under the Biden administration and the fact that renewables continue to be cheaper than fossil energy.

Representative Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee embraces anti-climate positions that ExxonMobil itself long ago abandoned, alleging that commitments to reach net zero global warming emissions by 2050 are part of a “left-wing climate agenda.” Does ExxonMobil, the nation’s largest energy corporation, really need protection by a paternalistic Congress against powerful bullying investors? More likely, ExxonMobil recognizes that to compete in the global market, it must convince investors that it is taking action to reduce heat-trapping emissions and limit the worst effects of climate change. (As my colleague Dr. Carly Phillips has shown, ExxonMobil’s recent climate reports are misleading at best, dishonest at worst—textbook examples of greenwashing).

Major fossil fuel corporations lit the fuse decades ago

Climate change denial is no accident. It was plotted decades ago by the fossil fuel industry—for example, in an infamous 1998 memo by a task force of the American Petroleum Institute, which said, “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognize) ‘uncertainties’ in climate science.” As my UCS colleagues and I wrote in the Climate Deception Dossiers in 2015, this plan was eerily reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s strategy, succinctly described in an internal corporate memo as, “Doubt is our product.…”

The fossil fuel industry’s concerted disinformation campaign has been so successful that ExxonMobil, one of the ringleaders, can now claim to accept climate science while cronies like Chris Wright and Jim Jordan continue to stoke doubt.

Fossil fuel interests have been in Trump’s inner circle from the jump

In 2016, President Trump tapped ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State. As I wrote at the time, Tillerson was an inappropriate and deeply troubling pick for the post, for countless reasons—here were five of the most distressing ones.

First, was the ways Tillerson doubted and downplayed climate change. And after his service in the Trump administration, the Wall Street Journal revealed new evidence that Tillerson had dismissed the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (and striving to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius) as “something magical.” Worse still, just months before the agreement was signed, Tillerson asked, “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough?”

Climate scientists, backed by robust research, say so. The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° C found that surpassing 2 degrees Celsius of warming would significantly increase the frequency and severity of climate impacts, including extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and threats to human health and livelihoods. However, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, could substantially reduce these risks, highlighting the critical importance of ambitious global climate action.

In 2017, Tillerson said he disagreed with President Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. He was fired from his position in the administration just nine months later.

ExxonMobil hides behind extremists

ExxonMobil is staking out a different position in the second Trump administration.

Last year wrapped up as the hottest year on record, with warming temporarily reaching 1.5° C. Unlike Tillerson or Trump, current ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods professes to support the Paris Agreement. However, the corporation pushes technological “solutions” that can’t bend the emissions curve steeply downward in the critical period between now and 2030.

In December, ExxonMobil released its plan to 2030, which calls for an 18% increase in oil and gas production, thanks largely to growth in the Permian Basin (after last year’s acquisition of Pioneer) and offshore Guyana. Woods bragged about reducing ExxonMobil’s upstream (exploration and production) emissions intensity by 20% between 2016 and 2023—and says it is aiming to cut emissions intensity 40-50% by 2050.

However, upstream emissions intensity measures emissions per unit of production—and excludes emissions from burning oil and gas, which constitute roughly 85% of the heat-trapping emissions attributable to ExxonMobil. So, if production is increasing—as ExxonMobil’s is—absolute emissions will continue to climb even if upstream emissions intensity significantly decreases.

The corporation says it is pursuing “up to $30 billion in lower-emissions investment opportunities”—which for ExxonMobil means carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and lithium. Among other projects, ExxonMobil’s Low Carbon Solutions business is developing a Texas plant to produce hydrogen from fossil gas (if the tax credit included in the Inflation Reduction Act survives) and a gas-fired power plant to support a data center. (Read more about how data centers’ rapidly growing energy use is changing electricity supply and demand—and what it means for energy infrastructure planning—in this blog by my UCS colleague Mike Jacobs.)

Fossil fuel lobbyists grab seats at the table

ExxonMobil’s Woods was one of more than 1,770 fossil fuel industry lobbyists granted access to the annual UN climate negotiations (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The heads of Aramco, BP, and TotalEnergies were also registered to participate as guests of the host country.

Woods made headlines when he discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement. Although some media outlets credited Woods with supporting climate policy and pushing back against Trump’s anti-climate agenda, what he actually said was, “The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit.” What I see in the oil and gas industry’s participation at COPs is not a commitment to climate action, but the determination—and access—to interfere with a fair, fast, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels by the international community.

What to watch out for in 2025

As 2025 begins, the challenges for climate advocates are at least threefold: 1) mobilizing fierce opposition and marginalizing climate science deniers who secure positions of power in Congress or the administration; 2) inoculating state, federal, and international policymakers against deception and greenwashing by ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel corporations; and 3) defending and expanding the use of ESG investment strategies against bad-faith Congressional “oversight.”

With federal climate and clean energy policies likely to be stalled or rolled back, climate litigation is a key arena for progress in the United States. Preserving access to justice through the courts will be essential, in the face of veiled threats against climate-related litigation in Project 2025 and President-elect Trump’s promise to stop climate accountability litigation against the oil and gas industry.

The fossil fuel industry will attempt to cash in on its political influence in the United States by advancing deregulation, facilitating increased oil and gas production on federal lands and waters, expanding subsidies and other giveaways, blocking mandatory climate disclosure, evading liability for climate damages and corporate misconduct, and stoking political and legal attacks against activists and organizers. As President-elect Trump opens the floodgates to all kinds of disinformation—including climate science denial—some pro-fossil forces will fight climate and clean energy policies directly. But others will more stealthily seek to delay and undermine the transition away from fossil fuels, claiming to support climate action while defining “climate solutions” in their narrow short-term interests. These efforts to regain social license by those most responsible for the climate crisis are particularly insidious.

Both approaches—and the actors who employ them—endanger our health, environment, energy security, human rights, and democracy. Even as we steel ourselves to refute a barrage of lies from top officials in the second Trump administration and Congress, we must resist compromising with leaders of an industry that has deceived the public and policymakers for decades, evaded accountability for the harm it has caused, continues to obstruct the urgent transition to renewable energy, and has not earned the public’s trust.

Even more alarming, the fossil fuel industry’s influence at COPs is deeply entrenched and goes beyond lobbying. We’ve seen it at COP29 with greenwashing by corporations and trade associations, misrepresentations of what science deems necessary to address the climate crisis, and a widening ambition gap due to the insidious effects of fossil fuel influence.

To help parties break free from the grip of fossil fuel interests, here’s a guide to the top five ways the fossil fuel industry is trying to co-opt climate talks—and a call to world leaders to resist them.

1. Showing strength in numbers

Late last week, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition revealed that at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to COP29, outnumbering nearly every national delegation attending the talks in Azerbaijan. This is a major presence for the industry primarily responsible for driving destructive and deadly climate change and more than all the delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable countries combined (1,033 people badged).

According to the provisional list of registered on-site participants, major fossil fuel corporations BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies brought a total of 44 lobbyists to COP29. Participating in and influencing COPs has been part of ExxonMobil’s playbook for decades. Darren Woods, the corporation’s chair and CEO, is one of 12 ExxonMobil lobbyists in Baku. By comparison, Guyana—a country vulnerable to floods, droughts, sea-level rise, and other climate impacts (and where ExxonMobil is being sued over its offshore oil extraction projects)—also has 12 representatives at COP29.

2. Obtaining high-level access

But it’s not just the numbers. It’s who’s representing the fossil fuel industry, and who they are consorting with. The heads of several major oil and gas corporations—Aramco, BP, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies—are included in the provisional registration list as guests of the host country.

ExxonMobil’s Woods showed up at COP29 as a host country guest. He was invited to speak at a high-level meeting convened by the COP Presidency—an unparalleled opportunity to personally cultivate political leaders from around the world and attempt to define the terms of the energy transition in ways that perpetuate reliance on fossil fuel products and grow corporate profits.

Meanwhile, Woods discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, saying “The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit.” Ironically, this is one point on which I would agree with ExxonMobil’s CEO—with one significant amendment when it comes to the fossil fuel industry: “The way you influence things UNDULY is to participate…”

3. Refusing to pay up

Climate finance is the top priority for COP29, and one leg of the financial stool is funding for lower income countries to address loss and damage from fossil fuel-driven climate impacts. The year 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record, with extreme weather events leaving a trail of death and destruction across the globe. While major fossil fuel corporations continue to rake in massive profits, people and communities in the Global South bear a disproportionate burden of these disasters—which is why many in the climate justice movement are campaigning to Make Big Polluters Pay.

According to a new report commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce, climate-related extreme weather events have cost the global economy more than $2 trillion over the past decade. In a painful irony, this is the same International Chamber of Commerce whose delegation to COP29 includes 33 fossil fuel industry lobbyists—and whose US arm pushes the oil and gas industry’s anti-climate agenda. (Read more in this blogpost by my UCS colleague Laura Peterson).

Earlier this year, Azerbaijan, the host country for COP29, announced a Climate Finance Action Fund to be capitalized with $1 billion in voluntary contributions from fossil fuel-producing countries and oil, gas, and coal companies. However, the fund’s launch—set for Climate Finance Day at COP29—has been quietly postponed. The shelving of the fund marks a small victory for advocates who had decried the initiative as a problematic distraction from the imperative for the United States and other wealthy nations— the responsible parties at these UN climate talks—to collectively provide at least $1 trillion per year in grants or very low-interest loans. National and international policymakers must be wary of voluntary approaches that low-ball polluters’ responsibility, risk granting them social license, and could give them inappropriate influence over decisions about how the funds are spent.

4. Conniving to cash in

Even as the fossil fuel industry avoids paying its fair share of the mounting costs of fossil fuel-driven climate harms, fossil fuel subsidies bankrolled by governments (and taxpayers) around the world soared to $7 trillion in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Here at COP29, ExxonMobil’s Woods added insult to these compounding injuries when he demanded that governments create “incentives” for companies to transition to less carbon-intensive energy sources. The problem: ExxonMobil has its own misleading, dangerous definition of “advancing climate solutions” that its lobbyists are no doubt pitching to COP29 decisionmakers. The corporation’s “low carbon” roadmap relies heavily on technologies such as carbon capture and storage and hydrogen that cannot deliver steep emissions cuts in the critical period between now and 2030. In an interview with The New York Times while he was at COP29, Woods bragged that he resisted investor “pressure to get into the wind and solar business”—and ExxonMobil’s stock soared as the company doubled down on oil and gas.

While fossil fuel industry lobbyists continue their efforts to delay the urgently needed phaseout of oil, gas, and coal, they’re simultaneously trying to co-opt the clean energy transition by demanding subsidies from governments for technologies that aren’t likely to play a material role in meeting 2030 climate targets. Countries must resist any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to swindle funding that should rightly be put toward climate finance desperately needed by nations in the Global South.

5. Greenwashing, diverting attention, and capturing the conversation

During the first week of COP29, I didn’t catch any fossil fuel industry lobbyists in the act of lobbying at the Olympic Stadium where the talks are being held, as such conversations are most likely taking place behind closely guarded doors staffed with security. But the fossil fuel industry’s presence is pervasive and prominent:

• The COP29 Presidency hired Teneo—a public relations firm with close ties to the oil and gas industry—to enhance its image ahead of the talks.
• The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter—a voluntary initiative launched at COP28 by oil and gas corporations and condemned by hundreds of civil society organizations as a greenwashing ploy—has predictably resurfaced at COP29 after minimal visibility or progress over the past year.
• Events in the business pavilion have been sponsored by oil and gas corporations including Chevron, ExxonMobil, SOCAR, and TotalEnergies.

I’ve spent hours walking around the pavilions in the Blue Zone, where the official negotiations take place, and the public Green Zone, collecting numerous examples of corporate greenwashing. I’ve seen posters promoting natural gas as “the cleanest of hydrocarbons,” dozens of “net zero” claims, and cartoons touting the deployment of problematic technologies over proven climate solutions.

In the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) pavilion, I found a banner announcing that “oil touches our daily lives in different ways.” In oil-producing regions of the world, that statement is painfully true—people suffer health problems, environmental devastation, displacement, and loss of livelihoods and cultural heritage.

Friday Nbani Barilule, who leads the Lekeh Economic Development Foundation in Nigeria, took the opportunity to share how oil touches his life and that of others in the Niger Delta region where he lives and works. Watch his testimony here and read more in my blogpost about last month’s Niger Delta Climate Change Conference.

Overcoming fossil fuel industry influence with public policies, investor action, and climate litigation

Fossil fuel corporations and their surrogates shouldn’t have a seat at the negotiating table where climate policy is being made. Allowing them access is like setting the cat loose among the pigeons. Corporations such as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—which have engaged in a decades-long campaign to deceive the public and policymakers and block or delay climate action—have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted as good-faith players in climate policymaking.

Even as they continue to exert undue influence over climate policy, major fossil fuel corporations insist that we focus only on governments to advance climate action. Shortly after new evidence emerged that Shell and other oil and gas corporations knew of the planet-heating effects of their products as early as 1954, a Dutch appeals court overturned an earlier order requiring Shell to cut its global warming emissions by 45% by 2030. In celebrating the ruling, Shell urged people to “lobby governments rather than Shell to change policies and bring about a green transition.”

UCS and our allies will continue to lobby governments, and we’ll continue to work with climate-conscious investors to pressure corporations to slash their heat-trapping emissions and align their lobbying with their stated support for the Paris climate agreement. And we recognize the symbiotic relationship between international climate negotiations and climate litigation. UCS’s Science Hub for Climate Litigation is building a community of scientists to help meet the great demand for scientific expertise to inform litigation and legal action around the world.

As the United States and other nations grapple with surging disinformation and drastic anti-climate political change, COP29 has an opportunity to show the world that international diplomacy remains a vital means to address the global climate crisis. As the fossil fuel industry employs a range of strategies to co-opt and derail the process, negotiators must exercise political will to overcome these schemes. We’ll measure world leaders’ success in COP29 decisions that begin to remedy the harms people around the world are already experiencing, accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels, and fund an equitable global transition to clean energy.

My time in the Niger Delta deepened my commitment to work alongside Global South allies at COP29 for increased international climate finance while resisting any efforts to roll back last year’s agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. To succeed on these fronts, the nations of the world will need to keep Shell and other major fossil fuel corporations from interfering in the international climate talks and in national policies to implement global agreements made over the past decade in Paris, Glasgow, Dubai and elsewhere. 

Oil and Gas: Poisoning Air, Water, Land, and People 

Imagine a bathtub overflowing with crude oil. Imagine that the tap is still gushing oil. Imagine a handful of people with teaspoons desperately and diligently trying to empty the tub, while being contaminated by its contents. This is the image that came to my mind last week, during my first visit to the Niger Delta. 

I took a field trip to the village of Goi, whose residents were forced to flee twenty years ago after an oil spill from a Shell pipeline poisoned the land and waters and fueled a fire that destroyed surrounding mangrove forests. Community members eventually won a lawsuit against Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary in a Dutch court, but the cleanup is slow and will take decades longer. Villagers have lost their homes, their livelihoods, and their cultural heritage. 

And this is only one spill in one village. Similar disasters have affected communities across the Niger Delta region since Shell’s discovery of crude oil in commercial quantities in 1956. 

Exposure to hydrocarbons in crude oil poses serious risks to human health. Chronic exposure to Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), in particular, can lead to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, neurological illnesses, respiratory disorders, visual and gastrointestinal ailments, and skin conditions.  

A case study of the impact of oil extraction on women’s health in Otuabagi community in Bayelsa State, conducted by the Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Center, found that 100% of the 80 participating women had PAHs in their blood at levels exceeding the World Health Organization’s permissible level. 

Niger Delta Climate Change Conference 2024 

This was just a sliver of what I learned at the Niger Delta Climate Change Conference convened by the Lekeh Development Foundation with a range of local, national, and international partners. The Union of Concerned Scientists was proud to support the event, and I was honored to participate and offer a brief presentation on Science toward Mitigating Impacts of Climate Change in the Niger Delta. 

The conference brought together representatives from local communities, grassroots leaders, civil society organizations, government officials, women’s groups, youth movements, environmental advocates, and international allies, toward the goals of advancing a just energy transition and building climate resilience. 

Over the course of five days, participants heard from: 

• Academic and civil society researchers documenting the impacts of oil extraction and climate change on the environment and human health. 

• Organizers demanding accountability from oil corporations, including comprehensive environmental remediation, health audits, and compensation for communities before finalizing any divestment of assets in the Niger Delta. 

• Advocates calling on the Nigerian government to prioritize renewable energy investments in the Niger Delta and ensure no community is left behind in its energy transition framework. 

• Litigators pursuing climate justice and corporate accountability, backed by climate science and social science. 

• Women and youth insisting that their perspectives, solutions, and leadership be centered in decision-making on climate change, environmental protection, and socio-economic development. 

A Call for Cleanup, Climate Justice, Corporate Accountability, and a Fossil-Free Niger Delta 

During the conference, participants took to the streets from the Rivers State College of Health Science and Technology to launch the Fossil-Free Niger Delta Campaign. Led by Lekeh Development Foundation, the campaign calls for an end to fossil fuel extraction in the region and resistance to any attempt to resume oil production in Ogoniland and other impacted areas. 

The conference closed with a powerful communiqué urging: 

• “The Government of Nigeria to prioritize environmental cleanup, enforce corporate accountability, and accelerate the transition to renewable energy. 

• “International development partners and allies to provide financial and technical support for climate resilience and community-based adaptation projects. 

• “Oil companies to honor their responsibility for environmental restoration and compensation before exiting the region. 

• “Communities and civil society organizations to remain united, resilient, and committed to advancing climate justice and sustainable development in the Niger Delta.” 

The Reality Behind Fossil Fuel Industry Greenwashing 

Although few participants from this conference will be present in Baku, all of these demands are relevant to the proceedings there. And what I witnessed in the Niger Delta contrasts starkly with the image that major oil and gas corporations attempt to project in the international climate negotiations—where they showed up in force last year, with more than 2,400 fossil fuel lobbyists. 

Lobbyists from Shell and other major fossil fuel corporations do not want COP29 delegates to know how they pollute the environment, drive disruptive climate change, poison people, and attempt to walk away with impunity from the mess they’ve made. Instead, they want the world to believe that they support the goals of the Paris climate agreement and that they’re aiming to achieve net zero global warming emissions by 2050. 

And yet these corporations’ actions reveal they are greenwashing: 

• In its latest energy transition strategy, Shell abandoned a key climate target for 2035 and weakened its 2030 emissions reduction pledge. 

• BP walked back its emissions reduction target and reversed its commitment to cut back oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. 

• The CEO of Occidental Petroleum, which touts its net zero strategy, said the world should only stop using oil and gas on “the day when we run out of oil and gas.” 

• ExxonMobil sued its own shareholders who were seeking more ambitious climate targets. 

• Leading members of the US Congress called on the US Attorney General to investigate major oil and gas corporations’ disinformation and efforts to delay climate action and the transition to clean energy. 

Amplifying Demands from the Niger Delta at COP29 

Under the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” of parties to the UN FCCC, the people of the Niger Delta and elsewhere in the Global South need financial support to cut their heat-trapping emissions, adapt to climate change, phase out fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy. COP29 is a key moment for climate finance. A commitment of $1 trillion per year in grants and grant-equivalent funding from Global North nations is needed to close the funding gap for Global South countries that have contributed the least to climate change but are bearing the brunt of its impacts. Read more in this blog by my colleague Rachel Cleetus. 

Hard-hit low- and middle-income nations also need funding for loss and damage—the negative impacts of climate change that are not being avoided or cannot be avoided through mitigation and adaptation. Unfortunately, pledges to the UN FCCC Loss and Damage Fund are still a drop in the bucket compared to the billions that Global South countries need and deserve. 

As people around the world suffer damaging climate impacts and the costs of delay and inaction mount, climate litigation continues to expand and evolve. Dozens of lawsuits across the United States and nearly 100 globally seek compensation from fossil fuel companies and their enablers for promulgating disinformation and/or contributing to damaging and deadly climate impacts. At COP29, government and civil society representatives must champion climate justice. 

With the host country announcing a Climate Finance Action Fund to be capitalized with $1 billion in voluntary contributions from fossil fuel producing companies and oil, gas, and coal companies, government and civil society representatives at COP29 must champion climate justice over greenwashing, charity, and evasion of liability. 

This is also a critical moment for the nations of the world to stick with the commitment they made at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels. The 2024 World Energy Outlook recently released by International Energy Agency (IEA): 

• Affirms that there are no new oil and gas fields or coal mines—and no additional liquefied natural gas export infrastructure—under its 1.5°C pathway. 

• Emphasizes that much more action is needed for a fast and fair phase-out of fossil fuels, even though demand for oil, gas, and coal will peak by 2030. Governments must do more to ensure record growth in renewable energy is rapidly displacing fossil fuels in the system and reducing inequalities in energy access and investment. 

Heading into COP29, we need to anticipate and prepare to fight attempts by the fossil fuel lobby to reverse or delay the agreement to transition away from oil, gas, and coal—or to divert resources to approaches like carbon capture and storage, carbon dioxide removal, and alternative combustion fuels that aren’t likely to play a material role in meeting 2030 targets and don’t fully reduce the environmental injustices and public health harms of fossil fuels that impose such a heavy burden on places like the Niger Delta. 

As we travel to COP29, my UCS colleagues and I are determined to support and amplify the demand from our partners in the Niger Delta for the global commitment, policies, and resources needed to protect communities and secure a sustainable, just future. 

I had the honor of moderating one of the latter events, Scientists & Activists vs. Fossil Fuel Finance. It featured a stellar panel of scientists, organizers, and frontline leaders reporting out from the Summer of Heat on Wall Street campaign and sharing their insights on why banks must stop financing fossil fuel expansion:

• Rose Z. Abramoff, PhD, Wintergreen Earth Science; Board President, Climate Emergency Fund 
• Michael Johnson, New York Communities for Change 
• Sandra Steingraber, PhD, Senior Scientist, Science and Environmental Health Network; Co-founder, Concerned Health Professionals of New York 
• Jenny Xie, Organizing Manager, Stop the Money Pipeline 

You can watch the recording of the event here.

Summer of Heat on Wall Street

According to the 2024 Banking on Climate Chaos report, Citi is the second-largest financier of fossil fuels and the largest financier of fossil fuel expansion since the Paris climate agreement, having poured $396 billion into the industry since 2016. That’s why activists with the Summer of Heat on Wall Street organized a campaign of sustained nonviolent direct action targeting Citi and other major players in the financial sector for their role in fueling the climate crisis.

In June, more than 750 scientists sent an open letter organized by UCS to Citi, calling on the bank to stop financing fossil fuel expansion, respect human rights, and redirect finance to renewable energy. Citi’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Val Smith, responded to the scientists’ letter in July, outlining the bank’s support for the transition to a low-carbon economy and sharing its 2023 Climate Report. Unfortunately, Citi’s response confirmed that the bank’s actions are not fully aligned with what science shows is necessary to limit the worst impacts of climate change and protect people, ecosystems, and economies from worsening climate disasters. 

And Citi’s response to the scientists’ letter came in the context of an escalating crackdown, as Citi and the New York Police Department attempted to suppress nonviolent protests and inhibit freedom of speech and free assembly at the bank’s headquarters.

Here are some key points emerging from last week’s event and UCS’s analysis, demonstrating why we must keep up the pressure on Citi and other Big Banks to do better when it comes to climate change and environmental justice:

Citi continues to finance more fossil fuels than low-carbon energy projects and companies

In 2021, Dr. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, stated, “If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now—from this year.” The science is clear that a rapid and fair phaseout of fossil fuels is necessary to limit the worst climate impacts and secure a livable future. Citi’s place as the biggest financier of fossil fuel expansion is taking us in the wrong direction.

While Citi touts its $1 trillion Sustainable Finance by 2030 Goal, that figure includes the bank’s full range of environmental, social, and governance investments. A 2023 report by BloombergNEF suggests the finance industry’s ratio for low-carbon to fossil-fuel supply investment needs to be at least 4:1 by 2030 to remain aligned with scenarios under which the average global temperature rises by no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. BloombergNEF calculated Citi’s 2022 Energy Supply Banking Ratio (that is, financing for low-carbon projects and companies compared to financing for fossil fuel activities) at 0.6:1.

This year, in response to pressure from shareholders, Citi committed to regularly disclose its ratio of clean energy supply financing to fossil fuel extraction financing. These disclosures should allow shareholders and advocates to monitor the bank’s future progress on this metric.

Citi’s energy sector clients are not leading the low-carbon transition

No major oil and gas corporation has a business plan that would put it on track to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement. A 2022 peer-reviewed study found that BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell continue to depend almost entirely on fossil fuels, with insignificant and opaque spending on clean energy—and that accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded. Indeed, a multiyear bicameral US congressional investigation found that the fossil fuel industry’s long-running campaign of climate deception and delay continues to this day.

Citi’s 2023 Climate Report reveals that, under Citi’s own criteria, 42% of its clients in the energy sector don’t have a substantive plan to reach net-zero, and an additional 29% don’t have a clear strategy to execute their high-level plans. Only 28% of energy clients have what Citi termed a medium-strong or strong transition plan.

Citi parrots fossil fuel industry talking points about energy needs in developing countries

The truth is low-income countries—which have done the least to cause climate change—are being hit the first and hardest by devastating climate impacts. Small Island Developing States and other Global South nations have been at the forefront of pushing for greater climate ambition and climate accountability.

The solution to meeting the world’s energy needs is not to further expand polluting, ecosystem-destroying, and climate-warming fossil fuel operations. Instead, low-income, climate-vulnerable countries urgently need and deserve rapidly scaled-up and steady funding from the wealthy nations that have caused the climate crisis, to help cut heat-trapping emissions, invest in clean energy and climate resilience, and address climate losses and damage (the negative impacts of climate change that are not being avoided or cannot be avoided through mitigation and adaptation).

Citi ignores negative health and human rights impacts on local communities from fossil fuel extraction

Fossil fuel pollution disproportionately harms BIPOC and low-income communities in the US. We urge Citi leadership to read this new report on environmental racism and health harms linked to Citi’s financing of LNG and petrochemical projects in the Gulf South, and to respond to ongoing requests from community leaders in Louisiana and Texas for a meeting to discuss these issues.

The impacts of Citi’s financing are global—Citi is also a top financier of oil and gas extraction in the Amazon. While Citi recently responded to years of pressure from Amazonian Indigenous organizations and environmental groups by saying it will no longer provide project-related financing of oil and gas expansion in the Amazon, its new policy leaves significant loopholes and fails to fully meet the demands of local Indigenous communities. While the new policy is a step forward, project-related deals are estimated to be only 18% of Citibank’s overall direct financing for Amazon oil and gas.

Citi lobbies against meaningful climate-related public policies

Citi is a member and funder of the US Chamber of Commerce, which continues to oppose climate-related legislation and regulation in its lobbying efforts. For example, the Chamber recently sued the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), aiming to stop the SEC from implementing a rule that would compel companies to disclose more details about how they manage climate-related risks. 

As noted by Alec Connon, director of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, Citi’s CEO, Jane Fraser, is Vice Chair of the Financial Services Forum and a board member of the Bank Policy Institute, both of which receive negative rankings from LobbyMap for their lobbying on sustainable finance policy, including corporate climate disclosure and climate-related risk management.

Science—and scientists—call on Citi to stop fueling the climate crisis

As part of the Summer of Heat on Wall Street campaign, scientists have engaged in civil disobedience and been arrested outside of Citi’s doors on multiple occasions, alongside elders, youth, frontline leaders, and other activists. It was a “summer of heat” in multiple senses, with an unprecedented number of heat records being broken across the globe and dangerous extreme weather causing economic damage and death.

Scientists are joining this powerful and growing movement to hold Big Banks accountable on climate because we know that the science is clear. The world will face increasingly catastrophic climate impacts if we do not swiftly phase out fossil fuels, cut heat-trapping emissions, and make a just transition to a clean energy economy, and every sector must play its part.

That’s why Citi and other major financial institutions must stop prolonging the fossil fuel era—and the fossil fuel industry’s exorbitant profits—at the expense of people and ecosystems around the world. You can help increase the pressure on Citi by sharing the event recording and the new report Citi: Funding Fossil-Fueled Environmental Racism in the Gulf South on social media. To stay tuned with what’s coming next for the Summer of Heat campaign, sign up for updates here.

Thanks to Campaign Organizer Hannah Poor for her assistance with this blogpost and for her leadership in organizing UCS’s Climate Week events.

This month, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a ban on advertising by fossil fuel companies, invoking the ban on tobacco ads as a relevant precedent. Member states of the UN’s specialized health agency—the World Health Organization—included a comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship in the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC). The treaty, in force as international law for nearly 20 years, now binds 183 parties, protecting more than 90 percent of the world’s people.

So what can we learn from the ban on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship that may be relevant to tackling the fossil fuel industry-driven climate crisis? Based on my experience, including as a civil society observer in the tobacco treaty negotiations: a lot.

Let’s consider why this measure was included in the global tobacco treaty, what tactics and entities it covers, how it came about, how it connects with and depends on measures to protect public policy from vested commercial interests, and what those of us working to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate deception and damages can learn.

Why ban advertising, promotion, and sponsorship of dangerous and deadly products?

The tobacco industry is the vector of a preventable epidemic that kills millions of people around the world each year. Corporations such as Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, and Reynolds American have used advertising, promotion, and sponsorship to addict new customers—youth in wealthy countries like the United States, women in countries where they hadn’t smoked, and of people in low- and middle-income countries.

Insidiously effective imagery used to hawk cigarettes included the infamous Marlboro Man—dubbed “a perfect symbol of independence and individualistic rebellion” by its creator; the notorious Joe Camel cartoon character designed to appeal to kids; the “Torches of Freedom” campaign promoting Lucky Strikes to women, developed by Edward Bernays (known as the father of modern public relations); and sponsorship of women’s tennis by Virginia Slims with the slogan “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” ironically proclaiming equal access to tobacco-related addiction, disease, and death.

Robust evidence backs a tobacco ad ban: it is well documented that tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship increase tobacco use, while comprehensive bans decrease it. Several countries, including South Africa and Thailand, had banned tobacco advertising before there was a global tobacco treaty, and their experiences informed the negotiations.

What do we mean by advertising, promotion, and sponsorship?

At the time the tobacco treaty was negotiated, the tobacco industry used a wide range of promotional tactics—including billboard and magazine advertising, point of sale ads and displays, “brand stretching” (use of tobacco logos on non-tobacco products such as T-shirts and baseball caps), sponsorship of sporting events such as Formula One racing and women’s tennis, and product placement in movies and TV.

The treaty defines tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship expansively to avoid loopholes the tobacco industry could exploit. Thus, a comprehensive ban on all tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship applies to all forms of commercial communication, recommendation or action and all forms of contribution to any event, activity or individual with the aim, effect, or likely effect of promoting a tobacco product or tobacco use either directly or indirectly.

Informed by civil society, treaty negotiators understood that if only certain forms of direct tobacco advertising were prohibited, the tobacco industry would inevitably shift its strategies. The guidelines for treaty implementation warn that—while it may be useful to give examples of prohibited activities—legislation should avoid providing lists that could be seen as exhaustive.

Importantly, the treaty guidelines also specify that corporate promotion by tobacco companies—even without brand names or trademarks—is a form of promotion of tobacco products or tobacco use. Recognizing that “it is increasingly common for tobacco companies to seek to portray themselves as good corporate citizens by making contributions to deserving causes or by otherwise promoting ‘socially responsible’ elements of their business practices,” the treaty guidelines recommend banning tobacco industry public education campaigns.

Note the clear parallel between the tobacco industry’s “youth smoking prevention campaigns” and today’s ubiquitous greenwashing ad campaigns from fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell touting their “low-carbon solutions” (which are too little, too late).

Who is responsible—and what entities should a ban cover?

Nation-states are ultimately responsible for safeguarding public health and a stable climate. Treaties like the UN FCCC and the WHO FCTC first and foremost bind countries.

The FCTC was groundbreaking in several ways. Not only was it the first legally binding treaty negotiated under the auspices of the WHO, it also established legal obligations for countries to hold corporations accountable. It built on the WHO’s experience and lessons learned from efforts to limit the abusive and deadly promotion of infant formula to mothers in the Global South through a voluntary code of marketing for breastmilk substitutes.

The WHO FCTC identifies the tobacco industry (including tobacco manufacturers, wholesale distributors, importers, retailers, and their agents and associations) as primarily responsible for tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship—and therefore as the primary objects of the ban.

And the treaty guidelines recognize that other entities involved in tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship should also be held responsible. Plainly, the media is a key enabler of advertising, promotion, and sponsorship of any product, brand, or corporation. Thus, the ban also encompasses persons or entities that produce or publish media content, as well as event organizers, sports stars, and other celebrities.

Fraud is not free speech

The tobacco treaty has a carveout for any state party that is “not in a position to undertake a comprehensive ban due to its constitution or constitutional principles.” But even in countries with strong free speech protections like the First Amendment to the US Constitution, governments have a right—indeed an obligation—to curtail speech that is harmful.

Regardless of constitutional limitations, parties to the global tobacco treaty are required to “prohibit all forms of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship that promote a tobacco product by any means that are false, misleading or deceptive or likely to create an erroneous impression about its characteristics, health effects, hazards or emissions.” In other words, free speech protections are not a license for fraud.

Countries that claim their constitutions don’t allow a comprehensive tobacco ad ban must also require health warnings describing the harmful effects of tobacco use, consistent with those required on product packaging. Evidence shows that effectiveness of health warnings increases with their prominence—which is why graphic warnings are now required on tobacco products in 138 countries and territories.

Ironically, the United States, which lobbied forcefully for the constitutional carveout, is not a party to the WHO FCTC. Nonetheless, the United States eliminated some forms of tobacco advertising through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with 52 state and territory attorneys general. The settlement prohibited tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship that targets youth; the use of cartoons; tobacco-branded merchandise; and payments for tobacco product placement in media.

US Food and Drug Administration regulation of tobacco products, enacted in 2009, mandates graphic health warnings on cigarette products and advertisements—but the tobacco industry has delayed implementation through a prolonged legal battle. A recent appeals court ruling affirmed that the warnings are “factual and uncontroversial.”

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently extended the idea of warning labels as a public health protection measure with his proposal for a warning label on social media platforms as a means to address the youth mental health crisis.

In light of clear evidence of the dangerous and deadly effects of fossil fuels, a few jurisdictions around the world have restricted fossil fuel advertising or banned particular ad campaigns, and lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations over deceptive and misleading communications to consumers and investors are gaining momentum.

How was the comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship achieved?

The ban faced fierce and sustained opposition—particularly from Global North countries that are home to the world’s largest and most profitable transnational tobacco corporations: the United States, Japan, and Germany.

Nations of the Global South—from Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Caribbean Islands—banded together to overcome bullying by wealthy nations and tobacco industry interference and insist on a strong treaty to prevent the export of a preventable epidemic. This dynamic will be familiar to anyone who has followed global climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC).

The inclusion of an ad ban in the global tobacco treaty went hand-in-hand with another precedent-setting provision: Article 5.3, which obligates parties to protect their public health policies from interference by commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry. Today, Article 5.3 is a cornerstone of treaty implementation and enforcement. [Full disclosure: the organization I previously led, Corporate Accountability, joined with allies in the Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals to center this measure in our advocacy. In 2008 I was the sole civil society representative in the room when parties finalized negotiations on the implementation guidelines.]

Without this obligation, states parties would have faced much stiffer opposition—in the form of tobacco industry lobbying and “corporate social responsibility” campaigns—to the adoption and enforcement of comprehensive bans on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship.

Overcoming fossil fuel industry interference

The UN FCCC does not have protections like those in Article 5.3 of the WHO FCTC against corporate conflicts of interest—at least not yet. But thanks to civil society organizing, we finally have a measure of transparency. After new rules requiring participants in the global climate talks to disclose who they represent took effect last year, we saw record numbers of fossil fuel industry lobbyists at COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This year’s talks in Baku, Azerbaijan—another oil-producing country—promise more of the same.

Like the tobacco epidemic, the climate crisis is a matter of life and death, and the death toll is rising. The best way to save lives is to reduce global warming emissions as quickly as possible—and accelerating a fair phaseout of fossil fuels is essential to turn the emissions curve downward.

As we in the United States plunge into another Danger Season of extreme heat, fire weather, and storms, scientists and activists are mobilizing in a Summer of Heat on Wall Street. Campaigns like this are exactly what’s needed to push political leaders in the United States and worldwide to confront the drivers of the climate crisis. Innovative approaches such as protecting international climate talks from fossil fuel industry interference and banning advertising, promotion, and sponsorship by fossil fuel corporations and their surrogates could be part a suite of urgently needed actions. We no longer have time to tinker around the edges. We must finally address the root cause of the climate emergency: the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.

And this spring’s corporate annual meetings are taking place against a backdrop of protests, new climate lawsuits (including a criminal complaint against the CEO and directors of TotalEnergies), a bicameral congressional investigation into Big Oil’s climate disinformation, and a call by congressional leaders for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long history of engaging in deceptive practices.

Here’s what’s happening—and what to expect as Big Oil’s annual meetings wrap up this week.

Shell evades questions and highlights “uncertainty”

On May 21, Shell held its hybrid annual meeting—disrupted by shareholders fed up with the corporation’s weak-and-getting-weaker climate action.

Attending virtually thanks to a proxy provided by the UK responsible investment organization ShareAction, I was able to ask our question:

Internal corporate documents made public through a bicameral Congressional investigation in the US demonstrate that days after President Trump was elected, a Shell media manager worked to “soften [methane reduction] language and still be true to ourselves” in an effort not to upset the Trump Administration, which sought to roll back methane standards. Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute (API)—in which Shell holds a leadership role—launched a voluntary methane program in 2017 that internal documents reveal was explicitly designed “to stave off future regulation.” Why, then, did Shell’s Gretchen Watkins call the final watered down Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations “frustrating and disappointing” in 2020?

Unfortunately, Shell CEO Wael Sawan’s response failed to address the blatant inconsistency between Shell’s internal and external communications about methane regulations, or between the corporation’s stated support for methane regulations and its trade association’s creation of a voluntary initiative to block mandatory rules.

Throughout the meeting, Shell used “uncertainty” as an excuse for rolling back its climate targets, claiming that the corporation can’t stick with medium-term emissions reduction benchmarks because it doesn’t know what governments or customers will do. Such doublespeak is the latest evolution in the fossil fuel industry’s deception playbook. These corporations may no longer be disputing climate science—now they are creating doubt about climate policy even as they seek to water it down, directly and through trade associations such as API. Yet no such uncertainty prevents them from planning further expansion of their oil and gas business.

In the face of opposition by the board, about one-fifth of Shell’s shareholders nonetheless voted in favor of a resolution put forward by the climate advocacy organization Follow This, calling for the corporation to align its medium-term emissions reduction targets—including emissions from use of its oil and gas products—with the goals of the Paris agreement.

BP keeps climate-conscious shareholders out

BP faced no climate-related shareholder proposals this year. On April 25, the corporation held only an in-person annual meeting, with no webcast and very little news coverage—even as activists protested the corporation’s role in the climate crisis and fueling the war in Gaza.

A supporter of ShareAction had planned to ask a question on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists, but was wrongly denied entry into the meeting.

Here’s the question we wanted to ask BP:

In its annual report, BP disclosed that total emissions had increased over the past year as a result of increased oil and gas production, representing a setback to corporate climate goals. Climate attribution science has quantified BP’s historical responsibility for global emissions, and social science is building a base of evidence of past and ongoing climate disinformation and obstruction campaigns by the fossil fuel industry. In recent weeks, two more jurisdictions in the US brought lawsuits to hold BP and other major fossil fuel producers accountable for climate damages and deception. Also, a report by the NGO Carbon Tracker found that BP’s transition plan is not aligned with the Paris climate goals. How do you calculate BP’s potential liability for its past actions and future foreseeable and preventable harms associated with its business plans?

We are still waiting for an answer.

ExxonMobil and Chevron on the hot seat

This week, ExxonMobil and Chevron will hold their annual meetings. They’ve both been in the news recently for being represented at a meeting at which former President Trump reportedly requested $1 billion in oil and gas industry contributions to his campaign in exchange for promised deregulation and dismantling of climate measures, accelerated permitting, and preservation of tax breaks.

Chevron bankrolls front group

Chevron’s virtual annual meeting comes near the end of what our allies at Amazon Watch are calling #AntiChevronMonth, when people around the world take action to call out the corporation’s horrific track record driving climate change, pollution, environmental injustice, and human rights violations.

Attending on the proxy of a climate-conscious shareholder, my colleague Laura Peterson plans to ask one question of Chevron:

In the first six months of 2023, Chevron directed between $2.5 and $7.5 million to a group new to Chevron’s trade association disclosures—Californians for Energy Independence. The group characterizes itself as a coalition of 200,000 Californians, but research has shown it’s actually a classic “astroturf” group funded by fossil fuel companies and related organizations. The group is behind expensive media campaigns to defeat legislation that would protect communities from harmful emissions resulting from oil and gas extraction, and incorrectly blames high gas prices in California on state politics. A Chevron 2023 report says the company lobbies “ethically, constructively and in a nonpartisan manner.” How does financing a front group that spreads partisan disinformation align with that statement?

ExxonMobil adapts disinformation strategies

ExxonMobil’s virtual annual meeting comes amid an unprecedented lawsuit by the corporation against its own shareholders, with growing numbers of institutional investors saying they will vote against one or more board members to protest this bullying. It also marks the end of the Board tenure of climate scientist Dr. Susan Avery.

I’ve submitted two questions to ExxonMobil:

1. ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods has recently been dismissing evidence of the company’s climate deception as “what was said 30 years ago,” and insisting that “the world has moved on.” But when I asked one of my climate scientist colleagues to evaluate the corporation’s latest “Advancing Climate Solutions” reports, she found them misleading at best, dishonest at worst—and concluded that while ExxonMobil’s strategy may have changed, its output of disinformation continues. And this month, congressional leaders called on US Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate ExxonMobil, other major oil and gas companies, and two of their trade associations for their decades-long climate disinformation campaign—including claims and actions since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015. What legal and financial consequences should shareholders anticipate from the ever-growing mountain of evidence of ExxonMobil’s deceptive practices and other corporate misconduct?
2. In its latest Climate Lobbying Report, ExxonMobil revealed that in 2022 it withdrew from the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents “independent” (i.e. smaller) oil and gas producers. The same report found 52 trade associations “aligned” with ExxonMobil’s climate policy positions, and three groups “partially aligned.” Yet many of the associations in which the corporation maintains membership are actively spreading climate disinformation and obstructing climate progress. For example, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers is running a massive ad campaign falsely claiming that the US Environmental Protection Agency has banned gasoline-powered cars. Why is ExxonMobil using a report requested by shareholders to justify its ongoing support for trade associations that promote climate disinformation, oppose climate action, and seek to delay the urgently needed transition to clean energy?

Based on my experience attending ExxonMobil corporate annual meetings on behalf of climate-conscious shareholders since 2016, I don’t expect a sudden rush of candor from Chair and CEO Darren Woods. Yet ExxonMobil’s efforts to censor climate-conscious shareholders—rather than transforming climate-destroying business model—are likely to provoke increased outrage from investors and affected communities.

The leaders of these corporations may think they can escape accountability by stonewalling, greenwashing, blocking shareholders from even discussing climate-related issues, and engaging in a concerted campaign to undermine Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing. They couldn’t be more wrong. These efforts to suppress shareholder input are exactly why investors are turning their attention to unseating oil and gas company board members.

As Danger Season 2024 brings extreme events like heat waves, heavy rainfall, wildfires, and poor air quality to millions of people across the United States, major oil and gas corporations should expect growing scrutiny from policymakers and public prosecutors over their role in driving the climate crisis—and rising votes of no confidence in corporate leadership the longer they continue to delay, deceive, and disinform.

Here’s a primer on why a climate scientist was on ExxonMobil’s board, what Dr. Avery accomplished during her tenure, and how ExxonMobil has acted on climate science over the past seven years. I conclude with one plea to Dr. Avery in her final weeks on ExxonMobil’s board: to call on her colleagues in corporate leadership to stop the company from suing shareholders who are seeking to preserve a livable climate.

Why is a climate scientist on ExxonMobil’s board?

Because climate-conscious investors requested it. As evidence mounted of ExxonMobil’s role in concerted campaigns to deny climate science—through investigative journalism exposés and reports such as UCS’s Climate Deception Dossiers—shareholders called for the company to nominate an independent director with climate change expertise, believing that the presence of an expert would  lead to science-informed corporate decisions.

Dr. Susan Avery, a physicist and atmospheric scientist, is the former director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts. She’s also professor emeritus at University of Colorado at Boulder. At the time of her nomination, Dr. Avery was a respected climate scientist—although she had also sparked controversy with her decisions at WHOI to accept major funding from oil and gas corporations.

It’s worth noting that the shareholder proposal requesting the nomination of a climate expert to ExxonMobil’s board received just over 20 percent support in 2016. Yet the corporation acted on it—giving the lie to claims that such shareholder advocacy is frivolous. In fact, shareholder resolutions can be an early warning system to help corporations address issues of investor and public concern before they snowball into major problems.

What did Dr. Avery accomplish?

Cynically speaking, she raked in well over $2 million in compensation for carrying out her responsibilities as an ExxonMobil director.

As a member of ExxonMobil’s board of directors and chair of the Environment, Safety, and Public Policy (ESPP) committee of the board, Dr. Avery was in a unique position with a critical responsibility to steer the corporation toward scientific integrity, transparency, and accountability. Shareholders and scientists had a legitimate expectation that she would use her leadership role to ensure that the company’s resources were not used to promote faulty science, climate disinformation, or greenwashing campaigns. Unfortunately, ExxonMobil’s decisions and actions over the course of her board tenure have dashed that expectation.

Back in the pre-pandemic days when ExxonMobil held in-person AGMs, I attended on the proxy of climate-conscious shareholders. Scientists from a range of disciplines and institutions joined me to ask questions of corporate decisionmakers and speak in support of climate action. You can read their insights from their experiences—including being denied the opportunity to take the floor—and their efforts to engage with Dr. Avery in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

A turning point for shareholder advocacy

ExxonMobil’s appointment of Dr. Avery to its board was an acknowledgment of mounting pressure on the corporation to align its decisions and actions with climate science. And the pressure kept growing. At ExxonMobil’s 2017 AGM—when Dr. Avery was added to the board—a majority of shareholders for the first time approved a climate-related shareholder proposal.

A few months later, Dr. Geoffrey Supran and Dr. Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University published an important peer-reviewed study of ExxonMobil’s climate change communications, concluding that the corporation “contributed quietly to climate science and loudly to raising doubts about it.”

What followed was a stream of yearly corporate reports produced in response to investor demands that ExxonMobil disclose its plans for a world that meets the Paris climate agreement’s goal of limiting the global average temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius (°C) above preindustrial levels, and striving to limit it to 1.5°C.

ExxonMobil wrapped itself in the mantle of “net zero”—conveniently omitting the emissions deriving from use of its oil and gas products, which account for about 85 percent of the total global warming emissions attributable to the corporation. The company used Dr. Avery’s image in promoting its bogus net-zero solutions.

The corporation faced an unprecedented shareholder rebellion in 2021, with upstart hedge fund investor Engine No. 1 capturing three seats on the board by successfully arguing that ExxonMobil was failing to adapt for the transition to clean energy. During Dr. Avery’s tenure, three climate-related shareholder proposals won majorities.

Not an information deficit

However, one climate expert on the board evidently could not change ExxonMobil’s business model. Numerous academic studies and internal corporate documents reveal that the problem was not a deficit of information. A single climate expert clearly failed to steer the corporation away from climate disinformation. Did her presence enable ExxonMobil to hone its climate disinformation and greenwashing for a new era when bald-faced climate denial no longer works?

The fossil fuel giant now claims to be “aligned” with the Paris climate agreement, all while it continues to massively expand oil and gas exploration and production and lobby against climate action. In sworn testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee in 2021, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods refused to ensure that corporate funds are not spent to spread disinformation and block climate action.

Not surprisingly, Big Oil’s disinformation campaign continues, as documented by the Congressional investigation and climate accountability lawsuits filed by dozens of cities, counties, and states across the United States and its territories.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil also resists transparency, working through the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and other business trade groups to oppose a strong Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule designed to mandate standardized and comparable corporate disclosures. (Read this recent blog by my colleague Laura Peterson to learn how the SEC weakened its final climate disclosure rule in an (unsuccessful) attempt to placate foes.)

Leading in the wrong direction

In the face of the climate crisis, every board member of every publicly held corporation must be climate competent—and every board member has a duty to limit corporate climate impacts, plan for the transition to clean renewable energy, and support science-based climate policy. Some experts warn that board members of corporations that do not adequately manage climate-related risks could even be held personally liable for breaching their legal obligations.

Dr. Avery, for her part, gave a ringing endorsement of ExxonMobil’s 2023 “Advancing Climate Solutions” report—a masterclass in paltering (using selected truthful statements to mislead) and greenwashing (deceptive marketing to suggest companies or products are environmentally friendly). “As chair of our ESPP Committee,” she said, “I’m proud to work on key issues related to climate risk at ExxonMobil. With my experience as an atmospheric scientist and a leader at a global research organization, I am committed to helping to advise the Board on public issues of significance…. The members of the ESPP Committee are united in our commitment to position ExxonMobil as an industry leader in pursuing sustainable solutions that improve quality of life and meet society’s evolving needs.”

As Dr. Avery nears the end of seven years on the board, here’s a snapshot of “key issues related to climate risk at ExxonMobil”:

• ExxonMobil presents misleading science and refuses to acknowledge its responsibility for reducing emissions from the use of its oil and gas products. In its 2024 “Advancing Climate Solutions” report, ExxonMobil continues to deny any responsibility for Scope 3 emissions from use of the oil and gas products that it markets and sells—which constitute roughly 85 percent of the heat-trapping emissions attributable to ExxonMobil. My climate scientist colleague Dr. Carly Phillips does a great job explaining how the charts presented in this report are not scientifically rigorous and even appear intentionally vague and misleading, which reduces transparency around ExxonMobil’s climate impacts and mitigation efforts.  
• The corporation’s “low carbon” roadmap relies heavily on unproven and unscaled technologies. ExxonMobil focuses on net-zero technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen, calling into question the corporate commitment to reducing emissions in the critical period between now and 2030.
• ExxonMobil’s advertising campaigns mislead consumers, overstate its current and planned clean energy endeavors, and increase its own liability. Given the centrality of polluting fossil fuels to its business, ExxonMobil’s recent marketing campaigns have been criticized as greenwashing for falsely representing ExxonMobil as a clean energy leader, making overblown claims about the environmental benefits of its products, and touting unproven technologies. In addition to misleading the public about key scientific and environmental issues, these campaigns increase corporate liability. The company is now being sued by states and municipalities across the United States and its territories for consumer fraud, deceptive trade practices, and racketeering, threatening the financial security of shareholders such as public pension funds.
• ExxonMobil continues to fund organizations that spread climate disinformation and seek to block climate action. Despite the company’s public claims of “advancing climate solutions,” ExxonMobil retains leadership roles in several trade associations—including  the American Petroleum Institute, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and National Association of Manufacturers—that engage in climate obstructionist lobbying. ExxonMobil also continues to bankroll organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce that have a long and ongoing history of distorting science and downplaying the grave nature of the climate crisis.

Ultimately, ExxonMobil’s “Global Outlook” projects higher oil, gas, and coal consumption in 2050 than today, utterly failing to align with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and International Energy Agency scenarios that fossil fuel use must fall to limit the most dangerous impacts of climate change.

Stop suing climate-conscious shareholders

Perhaps nothing shows that ExxonMobil is determined to maintain its climate-destroying business model better than the company’s current lawsuit against its own shareholders. In January, the corporation sued two shareholder groups that had filed a resolution requesting medium-term targets for reducing emissions from corporate operations and from the use of its oil and gas products. ExxonMobil is pressing ahead with its lawsuit even after the shareholders withdrew their proposal.

The SEC has long recognized climate change is a significant issue that shareholders have an interest in discussing. The agency has allowed many climate-related shareholder resolutions to proceed to a vote in recent years, and none has provoked such a legal backlash. As the climate crisis worsens, investors have a right to understand and address the financial risks posed by delays in climate action, particularly by fossil fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, that are contributing disproportionately to the problem while failing to evolve for the clean energy transition.

ExxonMobil should not attempt to repress its shareholders’ ability to consider and provide strategic guidance to corporate leadership about one of the most pressing issues of our time. This lawsuit against shareholders calling for more ambitious climate action, along with ExxonMobil’s aggressive expansion of oil and gas production, demonstrate to investors and the world that the corporation continues to act in bad faith. Investors including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS)—the largest US pension fund—are calling on ExxonMobil to drop the lawsuit and weighing whether to keep their investments in light of these tactics.

Over the past seven years, Dr. Avery has frustrated shareholders, scientists, and the general public by failing to steer the corporation toward transparency and accountability—and away from climate disinformation and greenwashing. While she cannot erase that legacy, in her final days on the ExxonMobil board Dr. Avery could do a significant service to climate science by persuading her colleagues in corporate leadership to drop this frivolous and hypocritical lawsuit. She still has time to act before her term expires at the corporation’s AGM in late May.

Now the nations of the world must meet the moment in Dubai to agree to a fast and fair phaseout of all fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), something more than 650 scientists urged President Biden to champion in a letter sent last month. It will certainly not be easy, but it is essential to limit the worst impacts of climate change, accelerate the clean energy transition, and build a healthier, safer, more just world. 

Fossil Fuels and Climate: Conflicting Interests 

It’s well known that there are serious conflict of interest issues with the head of this year’s talks, Sultan Al-Jaber, who is also the head of an oil company. On the eve of the talks, leaked internal documents revealed that the United Arab Emirates planned to use its role as the host of COP28 to pursue oil and gas deals. 

Science shows that that fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to human-caused climate change. Despite recent statements to the contrary, a fast and fair fossil fuel phaseout is really the only option to limit climate change damage and safeguard people’s health, lives, and livelihoods. There’s no room for the fossil fuel industry’s well-worn playbook of distraction, deception, and delay. 

In fact, fossil fuel industry influence at COP has been the rule, not the exception. A recent analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition found that lobbyists and other representatives of the biggest polluting oil and gas firms have attended UN climate talks at least 7,200 times over the past 20 years. 

ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods’s unprecedented presence here at COP28 is part of the corporation’s campaign to regain its social license. By showing up at climate talks, Woods is attempting to convince decisionmakers, the public, and investors that his corporation is part of the solution for climate change (although he revealed his determination to preserve fossil fuel business as usual when he complained that the talks have focused on renewable energy for too long). 

But Woods is far from alone. He is among a record 2,456 fossil fuel industry lobbyists here. According to a new analysis of the COP28 participants list by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition:  

• Fossil fuel industry representatives outnumbered almost every country delegation to COP28. 
• There are more fossil fuel lobbyists than delegates from the 10 most climate vulnerable nations combined, and seven times as many fossil fuel lobbyists as official Indigenous representatives. 

Thanks to civil society organizing, new rules requiring participants to disclose who they represent have increased transparency at COP28. But this year’s eye-popping figure—nearly four times the number of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP27—is likely an undercount, because delegates can still hide their ties to fossil fuel interests. 

More Empty Promises from the Oil and Gas Industry  

How does all this influence play out? Among the flurry of announcements in the first days of COP28 is the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter. Led by the president of this year’s talks, the charter is a voluntary initiative by oil and gas corporations. Don’t be fooled by the hype. The charter largely restates woefully insufficient emissions-reduction pledges already made by investor-owned fossil fuel corporations while bringing some national oil companies under its umbrella. 

More than 320 organizations on six continents published a letter rejecting the charter as a greenwashing ploy and calling on the COP presidency to drop the charter and instead focus on working within the COP process to secure a legally binding energy package that includes a fossil fuel phaseout, triples renewable energy, and doubles energy efficiency. 

According to the COP president, 50 companies representing 40 percent of global oil production have signed onto the charter, announced as part of a broader Global Decarbonization Accelerator. Major corporations, including BP, ENI, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies, signed the initiative. Many of the investor-owned oil and gas corporations signing the charter already claim to be aligned with the goals of the Paris climate agreement and have pledged to reach net-zero global warming emissions by 2050. National oil companies represent 60 percent of the signatories.

The charter covers only operational emissions. While reducing operational emissions is necessary, and it’s low-hanging fruit that can help limit the worst impacts of climate change, it is far from sufficient. The lion’s share of oil and gas sector emissions (80 to 90 percent for most oil and gas corporations) come when their products are burned. That is their intended and inevitable use when producers extract and process them, and it is the driver of company profits. 

Oil and gas corporations want the public and policymakers to focus on emissions, not fossil fuels. We’re getting that spin from ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods. Unfortunately, the US government is singing the same tune. ExxonMobil and other oil and gas corporations tout technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and schemes to trade and offset their global warming emissions. But such approaches are no substitute for steep cuts in emissions from fossil fuel production and use, and they cannot make a meaningful contribution to the reductions that are needed in the crucial time frame between now and 2030. Furthermore, CCS cannot stop air, water and land pollution from extracting, refining, distributing, burning, and disposing of fossil fuels, all which disproportionately harm low-income people, communities of color, and Indigenous peoples in the United States and the Global South. 

Stop the Greenwashing Game 

There is a real risk that the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter only serves to launch a new era of greenwashing cross-pollination between transnational investor-owned oil and gas corporations and national oil companies. That would be bad news, and only compound the climate crisis. Since the 2015 adoption of the Paris climate agreement, we’ve seen BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell aggressively expand oil and gas exploration and production while claiming to be part of the solution for climate change. 

This public relations onslaught includes paid advertising in traditional and social media, glossy climate reports, voluntary and selective disclosures, and emission-reduction targets misleadingly framed to appear significant while justifying business as usual. Big Oil’s deception campaign is increasingly becoming a legal liability, fueling a rising tide of climate litigation, as California Attorney General Rob Bonta told COP28 participants. But scrutiny from public prosecutors and investors hasn’t stopped the industry from aggressively lobbying against mandatory and standardized corporate reporting such as the climate disclosure rule proposed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2022 and two climate disclosure laws recently enacted in California. 

Mandatory and Enforceable Obligations are Needed 

The question regarding the appropriate role of voluntary initiatives within the international climate negotiations is complex. Voluntary initiatives cannot be a substitute for enforceable commitments and mandatory obligations with independent monitoring and verification—and they can even be a distraction or delay tactic. 

That’s not to say voluntary initiatives have no role to play as part of an all-hands-on-deck approach to addressing the climate crisis. Increasingly, leaders from civil society, businesses, Indigenous communities, labor, and other key constituencies convene around these talks, and major efforts to ratchet up ambition and action across all sectors of society are launched at COPs. 

But nations are the decisionmakers at international climate talks. They could have committed themselves to the charter’s principles years ago and required national oil companies to comply. Instead, states that are home to national oil companies have helped delay and block progress in the international climate talks for decades. The United States, heavily influenced by lobbyists for ExxonMobil and other investor-owned companies and their surrogates, such as the American Petroleum Institute and US Chamber of Commerce, also has been guilty of stalling and obstruction. 

At COP28, nations are undertaking the first global stocktake to examine progress made since the adoption of the Paris climate agreement. Through this process, they could commit to hold corporations under their jurisdiction—national oil companies as well as investor-owned fossil fuel corporations—accountable to achieve the emissions reductions promised in the charter. But, in point of fact, those emissions reductions are far too little, far too late. What the world actually needs in this global stocktake is a clear international commitment to a fair, fast, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels.

Progress on this front depends on protecting the negotiations—and national and subnational policies based on them—from fossil fuel industry interference. This will not be easy. Fossil fuel interests have had a heavy hand in international climate negotiations since they began more than three decades ago. A growing body of evidence amassed by academic research, investigative journalism, congressional investigations, and climate accountability litigation shows that ExxonMobil, Shell and other corporations have conducted campaigns to delay and block climate action. Those campaigns continue today.

As we near the end of a year of devastating climate change-fueled disasters and record-breaking global average temperatures, the options to limit the worst potential impacts of climate change are narrowing. The fossil fuel industry has a lot to lose in the negotiations at COP28, and a lot to gain from continued diversion, distraction, and delay. Below are my dos and don’ts for COP28 negotiators to give the world the best chance to meet the climate Paris Agreement’s climate goals.

DON’T trust the fossil fuel industry

Fossil fuels—coal, gas, and oil—are by far the largest contributor to human-caused climate change. Peer-reviewed research by Richard Heede traced two-thirds of all industrial carbon dioxide and methane emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution to just 90 entities—coal, gas, and oil producers and cement manufacturers.

It stands to reason that international climate change negotiations would tackle fossil fuels head on. Yet until two years ago in Glasgow, Scotland, no COP agreements or decisions mentioned fossil fuels, much less did anything to rein them in. The vested interests of investor- and state-owned fossil fuel companies ensured that glaring omission.

Christiana Figueres, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement as head of the UNFCCC, once believed that the fossil fuel industry should help set climate policy. Earlier this year, she disavowed her previous position. “I thought fossil fuel firms could change,” she wrote. “I was wrong.”

As fossil fuel corporations rake in record profits and roll back their pledges to invest in renewable energy, it’s past time for a paradigm shift. The United States and other nations negotiating in Dubai must recognize that corporations hell-bent on squeezing every nickel of profit out of the planet’s coal, gas, and oil resources have a conflict of interest with climate action. The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which obligates parties to protect their public health policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry, provides a valuable model for insulating national and international policymaking from corporate conflicts of interest.

DO watchdog fossil fuel industry presence and participation

Without protections against conflicts of interest at COP28, the fossil fuel industry will be out in force.

Two years ago at COP26, there were more than 500 people with links to fossil fuel interests accredited as participants, according to an analysis by Corporate Accountability, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), Glasgow Calls Out Polluters, and Global Witness. If the fossil fuel industry had been a delegation, it would have been larger than the delegation of any country.

At COP27, civil society watchdogs combed through registration lists to identify more than 600 oil and gas industry lobbyists. A more recent analysis by the Associated Press found nearly 400 people with fossil fuel industry ties attended last year’s talks.

In response to demands from elected officials and civil society, new transparency rules are in place for the first time at COP28. Participants must disclose their affiliation, which will be listed publicly. These disclosures are a step forward, necessary but not sufficient for true accountability.

Concern about fossil fuel industry influence at COP28 is heightened because the head of this year’s negotiations is Sultan Al-Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. The company plans to invest $150 billion to expand its oil and gas production over the next five years.

DON’T fall for fossil fuel industry disinformation and greenwashing

Under Chair and CEO Rex Tillerson (who served as secretary of state in the Trump administration), ExxonMobil supposedly acknowledged the risks of climate change and claimed to stop funding groups that promote climate denial. But a recent Wall Street Journal investigation of internal ExxonMobil documents revealed that the corporation has continued its efforts to cast doubt on climate science by, among other things, trying to influence the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the independent scientific body that provides the latest science to help inform nations participating in COP negotiations.

According to the internal documents, Tillerson dismissed the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—and striving to limit it to 1.5 degrees C—as “something magical.” And just months before the agreement was signed, Tillerson asked, “Who is to say 2.5 [degrees C] is not good enough?”

Today, most major investor-owned oil and gas corporations claim to be aligned with Paris Agreement goals, and most have pledged to reach net-zero global warming emissions by 2050, but their actions belie these claims. BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other major fossil fuel corporations continue to expand fossil fuel exploration, extraction, processing, marketing and sales while spreading climate disinformation and seeking to block climate action.

A 2022 peer-reviewed study led by Mei Li that drew on the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Climate Accountability Scorecard found that BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell continue to depend on fossil fuels, with insignificant and opaque spending on clean energy. The researchers concluded that the transition to clean energy business models is not occurring, and that accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.

These companies have responded to investor demands by setting emissions reduction targets and publishing glossy climate reports. According to Net Zero Tracker, two-thirds of fossil fuel firms have net-zero commitments, but most are largely meaningless because they do not fully cover Scope 3 emissions from the use of their products, which account for 80 to 95 percent of heat-trapping emissions from the oil and gas sector. ExxonMobil, for example, still refuses to take responsibility for reducing emissions from burning its oil and gas products. Moreover, fossil fuel companies’ climate targets that do not include plans to phase out oil and gas are misaligned with the scientific and policy consensus. A report by a UN expert group clearly recommends that credible net-zero targets must include “specific targets aimed at ending the use of and/or support for fossil fuels.”

DON’T grant the fossil fuel industry social license

Disinformation and greenwashing pose a growing legal liability for the fossil fuel industry. Dozens of cities, counties, and states across the United States and its territories are suing the fossil fuel industry over climate damages and fraud. The latest climate accountability lawsuit, filed by California in September, documents and seeks to end ongoing climate disinformation campaigns by five investor-owned oil and gas corporations and their main trade association, the American Petroleum Institute. (Read more about the synergy between climate litigation and UN climate talks in this blog by my colleague Delta Merner.)

Fossil fuel defendants are pulling out all the stops to evade accountability and delay justice for people and communities harmed by their products and business practices. Last week, a self-described “hacker for hire” was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison for his role in a large-scale spear-phishing operation that targeted UCS and other public interest organizations exposing disinformation campaigns by ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel interests. While the investigation has not yet revealed who hired the hacker, ExxonMobil has used some of the hacked information in its efforts to thwart legal and public accountability.

At the same time, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel corporations are trying desperately to frame themselves as part of the solution for climate change and regain their “social license”—their perceived legitimacy among consumers, workers, communities where they operate, investors, policymakers, and other key audiences. At last week’s Asia-Pacific Environmental Cooperation CEO summit in San Francisco, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods dismissed evidence of the company’s climate deception as “what was said 30 years ago or what they think Exxon knew back then.” Then he doubled down on his company’s deception by insisting that the problem is emissions, not oil and gas.

Woods wants us to believe that ExxonMobil can solve the climate change problem with such technologies as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS). He claims that ExxonMobil has the intellectual and financial resources to “bend the curve on emissions.” But the world’s most profitable oil and gas corporation had that technical and financial capacity decades ago, when its own scientists warned top management of the threat of climate change. Not only did Exxon decide to not apply its resources to leading the energy transition, it instead chose to fund a deliberate campaign of deception. Decades of delay have made the challenge the world faces between now and 2030 much bigger.

DO secure a fast and fair fossil-fuel phaseout

Ahead of the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September, tens of thousands of people marched to end fossil fuels. Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has clearly stated that countries must progressively phase out fossil fuels, “leave oil, coal and gas in the ground where they belong,” and massively boost investment in renewable energy. Guterres also has called for fossil fuel companies to “cease and desist influence peddling and legal threats designed to kneecap progress.”

While ExxonMobil’s Woods has falsely claimed that phasing out fossil fuels would prevent people in the Global South—who have contributed least to climate change—from accessing energy, Global South activists and advocates are among the most committed and powerful voices for a fossil-fuel phaseout. Extracting, processing, and burning fossil fuels is exacerbating health, environmental and social injustices in Black, Brown, Indigenous and low-income communities in the United States and around the world.

As my colleague Rachel Cleetus writes, the phaseout must be fast and fair and must cover all fossil fuels—gas and oil as well as coal. It also must include rapid, deep, direct cuts in fossil fuel use, and the default position of governments at every level should be to reject the expansion of fossil fuel production and the buildout of infrastructure that could remain in place for decades to come. Such approaches as CCS, carbon dioxide removal, and alternative combustion fuels may play a limited role to meet long-term climate goals, but they are not likely to play a material role in meeting 2030 targets, they would not fully reduce environmental injustices and public health harms of fossil fuels, and they are no substitute for immediate, sharp reductions in fossil fuel production and utilization that are necessary now.

Ahead of COP28, more than 650 scientists signed a letter to President Biden urging him to commit to a fast and fair phaseout of all fossil fuels with clear timelines and science-informed targets for the near- and long-term, and supported by finance for low- and middle-income countries for a clean energy transition. The scientists also called on the United States to publicly resist interference by fossil fuel interests, as well as their greenwashing that delays and impedes a fossil fuel phaseout, in the final agreement at COP28.

You can add your voice to this call for bold climate action at COP28 here.

Here are the key things you need to know about California’s advances and what’s new in the internal ExxonMobil documents.

California Sues Fossil Fuel Polluters

California’s climate accountability lawsuit is groundbreaking in several ways:

• California is the first major fossil fuel-producing state to file a climate accountability lawsuit.
• California filed its lawsuit after the US Supreme Court declined requests from the fossil fuel industry to intervene in similar cases in seven states, clearing the way for cases filed as long as six years ago to proceed in state courts where they were filed. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said that fossil fuel climate accountability litigation could be a gamechanger and he’s eager to work with other governors to pursue this strategy.
• The lawsuit relies on attribution science, which marshals evidence linking such impacts as wildfires, coastal erosion, drought, and heat waves to climate change. This rapidly advancing field includes studies such as a recent one led by my Union of Concerned Scientist (UCS) colleague Kristy Dahl, which found that 19.8 million acres of burned forest land—37 percent of the total area scorched by forest fires in the western United States and southwestern Canada since 1986—can be attributed to heat-trapping emissions traced to the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. (Dahl has just been named to Time magazine’s “Next 100” list of the most influential people in the world.)
• California seeks to create a fund to pay for recovery from extreme events and for mitigation and adaptation efforts (without supplanting the climate damage lawsuits filed by eight California communities against the fossil fuel industry since 2017).
• The lawsuit targets the role the American Petroleum Institute (API) has played in the fossil fuel industry’s climate deception conspiracy, building on previous complaints by the states of Delaware, Minnesota, and New Jersey; the District of Columbia; and five cities and counties. UCS’s 2015 Climate Deception Dossiers—cited in California’s complaint—highlighted an infamous 1998 internal API memo that outlined a roadmap to cultivate purportedly independent scientists as climate disinformers, confuse the public about climate science, and derail climate policies.
• The lawsuit documents and seeks to put a stop to ongoing and evolving climate disinformation campaigns by ExxonMobil, Shell, and other major oil and gas corporations. Peer-reviewed research, congressional investigations, investigative articles, and independent analyses have found that these corporations continue to depend almost entirely on fossil fuels, spend insignificantly on clean energy, and engage in greenwashing—which is making misleading or outright false claims about their corporate environmental performance.

The largest state by population, California has joined more than 40 cities, counties, and states across the United States and its territories that are suing the fossil fuel industry over climate damages or deception, or both. About one-quarter of US and US territory residents now live in a jurisdiction that has filed a fossil fuel industry accountability lawsuit.

With these innovative ingredients, California’s climate accountability lawsuit represents a pivotal development in the global climate movement, adding a powerful and long-anticipated voice to the growing chorus of jurisdictions across the United States and its territories that are holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in climate damages and deception.

Internal Documents Reveal ExxonMobil’s Deception

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation of internal ExxonMobil documents sheds light on the corporation’s ongoing strategy to cast doubt on climate science—even after former Chair and CEO Rex Tillerson supposedly acknowledged the risks of climate change and the corporation claimed to stop funding groups that promote climate denial. (For an overview of the Journal investigation, check out this article in The Guardian. For more about Tillerson’s real track record on climate change, see two HuffPost columns by my colleague Elliott Negin here and here.)

The documents the Journal obtained show that in 2012, ExxonMobil sought to gather information about and exert influence over the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is not clear exactly what influence ExxonMobil had over the IPCC at that time. However, a decade later, in its sixth assessment report, the IPCC itself acknowledged that disinformation about climate science had sowed uncertainty about climate science and delayed action.

Tillerson, meanwhile, dismissed the Paris climate agreement goal of keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (and striving to limit it to 1.5 degrees C) as “something magical.” Worse still, just months before the agreement was signed, Tillerson asked, “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough?”

Climate scientists, that’s who.

Climate impacts and risks would become more severe if global temperature exceeds 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels. (Source: IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° C)

In response to the Journal’s recent investigation, current ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods defended Tillerson, asserting that “[n]one of these old emails and notes matter, though.” Litigation may prove him wrong. Meanwhile, Woods’ present-day leadership of the company’s woefully inadequate climate action certainly does matter. He is promoting climate plans that ignore the vast majority of ExxonMobil’s global warming emissions—the so-called Scope 3 emissions from burning its products, which account for about 85 percent of the total emissions attributable to the company. Under Woods’s leadership, ExxonMobil claims to be “advancing climate solutions” while investing $25 billion per year through 2027 in capital expenditures, all but a fraction of it in expanding the corporation’s oil and gas business.

Woods is apparently following the playbook drafted by Exxon’s former head of corporate research in 1988: “1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options.”

The Wall Street Journal revelations demonstrate how essential it is for internal corporate documents to be made public so the public can fully comprehend what major oil and gas companies knew about the dangers their products pose to the global climate, as well as the devastating harms that have resulted from their lies, obstruction, and delay tactics.

In July 2023, more than 20 members of Congress sent two letters to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) calling for investigation and legal action against the fossil fuel industry over climate deception. These letters reprised previous congressional calls for DOJ action in 2015 and 2016, which relied heavily on UCS research.

Strengthening Corporate Climate Disclosures

Mandatory and standardized corporate disclosures are necessary to prevent companies from employing greenwashing, paltering (using technically true statements to create an overall false impression), and data cherry-picking to misrepresent corporate actions or plans. Such disclosures also would help investors evaluate a corporation’s exposure to climate-related financial risk, which is why regulators in the European Union, United Kingdom, and Canada are beginning to demand them.

This month, the California Legislature passed two bills to strengthen corporate climate disclosures:

• SB 253 requires large public and private US-based corporations that do business in California and have annual revenues greater than $1 billion to disclose their global warming emissions—including Scope 3 emissions;
• SB 261 requires corporations, financial institutions, and insurers to report on climate-related financial risk.

UCS joined with Environment California, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club California to urge Gov. Newsom to sign the bills, highlighting the opportunity for California to lead the country in corporate transparency and ensure the public has the information it needs to hold companies accountable for their role in the climate crisis and mitigate further harm.

Newsom just announced that he plans to sign the legislation. As it did with its vehicle emissions standards and its 100 percent renewable energy standard, California can set the pace for national and global action.

California’s laws should also motivate the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to finalize its climate disclosure rule, which it proposed in March 2022. As my colleague Laura Peterson has explained, disclosure of Scope 3 emissions is key to understanding the big picture of a company’s climate impact. Not surprisingly, the fossil fuel industry is behind efforts to weaken the SEC rule as part of its overall attack on environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.

Scientists: Time to Put Your Research on Record

Fossil fuel industry-driven opposition to climate action is growing fiercer as the climate accountability movement backs ExxonMobil and other major oil and gas corporations into a corner. Climate litigation is a key tool for corporate climate accountability, and science is essential to support efforts to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for their role in the climate crisis. (That’s probably why ExxonMobil and its codefendants are so worked up about a meeting UCS and the Climate Accountability Institute convened in La Jolla, California, in 2012, to explore lessons from tobacco control that could be applied to secure accountability for climate change damages.)

California’s lawsuit, like other cases filed in the United States in recent years, depends on the physical science of climate attribution and social science research on climate disinformation. You can learn more about how to engage at the intersection of science, climate litigation and the law in the Research on the Record toolkit an upcoming webinar series offered by UCS’s Science Hub for Climate Litigation.

Besides conducting invaluable research, scientists are taking to the streets, and nearly 400 of them signed a letter to President Biden endorsing the demands of the March to End Fossil Fuels ahead of this week’s Climate Ambition Summit hosted by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who has called for phasing out fossil fuels to avoid climate catastrophe. Now it’s time for scientists to provide their evidence in courtrooms in California, across the country, and around the world.

As a handy reference for litigators, regulators, investors, and all who are affected by climate change, below is an A to Z of fossil fuel industry denial, deception and delay tactics.

A is for American Petroleum Institute

The American Petroleum Institute (API), the largest US oil and gas industry trade association, receives millions of dollars in annual dues from such companies as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell. In 2021, an ExxonMobil lobbyist described API as a “whipping boy” that takes the heat for bad policy positions while allowing the oil and gas giant to appear reasonable. In a telling moment during a 2021 congressional hearing, top oil and gas company executives refused to tell API’s president to stop opposing climate and environmental policies the corporations claim to support.

B is for Beyond Petroleum

In the 1990s, BP famously rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum,” then backpedaled from its plans to invest in renewable energy. It’s déjà vu all over again in 2023, with BP rolling back its climate pledges after record-breaking 2022 profits since Russia’s unjust war on Ukraine.

C is for Customer emissions

Most major investor-owned oil and gas corporations claim to be on a pathway to net zero global warming emissions by 2050, which science says is necessary to limit the worst impacts of climate change. However, like a tobacco company distancing itself from the epidemic of disease and death caused by its products, ExxonMobil disavows responsibility for reducing the emissions from burning its products, known as Scope 3 emissions, which account for about 85% of the corporation’s total contribution to global warming. Meanwhile, companies such as BP and Shell sneakily frame the Scope 3 portions of their net-zero pledges as “helping customers” to reduce emissions. They seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it, too: winning praise and taking credit for the full range of emissions cuts, while transferring responsibility to all of us to clean up the mess they created.

D is for Divestment of dirty assets

Internal corporate documents reveal that BP is using asset divestments as a substitute for real reductions in global warming emissions. (An asset divestment is the sale of a particular oil or gas field, with the seller removing associated emissions from its portfolio and taking credit for cutting emissions as oil and gas pollution continues—and overall emissions may even increase—under a new owner.) According to documents made public by the House Oversight Committee investigation in 2022, BP executive Elizabeth Jackson wrote to company employees in March 2021 that “divestments are, and continue to be, an important part of our strategy. They enable us to strengthen our balance sheet and high grade or diversify our portfolio. …While these divestments may not directly lead to a reduction in absolute global emissions, they can accelerate the pace BP can grow low carbon businesses that underpin our aim to reduce our oil and gas production.” Asked about this strategy by my Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) colleague Laura Peterson during BP’s annual general meeting last month, CEO Bernard Looney replied, “It’s not financial maneuvering, it’s financial optimization.”

E is for (Anti)-ESG

Over the past few years, more asset owners and managers have been taking environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues into consideration when making investment decisions. Friends and surrogates of the fossil fuel industry, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Financial Officers Foundation, are at the forefront of an anti-ESG backlash to try to block even the modest progress that financial institutions have made on addressing the climate crisis. Heading into its annual shareholders’ meeting later this month, Chevron—still an ALEC supporter—appears to be using anti-ESG attacks as a shield against more ambitious climate action.

F is for Front Groups

Creating front groups is a tried-and-true tactic, especially useful now that fossil fuel corporations themselves profess to support climate action. For years, UCS has tracked and exposed how fossil fuel companies hide behind front organizations, and experts with Climate Social Science Network and a range of academic institutions continue to analyze and document the industry’s web of obstruction and denial. (See A and E.)

G is for Greenwashing

Major oil and gas corporations practice greenwashing by making misleading or outright false claims about their environmental performance. A 2022 peer-reviewed study that built on UCS’s Climate Accountability Scorecard found that BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell continue to depend almost entirely on fossil fuels, with insignificant and opaque spending on clean energy. The House Oversight Committee investigation came to the same conclusion as the 2022 study: Accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.

H is for Hydrogen

ExxonMobil, which spent an estimated $68 million to advertise its $300-million investment in algae biofuels, has pulled the plug on that research and now wants us to put our faith in hydrogen and carbon capture and storage as climate solutions. But these technologies are no substitute for sharp cuts in fossil fuels if we keep the goals of the Paris climate agreement within reach. Furthermore, hydrogen as a true decarbonization pathway hinges on the fuel being generated in a way that is carbon-free. Today, most hydrogen is produced from fossil (“natural”) gas.

I is for Intensity Targets

Reducing global warming emissions intensity alone is not sufficient to slow the pace of climate change. A fossil fuel corporation increasing its production could achieve intensity reduction targets (that is, reduce the emissions per unit of fossil fuel produced) even as its absolute emissions—and its contributions to climate change—continue to grow. Given the industry’s massive expansion of oil and gas exploration and production, modest emissions intensity reduction pledges by ExxonMobil, Chevron and their competitors are woefully inadequate and ignore the oil and gas sector’s other negative health impacts.

J is for Just Transition

Internal corporate documents made public by the House Oversight Committee investigation revealed that Chevron drafted talking points to frame oil and gas as vital to a “just transition,” the process of moving to a low-carbon energy system while ensuring that the needs of workers, communities and local economies are met, and that energy access, health and pollution inequities created by the fossil fuel energy system are repaired and not replicated by the new system. In Chevron’s twisted logic, the reliance of billions of people worldwide on a high-carbon energy system for decades to come is part of a transition to ever-cleaner energy as long as the industry lowers the carbon intensity of oil and gas. (See I.)

K is for Kafkaesque

Speaking of twisted logic: The very corporations that designed and funded campaigns to deceive the public and block climate action for decades now want the public to trust them. And they expect us to believe not only that they’re part of the solution to climate change, but that we can’t accomplish the transition to clean renewable energy without them.

L is for Lies

In sworn 2021 testimony before Congress, the CEOs of four major oil and gas corporations denied that they had ever approved a disinformation campaign, essentially spewing disinformation about disinformation. The congressional investigation uncovered substantial evidence that the leadership of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell know that their emissions reduction pledges are inadequate and their massive long-term investments in fossil fuels are inconsistent with achieving climate goals. No wonder cities, counties and states across the United States and its territories are suing ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel corporations for allegedly lying to consumers.

M is for Methane

Methane, the main component of fossil (so-called “natural”) gas, is about 80 times more potent in warming the atmosphere over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide. As revealed by the House Oversight Committee investigation, an advocacy campaign developed for BP by the Brunswick Group described methane as the “Achilles heel of a gas case” and suggested advocating for methane regulation to advance and protect BP’s self-interest in continuing to produce and sell gas. Internal documents show that Shell has similar worries that a full accounting of the global warming emissions from gas would make it more difficult to sell it as a “transition” fuel.

N is for No-Action

In recent years, investor-owned oil and gas corporations have faced shareholder rebellions over their failure to take ambitious climate action and adapt for the energy transition. As climate-conscious shareholders have continued to raise issues for consideration at corporate annual meetings, Chevron and ExxonMobil have filed “no-action” letters with the Securities and Exchange Commission seeking to block shareholder votes on proposals. The companies’ objections are a throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall exercise, claiming that proposals are both vague and substantially implemented or vague but somehow constituting micromanagement. As companies drag their feet, some investors are addressing the climate emergency with such escalation tactics as voting against members of corporate boards. (See Majority Action’s 2023 Proxy Voting Guide for recommendations on upcoming votes.)

O is for Offsets

Instead of sharply reducing emissions from burning fossil fuels, some major oil and gas companies’ climate pledges rely on dubious carbon offsets, which essentially allow polluters to continue emitting carbon dioxide by paying for projects that purportedly reduce emissions elsewhere. But the additionality and permanence of these projects can be difficult to verify, and some offset projects may have negative environmental or social impacts. Shell, for example, planned to spend about half of the current market for nature-based offsets every year, and its original 1.5 degrees Celsius scenario included planting trees over a Brazil-sized area, which it reduced in its newer scenario to a Mexico-sized forest. UCS recently joined with other organizations in calling for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to crack down on misleading claims about carbon offsets as it updates its Green Guides to regulate marketing of products’ environmental benefits.

P is for Paltering

Researchers describe paltering as the use of technically true statements to create an overall false impression. Fossil fuel industry advertisements, such as those promoting carbon capture and storage or highlighting relatively insignificant investments in renewable energy, are rife with paltering. That’s why public interest organizations are urging the FTC to address paltering in its Green Guides update.

Q is for Quest

Major oil and gas corporations misrepresent carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture, use and storage as a substitute for swift and deep reductions in emissions from burning fossil fuels. For example, Shell’s Quest plant (in which Chevron also holds a stake) is a showpiece in the industry’s promotion of CCS. However, a 2022 investigation by Global Witness found that the plant actually emits more carbon dioxide than it captures.

R is for Redacted

The fossil fuel corporations and trade associations that were the focus of the House Oversight Committee investigation sought to hide the truth about their operations and conduct by refusing to comply fully with subpoenas and inappropriately withholding and redacting key documents. Although the committee released hundreds of pages of internal documents, the evidence it made public only highlights the need for further investigation.

S is for Social License

Leaders of major fossil fuel corporations and their trade associations are acutely aware that the public does not trust them, and survey data back that up. The industry is scrambling to regain its “social license.” According to documents made public by the House Oversight Committee investigation, API strategically supported efforts to reduce methane emissions from flaring as “an opportunity to further secure the industry’s license to operate” and legitimize continued fossil fuel production.

T is for Time for Energy

Time for Energy, a 1981 film, is part of a collection of Shell materials compiled by Dutch researcher Vatan Hüzeir that DeSmog and Follow the Money posted earlier this year The collection reveals that Shell knew about the hazard its products posed to the global climate in the 1970s but downplayed the risks, emphasized scientific uncertainties, and promoted an unsustainable business model centered on fossil fuels, including coal. These internal corporate materials add to a growing body of evidence—submitted in court briefs—that the fossil fuel industry has known that its products would cause dangerous global warming since at least 1965, but failed to disclose this information or take steps to protect the public.

U is for US Chamber of Commerce

The US Chamber of Commerce was targeted by the House Oversight Committee investigation of fossil fuel industry climate deception. Despite its broad membership and its claims to support the Paris climate agreement, the Chamber still does the bidding of the fossil fuel industry when it comes to climate policy. The Chamber was especially obstructive and evasive in response to the congressional investigation, refusing to turn over almost all internal documents requested by the committee’s subpoena.

V is for Victory Memo

A notorious 1998 memo by an API task force described “victory” as the moment when “average citizens” recognize “uncertainties” in climate science. It mapped out a multifaceted strategy to use purportedly independent scientists as spokespersons for the industry’s views and inundate the news media, the public and policymakers with industry messaging that countered the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change.

W is for Windfall profits

With record profits approaching $200 billion in 2022 and continuing through the first quarter of 2023, major oil and gas companies have plenty of money to invest in a just transition to clean renewable energy. Spoiler alert: They’re doing nothing of the sort.

X is for eXXchange

In response to shareholder pressure, ExxonMobil expanded its disclosure of its lobbying activities and expenditures, including more than $1 million on Exxchange, the corporation’s grassroots lobbying platform. Among other ploys, ExxonMobil has used Exxchange to lobby on oil well setbacks in Colorado—despite the scientific consensus that fracking operations should be set back 2,000 to 2,500 feet from schools, drinking water sources, and other vulnerable sites to reduce air and water pollution and protect public health and safety.

Y is for You

With such tactics as the carbon footprint (invented by BP), the fossil fuel industry wants to divert attention from its own egregious misconduct and make you blame yourself for climate change. The good news is you actually do have a lot of power to rein in climate chaos by holding major fossil fuel corporations accountable for climate deception and damages. You can take action here.

Z is for (Net) Zero

Major oil and gas corporations are trying to use “net zero by 2050” pledges as an excuse for inaction and delay. In 2022, a United Nations High-Level Expert Group concluded that to avoid further delays and stop greenwashing, businesses cannot claim to be net zero while continuing to build or invest in new fossil fuel supply. Ahead of their annual general meetings, shareholders of Shell (May 23), ExxonMobil (May 31), and Chevron (May 31) are voting on proposals to strengthen corporate climate targets and accelerate meaningful action. About one-sixth of BP shareholders supported a similar proposal last month, sending a warning signal to corporate leadership.

From attribution science to following the lead of Gen Z, climate scientists and activists are employing an A to Z of tactics to thwart this A to Z of corporate deception. Please join us—and share your additions to this glossary!

Fortunately, spring also provides an opportunity for scientists to demand that bank shareholders and investors take responsibility and act, since it is when private and public sector banking institutions hold their annual meetings. Read on to learn why and how more than a thousand scientists issued an open letter urging JPMorgan Chase shareholders to vote in favor of a time-bound phaseout of financing for new fossil fuel development and exploration at the bank’s annual meeting on May 16.

Banks are still fanning the flames

According to the 2023 edition of Banking on Climate Chaos, released this week, the world’s 60 largest banks spent $673 billion on fossil fuel financing in 2022 and $5.5 trillion in the seven years since the adoption of the Paris climate agreement. The report—prepared by Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Reclaim Finance, the Sierra Club and Urgewald—examines commercial and investment bank financing, combining lending with underwriting debt and equity issuances. It also assesses bank financing for the top 100 companies expanding fossil fuels as well as those active in such sectors as tar sands oil, Arctic oil and gas, Amazon oil and gas, coal mining, and coal power.

Total bank financing for fossil fuels in 2022 was lower than it was in 2016, but Banking on Climate Chaos attributes that decrease partly to record oil and gas industry profits of $4 trillion last year. Several major oil and gas companies—including ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum and Shell—did not borrow any money in 2022. Those three alone borrowed more than $200 billion between 2016 and 2021.

Since the adoption of the Paris agreement, JP Morgan Chase is at the top of the list of fossil fuel bankers, financing a staggering $434 billion from 2016 through 2022. In 2022, JPMorgan Chase’s biggest fossil fuel clients (in rank order) were TransCanada Pipelines, Vitol SA and Pacific Gas and Electric. From 2016 through 2022, TransCanada Pipelines, ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabian Oil (in rank order) received the most financing from the bank.

Science—and scientists—demand action

According to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) latest report, limiting the climate crisis means sharply reducing fossil fuels and stopping new fossil fuel infrastructure expansion. The IPCC report also found projected carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure without additional abatement would be enough to blow through the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 C. This, coupled with the continued expansion of fossil fuels and rising heat-trapping emissions, is making it unlikely that the increase in global average temperature will stay below 1.5 C above preindustrial levels.

That’s why more than 1,300 scientists have joined with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in calling on JPMorgan Chase shareholders to vote “yes” on a resolution asking the financial institution to phase out its financing—including loans, bonds and underwriting—of companies expanding fossil fuel production.

The scientists’ letter is addressed to JPMorgan Chase because of its role as the largest financer of fossil fuel companies since the adoption of the Paris agreement. The resolution, which is proposal 6 on the agenda at JPMorgan Chase’s annual general meeting on May 16, is similar to proposals filed with Bank of America, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo.

Advocates are presenting several other climate- and human rights-related proposals to JPMorgan Chase shareholders this year, requesting reports on:

• a transition plan describing how the company intends to align its financing activities with its 2030 sectoral global warming emissions reduction targets;
• absolute 2030 global warming emissions reduction targets covering lending and underwriting for oil and gas and power generation;
• how the company oversees risks related to discrimination and civil rights; and
• congruence of the company’s political and electioneering expenditures with its stated policies and values.

UCS and the letter’s signatories also are encouraging JPMorgan Chase shareholders to support all other resolutions that would promote the rapid decarbonization of our economy, advance a just transition to clean and renewable energy, and protect Indigenous sovereignty.

Words are not enough

One of the most alarming Banking on Climate Chaos findings is that ConocoPhillips received financing in 2022 for “general corporate purposes” from a syndicate that included 12 of the banks profiled in the report, among them Bank of America, Citi, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. So although 39 of the 60 banks profiled in the report had an exclusion policy applicable to projects in the Arctic, the policies did not preclude financing for ConocoPhillips’s controversial Willow project, which the Biden administration recently approved.

How could this happen?

Bank policies have major loopholes. Most fossil fuel exclusions apply only when a company seeks financing designated for a particular project, but project-specific financing accounts for only about 4% of total annual fossil fuel company finance.

Furthermore, while underwriting bonds and equities accounted for more than a third of fossil fuel financing in 2022, major bank policies omit these activities. According to the World Benchmarking Alliance, only 37% of leading financial institutions have disclosed long-term (midcentury) net-zero targets, of which only 2% have been translated into interim (2030) targets applied across the institution’s financing activities.

Banking on Climate Chaos found that most of the 60 banks studied have policies restricting fossil fuel financing and four-fifths have made net zero pledges, but only one bank had policies robust enough to help meet the goal of keeping global temperature increase to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels. The report determined that the 49 banks with net-zero commitments provided 81% of the financing to the top 100 companies expanding fossil fuels in 2022.

The new report echoes the findings and recommendations of other recent analyses, including a January 2023 report by Reclaim Finance, which concluded that the leading banks, asset owners and managers of the seven sectoral alliances that make up the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero are continuing to pour billions of dollars into expanding the coal and oil and gas industries. The report urged the alliances to update their guidelines and protocols to require members to phase out providing financial services for fossil fuel expansion.

Elizabeth Harnett and Asia Salazar at RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute) recently warned that banks’ empty climate promises can backfire. “Banks using target-setting as a channel for good publicity,” they wrote, “are … walking a thin line between demonstrating their commitment and being accused (publicly and privately) of using targets as a greenwashing tool.”

Investors have power

In recent years, shareholders have issued wake-up calls to ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel companies. In the face of mounting evidence of deception and denial, fossil fuel polluters continue to delay meaningful emissions reductions, greenwash, and backslide on their promises. To spur climate action, shareholders are now turning their attention to banks and other key fossil fuel industry business partners.

Banking on Climate Chaos presents five demands to banks, all of which their shareholders should use their proxy votes to amplify:

1. Prohibit all finance for fossil fuel expansion immediately.
2. Adopt absolute financed emissions reduction targets.
3. Demand robust transition plans for all existing fossil fuel clients.
4. Protect Indigenous Peoples’ and human rights.
5. Scale up financing for a just and fair transition.

Like private sector finance through such banks as JPMorgan Chase, public finance also must be oriented toward the objectives of mitigating further climate change-related damage, advancing climate justice, and accelerating the clean energy transition. Yet a report released in October 2022 found that the World Bank had provided nearly $15 billion in financing directly to fossil fuel projects since the Paris agreement, and likely encouraged far greater investment indirectly.

On the eve of the World Bank Spring Meetings, the International Finance Corporation (the World Bank’s private sector lending arm) announced last week that it would no longer allow financial intermediary clients to support new coal projects. This step, while welcome, was slow and timid.

Hold big banks accountable

Last month, UCS joined Third Act and 50 other organizations for the Stop Dirty Banks National Day of Action to protest the banks that lend the most toward expanding the fossil fuel industry. More than 100 in-person demonstrations took place in more than two dozen states alongside virtual actions. (Read more here.)

On Wednesday, May 3, at 12 p.m. EDT, UCS will join with Follow This, Majority Action, Sierra Club Foundation and Stop the Money Pipeline in a virtual event titled “JPMorgan Chase & the Climate Crisis: How 2023 Shareholder Action Can Advance Corporate Accountability.” This webinar will feature shareholder advocates, community leaders and UCS experts discussing how JPMorgan Chase is enabling climate destruction and environmental injustice and what shareholders can do this annual general meeting season. (You can register here.)

New tactics focused on new targets are springing up as the climate crisis grows more urgent. Bank shareholders probably aren’t accustomed to hearing directly from scientists. Shareholders, now that we have your attention, please heed the message and start by voting in favor of JPMorgan Chase and other large banks adopting a time-bound phaseout of financing fossil fuel expansion.

Science plays a vital role in assessing fossil fuel companies’ climate claims, including their pledges to be aligned with net zero global warming emissions by 2050—the level science says is needed if we are to limit the worst effects of climate change. Science can and must also inform society’s consideration of how to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the heat-trapping emissions associated with its products and operations, the resulting impacts on people and the planet, and its concerted campaigns to deceive the public and block climate action.

Here are six ways that science has helped advance fossil fuel company climate accountability over the past year—and six key levers for science-driven action in 2023. For a more in-depth look at the prospects for climate accountability litigation in 2023, read this blog by my UCS colleague Dr. Delta Merner. For a deeper dive into what’s in store for major investor-owned oil and gas companies, read this blog by my UCS colleague Laura Peterson.

Science advances corporate climate accountability

1. Exposing oil and gas industry greenwashing and deception. Informed by UCS and other experts, the US House Oversight and Reform Committee held hearings, published reports, and released internal fossil fuel company and trade association documents through its investigation into Big Oil’s past and ongoing climate disinformation. The investigation revealed that the companies’ climate pledges and professed solutions cannot deliver swift and deep cuts in global warming emissions and will further delay the necessary transition to clean energy—and corporate leadership knows it. In fact, decisionmakers at BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell oversee deliberate greenwashing campaigns. Meanwhile, the House Natural Resources Committee highlighted how PR firms are complicit in these efforts to mislead the public, investors, and policymakers.
2. Strengthening corporate climate disclosure. Last March, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a new rule that would mandate and standardize corporate climate disclosure. Importantly, the rule requires corporations to disclose Scope 3 global warming emissions, which include emissions from use of their products—which represent the lion’s share of the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for climate change.
3. Breaking new ground in climate litigation-relevant science. 2022 highlights included a peer-reviewed paper by my UCS colleague Delta Merner and collaborators outlining research priorities for climate litigation and an event at Harvard University on Accountability for the Deception Industry. 2023 began with an important peer-reviewed publication by Dr. Geoffrey Supran and colleagues demonstrating that ExxonMobil’s scientists were conducting and contributing to robust climate science as far back as the 1970s. My UCS colleague Dr. Shaina Sadai breaks down the significance of that paper here.
4. Informing dozens of climate accountability lawsuits. Citing climate attribution science and social science research into past and ongoing climate disinformation campaigns, more than 40 cities, counties and states across the US and its territories are suing the fossil fuel industry over climate damages and/or deception. Federal courts have unanimously ruled that these cases belong in state courts, where they were filed, and where the concerns of communities affected by climate harms are front and center.
5. Supporting investor demands for climate action. Thanks to concerted pressure by activists, experts, shareholder advocates, and the investment community as a whole, major oil and gas companies including BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell claim to be aligned with net zero global warming emissions by 2050. Yet these companies took advantage of Russia’s unjust war on Ukraine to double down on fossil fuel extraction and pad their profits.
6. Documenting loss and damage from climate change. For the first time, loss and damage from climate change—which disproportionately affects low-income countries that have benefited least from our fossil fuel-based economy and energy system—was on the formal agenda at the United Nations’ annual climate meeting (known as COP27) in November. Nations agreed to set up a financing mechanism. For high-income countries such as the United States, paying our fair share of climate damages means holding accountable the fossil fuel companies that are based here and chartered in our names.

Looking ahead: Levers for science-driven climate action

1. Following through on investigations. The US Senate and the Department of Justice have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to follow up on the House Oversight Committee’s investigation by bringing additional evidence to light and acting to prevent further misconduct by the fossil fuel industry and its surrogates.
2. Finalizing and enforcing science-based corporate climate disclosure requirements. Facing a fossil fuel industry-driven backlash against Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing (read more here and here), the SEC must issue a final rule promptly, resisting pressure to water it down.
3. Building the field of climate litigation-relevant science and the community of scientists doing this work. UCS’s Science Hub for Climate Litigation is part of a vibrant and growing network of physical and social scientists, legal experts and litigators who are anticipating and developing evidence to inform cases that aim to hold fossil fuel polluters accountable for climate harms.
4. Calling for timely access to justice. More than five years after the first of this wave of climate accountability lawsuits was filed, fossil fuel defendants have managed to keep them from being heard on their merits, using their deep pockets to pull out all the procedural stops. The Biden administration and the Department of Justice must back up President Biden’s campaign pledge to “strategically support” climate litigation against polluters by weighing in on the side of the plaintiffs in the jurisdictional dispute.
5. Wielding investor leverage to accelerate climate action. Some climate-conscious investors are ready to step up the pressure on fossil fuel companies to move beyond empty pledges to meaningful climate action between now and 2030, when deep cuts in global warming emissions are urgently needed. Science can help guide the investor community to identify laggard companies to challenge (for example, by voting against board members) and to hold financiers accountable for their role in the climate crisis.
6. Making polluters pay. With US federal data showing that 2022 was one of the hottest years on record, and one of the most deadly and costly in terms of climate and extreme weather disasters, it is past time for fossil fuel polluters to internalize the costs of their climate-destroying business. Climate impacts are hurting marginalized communities first and worst, exacerbating inequities around the globe. Paying their fair share also includes investing in diversifying economic opportunities for fossil fuel-dependent workers and communities in the US and around the world.

In coordination with a range of partners, UCS will be organizing our experts and supporters to ensure progress on all of these fronts this year. As the climate crisis accelerates, so too must the momentum for fossil fuel industry climate accountability. For decades, the scientific community has documented climate impacts. Now scientists are building a robust evidence base that can support various strategies to hold the companies most responsible for climate change accountable for the damage they’ve caused through their pollution and their lies—and limit further harm.

As part of its ongoing investigation of fossil fuel industry climate disinformation, the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform released more than 200 pages of internal corporate documents last month that provide new evidence of industry deception. Among the more startling revelations, the documents show that oil and gas corporation executives acknowledged in private emails that their companies’ climate pledges and professed solutions cannot deliver swift and deep cuts in global warming emissions and will further delay the necessary transition from fossil fuels.  

The committee, which launched its investigation in September 2021, held a series of hearings over the past year, including one with the chief executive officers (CEOs) of BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell USA. In a video released last month, several of my colleagues at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) reacted to some of the CEOs’ most outrageous statements, while another UCS colleague documented their disinformation in a December blog.

Following the executives’ deceptive and misleading testimony last October, the committee issued subpoenas to the four major oil and gas companies, the American Petroleum Institute, and the US Chamber of Commerce. The subpoenas requested that they turn over key documents they failed to produce in response to the committee’s initial request, which focused on the period beginning in late 2015, when nearly 200 countries signed the Paris climate agreement.

Since then, the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis has escalated as inequitable climate impacts intensify around the globe. And the movement to hold fossil fuel polluters accountable for climate damages and deception—including through litigation—has grown in size, scope, and urgency.

As someone who has tracked and analyzed Big Oil’s climate-related communications and actions since co-authoring The Climate Deception Dossiers in 2015, I eagerly dug into this online treasure trove of internal corporate documents. Below are some of the observations I shared during a talk I gave at the International Conference on Fossil Fuel Supply and Climate Policy in Oxford last month.

Companies Plot “Greenwashing” Campaigns

According to a peer-reviewed paper published in February, all four of the companies under investigation engage in greenwashing: They make misleading or outright false claims about their environmental performance. That conclusion was confirmed by a recent InfluenceMap analysis, which found that their investments and lobbying activities don’t match their climate claims.

The documents the Oversight Committee released reveal that company officials are well are of this disconnect. BP, for example, publicly claims that carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) “plays a central role in supporting the transition to a low-carbon energy system.” Yet an April 2016 internal memo reveals that the company has a less climate-friendly purpose for this technology, which was at the time (and still is) unproven at scale. BP expects CCUS “to enable the full use of fossil fuels across the energy transition and beyond.”

Like BP, ExxonMobil features carbon capture and storage in its ad campaigns. ExxonMobil’s ads also showcase the company’s research into making biofuels from algae, another technology that cannot deliver steep cuts in global warming emissions in the crucial period between now and 2030.

According to the Oversight Committee, ExxonMobil has spent $68 million to advertise its algae biofuel research, nearly a quarter of what the company reportedly spent since 2009 on the research itself (which is a tiny fraction of what ExxonMobil still spends on developing oil and gas).

In a December 2016 exchange with its ad agency, ExxonMobil highlighted its algae research but walked back from overpromising results by “remov[ing] any [copy] lines that imply the technology is live today, and [stressing that] the solution is more future focused.” Similarly, a draft presentation of the company’s 2018 Outlook for Energy admitted that algae fuel technology is “[s]till decades away from the scale we need.”

Talking the Talk

Another form of greenwashing is using weasel-words such as “pledge,” “aim,” and “ambition”—or bait-and-switch schemes with theoretical scenarios that don’t represent actual business plans.

Shell is a pro with these tactics. With great fanfare, the company launched its Sky Scenario, a “technically possible, but challenging pathway for society to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement.” Yet the internal documents show how carefully the company had to prep its spokespeople not to say explicitly what a casual listener might mistakenly believe.

Internal Shell “Net Zero Emissions” (NZE) messaging guidance from January 2020 includes the following points:

1. Be explicit in defining NZE as a goal for society.
2. Focus on the need to decarbonise the economy, rather than solely the energy system.
3. Please do not imply, suggest, or leave it open for possible misinterpretation that NZE is a Shell goal or target.

The guidance warns: “Please do not give the impression that Shell is willing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to levels that do not make business sense,” and notes that it “will require a careful and continuous balancing act that conveys credible optimism while setting realistic expectations of how fast both Shell and the energy system can change.”

There is a clear purpose to this semantic sleight of hand. In the face of legal complaints filed in the United States and other jurisdictions, Shell and the other targets of the congressional investigation are acutely aware of the litigation risks associated with making misleading and deceptive claims to consumers, investors, and the general public.

Lobbying Lip Service

All four of the oil and gas companies now claim to support the Paris climate agreement. For example, following candid revelations by then-ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy to an undercover reporter about the company’s deceptive lobbying and public relations strategies, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods asserted that his company has “fully supported the Paris agreement since its inception.” Woods repeated this assertion in his formal testimony at the committee’s October hearing.

However, it was not until September 2018—three years after the adoption of the Paris accord—that  ExxonMobil and Chevron joined the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), whose members “explicitly support the Paris agreement and its aims.”

More important than that three-year gap, internal documents show that neither ExxonMobil nor Chevron had any intention of backing their stated support with action. An ExxonMobil briefing memo for an OGCI CEO meeting, drafted in consultation with Chevron, lays bare the companies’ desire to avoid a “commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals,” noting that “support for the Paris agreement goals and member company advocacy are separate concepts and are not directly related.” Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

Momentum Builds for Accountability

This first tranche of documents released by the House Oversight Committee last month is just the tip of the (melting) iceberg. “We’re also going to release an explosive report documenting and detailing everything sometime in October,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California, chair of the Oversight Committee’s Environment Subcommittee, told Emily Atkin’s Heated newsletter. “We’re going to have even more documents, even more shocking than what’s already been released. And that report will be looked at by a lot of people who have an interest in holding Big Oil accountable.”

A growing community of researchers is poring over this new evidence of fossil fuel industry deception and eagerly awaiting the additional documents promised by Khanna. There is increasing concern over fossil fuel industry influence in academia:

• Climate disinformation—and the complicity of enablers such as the public relations industry—was the focus of a public event at Harvard University last month. (Listen to the Drilled podcast of the event here).
• In response to years of organizing by students and alumni, Princeton University recently announced plans to divest from fossil fuels and to reject funding from 90 companies involved in coal and tar sands. Unfortunately, Princeton rejected a faculty recommendation to dissociate from companies with a history of climate disinformation. This decision leaves BP eligible to continue its sponsorship of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative—the source of the above-cited recommendation that the company use CCUS as an excuse to avoid the transition away from fossil fuels.
• The Guardian earlier this year exposed the ties of Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishing companies, to the fossil fuel industry. Scientists have responded by launching a petition calling on the publisher to better align its business practices with its public commitments to address climate change. Read more in this new blog by my UCS colleague Kristy Dahl.

Meanwhile, other public officials beyond the House Oversight Committee are taking notice of the fossil fuel industry’s climate disinformation campaign and raising the specter of liability. Just last week, in a letter to President Biden, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and seven other US senators recommended that the “Department of Justice … investigate the fossil fuel industry for its decades of lying about its products and consider bringing a civil suit against the industry the way it successfully sued the tobacco industry.”

Merkley’s request was timely. Also last week, the US Supreme Court invited the solicitor general to submit a brief providing the federal government’s position on whether the climate liability case filed by three Colorado communities, which have been awaiting justice since 2018, should proceed in state or federal court.

The Colorado communities are among more than two dozen cities, counties and states across the country suing to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate damages and fraud. So it is a critical moment for the Department of Justice to follow through on President Biden’s campaign pledge to “strategically support ongoing plaintiff-driven climate litigation against polluters.”

The evidence continues to roll in: Fossil fuel polluters cannot be counted on to reform themselves. That is why scientists are joining with affected communities, elected representatives, investors, and litigators to hold these corporations accountable, drive deep cuts in emissions, and equitably address climate change-related loss and damage.

Two key things have changed since last year:

1) Evidence has piled up that sharp cuts in fossil fuels are needed to keep the goals of the Paris climate agreement within reach—and that major oil and gas companies’ climate claims are greenwashing.

2) Oil and gas companies are raking in record profits as Russia wages an unjust war in Ukraine.

Less shareholder support for climate proposals at BP, ConocoPhillips and other major oil and gas companies’ annual meetings earlier this month suggests that some investors may be falling for fossil fuel industry spin and deprioritizing climate action. That would be shortsighted and dangerous. According to the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, action between now and 2030 is most critical: Immediate, deep cuts in heat-trapping emissions are necessary across all sectors if we are to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Here are four corporate annual meetings that my colleagues at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and I will be attending on the proxies of socially responsible investors, as well as a few things we will be watching for.

Shell (Tuesday, May 24, at 10 a.m. BST)

I’ll be in London on Tuesday for Shell’s annual meeting. My first in-person attendance at a shareholders’ meeting since 2019 promises some drama, with #DefundClimateChaos organizing a rally outside and conflicting climate resolutions before shareholders.

Since its last annual meeting, Shell’s climate pledges and plans have drawn intense scrutiny:

• A year ago this week in a case brought by Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands), a Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce global warming emissions from its operations and the use of its products by 45 percent relative to 2019 levels by 2030. Shell is appealing the ruling.
• In March, Client Earth launched a legal action against Shell’s board of directors, seeking to hold it liable for its failure to prepare the company properly for the clean energy transition.
• As part of an ongoing investigation into the oil and gas industry’s climate disinformation campaign, the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing last October featuring Shell USA President Gretchen Watkins and other top oil and gas industry executives and another hearing in February with experts examining Big Oil’s insufficient, self-serving climate pledges.

At last October’s hearing, Watkins and the other CEOs refused to commit to stop funding climate disinformation or efforts to block climate action, and since then none has budged an inch. In April, for example, Shell released its latest climate lobbying report that acknowledged “some misalignment” between its climate policy positions and those of several of its trade associations, including the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the US Chamber of Commerce. API is using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to stall or roll back the transition to renewable energy, and the US Chamber continues to lobby against climate policies, including methane regulations and the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan. Regardless, Shell has retained its membership in both associations, claiming that it will press for change from within.

Now, Shell investors are voting on a resolution proposed by the shareholder advocacy group Follow This calling on the company to set and publish targets for reducing emissions from its operations and products that are aligned with Paris climate agreement goals.

The Shell board has recommended that shareholders vote against the resolution and instead is seeking shareholder approval of the company’s Energy Transition Progress Report 2021. But, according to an independent analysis by Global Climate Insights, under Shell’s existing strategy the company’s net carbon dioxide emissions will increase 4 percent by 2030 relative to 2019 levels.

ExxonMobil (Wednesday, May 25, at 9:30 a.m. CDT)

On Wednesday, I’ll participate in ExxonMobil’s virtual annual meeting. Last year its shareholders rebelled, replacing three members of the board of directors and voting in favor of two climate-related shareholder proposals. Since then, ExxonMobil has been publicly embarrassed by revelations by one of its top lobbyists about its deceptive lobbying and public relations strategies, had its Chair and CEO Darren Woods testify under oath before Congress about the company’s sponsorship of climate disinformation campaigns, and was spotlighted by new documentary series produced by PBS’s Frontline and Paramount Plus.

In a lackluster effort to placate shareholders’ climate concerns, the company pledged to cut carbon emissions from its oil, gas and chemicals businesses to net zero by 2050. But, by refusing to address emissions from burning its products—which make up roughly 85 percent of its total emissions—ExxonMobil is still trying to evade responsibility for its role in the climate crisis.

Shareholders have the opportunity to submit questions to ExxonMobil’s management ahead of the meeting. Retired ExxonMobil engineer Bill Hafker, who I interviewed back in 2018, posed four crucial climate questions in a recent opinion column. My UCS colleague Laura Peterson’s recent blog, which reveals that ExxonMobil’s latest lobbying disclosures omit important details, also provides fodder for shareholder inquiries.

Until the company gives satisfactory responses to questions posed by members of Congress, Hafker and Peterson, ExxonMobil shareholders should continue to press corporate decisionmakers to step up climate ambition and action. This year, that means voting for the climate-related proposals filed by Follow This and Christian Brothers Investment Services, and voting against CEO Woods and Lead Director Joseph Hooley.

To increase transparency about the oil and gas industry’s political activity at this critical juncture for US climate policy, shareholders should also support the resolution filed by the Unitarian Universalist Association calling for ExxonMobil to disclose its political spending.

Chevron (Wednesday, May 25, at 8 a.m. PDT)

UCS’s Peterson will participate virtually in Chevron’s annual meeting, where the company faces the prospect of a revolt similar to what ExxonMobil experienced last year.

Chevron has a long history of human rights abuses, environmental pollution, racial injustice, climate destruction and climate deception. This month, UCS joined Amazon Watch, Follow This, Investor Advocates for Social Justice, Majority Action, Newground Social Investment, Sierra Club, and the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia to sponsor a virtual discussion titled “Chevron on Notice: How 2022 Shareholder Action Can Advance Corporate Accountability.”

I was particularly moved by the remarks of Alfredo Angulo, a community organizer with the Richmond  Listening Project, who described the harm to public health from oil spills, fires and gas leaks at Chevron’s refinery—one of California’s largest polluters—during the event. Likewise, Donald Moncayo, president of the Union of Peoples Affected by Chevron/Texaco, provided powerful testimony about the company’s refusal to clean up environmental damage or pay restitution to people and communities devastated by oil pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Led by Majority Action, shareholders pointing to a failure of corporate governance are calling for the ouster of CEO Michael Wirth as board chair and Ronald Sugar as lead independent director. UCS is supporting this demand and joining event cosponsors in urging Chevron shareholders to vote for six shareholder proposals:

• Adopt medium- and long-term global warming emissions reduction targets (Item 5 on the proxy card);
• Provide independent, audited climate-related financial risk reporting (Item 6);
• Report on reliability of methane emissions disclosures (Item 7);
• Report on business with conflict-complicit governments (Item 8);
• Report on racial equity audit (Item 9); and
• Allow 10 percent of shareholders to call a special meeting of shareholders (Item 10).

BlackRock (Wednesday, May 25, at 8 a.m. EDT)

My UCS colleague Hannah Poor will participate virtually in BlackRock’s annual meeting.

BlackRock is one of the world’s largest investors in fossil fuels and owns a substantial stake in companies across every sector of the global economy, including Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron. The asset manager has been under increasing pressure from climate activists, and faces a shareholder proposal calling for it to adopt stewardship practices designed to curtail corporate activities that externalize social and environmental costs—in other words, make corporations pay for the harms their products and actions cause.

Regardless, BlackRock appears to be moving in the wrong direction. The world’s largest asset manager changed its voting guidance to vote for fewer climate proposals this year because, it maintains, they may be unduly “prescriptive.”

As the climate crisis escalates, it’s clear that leaving major oil and gas companies to prescribe their own remedies is not resulting in action at the pace and scale necessary to limit the worst effects of climate change. Urge BlackRock to hold Chevron accountable for climate inaction by sending a message here today.

Mandatory Climate Disclosure

Shareholder votes calling for corporate transparency and climate action are necessary, but not sufficient. Investors need consistent, comparable data to make informed decisions and hold corporations accountable for their response to climate change.

That’s why the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed a new rule that would require publicly traded companies to disclose the amount of heat-trapping emissions their businesses produce, detail how climate impacts and the clean energy transition might affect their businesses, and publicize their plans for meeting their carbon emissions reduction targets.

The public comment period on the rule is open through June 17. Click here to send a message to the SEC supporting strong climate disclosure rules.

Looming Liability

Earlier this month, the Philippines Commission on Human Rights concluded a nearly seven-year inquiry into the role Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major carbon producers have played in climate change impacts on the human rights of the Filipino people. The commission’s report, informed by UCS and many other experts, concluded that these companies “engaged in willful obfuscation of climate science, which has prejudiced the right of the public to make informed decisions about their products, concealing that their products posed significant harms to the environment and the climate system.” These acts, the commission said, “may be bases for liability. At the very least, they are immoral.”

Big Oil’s past and ongoing climate deception is worsening the climate crisis, harming Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities; poor and working-class communities; and communities in the Global South first and worst. This week investors have the opportunity—and responsibility—to ratchet up pressure on Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron for climate accountability. Scientists, activists, litigators and policymakers around the world are watching, and are ready to act.

But in reality, the oil and gas industry is trying to have it both ways. We can’t let them get away with it, and one way to hold them accountable is for Congress to continue to expose and challenge their self-serving deception and pursue clean energy solutions that truly benefit people in the United States and around the world.

Here’s how this industry’s response to the war is its latest display of hypocrisy and disinformation.

Climate Action is the Solution, Not the Problem

(This is a corollary to my colleague Julie McNamara’s observation that fossil fuels are the problem, not the solution. Read more here.)

The oil and gas industry has seized the opportunity provided by Russia’s war in Ukraine to lobby against ambitious climate action and for regulatory rollbacks.

However, policies to deliver on the Biden administration’s commitment to cut US heat-trapping emissions by 50 to 52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 have not yet been enacted and implemented. And removing health, safety, and environmental protections will not magically increase fuel supply or reduce prices at the pump—while it certainly will impose significant burdens on communities and ecosystems.

Moreover, the push by the American Petroleum Institute (API) to use the war as an excuse for stalling or rolling back the transition to renewable energy gives the lie to climate pledges by major oil and gas companies that lead the trade association.

Last October, the CEOs of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell trotted out a host of climate claims, under oath, at a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing. In the past six months, each of these companies has made or updated its net-zero pledge (BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell). Yet they all oppose proposals by their own shareholders to set and implement short-, medium-, and long-term targets aligned with the Paris agreement’s global temperature goal.

A recent peer-reviewed paper by Mei Li, Gregory Trencher, and Jusen Asuka found that all four of these companies’ climate claims are greenwashing, because their actions and investments don’t match up with their promises. Failure to back up words with actions can be a legal liability, as Shell is discovering through a Dutch court ruling last year and a new lawsuit announced by the UK-based environmental organization Client Earth this month.

API, for its part, seems to understand these risks: The trade association expressed concern about the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed new rules requiring publicly traded companies to include climate-related disclosures in their regular reports for investors. For fossil fuel companies and trade associations, talking about climate change was all fun, games, and PR until some people—scientists, lawyers, financial regulators—insisted that they get serious about addressing the climate crisis.

Russia’s war in Ukraine and its global implications have blown the oil and gas industry’s cover, revealing the same old climate obstruction and deception beneath the surface.

Oil and Gas Production Does Not Equal Energy Security

Oil and gas companies are hell-bent on convincing us that now is the time to increase drilling in the United States, build new infrastructure, revive projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline, and issue leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

API admitted that “increasing American oil and gas production will not help Ukraine today”—and then implied that the Biden administration might have deterred Russia’s attack by supporting US oil and gas production months ago.

But as my colleague Julie McNamara explained, the industry can’t ramp up production fast enough to make a difference anytime soon. We have to look past these blatantly opportunistic dead-ends and implement real, long-lasting solutions instead.

Furthermore, there’s ample evidence from around the globe that nations whose economies rely heavily on oil and gas extraction are less secure and less stable than those that are less dependent on fossil fuel resources. The “resource curse” plagues extractive economies with deep-seated inequity and undemocratic governance.

Which brings us to the next point.

Putin Is Not Our Friend

Major oil and gas companies have a long history of working with autocratic governments and capitalizing on geopolitical conflicts in pursuit of higher profits. This is the case with the current war being waged against Ukraine by Russia, and (as I learned from my past work with EIRIS Conflict Risk Network) is also true of current and past conflicts in Burma/Myanmar, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, and Sudan.

BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil have already announced withdrawals from their investments in Russia. (Chevron, which says it has “very little exposure to Russia,” has not). However, the industry and its surrogates actively defended these investments until very recently, including by lobbying against wide-ranging sanctions on Russia. Following the invasion, the oil and gas lobby did not call for sanctions on Russia’s oil and gas sector—and some industry-backed groups still oppose crucial sanctions on President Putin and his cronies.

While it’s good to see these companies stepping away from these investments in Russia, such actions don’t absolve them of responsibility for decades of funding Putin’s regime and transferring key technologies to the Russian oil and gas industry. They did not withdraw in response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, and according to new research by Global Witness, Greenpeace USA, and Oil Change International, nine European and US fossil fuel companies have paid a total of $15.8 billion in taxes and fees to Russia since then.

These companies clearly bear some responsibility for fueling Putin’s war machine.

Oil and Gas Profits Benefit the Few, Not the Many

President Putin and his cronies aren’t the only ones raking in billions from the oil and gas industry. Together, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell amassed more than $65 billion in profits in 2021. They’re not even close to sufficiently investing those profits in renewable energy or other truly clean energy solutions, which still account for only a tiny fraction of the oil and gas industry’s total capital expenditures.

Even as API tries to defuse public outrage, its members are not reducing their profit margins to alleviate the burden of high gasoline prices on those who can least afford spiking energy costs—low-income and fixed-income households. (If you want to understand why gas prices are so volatile, check out this blog by my colleague Jeremy Martin).

Some, such as Marathon Oil and Occidental Petroleum, are not even increasing oil and gas production, choosing to prioritize raising dividends and buying back shares from their current investors. BP announced it will repurchase $1.5 billion worth of shares using surplus cash from 2021. Chevron will buy back $5 billion to $10 billion of stock each year. Shell has begun a share buyback of as much as $8.5 billion. ExxonMobil has initiated a $10-billion share repurchase program.

Stock buybacks, by definition, benefit current shareholders. The rich literally get richer while everyone else falls behind. Buybacks are dangerous to the economy, resulting in increased income inequality, employment instability, and weak productivity.

People trying to fill up their tanks to get to work or school or the grocery store recognize these financial machinations as corporate greed. And as Jeremy Martin explains in his blog, the only sure solution to the many problems caused by oil is to use less oil.

Congress Should Investigate—and Act

As oil and gas industry profits rise while Ukrainians suffer from Russia’s ongoing assault and consumers worldwide feel the squeeze of high energy costs, three congressional committees have called corporate CEOs to testify, starting next week.

• House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) invited the CEOs of EOG Resources, Devon Energy Corporation, and Occidental Petroleum—which have the most unused permits for drilling on public lands and waters—to testify on Tuesday, April 5, about the fossil fuel industry’s failure to stabilize US gasoline prices. The executives refused to appear, suggesting they can’t defend their corporate conduct or they think they’re above the law. Either one is a bad look.
• Meanwhile, the CEOs of BP, Chevron, Devon Energy Corporation, ExxonMobil, Pioneer Natural Resources, and Shell USA will testify at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday, April 6, at 10:30 a.m. EDT. Chair Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) asked the executives to answer for their companies business practices and address the industry’s impact on consumers.
• Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has announced an upcoming hearing to examine the impact of the surge in petroleum prices on commerce and consumers. She has invited executives of BP America, ExxonMobil, and Pioneer Natural Resources to testify.

Ahead of these hearings, a Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax bill has been introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). Designed to curb oil industry profiteering and provide relief from high gas prices, the bill would return revenue to consumers in the form of a quarterly rebate that would phase out for single filers who earn more than $75,000 annually and joint filers who earn more than $150,000 annually.

According to a recent poll, 87 percent of voters favor a crackdown on price gouging by oil companies, and 80 percent—including 73 percent of Republicans—support the specific idea of a windfall profits tax on Big Oil. Organizations such as Amazon Watch, Indigenous Environmental Network, and People vs. Fossil Fuels have expressed support for the windfall profits tax, and a new Stop the Oil Profiteering campaign has launched.

Taxing obscene corporate profits cannot repair all the damage done by the oil and gas industry to the climate, environmental justice communities, or the rights of people and nature, but it could reduce the incentive for Big Oil to take advantage of war, mass displacement, and economic disruption—and provide some financial support for struggling individuals and families.

And Congress standing up for people, against oil and gas industry self-interest, is what we need to secure a robust package of investments in clean energy, environmental justice, and jobs. Congressional action to hold oil and gas corporations accountable can also build momentum for climate accountability litigation and shareholder advocacy leading up to this spring’s corporate annual meetings.