House Oversight Committee accuses oil companies of ‘lying’ about climate actions

Oil majors portrayed themselves as committed to a clean energy transition even though their executives doubted those efforts would work and the companies poured billions of dollars into new oil and gas investments, according to a memo and internal industry documents the House Committee on Oversight and Reform released Friday.

The release is a culmination of years of hearings and document requests by the committee under Democratic leadership, but its impact is likely limited by the GOP takeover of the House in January. 

“Even though Big Oil CEOs admitted to my Committee that their products are causing a climate emergency, today’s documents reveal that the industry has no real plans to clean up its act and is barreling ahead with plans to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come,” Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “It’s time for the fossil fuel industry to stop lying to the American people and finally take serious steps to reduce emissions and address the global climate crisis they helped create.”

Democrats over the past two years have accused the oil industry of undermining the clean energy transition while asking it to increase production as gasoline prices hit near-record levels in the run-up to the November midterm elections.

In the memo released Friday, the committee said the internal company documents it had received via subpoena “demonstrate how the fossil fuel industry ‘greenwashed’ its public image with promises and actions that oil and gas executives knew would not meaningfully reduce emissions, even as the industry moved aggressively to lock in continued fossil fuel production for decades to come—actions that could doom global efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change.”

Maloney and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the head of the environment subcommittee, held multiple hearings, including one featuring the CEOs of Exxon and Chevron and the heads of European firms Shell and BP’s U.S. operations. The hearings aimed to illustrate the industry’s business practices and use of public relations firms to paint themselves as major players in the clean energy transition.

A spokesperson for Exxon blasted the committee’s release as cherry picking internal documents to cast the industry in a poor light.

“The House Oversight Committee report has sought to misrepresent ExxonMobil’s position on climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by recasting well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign,” company spokesperson Todd Spitler said in an email. “If specific members of the committee are so certain they’re right, why did they have to take so many things out of context to prove their point?” Spitler did not point to specific parts he considered out of context.

Chevron and BP did not offer immediate comment.

Industry officials have publicly argued that renewable energy, while growing, is not yet sufficiently available to replace fossil fuels.

Exxon and Chevron have focused on technologies they say will trap greenhouse gas emissions before they reach the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Exxon has also highlighted a new business arm aimed at capturing carbon emissions, saying on Thursday it would invest $17 billion for lower-emission initiatives through 2027, an increase of 15 percent over its previous budget.

Many environmentalists are skeptical about technologies such as carbon capture, which have not worked at scale in the oil, gas and power sector. They fear the promise of such technologies could encourage more fossil fuel production that will continue to warm the planet even as scientists say a drastic decrease in the use of these fuels is necessary to thwart the worst impacts of climate change.

“Big Oil is fundamentally unserious about addressing the climate crisis,” Jordan Schreiber, energy and environment director at watchdog group Accountable.US, said in a statement. „For years the industry has spent millions on flashy marketing campaigns signaling support for a low-carbon future while they spew dangerous climate-warming pollution into our communities and lobby Congress to continue the country’s status quo reliance on dirty fuels.”

The documents showed industry lobbying group American Petroleum Institute grappling with where to land on climate policy as it ramped up engagement with the Biden administration in March 2021.

Internal documents from API executive committee and board of director meetings showed member companies weighing whether to endorse a price on carbon emissions as well as potential support for more federal spending on carbon capture and hydrogen, efforts to prevent methane emissions from oil and gas operations and policies on alternative fuels for vehicles.

Yet it also showed API working directly against policies that would stymie fossil fuel use. The documents include a Sept. 24, 2020 message from Ron Chittim, then API’s vice president of downstream policy, saying the company sent an email “to all Capitol Hill Republican offices in response” to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to ban all new internal combustion engine vehicle sales in the state by 2035 — a move that caused significant ripples across the U.S. vehicle sector given the Golden State’s sheer size.

The message API amplified to GOP offices in Washington criticized Newsom’s move, saying California “has a history of aspirational targets and failed outcomes,” adding state residents “pay a high price for electricity, yet still experience rolling blackouts and unreliable supplies.”

A statement from API Senior Vice President Megan Bloomgren did not directly address the committee’s release.

“API will continue to work with policymakers on both sides of the aisle for policies that support industry innovation and further the progress we’ve made on emissions reductions,” Bloomgren said.

The committee memo called out the companies’ billions of dollars worth of investments in oil and natural gas projects, spending that is many multiples of their clean energy development costs. In one example, it pointed to the difference in how much Chevron was spending on the industry-led Oil and Gas Climate Initiative to how much it spent on new drilling projects in the West Texas oil fields in the Permian Basin. Chevron spent at least $100 million on the initiative through 2022, which „amounts to only 2% of the $5 billion Chevron has planned to invest in the Permian each year,” the memo states.

Chevron’s own documents compared its overall strategy with that of its industry rivals, with one presentation highlighting that it and Exxon made investments in “new energy” that were below that of all their major competitors. Chevron’s strategy instead was to “grow production” of oil and gas even as other companies moved away from fossil fuels.

“Competitors retreating … Chevron’s strategy: Continue to invest,” the presentation read. The company would also invest in carbon capture, biofuels and hydrogen, its presentation said.

The committee was more positive on European companies Shell and BP, which it said were actively moving their businesses to focus more on solar, wind and other renewable energy although it criticized those companies for not moving faster.

But a Shell spokesperson still lambasted the release despite that relatively positive assessment.

“The Committee’s fourteen month investigation, which included several hours of executive testimony and nearly a half-million pages of documents, failed on all fronts to uncover evidence of a climate disinformation campaign,” company spokesman Curtis Smith said via email.

Documents from Shell showed that oil and gas companies striving to bolster their climate images considered it wise to keep their distance from Exxon, which had drawn global scorn after reporting revealed company officials knew for decades that burning fossil fuels would drive climate change — but created front groups, dark money campaigns and misinformation to obfuscate the role oil and gas played in heating the planet.

Shell, in particular, was cautious. Emails revealed Shell did not want to join an Exxon-led consortium of companies backing a carbon capture effort in Houston unless it could get other global companies with better climate reputations to join, too.

“Exxon wants us — let’s try harder to leverage that to make participation more acceptable,” Marnie Funk, a lobbyist for Shell, said in an Aug. 24, 2021 email.

Public perception worries had crept in years earlier at Shell on the heels of explosive revelations about Exxon’s lobbying and disinformation, led by academics like Naomi Oreskes and publications such as Inside Climate News. The Dutch company wanted to distinguish itself from its American competitor.

“At the moment the likes of Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt) are painting people like us as ‘climate deniers’ because we don’t believe that renewable energy will solve the entire transition or that it can be done in a couple of decades,” David Hone, chief climate adviser at Shell, said in an Oct. 12, 2016 email, referring to the book and documentary Oreskes spearheaded on climate disinformation.

Shell had been planning a pivot to become an energy company, rather than purely an oil and gas developer. An energy transition plan drafted for Shell’s executive committee before the 2020 election noted that while Trump administration policies might reveal an American public skeptical on climate action, the politics were more nuanced.

“Climate change is one issue that provokes partisan tensions,” the document said.

The company eventually staked out a position that federal regulation of methane emissions was necessary, separating it from its U.S.-based peers.

“We have a dilemma. The level of industry flaring in the Permian is unfortunate. It will likely only be resolved by responsible regulation,” Glenn Wright, Americas senior vice president of Shell renewables and energy solutions, said in a Nov. 29, 2019 email. “The key to resolution is leveling the playing feel [sic], so that every producer in the US (ideally the world) is subject to common carbon pricing mechanism. This requires federal intervention.”

Shell fiercely guarded its image as a climate-conscious oil and gas company, with that defense running all the way to the top. Then-Shell CEO Ben van Beurden took offense to public comments Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp made that suggested leaks of methane, or CH4, from producing natural gas made it no better for the climate than coal, which is twice as carbon-dense.

“I felt Fred was very disingenuous in his advocacy on CH4 emission, essentially pointing out in front of the international press that if you burden the gas value chain with all the emission of the oil industry, it would put gas on a par with coal,” van Beurden said in an Oct. 27, 2017 email. “I felt I should not reward him with a meeting, not in the least as I am not sure anymore we can rely on him to be honest about reflecting the input we give them.”

Krupp said his comments came at a London event where he, van Beurden and a handful of other oil and gas CEOs were discussing new commitments to curb methane. In a text, Krupp described those steps as a “positive initiative,” but implored the industry that “you can’t ignore the large quantities of natural gas that goes into the atmosphere from those oil wells” when gas is vented or flared at the production site. Krupp said he has since talked to van Beurden and other CEOs, noting some companies have begun to address methane leaks — but that the industry as a whole still emits too much.

“Methane pollution is a powerful destructive gas whether coming from a natural gas or an oil well. EDF will always call it like we see it,” Krupp wrote.

Natural gas was also featured prominently in the documents the committee released from BP. In a campaign strategy document developed by the Brunswick Group and distributed within BP in 2017, BP would acknowledge the outsized role that methane — the chemical name for natural gas — has in trapping heat inside Earth’s atmosphere. But a business strategy document emphasized that the company needed to keep the business going despite criticism that the industry wasn’t doing enough to prevent methane leaks.

“Advance and protect the role of gas — and BP — in the future of energy conservation,” the campaign document stated. “Take a leading role on methane as the Achilles heel of gas case.”

The same presentation offered one possible path forward: “Establish an employee challenge — internal prize for helping to crack the methane challenge.”

Bob Stout, then BP’s head of U.S. regulatory affairs, also in 2017 suggested against describing natural gas as a “bridge fuel” that would eventually lead to renewable power in a publicly released sustainability report. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups had recently started opposing natural gas production because of the concerns over methane.

“It is conceivable that gas could even serve as a destination fuel to back up intermittent renewables,” Stout wrote in the email. “We would not want to spell all this out, but also not implicitly concede the point by referring to it mainly as a ‘bridge.’”

Democrats have held hearings and floated legislation over the last two years hitting oil majors for huge profits they earned as energy prices soared due to supply disruptions triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the GOP has defended oil, gas and coal in the wake of the invasion, which has contributed to higher energy prices and raised national security concerns, arguing that green transition plans were too hasty.

House Oversight Committee ranking member James Comer (R-Ky.) is expected to take the gavel of the oversight committee and has outlined Biden administration energy policies his panel would scrutinize, including the president’s decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline, the causes of high gas prices and U.S. reliance on countries like Russia and China for the minerals needed to produce clean energy technologies.

„Democrats weaponized the resources of the Oversight Committee to wage a war against America’s oil and gas industry, appease radical environmentalists, and enable the Biden Administration’s radical climate agenda that’s harming the pocketbooks of Americans,“ Comer said in a statement. „Instead of political stunts, Republicans will return the Oversight Committee to its primary mission of conducting oversight over the Biden Administration and its disastrous energy policies that have ignited an energy crisis.”