Message From the Editor

This week another trove of internal documents revealed the oil and gas industry’s ongoing attempts to sell the public one product — purported climate solutions — while behind closed doors admitting what’s really going on. With a new report, subpoenaed documents, and hearing, the Senate Budget Committee and Democrats on the House Oversight Committee officially revived the joint investigation of top oil companies and their trade groups begun three years earlier. 

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse summed up the revelations from the report and hearing as “climate denial lite,” in which the industry pivots “to pretending it is taking climate change seriously, while secretly undermining its own publicly stated goals.”

Algae-based biofuels are the low-carbon future? “Clean” natural gas is the “bridge fuel” to renewables? Carbon capture technologies are reducing fossil fuel pollution? 

These false solutions have dominated the public narratives of major oil companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell, but, as the latest internal industry documents exposed yet again, that doesn’t match up to the reality inside these companies and their trade groups. 

Despite acknowledging internally the concern that “gas doesn’t support climate goals,” BP set out on a marketing campaign to “advance and protect the role of gas—and BP—in the energy transition,” according to some of the documents released this week.

Princeton University researchers told BP in 2016 that climate change accelerated in part by new global supplies of shale gas could lead to catastrophic events such as “mass extinctions and unprecedented famine.” Reporter Geoff Dembicki dives deep on these BP documents.  

But Congress only caught glimpses because the fossil fuel industry refused to respond adequately to the subpoenas, while also flooding the committee with what Rep. Jamie Raskin’s testimony called a “paper blizzard” of some 125,000 “mass emails, newsletters, flyers, and otherwise meaningless fluff documents.”

A blizzard of fluff sounds familiar. Perhaps not unlike an oil company showering the public with glossy ads about so-called climate technofixes it knows won’t work?

Adam Lowenstein has more on the report and hearing.

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Thanks,
Brendan DeMelle
Executive Director

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Image credit: Terekhova (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)

BP Was Warned Gas-Driven Climate Change Could Cause ‘Unprecedented Famine’

— By Geoff Dembicki (3 min. read) —

BP was warned by Princeton University researchers in 2016 that climate change accelerated in part by new global supplies of shale gas could lead to catastrophic events such as “mass extinctions and unprecedented famine.” 

Yet despite acknowledging internally the concern that “gas doesn’t support climate goals,” the UK-headquartered oil and gas major embarked on a marketing campaign to “advance and protect the role of gas—and BP—in the energy transition.”

Congressional Investigation Reveals New Evidence of Big Oil’s Decades-Long Campaign to Deny Climate Science

— By Adam M. Lowenstein (5 min) —

Oil and gas companies and their top trade groups were aware for decades that carbon emissions contribute to climate change, according to a scathing new report from congressional investigators. Moreover, industry giants knew that many of the technologies they presented publicly as solutions to the climate crisis – such as algae-based biofuels and carbon capture and storage (CCS) – were neither as green nor as feasible as they promised, the study reveals.

The Senate Budget Committee and Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability published the report and related documents on April 30, three years after launching a joint investigation of Shell, Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, and two leading industry trade groups.

How Fracking Is Making Some U.S. Communities More Radioactive Than Chernobyl

— By Geoff Dembicki (6 min. read) —

Of all the things that come to mind when you think of oil and gas fracking, radioactive cancer-causing sludge may not necessarily be at the top of the list. But award-winning investigative DeSmog journalist Justin Nobel is working to change that with his new book Petroleum-238, which exposes an unsettling secret at the heart of the industry (read an excerpt here). Oil and gas companies across the U.S. are producing billions of gallons of radioactive waste each day, and it’s ending up in municipal landfills, local drinking water supplies, and the bloodstreams of industry workers and their families. 

Shockingly, he found, radiation levels at some oil and gas facilities within small American towns are higher than those at the exclusion zone around the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Pro-Trump Platform Promotes Climate Science Denial Ads to Millions Across Europe

— By Joey Grostern (7 min. read) —

The pro-Trump Epoch Times has run hundreds of anti-climate social media adverts in Europe since the beginning of 2024 that have been seen millions of times, DeSmog can reveal. 

Epoch Times accounts in Europe have run 425 adverts on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) that have attacked or undermined climate science, green energy, or climate action since the start of the year. These adverts have been run in the UK, Germany, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, appearing on social media feeds at least 2.3 million times across Facebook and Instagram, and 3.1 million times on X.

Top Human Rights Court Urged to Tackle Corporate Climate Crimes

— By Isabella Kaminski (5 min. read) —

In a landmark hearing at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, legal experts and campaigners argued that businesses, such as the fossil fuel and agriculture industries, have legal duties to stop climate-related human-rights breaches.

A panel of six judges met starting April 23 in Barbados at the University of West Indies for the hearing, which was dubbed “The climate emergency and human rights.” It opened with statements from Chile and Columbia, which had requested that the court provide an advisory opinion on climate change and human rights in 2023.

From the Climate Disinformation Database: Willie Soon

Willie Soon is an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Since 1992, Dr. Soon has been an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California. Soon is a prominent climate change denier who has received much of his research funding from the oil and gas industry, including the ExxonMobil Foundation, Southern Company, and the Charles G. Koch Foundation. He is known for his work on the climate-Sun connection and has called carbon dioxide “merely a bit player in climate change.”

Read the full profile and browse other individuals and organizations in our Climate Disinformation Database, Ad & PR Database, and Koch Network Database.