SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
exxonknew
Climate Denier Lee Raymond Left the World Hotter Than He Found It
I don’t believe a loving God consigns people to eternal damnation. But I do believe that Raymond, Exxon, and Chase have helped send the rest of us to a kind of hell.
Jun 12, 2026
Here’s how Lee Raymond’s hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, remembered him Thursday morning.
The Texas paper was more direct, and more accurate, than anyone else covering the story. The Times obit gave top billing to the fact that he led the acquisition of Mobil and “cut costs relentlessly;” the Wall Street Journal waited till paragraph six to note that he was “openly skeptical” of climate science (much like The Wall Street Journal). But the Chron had it right—when people think back in a hundred years or a thousand or ten thousand, the one thing worth remembering about him will be the crucial role he played in holding back action on climate change.
I’m going to recount the lowlights of the story here, and add one that gets very little notice in the obituaries, but that ties directly to the ongoing crisis.
Raymond was a research engineer who spent his whole career at what was then the world’s largest company. He joined its board in 1984, already a leading candidate for CEO, which means he was near the top during the 1980s, the period when (as we now know thanks to great investigative reporting) the company’s scientists correctly identified the dangers of global warming and linked them directly to Exxon’s products. That research, as Inside Climate News reported in 2015,
laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs office. Marked “not to be distributed externally,” it contained information that “has been given wide circulation to Exxon management.” In it, the company recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”
Unless that happened, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered,” the primer said, citing independent experts. “Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”
This was, of course, the same decade when Jim Hansen was carrying out his groundbreaking research at NASA (and I was writing The End of Nature). Exxon, as it turns out, was on precisely the same wavelength. Here’s, to me, one of the great historical what-ifs: Imagine that, on the night that Hansen made his remarks to Congress, an Exxon exec like Raymond had gone on the evening news and told Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, or Peter Jennings that “our research shows pretty much the same thing.” No one would have accused Exxon of climate alarmism; instead, we would have gotten to work as a civilization.
Instead, they chose denial. And it was Raymond who played a lead role, as Exxon helped form the Global Climate Coalition, first of the obfuscation fronts. He became the spokesman for anti-science in many ways: In 1997, as the world approached the first global climate talks in Kyoto, he gave what may be a speech second only in importance to Hansen’s original testimony. Speaking in Beijing to the Worl Petroleum Congress, he contended that the world was cooling, that there was no way to know if carbon dioxide was to blame, and that in any event “it is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.”
These, of course, were exactly the things Exxon’s scientists had told them were not true. Indeed, they’d been explicitly warned that
man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.
And Exxon had believed its scientists. As a 2015 Los Angeles Times report made clear, they’d begun building drilling rigs higher to counteract rising sea levels, and plotting out what parts of the Arctic might be prime for oil drilling once they’d helped melt the ice.
Exxon, more than any single force on Earth, made sure that the planet didn’t address climate change while it had time. Given what it knew in the 1980s Exxon could have had a head start on building and owning the solutions like sun and wind. But, as one of Raymond’s successors said two years ago, that didn’t happen because “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders” with clean energy. And he was right. You can make money putting up solar panels, but you can’t make Exxon money, because the sun delivers energy for free. It doesn’t offer the same scope for greed.
And greed was the word here. For his role in helping wreck the Earth’s climate system, Exxon paid him $686 million, or $144,573 a day, during his tenure as CEO. His retirement package was $400 million.
And even when he finally left Exxon in 2005 he continued on doing damage—this is the often overlooked part of his story. He was the lead independent director at JP Morgan Chase, which had been the Exxon house bank, and which, as I chronicled for Rolling Stone in 2020, became the fossil fuel industry’s biggest lender—the “doomsday bank.”
Many of us ginned up a campaign to get him off that board (along with Rev. Lennox Yearwood and other protesters, and with Jane Fonda looking in through the glass windows, I was arrested at a DC Chase branch to help kick off that fight in 2020). It was eventually successful—that summer he was demoted as lead director, and left the board in December.
But Raymond’s legacy lives on. Just as Exxon has gone on pumping out oil (and climate nonsense), Chase has kept pumping out money. As the brand new edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report pointed out last week, Chase remains the No. 1 financier of fossil fuels around the world, besting Mitsubishi, Citigroup, and Bank of America; since 2021 they’ve pumped a quarter-trillion dollars into this effort. Asked by The Guardian for a comment, a Chase spokesman said, “As one of the world’s largest financiers of energy, we support the full range of energy solutions and technologies, with a focus on reliability, affordability, security, and long-term resilience.” That kind of bland corporate-speak hides an almost unimaginable multitude of sins.
Like a great many Christians, I don’t believe a loving God consigns people to eternal damnation. But I do believe that Lee Raymond, Exxon, and Chase have helped send the rest of us to a kind of hell. As Jeff Masters just reported:
The world recorded its highest burned area for any January-May during the past 15 years, with more than 150 million hectares burned globally—22% higher than the previous high set in 2020 and about double the recent average for this period. In the US, the burned area so far in 2026 has been the highest for at least the past 10 years—about double the 10-year average—according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'The Well-Oiled Plan': Short Film Targets Fossil Fuel Industry's PR Tricks
"Fossil fuels are making people sick—and the companies behind them are spending millions on advertising and PR to cover it up," said a leader at the Global Climate and Health Alliance.
Oct 14, 2025
With less than a month until the next United Nations climate summit, filmmakers and campaigners on Tuesday released an animation that calls out the fossil fuel industry's use of Big Tobacco's public relations tactics in under three minutes.
The Well-Oiled Plan was created by Daniel Bird and Adam Levy at Wit & Wisdom, in association with the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA), a consortium of over 200 health professional and civil society groups. It "comprises scenes spun off from My Pet Footprint," a comedy feature film about climate grief that Wit & Wisdom is developing with Greenpeace.
"My Pet Footprint plays with the idea that consciences are removable," Bird, the director, said in a statement. "Decades ago, the fossil fuel industry decided business as usual was worth any price, and it takes an incredible deficit of conscience to be able to do that when that price is the demise of civilization and possibly even life in general."
With the new short, he said, "we took a direct route from smoking as an evil perpetuated on individuals, and the nascent public relations industry around that, to smoking as an industrial process imposed upon the global population. The only difference now is that the PR machine has become all the more sophisticated, and, dare we say it, successful."
The short film—starring comedians Cody Dahler and Michael Spicer, and actors Jaylah Moore-Ross and Sinead Phelps—comes as Big Oil has faced mounting scrutiny for its decades of burying, denying, and downplaying the impacts of its products. Since the #ExxonKnew exposés a decade ago, more journalism, scholarly research, lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry, and congressional reports and hearings have further revealed major polluters' climate disinformation efforts.
In 2020, Fossil Free Media launched Clean Creatives, a project targeting public relations and advertising agencies that serve Big Oil. Since then, 2,700 creatives and 1,500 agencies have signed the campaign's pledge to decline future contracts with the industry. Despite that progress, polluters continue to dump money into PR and ads from firms that will work for them.
" Fossil fuels are making people sick—and the companies behind them are spending millions on advertising and PR to cover it up," said Shweta Narayan, campaign lead at GCHA—which last month released a report detailing "the health toll of fossil fuels" for at every stage of the production cycle and across the human lifespan.
"The PR and communications industry must commit to fossil-free contracts," she argued. "Firms cannot claim to advance sustainability while helping fossil fuel companies greenwash their image or delay climate policy. We call on agencies to adopt fossil-free policies, disclose all fossil fuel clients, and ensure their work does not obstruct the transition to clean, healthy energy systems."
"We call on agencies to adopt fossil-free policies, disclose all fossil fuel clients, and ensure their work does not obstruct the transition to clean, healthy energy systems."
Narayan noted that "the same PR firms spreading fossil fuel disinformation are also working with health organizations—a clear conflict of interest for health. Through the Break the Fossil Influence—Fossil-Free Health Communications commitment, health organizations are leading by example, by cutting ties with those agencies."
Clean Creatives executive director Duncan Meisel stressed that "health organizations should not be hiring agencies with fossil fuel clients."
"The fossil fuel industry is one of the leading causes of long-term illness and premature death worldwide, and agencies that help sell coal, oil, or gas products have a conflict of interest when it comes to organizations and companies that promote public health," he continued. "At the same time, the public health sector has enormous leverage to use their procurement policies to accelerate the marketing industry's exit from fossil fuels."
Hundreds of organizations including GCHA are also calling on Brazil, host of the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference (COP30), to "make clear that unchecked corporate influence is not compatible with climate leadership."
GCHA executive director Jeni Miller on Tuesday urged the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) "to draw a red line" and declare that "no PR or advertising firms that continue to work for fossil fuel companies should be allowed to shape the story of the COP or the climate crisis."
"For all future COPs, governments and the UNFCCC must adopt clear conflict-of-interest rules and ethical procurement standards for all communications, PR, and event contractors—just as the World Health Organization does under its tobacco control framework," she said. "Just as the health community once stood up to Big Tobacco and its advertising, now it's time to stand up to Big Oil."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Shopping Differently Won't Solve the Climate Crisis, So What Should We Do Instead?
Large companies like BP have taught us to track what we buy, and take responsibility for what we do with the stuff we buy, so that they won’t have to stop making and selling the stuff we buy from them or deal with laws regulating how they do it.
Sep 26, 2025
This article has been adapted from Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (The MIT Press, September 16, 2025) by Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly. It is taken from Chapter 1: “You Do You: The Misdirected Individualist History of Climate Activism,” and is provided courtesy of the publisher.
Your Footprint, Your Responsibility
The more recent notion of everyone having a “personal carbon footprint” has similar roots in the dark arts of corporate PR. The oil giant BP popularized the term and bent it to its own purposes.
BP worked from the same playbook as the Ad Council. After acknowledging that climate change exists, the company makes you feel responsible for it. And then they give you something to do that helps you feel like you're part of the solution. Meanwhile, BP continues pumping away, enjoying massive federal subsidies and outlandish profits while avoiding any new, restrictive regulations.
The strategy was popular. One analysis of decades of ExxonMobil’s public communications found that the corporation framed climate change in terms of consumer energy demand when speaking publicly. But in internal company documents, ExxonMobil recognized that it could not continue to supply fossil fuels without disastrous consequences to the environment. They knew they were causing the problem (supply) but put the blame on us (consumer demand).
The general template should sound familiar. What causes climate change? We do. How? Driving gas guzzlers, leaving on the lights, and buying unrecyclable plastic. What’s the solution? Stop doing these things. Consume better.
ExxonMobil even conducted its own secret research on climate change in the 1970s. The results were consistent with scientific predictions. The corporation's in-house models predicted that global temperatures would rise to within 0.2°C of what they have in fact risen to since. While it publicly claimed in 1997 that “some of today’s prophets of doom from global warming were predicting the coming of a new ice age,” in the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists had privately been in agreement all along with the overwhelming majority of published science on climate forecasting.
Once you know what to look for, you start to see the message of personal responsibility everywhere. Worried about retirement? Start saving more. Have a gambling problem? Exercise some willpower and stay away from the casino. Worried about obesity? Fix your lifestyle. From 2008 to 2010, 87 percent of all alcohol ads in magazines told consumers to “drink responsibly.”
While it was becoming clearer that Americans consume too much sugar, Coca-Cola fought back by subsidizing research arguing that the problem was not calories in but calories out: “Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.” The central plank of the food industry’s lobbying has been to frame discussions about eating habits in terms of personal responsibility (e.g., “portion control”).
What these messages minimize are all the social, structural, and systemic drivers of health problems like diabetes. In one New York Times article, Dr.Dean Schillinger explained how “our entire society is perfectly designed to create Type 2 diabetes.” There is no amount of scolding about sugary foods and exercise, he explains, and “no device, no drug powerful enough to counter the effects of poverty, pollution, stress, a broken food system, cities that are hard to navigate on foot, and inequitable access to healthcare, particularly in minority communities.”
Yet these companies have devoted enormous amounts of money to teaching the public to focus on the symptoms rather than the underlying system. They have taught us to track what we buy, and take responsibility for what we do with the stuff we buy, so that they won’t have to stop making and selling the stuff we buy from them or deal with laws regulating how they do it.
A Too-Convenient Model for Facing Inconvenient Truths
Whole social movements have been built around this individualist, little-things-add-up ethos. An iconic poster from the early days of the modern environmental movement mirrors the Ad Council’s claim that personal choices are both the cause of and the solution to pollution. This individualist thinking prevailed all the way from the 1970s environmental movement to May 2006, which marks one of the biggest box office events in documentary history: the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary reached millions of people around the world. Its vivid depictions of solar rays pelting the atmosphere and glaciers melting raised public awareness of climate change to new heights and ignited collective fervor about the environment like never before. It demanded action.
Widely and deservedly lauded, An Inconvenient Truth presented the facts in a way that was hard to argue with. It also presented solutions:
Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource.
The general template should sound familiar. What causes climate change? We do. How? Driving gas guzzlers, leaving on the lights, and buying unrecyclable plastic. What’s the solution? Stop doing these things. Consume better. This is another effect of the long history of corporate-funded individualist messaging: the first thing that comes to mind for many of us when we ask “what can I do?” is a series of thoughts about stuff. What should I buy? Where should I buy it from? What should I do with it? Even leaders in the fight against climate change have perpetuated our preoccupation with consumption.
As the credits of An Inconvenient Truth roll, the film offers concrete suggestions for how to make a difference, stating, “The climate crisis can be solved. Here’s how to start.” Here are the first five items in the list:
- Buy energy-efficient appliances + lightbulbs.
- Change your thermostat . . . to reduce energy for heating + cooling.
- Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit.
- Recycle.
- If you can, buy a hybrid car.
These are good things to do, though energy-inefficient incandescent bulbs are basically illegal now and hybrid cars may be on their way to being old news. But An Inconvenient Truth exemplifies a whole world of books, TV, and academic research that looks at climate change through the lens of our personal consumer choices. Even academics have gotten in on the act. One widely cited study examined and ranked nearly 150 personal lifestyle choices by their effectiveness in reducing personal carbon footprints. The four most impactful options, it found, are having one child, living car-free, flying less, and eating a plant-based diet. Eventually, further down the list of action items, An Inconvenient Truth also tells viewers to do the following:
- Vote for leaders who pledge to solve this crisis.
- Write to congress.
- If they don’t listen, run for congress
- Speak up in your community.
- Insist that America freeze CO2 emissions + join international efforts to stop global warming.
These suggestions head in a different direction, away from what we buy. They gesture toward our political choices and our communities’ values. This is promising, and we’ll talk a lot more about why in the coming chapters. For now, notice how vague they are. “Speak up in your community” sounds empowering, but what does it really mean? Speak up to whom? Say what? “Join international efforts” sounds good too. But your average moviegoer may be forgiven for thinking, “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” Most viewers likely walked out feeling alarmed, maybe intending to buy better lightbulbs. After all, lightbulbs were first on the list!
It turns out audiences did become both more knowledgeable and more concerned about the climate crisis. But this new found knowledge and concern doesn’t appear to have amounted to much, at least in the short term. One study found that a month after seeing the film, viewers had done next to nothing to put their newfound climate knowledge into action. Not one of them had examined their carbon footprint or written a letter to their senator.
Another study found that framing solutions in terms of individual consumer choices decreases people's willingness to take other forms of action to fight climate change. Maybe people feel like they’re being blamed for a global crisis beyond their control. Maybe they resent being asked to respond with what to them looks like merely symbolic, even futile, changes to their personal behavior. The danger, then, is not just that such messages don’t help. It’s that they might be making things worse.
System Change, Not Climate Change
Some people have started to get wise to this long history of corporations laying problems at the feet of individuals. The backlash it’s helped create has produced slogans now found on fridge magnets, protest posters, and newspaper headlines. The most common ones suggest a different kind of thing to do: stop worrying about personal choices, and start focusing on changing the system. The news site Vox published an article in 2019 whose headline perfectly expresses this idea: “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care If You Recycle.”
The Sunrise Movement, a decentralized, youth-led group at the forefront of progressive climate politics, advocates system change: “to abolish or reimagine institutions that degrade our communities and our climate.” This marks a generational sea change in climate activism. Abolishing or reimagining institutions was most certainly not on An Inconvenient Truth’s list. Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz recounts a telling experience with a Sunrise group in Philadelphia:
The organizers were scanning the menu of a Middle Eastern restaurant on Uber Eats. Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s training director, sat at a laptop, taking orders. “Can you get me a beef kebab?” Dejah Powell, an organizer from Chicago, said. “Or, no. Beef is the worst, right? Maybe chicken. Or falafel?”
“Dejah,” an activist named John Paul Mejia said, in a mock-scolding tone. He started reciting a movement adage, using the singsong rhythm of a call-and-response: “The biggest driver of emissions is . . .” The others joined him, in unison: “. . . the political power of the fossil-fuel industry, not individual behavior.” In other words, if you want the beef, get the beef.
One way to think about Sunrise’s system-over-individual logic is to recall Iron Eyes Cody. We called him a fraud, but looked at another way, his personal deception obscures the bigger story. A first-generation Sicilian American was able to play some of the most iconic Native American roles in Hollywood because the movie industry excluded actual Native Americans from taking those roles. The biases woven into cultural norms and movie business practices allowed, and incentivized, Cody’s personal fraud. Too much focus on what he should or shouldn’t have done, as a single person, makes it easy to overlook the system that structured his options and made his personal choices possible in the first place. Coming to appreciate the significance of systems can be disorienting, but keeping that significance firmly in view is crucial to understanding the bigger picture. The little-things-add-up take on individual responsibility is too easily weaponized by corporations advancing their own interests. When it comes to climate change, they have long pushed a picture where “taking action” means tweaking our shopping choices. It’s this history that Sunrise and other progressive climate activists are rightly standing at war, yelling stop.
But even if we accept this change in perspective, it’s not at all obvious what we should do next. To take that step, we’ll look at another area of life where a loud chorus is rightly demanding structural change.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Time to Make Polluters Pay': Study Ties Fossil Fuel Pollution Directly to Deadly Heatwaves
"We're talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms," said one campaigner.
Sep 11, 2025
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature establishing "that the influence of climate change on heatwaves has increased, and that all carbon majors, even the smaller ones, contributed substantially to the occurrence of heatwaves," is fueling fresh calls for fossil fuel giants to pay for the deadly impacts of their products.
With previous "attribution studies," scientists have generally looked at single extreme weather events. The new study, led by Sonia Seneviratne, a professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, is unique for its systematic approach—but that's not all.
"Past studies have mostly looked at emissions from people and countries. This time, we're focusing on the big carbon emitters," explained lead author Yann Quilcaille, a postdoctoral researcher in Seneviratne's group, in a statement.
"We are now at the point where we recognize the serious consequences of extreme weather events for the world's economies and societies—heat-related deaths, crop failures, and much, much more," he said. "People are concerned about who contributed to these disasters."
The researchers found that climate change made 213 heatwaves from 2000–23 "more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed." They also found that global warming since 1850-1900 made heatwaves 2000-09 about 20 times more likely, and those 2010-19 more likely.
"Overall, one-quarter of these events were virtually impossible without climate change," the paper states. "The emissions of the carbon majors contribute to half the increase in heatwave intensity since 1850-1900. Depending on the carbon major, their individual contribution is high enough to enable the occurrence of 16-53 heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible in a preindustrial climate."
Anybody surprised? Emissions from 14 fossil fuel giants drove 213 major heatwaves since 2000, making >50 deadly ones 10,000× more likely and adding up to +2.2°C increased intensityAll while knowing the impact of GHG emissionsCorporate negligence =Human costwww.theguardian.com/environment/...
[image or embed]
— Ian Hall (@ianhall.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 12:37 PM
While the study highlights the climate pollution of "14 top carbon majors," including the governments of the former Soviet Union, China (coal and cement), India (coal), and the companies Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Shell, Pemex, and CHN Energy, Quilcaille said that "the contributions of smaller players also play a significant role."
"These companies and corporations have also primarily pursued their economic interests, even though they have known since the 1980s that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming," the researcher added.
In a review of the study for Nature, climate scientist Karsten Hausten from Germany's Leipzig University pointed out that "Quilcaille and colleagues' results, as well as the attribution framework that they have developed, provide a tool to continue the legal battle against individual companies and countries."
"This study is a leap forward that could be used to support future climate lawsuits and aid diplomatic negotiations," he wrote. "Finally, it is another reminder that denial and anti-science rhetoric will not make climate liability go away, nor will it reduce the ever-increasing risk to life from heatwaves across our planet."
Hausten was far from alone in recognizing how the new research could contribute to climate cases. Jessica Wentz, senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, pointed to the International Court of Justice's landmark advisory opinion from July that countries have a legal obligation to take cooperative action against the global crisis.
"Initially, when a plaintiff needs to show that they have standing in a case, they have to allege that they have an injury that is traceable to the defendant's conduct," she told CBC, suggesting the new study will help establish that connection.
"The methodologies that underpin these types of findings can also be used in more fungible ways to look at not only the contributions of the carbon majors, but presumably you could use a similar approach to start looking at government," Wentz said.
Christopher Callahan, a scientist at Indiana University Bloomington who has published research showing that economic damages from rising extreme heat can be tied to companies such as Exxon, said that "this study adds to a growing but still small literature showing it's now possible to draw causal connections between individual emitters and the hazards from climate change."
"There is a wealth of evidence now that major fossil fuel producers were aware of climate change before the rest of the public was and used their power and profit to undermine climate action and discredit climate science," he said, adding that it is "morally appropriate" to hold companies accountable for the emissions of their products.
Callahan also gathered some of the relevant research in a series of posts on Bluesky, noting that on the same day that this new study was published, another team "quantified the thousands of heat-related deaths in Zurich, Switzerland that can be attributed to climate change—and showed that dozens of these deaths are due to the emissions from these individual firms."
"Together, this science—and the broader attribution science that preceded it—are building a clear scientific case for climate accountability," he concluded.
Several US states and municipalities in recent years have launched lawsuits and passed legislation designed to make Big Oil pay for driving the deadly climate emergency—and earlier this year, drawing on an essay in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, an American woman filed the first climate-related wrongful death suit against fossil fuel companies.
In a Wednesday statement to The Guardian about the new study, Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said that "we can now point to specific heatwaves and say: 'Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this.'"
"When their emissions alone are triggering heatwaves that wouldn't have happened otherwise," she added, "we're talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us': Scientists Publish Sweeping Review of Industry Harms
"We've got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools, and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy," said one co-author.
Mar 31, 2025
"The evidence is clear that fossil fuels—and the fossil fuel industry and its enablers—are driving a multitude of interlinked crises that jeopardize the breadth and stability of life on Earth."
That's the first line of the abstract for an article published Monday by top scientists who reviewed "the vast scientific evidence showing that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are the root cause of the climate crisis, harm public health, worsen environmental injustice, accelerate biodiversity extinction, and fuel the petrochemical pollution crisis."
The new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Climate Change highlights the diverse impacts of "every stage of the fossil fuel life cycle" and stresses that the "industry has obscured and concealed this evidence through a decadeslong, multibillion-dollar disinformation campaign aimed at blocking action to phase out" its deadly products.
"The fossil fuel industry has spent decades misleading us about the harms of their products and working to prevent meaningful climate action," said co-author Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, in a statement. "Perversely, our governments continue to give out hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to this damaging industry. It is past time that stops."
"The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure."
While the researchers focused on the United States, "as the world's largest oil and gas producer and dominant contributor to these fossil fuel crises," their review—including proposed "science-and-justice-based solutions" for an economywide effort to "forge a path forward to sustaining life on Earth"—applies to the whole world, which is quickly heating up due to emissions from coal, gas, and oil.
The article features sections on the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, public health harms, environmental injustice, biodiversity loss and extinction, petrochemical pollution, and industry disinformation. Each section lays out the "problem" and "solutions."
The climate emergency section includes details such as "the production and combustion of oil, gas, and coal are responsible for nearly 90% of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and approximately 79% of total greenhouse gas emissions," and "failures in political will to implement necessary climate action have made the 1.5°C benchmark nearly impossible to achieve without overshoot," referring to a primary goal of the 2015 Paris agreement.
Although the current U.S. administration has demonstrated its alliance to the fossil fuel industry—including with President Donald Trump's recent energy emergency declaration—the scientists still emphasized what's possible in the country.
"In the USA, powerful policy levers are available to governments and civil society at the local, state, national, and international levels to phase out fossil fuels and transition to a clean, renewable energy economy," they wrote. "These levers include regulation (e.g. applying and enforcing existing laws), legislation (e.g. polluters pay laws, fossil fuel subsidy reform, land use laws limiting drilling), and litigation (e.g. holding fossil fuel companies accountable, defending existing law)."
They also warned that "last-ditch efforts to prolong the fossil fuel industry are proliferating. These include counterproductive false solutions, like carbon capture and storage (CCS), which would perpetuate fossil fuel use while capturing only some of the resulting emissions, and hydrogen made from fossil fuels."
The public health section notes that "air pollution from fossil fuel combustion accounts for 8.7 million (equaling 1 in 5) premature deaths per year worldwide and 350,000 premature deaths per year in the USA. In a single year, air pollution from oil and gas production in the USA resulted in 410,000 asthma exacerbations, 2,200 new cases of childhood asthma, and 7,500 premature deaths in 2016."
Co-author David J.X. González, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, said Monday that "we've got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy."
"Oil, gas, and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions, and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past."
The paper points out that "climate change is increasing incidence of physical and mental health impacts and mortality through multiple pathways: worsening extreme events including heatwaves, severe storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires; shifting ranges of disease vectors; threats to food security; and displacement and forced migration, which restrict access to healthcare and other basic services."
"These harms, though broadly felt, also disproportionately impact marginalized communities which are already disproportionately burdened by other socioenvironmental hazards, as well as susceptible populations including young children, people with certain disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, pregnant people, people with chronic diseases, and older adults," the publication continues.
University of Montana associate professor of environmental studies Robin Saha, another co-author, said that "decades of discriminatory policies, such as redlining, have concentrated fossil fuel development in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor white communities, resulting in devastating consequences."
"For far too long, these fenceline communities have been treated as sacrifice zones by greedy, callous industries," Saha added. "The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure."
The paper's other co-authors are Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University, Boston University's Jonathan J. Buonocore and Mary D. Willis, Trisia Farrelly of the Cawthron Institute, William Ripple of Oregon State University, and the Center for Biological Diversity's Nathan Donley, John Fleming, and Shaye Wolf.
"The science can't be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us," declared Wolf, the paper's lead author and the center's climate science director. "Oil, gas, and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions, and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past. Clean, renewable energy is here, it's affordable, and it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars once we make it the centerpiece of our economy."
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Supreme Court Rejects Big Oil Attacks on Hawaii Climate Lawsuit
"With this latest denial, the fossil fuel industry's worst nightmare—having to face the overwhelming evidence of their decades of calculated climate deception—is closer than ever to becoming a reality," said one advocate.
Jan 13, 2025
Climate campaigners and scientists on Monday welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to reject attempts by fossil fuel giants to quash the Hawaii capital's lawsuit aiming to hold the major polluters accountable for the devastating impacts of their products.
"This is a significant day for the people of Honolulu and the rule of law," Ben Sullivan, executive director and chief resilience officer at the City and County of Honolulu's Office of Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resiliency, said in a statement.
"This landmark decision upholds our right to enforce Hawaii laws in Hawaii courts, ensuring the protection of Hawaii taxpayers and communities from the immense costs and consequences of the climate crisis caused by the defendants misconduct," he added.
Honolulu first sued companies including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Sunoco in March 2020. The companies have fought to shut down the case—like dozens of other climate liability lawsuits that states and municipalities have filed against Big Oil at the state level.
Shell and Sunoco led a pair of appeals to the Supreme Court, arguing that Honolulu's suit was "a blueprint for chaos" because it could inform other legal actions against fossil fuel companies and such cases "could threaten the energy industry." Similar to three previous decisions, the justices declined to intervene.
Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles connected Monday's victory to the other cases, saying in a statement that "Big Oil companies keep fighting a losing battle to avoid standing trial for their climate lies."
"With this latest denial, the fossil fuel industry's worst nightmare—having to face the overwhelming evidence of their decades of calculated climate deception—is closer than ever to becoming a reality," Wiles continued. "Communities everywhere are paying dearly for the massive damages caused by Big Oil's decadeslong climate deception. The people of Honolulu and communities across the country deserve their day in court to hold these companies accountable."
Delta Merner, lead scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Science Hub for Climate Litigation, similarly celebrated the decision, which she called "a resounding affirmation of Honolulu's right to seek justice under state law for the mounting climate impacts caused by fossil fuel companies' deceptive practices."
"For more than 50 years, fossil fuel companies have conducted sophisticated disinformation campaigns to obscure their own research showing that burning fossil fuels would drive climate change," Merner highlighted. "This case lays bare how these actions have contributed to rising seas, intensified storms, and coastal erosion that are devastating Honolulu's people, infrastructure, and natural resources."
"Scientific evidence is unequivocal: The human-caused emissions from fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change," she stressed. "Honolulu's case stands as an example of how communities are using both science and the law to challenge corporate misconduct and demand accountability for climate damages."
Merner added that "the people of Honolulu are demonstrating remarkable leadership in standing up to powerful fossil fuel companies whose disinformation campaigns have directly contributed to the climate harms they now face. Their efforts serve as a powerful example for communities around the world. This decision is one step in a larger effort to seek accountability and justice."
The Supreme Court's latest blow to the oil and gas industry came just a week before the second inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who courted Big Oil executives on the campaign trail and pledged to "drill, baby, drill" if he won the November election.
The high court—which has a right-wing supermajority that includes three Trump appointees—had asked the Biden administration to weigh in. Last month, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar
urged the justices not to intervene. Merner said at the time that her briefs "represent an important step in the pursuit of climate accountability."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Killer CEOs of Big Oil
Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week it's horrifying to look out and see the world they are creating for the rest of us.
Jan 11, 2025
Public Citizen would like you to know that there are killers among us.
They wear $2,000 suits and travel in private jets, unbothered by the TSA or the teeming masses. Their children attend the finest universities in the world, and they vacation on private islands and yachts. Many “earn” more in a day than most Americans take home in a year; their positions ensure their heirs will never have to work a day in their lives.
Their fortunes are the result of poisoning you, me, our children and grandchildren, every other living thing on Earth, and destroying the temperature stability of our atmosphere. This week they’re arguably responsible, in part, for billions of dollars in losses, numerous deaths, and thousands of shattered lives in Southern California.
Illegitimate president-elect Trump is trying his best to cover for them, claiming that the fires ripping through the Los Angeles area are the fault of California’s Democratic governor, calling Gavin Newsome by a childish name to draw more attention to Trump’s efforts on behalf of the Republican Party’s most generous donors.
Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.
Mainstream media is largely going along with Trump’s charade, choosing not to even mention — in the vast majority of their reports on the crisis — the role of climate change in the fires. And never, G-d forbid, mentioning the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate change that has turned these fires from an annual nuisance into a hellscape.
It’s as frankly absurd as a TV news person reporting on a plane crash and, instead of asking aviation experts what caused it, simply lifting their collective shoulders with a helpless “shit happens” shrug.
But these fires — and the droughts and changing weather patterns that made them so severe — aren’t something that just happens by random happenstance, any more than an airliner crash.
And the oil industry has known for decades this day was coming.
In November, 1959, the famous scientist Edward Teller — the “Father of the H-Bomb” — was the keynote speaker at a conference on “The Energy of the Future” in New York, organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. The news he conveyed to the assembled oil industry executives was stark:
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect ...
“It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
This shocking news apparently provoked a scramble in the oil industry, probably similar to when the asbestos industry learned in the 1930s that their product caused lung cancer (the mesothelioma that killed my father), or in 1939 when the tobacco industry learned that smoking also killed people.
They set out to determine if Teller’s prediction was true. He’d predicted that CO2 levels would reach the point where they’d begin to seriously melt the polar and Greenland ice caps and alter weather patterns within a few decades, telling the oil executives at that 1959 meeting:
“At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the [heat] radiation leaving the earth.”
For the next decade, industry scientists went to work along with studies commissioned by major universities. One of the most well-known was a 1968 report the American Petroleum Institute hired the Stanford Research Institute to conduct. Its findings corroborated Teller’s prediction:
“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. ... there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. ... pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”
It was the first of dozens of studies the industry paid for or knew about, all predicting pretty much exactly what’s happening right now in Los Angeles, including major reports in 1979, 1982, and 1991.
And then the “climate denial” began.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their oil companies funded think tanks to promote skepticism, pushed frontmen onto radio and TV to claim that climate scientists and people like Al Gore were “in it for the money,” and began funding the campaigns of politicians willing to exchange the future habitability of the planet for a few decades of power and wealth.
In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented decades of internal industry memos and strategy sessions that were organizing, funding, and detailing roughly three decades of lies foisted on the American Public. The industry and its executives’ efforts were all, apparently, in the service of preserving their income stream and avoiding any liability for the deaths they knew would one day come as a result of their product poisoning our atmosphere.
And now that day is here. Oil industry executives and fossil fuel billionaires are the hands holding the smoking gun of climate change that have directly or indirectly caused tens of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced worldwide over the past two decades. And now the fires in southern California.
Two-thirds of voters, according to a 2024 poll, believe the fossil fuel industry and its pampered executives should be held civilly responsible for the damage climate change is causing, and a plurality want them to face criminal charges.
Public Citizen published a 2023 report titled “Charging Big Oil with Climate Homicide,” including legal rationales and possible strategies for holding the killers in suits accountable by state and local prosecutors.
Will Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or California Attorney General Rob Bonta have the courage to hold these companies and/or their executives accountable for the lies and deceptions they’ve funded that this week are killing Angelinos?
Will enough people call their members of Congress at 202-224-3121 to provoke investigations that could lead to congressional action?
Will our media ever begin to call out Trump and the alleged climate lies and deceptions of the industry that owns him?
Keep ReadingShow Less
ExxonMobil Plans to Keep an Entire Generation on the Hook for Its Climate Destruction
Public pensions must exit Exxon to protect workers' savings and retirement.
Nov 22, 2024
It is no secret that ExxonMobil poses some of the most powerful opposition to climate action at every level of government. Environmentalists have long pointed out that Exxon Knew about climate change, and instead of pivoting their business model to a more sustainable energy future, buried the evidence and began a decades-long disinformation campaign.
Leaders across the country have wisened up to the oil major's dirty politics, which is why the House Oversight Committee has been investigating Exxon and its peers, and state attorneys general have sued the company for damages. Most recently, California AG Rob Bonta, alongside environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, sued the company for lying to the public about the recyclability of plastics.
If the tide is turning against Exxon, why haven't investors caught on?
Unrestricted funding for companies engaged in fossil fuel expansion threatens workers' right to dignified retirement safety, a right that unions have fought hard to win.
ExxonMobil sparked headlines and investor outrage this spring when the company sued its own shareholders over a climate-related shareholder resolution. Public pensions representing trillions in worker savings across the country pushed back and mounted a vote-no effort against CEO Darren Woods and Director Joseph Hooley, but Wall Street asset managers watered down their efforts instead offering unwavering support of Exxon.
To add insult to injury, Woods made an appearance at the Council of Institutional Investors—a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for the investor rights of public, union, and private employee benefit funds—in September. There, he promised to continue to crack down on "extreme" investors who are concerned that the company's business model has loaded the economy with systemic financial risks and instability. Never mind that such a definition of extreme would describe many of the institutions present, which represent over 15 million workers and $5 trillion in assets under management.
But perhaps most indicative of ExxonMobil's commitment to business-as-usual pollution is the bonds they've issued this fall, with a maturity date of 2074.
These long-dated bonds represent unrestricted funds for ExxonMobil to continue to pursue fossil fuel expansion and plastic pollution well past most of the world's—and investors'—Net Zero by 2050 goals. This is an especially risky gamble for investors with long-term obligations, including public pension funds that manage millions of workers' retirement savings.
Not only is the future of oil and gas uncertain, but prolonged pollution wrought by disinformation and investor cash increases economy-wide systemic risks. Investors—and the everyday people who rely on institutions to manage their savings—will be left holding the purse strings as climate change wreaks havoc. Moreover, bond ownership does not come with the shareholder rights investors hope to use to influence company behavior. This gives Exxon complete freedom to use the funds however it wishes, even if that's out of alignment with investor interests.
This increasing risk is why we joined California Common Good and pension beneficiaries to testify during a recent CalPERS Board meeting to ask CalPERS to issue a moratorium on purchasing Exxon bonds.
The Sierra Club represents millions of members, many of whom are saving for retirement in the face of an uncertain future and working tirelessly to protect the communities and places they love. Whether relying on a public pension plan or a private asset manager, our members rely on investment professionals to keep their futures in mind. Unrestricted funding for companies engaged in fossil fuel expansion threatens workers' right to dignified retirement safety, a right that unions have fought hard to win. That's why we call on investors, particularly public pension funds, to refuse to participate in Exxon's bond issuances.
Keep ReadingShow Less
It’s Not Enough to Blame ‘Climate Change’ for Disasters Like Helene and Milton
Decades of lies from big oil and gas companies created the climate emergency and are still fueling it today.
Oct 15, 2024
For years, linking climate change to the growing destructive power of hurricanes was off limits for mainstream media. Now the connection is undeniable. Massive in size, rapidly intensifying, loaded with unprecedented rainfall, and firing off fatal tornadoes, the link between a warmer world and monster hurricanes like Helene and Milton is impossible to ignore—though too much coverage still does.
But even when news stories tell us that “climate change” is causing these rapidly intensifying storms, they are only telling us half the story. Climate change is not just the fuel for these disasters, it is also the result of the decades of lies from big oil and gas companies that created the climate emergency and are still fueling it today.
Scientists from ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel majors told executives decades ago that unabated use of their products could cause “catastrophic” climate disasters. Instead of sounding the alarm, the oil and gas industry launched the most consequential campaign of lies in human history, on a scale far worse and more damaging than anything before. They funded junk science, polluted our politics, and ran massive advertising campaigns all with the goal of stopping any action that could threaten their bottom line. Our climate crisis is the result of that deception, as are the super-charged hurricanes, deadly heatwaves, and mega wildfires that we now face because Big Oil stole decades from humanity that we can never get back.
The problem with only blaming “climate change” for killer weather events is that it leaves out how exactly we got into this mess—and who is responsible.
If we talk only about “climate change” during these disasters, we forgo a critical teaching moment when millions are open to learning about an issue that typically commands almost no attention at all. As painful as they are, the moments when deadly storms have our attention are precisely the times we need to talk about the elephant in the room: the fossil fuel industry. The longer we avoid the issue, the more violent these storms will become, because the industry has not stopped lying and is doubling down on the products fueling the crisis. Now that climate change is everywhere, fossil fuel companies don’t so much deny the problem as they promote “solutions” they know are bogus, like “natural gas,” which is roughly as bad for the climate as coal, or carbon capture, which is laughable as a solution in the timeframe and scale that is needed, not to mention that to date it has been used primarily to extract even more oil.
The problem with only blaming “climate change” for killer weather events is that it leaves out how exactly we got into this mess—and who is responsible. Climate change doesn’t have lobbyists, doesn’t have executives making decisions, cannot be investigated, and cannot be held accountable in the courts. As long as climate change is seen as the cause of all extreme weather destruction, the oil industry can continue pretending to be part of the solution.
It was the oil and gas industry, not climate change, that created widespread climate denial and turned climate action into a partisan political issue. It was the oil and gas industry, not climate change, that successfully blocked ratification of the Kyoto Treaty in 1998, killed Waxman-Markey in 2009, and watered down the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, ensuring the law would not place limits on climate pollution or in any way slow the expansion of the U.S. oil and gas industry.
This focus on a causal agent that can never be held accountable spawns a spectrum of negative consequences. It shields the true cause, the lying oil and gas majors, from any form of accountability. Instead of the oil and gas majors being forced to pay their fair share for disaster recovery, we hear calls for more FEMA funding, which is merely taxpayers footing the bill. And instead of reckoning with the fact that some of those who died would very likely still be alive were these storms not radically amplified by fossil fuel emissions made possible by companies who have lied about just about every aspect of their role in causing the problem, we act as if there can be no accountability for these deaths.
The question is not, “Did climate change make these two hurricanes more destructive?” We already know that along with climate change comes more powerful and deadly storms. The question is, who and what caused climate change? The answer to that question is right before us.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Disrupting Punchbowl News Event, Climate Advocates Say Exxon 'Should Have No Place at the DNC'
"Instead of fossil fuel profits, Democrats must prioritize making the world a healthier, more equitable place," said DNC member RL Miller, who disrupted the event declaring "Exxon lied and people died."
Aug 21, 2024
Climate campaigners on Wednesday called out and even disrupted a Punchbowl News event on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago because it was sponsored by fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil.
"Companies like Exxon should have no place at the DNC," said Sunrise Movement communications director Stevie O'Hanlon in a statement. "Exxon has spent decades misleading the public about the climate crisis and buying off politicians. If the Democratic Party wants to be taken seriously by our generation on climate change, they need to walk the talk."
Oil Change U.S. political director Collin Rees pointed out that "no major oil and gas company is pledging to do the bare minimum to prevent climate chaos."
"Fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil are moving in the opposite direction of the Democratic Party, whose platform is clear on the need to end public money for oil and gas production," he continued. "ExxonMobil continues to invest billions in new oil and gas, all while spreading misinformation and lobbying against meaningful climate policies. Exxon should have no platform at the DNC."
Rees joined DNC member RL Miller of California and Climate Defiance in disrupting the Wednesday event. Video shows that as Miller was escorted out by men who appeared to be security, she explained that "I am here because Exxon lied and people died."
"We call on party leaders and attendees to end the involvement of fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil in the political process."
Congressional, journalistic, and scholarly research has exposed how ExxonMobil knew decades ago that fossil fuels would drive climate chaos but continued to cash in on their products anyway while spreading disinformation. The company is included in various climate liability lawsuits and some Democrats on Capitol Hill have recently demanded a federal probe.
Ahead of the Wednesday action, Miller, the political director of Climate Hawks Vote, highlighted the close ties between the fossil fuel industry and the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump—who earlier this year told a room of Big Oil executives that he would roll back the Biden-Harris administration's climate policies if they invested just $1 billion into getting him elected.
"ExxonMobil and Donald Trump have already committed to each other—so why is the company sneaking around the DNC?" she asked. "We call on party leaders and attendees to end the involvement of fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil in the political process."
Miller specifically directed pressure at the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris—who has broad support from the climate movement—and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who has also been welcomed by green groups, despite his record on the Line 3 pipeline and Indigenous-led opposition to it.
"Instead, our government must deliver clean, affordable energy that is tailored to our communities, supports workers to transition to new jobs, and helps regions that have been deliberately sacrificed to toxic pollution and climate chaos," she said. "Instead of fossil fuel profits, Democrats must prioritize making the world a healthier, more equitable place and electing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable."
The Punchbowl event featured a "pop-up conversation" with Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) and Vijay Swarup, ExxonMobil's senior director climate strategy and technology. The daylong event also had an appearance by Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and other sponsors included Duke Energy.
In response to the news outlet sharing a photo from the event on social media, Miller said: "Yeah. That's what I disrupted and I'd do it again in a heartbeat."
"The DNC is devoted to solving the climate crisis, not propping up DINOs like Lizzie Fletcher," she added, using the shorthand for "Democrat in name only."
Climate Defiance blasted Fletcher—first elected in 2018—in a series of posts, highlighting that she has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry during her career.
"Lizzie co-chairs the Natural Gas Caucus, and, since that isn't enough, also belongs to the Oil and Gas Caucus as well. She literally cannot get enough of her fossil fuels," Climate Defiance said.
"Lizzie's voting record is garbo. Utter garbo," the group continued. "She voted AGAINST the bill cracking down on Big Oil's price gouging. She voted AGAINST a bill requiring companies to merely disclose their climate risk. She voted AGAINST the bill protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."
Kate Aronoff, a climate reporter at The New Republic, took aim at Punchbowl—which has previously faced criticism for allowing fossil fuel interests to buy advertising in its newsletter—with a sarcastic response to the social media post.
The event came just two days after the Democratic Party platform was finalized. Lukas Ross, deputy climate and energy director at Friends of the Earth Action, pointed out Wednesday that "the DNC platform rightly calls for the repeal of $110 billion in fossil fuel subsidies that have lined Big Oil's pockets for decades."
"Dinosaurs like ExxonMobil are scared of losing their precious tax loopholes under a Harris administration," he said, nodding to revelations from a Greenpeace reporter posing as a corporate recruiter while speaking with an Exxon leader in 2021. "Any fossil fuel company looking to peddle influence in Chicago should be shown the door."
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy