[Senate Hearing 118-294]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                        S. Hrg. 118-294

                DENIAL, DISINFORMATION, AND DOUBLESPEAK:
                  BIG OIL'S EVOLVING EFFORTS TO AVOID
                   ACCOUNTABILITY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE
                               
                        COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET
                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             SECOND SESSION

                               __________

                              May 1, 2024

                               __________

           Printed for the use of the Committee on the Budget
           
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                   U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
55-698                     WASHINGTON : 2024                    
          
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                        COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET

               SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island, Chairman
PATTY MURRAY, Washington             CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa
RON WYDEN, Oregon                    MIKE CRAPO, Idaho
DEBBIE STABENOW, Michigan            LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina
BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont             RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
MARK R. WARNER, Virginia             MITT ROMNEY, Utah
JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon                 ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
TIM KAINE, Virginia                  MIKE BRAUN, Indiana
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland           JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico            RICK SCOTT, Florida
ALEX PADILLA, California             MIKE LEE, Utah

                   Dan Dudis, Majority Staff Director
        Kolan Davis, Republican Staff Director and Chief Counsel
                   Mallory B. Nersesian, Chief Clerk 
                  Alexander C. Scioscia, Hearing Clerk
                            
                            
                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                         WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 2024
                OPENING STATEMENTS BY COMMITTEE MEMBERS

                                                                   Page
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Chairman.............................  1,45
    Prepared Statement...........................................    49
Senator Charles E. Grassley......................................  4,42
    Prepared Statement...........................................    52

                    STATEMENTS BY COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Senator Ben Ray Lujan............................................    12
Senator John Kennedy............................................. 14,38
Senator Tim Kaine................................................    17
Senator Ron Johnson..............................................    19
Senator Chris Van Hollen.........................................    21
Senator Jeff Merkley............................................. 23,41
Senator Bernard Sanders..........................................    37
Senator Alex Padilla.............................................    44

                               WITNESSES

Hon. Jamie Raskin (MD-8), Ranking Member, Committee on Oversight 
  and Responsibility, U.S. House of Representatives..............     7
    Prepared Statement...........................................    55
Ms. Sharon Eubanks, Former Director, Tobacco Litigation Team, 
  U.S. Department of Justice.....................................    30
    Prepared Statement...........................................    60
    Addendum.....................................................    63
Mr. Geoffrey Supran, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Environmental 
  Science and Policy, and Director, Climate Accountability Lab, 
  University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, 
  and Earth Science..............................................    27
    Prepared Statement...........................................    84
Dr. Ariel Cohen, Senior Fellow, The Atlantic Council, and, 
  Managing Director, Energy, Growth, and Security Program, 
  International Tax Investment Center............................    32
    Prepared Statement...........................................   340
Mr. Michael Ratner, Specialist in Energy Policy, Congressional 
  Research Service...............................................    35
    Prepared Statement...........................................   354

                                APPENDIX

Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record
    Hon. Raskin..................................................   357
    Ms. Eubanks..................................................   358
    Dr. Supran...................................................   359
    Dr. Cohen....................................................   379
Charts submitted by Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse..................   381
Statement submitted for the Record by Senator Jeff Merkley.......   386
Statement submitted for the Record by Senator Chris Van Hollen...   460
Statement submitted for the Record by Senator John Kennedy.......   464
Documents submitted for the Record by Hon. Jamie Raskin..........   468

 
                      DENIAL, DISINFORMATION, AND
                         DOUBLESPEAK: BIG OIL'S
                       EVOLVING EFFORTS TO AVOID
                   ACCOUNTABILITY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE

                              ----------                              


                         WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 2024

                                           Committee on the Budget,
                                                       U.S. Senate,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The hearing was convened, pursuant to notice, at 9:02 a.m., 
in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room SD-216, Hon. 
Sheldon Whitehouse, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
    Present: Senators Whitehouse, Sanders, Merkley, Kaine, Van 
Hollen, Lujan, Padilla, Grassley, Johnson, Braun, Kennedy and 
R. Scott.
    Also present: Democratic Staff: Dan Dudis, Majority Staff 
Director; Jonathan Misk, Director of Oversight and Senior 
Counsel; Melissa Kaplan-Pistiner, General Counsel; Aria 
Kovalovich, Senior Investigator.
    Republican Staff: Chris Conlin, Deputy Staff Director; 
Krisann Pearce, General Counsel; Jordan Pakula, Professional 
Staff Member; Ryan Flynn, Budget Analyst.
    Panel One Witness:
    The Honorable Jamie Raskin (MD-8), Ranking Member, 
Committee on Oversight and Accountability, U.S. House of 
Representatives
    Panel Two Witnesses:
     Ms. Sharon Eubanks, Former Director, Tobacco Litigation 
Team, U.S. Department of Justice
    Mr. Geoffrey Supran, Ph.D., Associate Professor, 
Environmental Science and Policy, and Director, Climate 
Accountability Lab, University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of 
Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science
    Dr. Ariel Cohen, Senior Fellow, The Atlantic Council, and 
Managing Director, Energy, Growth, and Security Program, 
International Tax Investment Center
    Mr. Michael Ratner, Specialist in Energy Policy, 
Congressional Research Service

          OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN WHITEHOUSE \1\
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    \1\ Prepared statement of Chairman Whitehouse appears in the 
appendix on page 49.
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    Chairman Whitehouse. Good morning, everyone. I call to 
order this hearing of the Senate Budget Committee. Today's 
hearing is entitled ``Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: 
Big Oil's Evolving Efforts to Afford Accountability for Climate 
Change.''
    Today's hearing will feature two panels with a short 10-
minute break between them. The first panel will feature one 
witness and the second panel will feature four. While we will 
get to formal witness introductions shortly, I would express my 
appreciation to Congressman Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the 
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, for appearing 
before us today.
    In terms of process, Ranking Member Grassley and I will 
each have 15 minutes for opening remarks. Witnesses will have 
up to 10 minutes each to deliver their oral testimony and 
Senators will, as usual, have 5 minutes each for questions. 
With that, I turn to my opening remarks.
    Ranking Member Grassley, members of the Committee, 
witnesses, and guests, welcome. It has not gone unnoticed that 
my Republican colleagues disapprove of my work as Budget 
Committee Chairman to warn about the economic and budgetary 
dangers of disruption to our climate by fossil fuel emissions. 
But the warnings are deadly serious across multiple vectors of 
danger.
    The witnesses we brought in were often accomplished experts 
with fiduciary responsibilities. Yet, the response, almost 
without fail, was mockery or changing the subject. Perhaps my 
friends are right. Perhaps history will show that climate 
upheaval caused by fossil fuel emissions won't have any serious 
economic impact on our economy or our budget.
    Perhaps history will show that the economic shocks from the 
mortgage meltdown and from COVID, which produced a third of our 
national debt, don't pre-figure an even worse economic shock 
from our failure of stewardship on climate. Perhaps, but I 
doubt it. I believe the economic danger is deadly real. You all 
have your views and I have mine, and time will tell. History 
will judge us.
    In the meantime, I will try to fend off as best I can from 
this chair the massive economic shocks we've been warned of. 
Economic shock from disruptions in agriculture and shipping 
whose early signals we already see in grocery store aisles. 
Economic shock from unprecedented storm and wildfire damage 
already burdening our emergency funding needs. Economic shock 
from collapsing insurance markets already stressed in Florida, 
Louisiana, coastal Texas, and California. And global economic 
shock from the carbon bubble bursting and a fossil fuel 
industry stubbornly oblivious to the dangers.
    The obvious way to fend off these economic shocks is to 
head off the cause of those shocks, fossil fuel emissions. To 
head off that cause, we have to understand, first, what is 
protecting enormous fossil fuel subsidies now pegged at 
approximately $750 billion per year in America. And second, 
what is preventing us from adopting policies to prevent the 
worst dangers? That's what this hearing is about because what 
is protecting the massive fossil fuel subsidies and what is 
preventing policies to reduce the danger is the same thing, the 
fossil fuel industry itself.
    And when I say ``itself,'' I include its apparatus of 
political influence, its armada of front groups spreading 
disinformation, and its rivers of political dark money made 
possible by the Citizens United decision.
    This hearing looks at what the industry's own documents 
reveal. That is why Ranking Member Raskin is here today. Two 
and a half years ago, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed 
documents from four oil companies and two fossil fuel trade 
associations about their response to climate change. After much 
delay and obstruction, the six entities produced more than two 
million pages of documents.
    During the 117th Congress, the Oversight Committee held 
three hearings and released two public memoranda setting out 
its initial findings. But more than a million pages of those 
documents were not reviewed. This hearing is drawn from those 
unreviewed documents.
    Yesterday, Ranking Member Raskin made public approximately 
4,500 new documents of interest from this latest review, 
exposing new details about the fossil fuel industry's decades-
long campaign of denial and deception. The collective record 
shows the fossil fuel industry going through four phases.
    Phase 1 was its own scientists warning very clearly and 
accurately about the climate dangers from unchecked fossil fuel 
emissions. Fossil fuel industry scientists began ringing 
climate alarm bells nearly 65 years ago. In one example, the 
American Petroleum Institute had physicist Edward Teller of 
Oppenheimer fame report that continued fossil fuel combustion 
could raise sea level dozens of feet. The year was 1959. In 
another, an Exxon senior scientist in 1977 reported to Exxon's 
Management Committee ``general scientific agreement'' that 
burning fossil fuels was changing the Earth's climate. There 
were many such warnings.
    Phase 2 was the industry looking at what those warnings 
meant for profits and setting up an elaborate, covert operation 
to undermine the very science its own scientists had revealed 
and to bring industry influence to bear in politics to prevent 
any remedies. It set up an armada of front groups depicted in 
this graphic.\2\
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    \2\ Chart submitted by Chairman Whitehouse appears in the appendix 
on page 374.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Phase 3 was the hoax phase. Using that elaborate, covert 
operation to spread lies that climate change was a hoax, that 
the science wasn't settled, and that remedies would do more 
harm than good. In it's now infamous 1998 ``Victory Memo'', API 
wrote that victory will be achieved when average citizens 
``understand, recognize uncertainties in climate science with 
the stated goal that climate change becomes a nonissue.'' The 
Victory Memo laid out a massive campaign to spend millions of 
dollars, but climate change would not become a nonissue. It 
began to wreak visible havoc around the world. The hoax 
strategy collapsed and Big Oil had to evolve from denial to 
duplicity.
    This hearing documents Phase 4, the industry pivoting to 
pretending it is taking climate change seriously while secretly 
undermining its own publicly stated goals. Phase 4 is nominally 
expressing alignment with the Paris Agreement climate goals 
while internally making them unachievable. Phase 4 is stating 
emissions reduction targets too far out to matter and 
internally not taking the steps necessary to meet them. Phase 4 
is advertising your interest in climate safety technologies, 
but refusing to put the investments behind them to make them 
real.
    Phase 4, put simply, is ``Climate Denial lite.'' A green-
leaning cover for the industry's continued covert operation 
through dark money, phony front groups, false economics, and 
relentless exertion of political influence to block meaningful 
climate safety progress.
    Our investigation uncovered public pledges undermined by 
private memos. Public support for climate policies contradicted 
by private emails. Rampant evidence of deception and corporate 
double speak. Here's how it went. Play the tape.
    (Video plays)
    Chairman Whitehouse. Give us a moment to get through the 
technical difficulties and we'll get back to the tape.
    (Technical difficulties)
    Chairman Whitehouse. Sorry, somehow, we have lost the 
projector behind us, so we will resume playing only on the two 
screens that are over here at the side of the room. My 
apologies for the technical mishap.
    (Video continues)
    Chairman Whitehouse. My apologies to colleagues for the 
extra time it took to solve the technical difficulties. I turn 
now to Ranking Member Grassley.

           OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR GRASSLEY \3\
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    \3\ Prepared statement of Senator Grassley appears in the appendix 
on page 52.
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    Senator Grassley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to air 
some disappointment that I have regarding the process of this 
hearing and underlying documents.
    When I was Chairman of Finance during the Biden 
investigation, I ensured that Ranking Member Wyden possessed 
investigative records as they were produced. I also ensured 
that Wyden's staff had access to the Trump Justice Department 
classified facility to review records. Also, when I was Ranking 
Member of Judiciary last Congress, Chairman Durbin ensured that 
my staff possessed records during his Trump investigation. 
Those are examples of how I have handled investigations and 
what was expected over the decades.
    Regarding the matter before us today, since August of last 
year, and at times after that, my staff have asked the Majority 
staff about possessing records and whether they'd issue a 
report. My staff never received an answer. This past Sunday, 8 
months after, we finally received a copy of these records. 
Those records were obtained from House Democrats. On Tuesday 
morning, the Majority issued a joint staff report with House 
Democrats. The Majority failed to inform the Minority that they 
were working with House Democrats on a report.
    And the Washington Post published a story of this report 
before I received it from Majority staff. So, the Majority gave 
the report to outside interests before giving it to members of 
the Committee. The Majority could have been transparent with 
the Minority many months ago, as is normal course of business. 
The Majority chose not to do so. This unfortunate series of 
nontransparent events have undone years of investigative 
precedent and around here I think process matters, equitable 
treatment matters. The Majority has now created a new 
investigative precedent and I will keep that in mind as my 
investigations move forward.
    Now, to the work of today's hearing and the work of the 
Budget Committee and my usual comments about what the Budget 
Committee ought to be doing and how climate change does or does 
not work into it. But I always like to remind people about my 
efforts of alternative energy. Thirty-one years ago, I was the 
author of the Wind Energy Tax Credit, so I was for a time 
called the Father of the Wind Energy Tax Credit. I guess now 
I'm the grandfather of that tax credit.
    Anyway, that was before global warming and climate change 
became the big policy issue it was now. So, I like to think of 
myself as being a little bit ahead of it. Now, for the 16th 
time, the Budget Committee is holding a hearing related to 
climate change rather than the nation's dismal fiscal outlook. 
As I've said in the previous 15 hearings, the Budget Committee 
ought to focus on the budget, plain and simple.
    While this Committee continues to ignore our unprecedented 
deficit, these are all top of mind of my constituents back in 
Iowa. Over the break, I held 10 county meetings. In each and 
every one, Iowans voiced their dismay at the state of our 
nation's finances. They're furious about the Congress's utter 
lack of attention to our bloated federal budget, and they 
should be so concerned.
    Just last week, the Commerce Department released its 
economic update for the first quarter of 2024. This update 
obliterates the Biden Administration's fake talking points on 
how strong the economy is with inflation presumably contained 
and it's not. The Feds preferred measure of inflation ticked 
higher and now stands nearly double their 2 percent inflation 
target.
    At the same time, the economy grew far slower than 
expected, registering its weakest performance since first 
quarter of 2022. The Fed now finds itself between a rock and a 
hard place. The economy is weak, but surging inflation requires 
the Fed to maintain interest rates higher for longer, risking 
an era of stagflation.
    Left unchecked, our mounting national debt will 
increasingly put upward pressure on interest rates and 
inflation. This spells disaster for our economy and for the 
consumer's pocketbook. Interest on the national debt is already 
projected to cost the federal government more this year than 
what's spent on national defense. Now, higher than previously 
expected interest rates could cost us hundreds of billions more 
in interest on the national debt.
    Meanwhile, hardworking Americans will find themselves 
priced out of the American dream of homeownership thanks to sky 
high mortgage rates. At the same time embedded inflation means 
that they'll find it increasingly hard to make ends meet. It's 
no wonder Iowans are frustrated with Washington, D.C.'s lack of 
attention to our nation's fiscal policy. So, yes, the Budget 
Committee should focus on the budget.
    Climate legislation isn't referred to the Budget Committee. 
This Committee doesn't legislate climate change policy. 
Democrats would rather accuse oil companies of conspiracy and 
raise gas prices than work with Republicans to write a budget 
or acknowledge the unpopularity of many climate change 
policies.
    And all the electric vehicle (EV) cars sitting on dealer 
lots is evidence of these policies just not moving as people 
here in Washington, D.C. thought they would. What's worse is 
they assume the American people who don't want expensive and 
burdensome climate regulations are too dumb to think for 
themselves. I can't say what the fossil fuel industry has or 
hasn't done, although I recently just saw it on the video given 
to this Committee.
    Especially in the last two days, that is true that the 
Democrats have given me to review their thousands of pages of 
so-called evidence, but I have a long record of disagreeing 
with and tangling with Big Oil over various issues for three 
decades over ethanol as just one issue of alternative energy 
and also disagreeing with Big Oil on tax policies.
    But it's also undeniable that the fossil fuels are critical 
to our energy security and the energy security of our allies, 
and we surely know how critical it is to China because while 
we're cutting down on fossil fuel, they're building utility 
plants fired by coal quite regularly.
    We just appropriated $95 billion for a national security 
supplemental package to aid Ukraine to defend itself against 
Putin, also bolstering Taiwan's defenses to deter Chinese 
aggression and restock Israel's air defense capabilities. I 
voted for this package.
    I also want to congratulate you, Mr. Chairman and Senator 
Risch, for the inclusion of your repo for Ukrainians Act in 
this package. I strongly support your efforts to ensure Russian 
assets are repurposed for Ukrainian humanitarian assistance and 
reconstruction. Our nation and our allies need a stable and 
secure fossil fuel supply to stand up to the world's 
authoritarian dictators.
    Demonizing fossil fuels in the name of climate change won't 
bolster our allies' national security. And this Committee's 
failure to address our dire fiscal situation certainly won't 
help in that regard either. This is why I've invited two 
international energy experts to testify on the state of global 
energy security. So, we welcome Dr. Cohen and Mr. Ratner. I 
hope your testimony turns this spectacle into a learning 
opportunity and I welcome all of today's witnesses, including 
our colleague from the House of Representatives.
    And Mr. Chairman, because of Finance, I'm going to be in 
and out of this hearing, so I can go across the hall and ask 
questions.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Understood. And I thank my Ranking 
Member for his statement. We don't always agree, but I do 
always admire him. And I now turn to our first panel, which 
features just one witness, a very distinguished one. 
Congressman Jamie Raskin needs no introduction. Representing 
Maryland's Eighth Congressional District in the House of 
Representatives, Congressman Raskin serves as the Ranking 
Member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
    During the 117th Congress, Representative Raskin served as 
Chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil 
Liberties of the House Oversight Committee. He was also a 
member of the Judiciary Committee, the Committee on House 
Administration, the Rules Committee, the Select Committee on 
the Coronavirus Crisis, and the Select Committee to Investigate 
the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
    Prior to his election to the House, Congressman Raskin was 
a constitutional law professor at American University 
Washington College of Law for over 25 years, cofounding and 
directing the Latin Legum Magister (LL.M) Program on Law and 
Government.
    Mr. Raskin, thank you very much for taking time from your 
busy day to be here. You may proceed for 10 minutes.

   STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE JAMIE RASKIN, RANKING MEMBER, 
   COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY, U.S. HOUSE OF 
                      REPRESENTATIVES \4\
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    \4\ Prepared statement of Hon. Raskin appears in the appendix on 
page 55.
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    Representative Raskin. And thank you, Chairman Whitehouse, 
and thank you Senator Grassley, for your remarks and 
distinguished members of the Committee.
    In 2019, we called a hearing in House Oversight on what the 
oil and gas companies knew about climate change and when they 
knew it. Industry scientists and experts testified that the 
companies knew the burning of fossil fuels caused climate 
change as early as 1959, the year the first Barbie doll 
appeared in the United States, the year that Alaska and Hawaii 
were admitted to the Union. By the 1960s, before Neil Armstrong 
even walked on the moon, the science of global warming was well 
understood by Big Oil.
    Instead of telling the world about the perils of global 
warming, in changing their business model, the companies 
deliberately suppressed relevant scientific findings for 
decades and then challenged and dismissed urgent calls by 
scientists to take climate change seriously. Instead of acting 
like Paul Revere in sounding the alarm about climate change, 
the acted like Maleficent, the evil fairy in Sleeping Beauty, 
and cursed everyone to try to go to sleep for a hundred years.
    As the experts told us, Big Oil's pattern of lying and 
coverup set the country back decades in our ability to 
seriously address the problem. For three years, the House 
Oversight Committee has investigated Big Oil's six decades of 
climate deception. On September 16, 2021, we sent investigative 
letters to Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron, the American Petroleum 
Institute (API), and the Chamber of Commerce.
    Just yesterday, with your committee, we released our final 
report. Our investigation uncovered compelling evidence of 
aggressive industry deceit which continued long after Big Oil 
gave up on its outright climate denialism. The joint report and 
documents we discovered show how time and again the biggest oil 
and gas companies have talked a good game for purposes of 
public consumption, but have acted in a completely reckless way 
to protect their long-term profits in the carbon industry.
    Company officials admit the terrifying reality of their 
business model behind closed doors, but always manage to say 
something deceptive, false, and soothing to the public about 
climate change.
    Our investigation reveals Big Oil's denial, disinformation, 
and doublespeak, all to lull the public into complacency about 
the enormous climate emergency we are in and the role that Big 
Oil has played in bringing it about. We learned the fossil fuel 
companies made public pledges to support the Paris Agreement 
and achieve net zero emissions while internally recognizing 
that their actual practices would never allow them to achieve 
these goals.
    We found the companies' PR tactics mutated from simply 
denying climate science to spreading disinformation about the 
safety of natural gas and engaging in propaganda about their 
commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We learned 
they publicly broadcast and advertised their interest in low 
carbon technologies like carbon capture and algae-based 
biofuels while internally acknowledging that these pie-in-the-
sky technologies are expensive, difficult to scale, and simply 
not ready for commercial development.
    We consistently found that the oil and gas companies relied 
on trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute and 
the Chamber of Commerce to spread misleading narratives to the 
public and to lobby politically against effective climate 
solutions that they pretended to favor. We found they pumped 
$700 million into universities and academic research programs 
to influence pro-natural gas studies and findings over 
renewable energy solutions.
    The companies paid lip service to global environmental 
goals, but dismissed them as basically meaningless behind the 
scenes. BP's website states that it supports the goals of the 
2015 Paris Accord, but our investigation uncovered an email 
revealing that BP trivialized the Paris Agreement, stating that 
``No one is committed to anything other than to stay in the 
game.''
    So, instead of BP choosing to take the actual steps needed 
to reduce its vast contribution to carbon pollution, BP is 
instead, ``staying in the game of fossil fuels and carbon 
pollution.'' Spinning a fairytale about their commitment to 
renewable energy, fossil fuel companies have often advertised 
their commitment to low carbon technologies like Exxon's 
vaunted algae biofuels program. From 2009 to 2023, Exxon spent 
nearly half as much on advertising algae as a climate solution 
as it spent on actually researching and developing it.
    Our investigation revealed that Exxon's own employees 
raised concerns that the company's beautiful ads might 
mistakenly imply that ``the technology is live today,'' but it 
was never live. And indeed, Exxon ended up pulling up stakes on 
the whole project before it ever produced any energy. When you 
compare the actual investments in low carbon technologies to 
the company's overall expenditures, you see exactly what kind 
of priority this really is.
    Shell, for example, spent just 11 percent of its total 
capital expenditures on lower carbon technologies and Exxon and 
Chevron spent even less at 6 and 4 percent, respectively.
    We learned all of these damning facts, despite the 
companies setting up huge roadblocks to our investigation. In 
response to the Committee's initial letters in 2021, the 
companies only provided trivial and publicly available 
documents, so we sent them subpoenas. And even after being 
subpoenaed, the companies continued to block our investigation. 
They heavily redacted or withheld entire documents based on 
erroneous privilege claims. More than 4,000 documents came back 
to us substantially redacted.
    They also used a paper blizzard tactic by producing 
hundreds of thousands of generic and nonresponsive documents. 
Of the more than 280,000 produced, more than 125,000, nearly 
half, were mass emails, newsletters, and other fluff documents. 
If the companies had actually complied in good faith, who knows 
what else we might have discovered.
    During our probe, I've been struck by the parallels between 
Big Oil's aggressive denialism about climate change and the 
tobacco industry's suppression of the truth about tobacco 
addiction and the carcinogenic effects of smoking. More than 20 
years ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) brought a precedent 
shattering case against the cigarette companies. We learned 
about the massive decades-long disinformation campaign waged by 
Big Tobacco. And the companies were ordered to cease and desist 
their propaganda and to start telling the truth.
    Governments and people around the world mobilized the facts 
found to battle the tobacco industry effectively for 
restitution and for investment in public health. As a result of 
holding the tobacco industry accountable to the truth, rates of 
cigarette smoking in our country have plummeted, particularly 
among young people, and rates of cancer, emphysema, and other 
lung diseases have fallen. Since the Tobacco Master Settlement 
in 1998, cigarette smoking among high schoolers has fallen from 
35 percent to less than 4 percent in 2021. Just insisting upon 
the truth has saved millions of lives.
    We're beginning to see comparable efforts to hold Big Oil 
accountable for its own industrial sabotage of the truth and 
accountability. State Attorney Generals (AGs) across America, 
along with dozens of municipalities and Tribal Governments, 
have brought lawsuits against the companies and their trade 
associations to recover huge public damages allegedly caused by 
injuries made possible their alleged deceptive trade practices, 
fraud, public nuisance, and civil conspiracy to name just a few 
causes of action we've identified.
    Every citizen in America, everyone on Earth has a vested 
interest in addressing the climate emergency. Scientific 
research shows that the result of 1.5 Celsius degree of warming 
will be more extreme heatwaves, more massive flooding, record 
drought, recurring food scarcity, and dramatic sea level rise. 
My watery home state of Maryland, with more than 7,000 miles of 
ocean and bay coastline, is striking vulnerable to the effects 
of climate change in the rising sea. Anne Arundel County, where 
our state capital is, faces potential damage of more than $4 
billion to its public infrastructure if sea level rises by just 
5 feet.
    If we were to rebuild the sea wall, which has been 
recommended to protect us from an anticipated 5-foot rise in 
ocean levels, it would cost our state $27 billion. How can we 
do that? In his acclaimed book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied 
the collapse of human societies in history. He identified five 
factors that precipitate collapse, three of which relate to the 
environment: climate change, environmental degradation, and the 
third, the political inability to respond effectively to 
environmental threats.
    Diamond says that a leading cause of a society's inability 
to respond to environmental emergency is the capture of 
political and social power by a narrow subset of society which 
is committed to its own power and profit rather than the common 
good of the whole society and therefore refuses to take the 
steps necessary for survival.
    Fossil fuel companies publicly claim to be partners, if not 
leaders in fashioning climate solutions, but our investigation 
exposed that as a fraud. Big Oil is not addressing the climate 
crisis, but profiting from it and using a lot of its mammoth 
resources on continuing campaigns to insulate its carbon-based 
business model.
    For more than half a century, they've suppressed the truth 
about how carbon emissions destabilize the climate and what we 
need to do to protect ourselves from calamity. The era of 
denial and deceit must come to an end. Thank you for your 
attention, Mr. Chairman, Committee members. I yield back.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you very much, Representative 
Raskin. I appreciate very much you being here. I'd like to 
start looking again at the armada of front groups that the 
fossil fuel industry has set up to try to disguise its hand in 
all of this. Obviously, when you work through front groups, 
you're not accountable for what you say, and you can 
communicate different messages to shareholders and to the 
public than what you're telling regulators and officials 
through these enormous arrays of front groups numbering 
actually in the hundreds. And I thank Bob Brulle for his work, 
years of work identifying this front group, Armada.
    Specific to that, let's talk a little bit about API and 
when the Trump Administration determined to roll back methane 
emissions. And the oil companies publicly took the position 
that they were opposed to those methane rollbacks. That they 
wanted those regulations to continue. That, am I correct, was 
the public position that they took?
    Representative Raskin. Yes.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And at the same time, they used API, 
American Petroleum Institute, an organization that they fund, 
to send a counter message. Is there any indication in the 
materials that we got that the oil companies actually control 
what API does?
    Representative Raskin. They certainly have significant 
influence.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And in this case, API took a position 
for the rollbacks counter to the publicly stated position of 
the oil companies. And what we discovered was an internal email 
from BP saying that the rollback, which they publicly opposed 
is actually, and I'll quote here, ``Aligned with our thinking, 
even if it hasn't been said so publicly.'' Aligned with our 
thinking, even if it hasn't been said so publicly. Your 
reaction?
    Representative Raskin. Well, this is the general pattern, 
Senator Whitehouse, that we've found throughout our 
investigation. That the companies wanted to maintain as rosy a 
public posture as possible in terms of communicating the 
message to the people of the country that the companies are on 
board with effective climate change policies. But in reality, 
they wanted to use their political power and influence to throw 
the brakes on any efforts to actually make progress.
    Chairman Whitehouse. The investigation has focused a lot on 
what we found in the records of the industry and in its 
communications with its front groups. And sometimes, like 
Sherlock Holmes' famous dog that didn't bark, what isn't there 
can be just as important as what is there. Can you comment on 
what was not found in this investigation?
    Representative Raskin. Well, the thing that gets me the 
most, Mr. Chairman, is just thinking back to the decades in 
which Big Oil and Gas understood the problem in a way that 
almost no one else in the country or the world did. And I kept 
looking for what their strategy was to get the message out to 
the American people about the danger that we're all in from 
climate change, a danger that is now perfectly manifest to 
people around the country as we face hurricanes of record 
velocity, record droughts, wildfires that are out of control, 
environmental calamities that none of us had ever experienced 
before.
    These were all things that were predictable to the people 
who had the science, and what I kept looking for was what was 
there plan to notify everyone. That's why I'm talking about 
Paul Revere. They could've been the environmental Paul Revere, 
but instead, they were more like Rip Van Wrinkle, and they 
wanted everybody to go to sleep with them for a century.
    Now, I understand that they wanted to do it in a way to 
continue to make profit for their shareholders and that's built 
into our economic system and that's legit. They could've done 
that at the same time that they told everyone what they 
understood about the environmental catastrophe, as their own 
people described it, that we were facing. And I didn't see 
that, and maybe that could come out. Those might be more 
damning documents that reveal discussions about what they 
should do, but it almost seems as if they immediately moved 
into a coverup mode and they've never gotten out of it.
    Chairman Whitehouse. No sign of the alternative universe in 
which they took climate change seriously, changed their 
business model to move to renewables, put real and significant 
investment into the transition, and spared us the long campaign 
to mislead.
    Representative Raskin. You know, I concede that it might've 
been a difficult thing for them to contemplate doing, but what 
are we talking about other than the fate of our species?
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Grassley. The order is 
Grassley, Kaine, Johnson, Lujan, Kennedy, Van Hollen at this 
point.
    Senator Grassley. I thank you. Thank you for your 
willingness to take questions and I only have one question, but 
let me lead in with this short statement. We received a grand 
total of two days to read thousands of pages of documents. We 
weren't informed that House Democrats were working with Budget 
Committee Democrats in a joint investigation until we received 
your joint staff report yesterday.
    Under this process, it's evident that this was a partisan 
investigation while we haven't had nearly enough time to review 
all the documents, we haven't learned anything really new in 
the joint staff report. If there is new news, please tell us 
what it is because this material has been mostly reported on 
before.
    The question, in the process of your investigation, did you 
or your team discuss investigation with any environmental 
groups, activists, or lobbyists?
    Representative Raskin. Chairman Grassley, thank you very 
much. Let me comment first on your statement, if I could, and 
then I'll go to the question, or I can do it the other way.
    I'm not certain which environmental groups came to testify, 
and I could go back and check that for you and I will. We had 
our first hearing, which I think was the first hearing in 
Congress on the deception of the industry back in 2019, so I 
will double check that for you. But the documents that we 
released yesterday, and that overwhelming constitute the 
investigation were directly received from the companies 
themselves that we were forced to subpoena.
    But as to your general point, I suppose you could say if 
you assumed that Big Oil and Big Gas would do everything in 
their power to deny the original science and then once the cat 
was out of the bag on that to try to slow down our transition 
to renewable energy, then I guess there wouldn't be much new 
here. What we have is thousands of documents that justify that 
basic intuition and that corroborate people's sense which I 
readily concede is that, of course, they would fight it.
    And so, call me a little starry eyed, but I think there was 
an opportunity there for Big Oil and Big Gas to be heroes, not 
just to our country but to all humanity, by blowing the whistle 
and saying all of us are equally invested in this. We've all 
benefited from the carbon model, but it's becoming a danger to 
us as a species, and they never did that. And they continue to 
try to frustrate and thwart our ability to move to the 
renewable energy future that we need.
    Senator Grassley. Thank you.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Next up is Senator Lujan. Senator 
Kaine is not here, so we'll go to Senator Lujan, followed by 
Senator Johnson if he returns.

                   STATEMENT OF SENATOR LUJAN

    Senator Lujan. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and 
thank you to our Ranking Member as well, and appreciate you 
being here, Mr. Raskin, and your work in this space for 
bringing attention to a hearing, namely, about emissions and 
avoiding accountability.
    One thing, Mr. Chairman, I'd just like to say off the top 
here is I don't understand why this is a controversial 
statement or not agreed to by all colleagues in the Senate and 
in the House and around the country and the world. Climate 
change is a serious threat to our wellbeing and to our economy. 
The devastation that we're seeing all around us every day and 
around the world I don't understand why that is something 
there'd be disagreement upon, so I appreciate this hearing for 
several reasons.
    Now, first off, Mr. Raskin, to solve this problem, our 
country made serious commitments with the Paris Agreement. And 
importantly, major oil and gas companies, including Shell, BP, 
ExxonMobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, and Occidental are all on 
the record voicing their support for this Paris Agreement and 
many of them have told me personally about their commitment in 
this space and also their commitment to reducing methane 
emissions in New Mexico.
    Now, these companies also know that our country cannot meet 
our Paris commitments without addressing climate change as root 
causes, including reducing methane emissions from the 
production of oil and gas.
    Now, Mr. Raskin, based on your findings of your 
investigation in the House and Chairman Whitehouse's more 
recent work in the Senate, yes or no, did some of these 
companies privately say they didn't have plans to meet their 
public pledges?
    Representative Raskin. The way you worded it is a little 
difficult to say yes or no, but I would say, yes, they 
certainly indicated that they had no serious intention to meet 
these goals. I don't know if they had plans not to, but they 
certainly lacked any intention to get there.
    Senator Lujan. I appreciate the clarity and honesty in your 
response, Mr. Raskin.
    Now, natural gas is delivered with harmful and wasteful 
methane emissions that come from venting, flaring, faulty 
valves, and outright abandonment of wells. Now, this is a 
problem because methane is many times worse for the climate 
than carbon dioxide and one third of the methane emissions in 
our country come from oil and gas supply chain.
    Now, what's concerning is that companies in this 
investigation have known that their methane emissions are a 
problem for a long time. My question, Mr. Raskin, yes or no, 
have these companies consistently said the same thing about 
methane emissions in public that they have in private?
    Representative Raskin. No.
    Senator Lujan. Some methane emissions come from accidental 
leaks, but many come from outdated industry practices that 
don't reflect how impactful methane emissions are to our 
climate.
    Mr. Raskin, given what you've learned, yes or no, have 
these companies downplayed the serious climate harms coming 
from methane emissions in their supply chains.
    Representative Raskin. Yes. If I could add one note, 
methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so the 
idea that natural gas is the panacea for what ails us in carbon 
emissions is just a pure fantasy and everybody knows it.
    Senator Lujan. Now, one concern that I have that it appears 
this investigation has shed light on is that it's more clear 
that oil and gas companies are not acting on their own with 
enough urgency. Now, in the rapidly growing Permian Basin in 
southeastern New Mexico, methane emissions are an urgent 
problem. As a matter of fact, if you look at satellite imagery 
of the United Sates, there's a big methane plume over New 
Mexico, arguably two, but they aren't anywhere else.
    New Mexico is not the top producer in the country, but we 
have the worst methane plumes. What's going on? So, when I sit 
with these executives and ask them about their commitment to 
reduce emissions in New Mexico, everyone says they'll do it, 
but nothing happens. The methane plume gets worse and worse and 
worse. People are getting sick. What about the health concerns 
that people that live in proximity of these areas that they 
can't see the gas, but they're breathing this stuff in? What 
about them?
    So, a recent study showed that New Mexico side of the 
Permian emitted twice as much methane per unit produced as the 
other basins across the country. Now, I'm very proud that in 
New Mexico there's action now being taken. In 2021, there was 
an effort by the State of New Mexico to lay out blueprint that 
is now being looked at and used by the Environmental Protection 
Agency (EPA).
    Now, Mr. Raskin, I have several other questions in this 
space and I'll submit them to you on the record. But again, Mr. 
Chairman, I appreciate you bringing attention to this issue 
because I'm speaking about it, not just from the seat as a 
United States Senator looking at what's good for America, but 
what's happening to the people that elected me to represent 
them and the nonsense that's coming from--I need to be careful 
with the words I'm using, Mr. Chairman, because there's a lot 
of emotion in what I'm trying to share with you, Mr. Raskin.
    But when any of us across America asks someone else a 
question, especially dealing with the health impacts to our 
constituents and they lie to us, what are we supposed to do? 
And I'm sick and tired of not getting the truth and people 
dying that are just trying to farm, trying to grow up in these 
rural communities, Native American communities, and people just 
are not being honest with them and it's just not right.
    So, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate this hearing very much and 
thanks for calling this hearing.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you, Senator Lujan. Next is 
Senator Kennedy, who will be followed by Senator Kaine.

                  STATEMENT OF SENATOR KENNEDY

    Senator Kennedy. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
Congressman, welcome.
    Representative Raskin. Thank you, Senator.
    Senator Kennedy. I just want to say on a personal note I'm 
so pleased that you beat your cancer diagnosis.
    Representative Raskin. You're very kind.
    Senator Kennedy. We all followed your unfortunate public 
dealing with that.
    Representative Raskin. My bandana made it public, I think. 
Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. But it was a nice touch. It was a nice 
touch and I'm sorry about your son.
    Representative Raskin. Thank you. I appreciate it.
    Senator Kennedy. I gather, Congressman, that you support 
trying to make the world carbon neutral by 2050.
    Representative Raskin. Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. Okay. And I gather from your testimony 
that, in your judgment, part of achieving that goal is 
eliminating the use of fossil fuel generated energy?
    Representative Raskin. Not immediately, but there are 
staged reductions that would be required in order for us to 
meet that goal. And I don't think it requires the absolute 
elimination of all carbon fuels, but I think something like a 
steady 4 percent per year reduction.
    Senator Kennedy. By 2050, how much do we need to eliminate?
    Representative Raskin. Well, what the scientists are 
telling us is that in order to avert the most extreme 
calamities, we need to limit the global warming to 1.5 degrees 
Celsius.
    Senator Kennedy. But here's what I'm getting at. Right now, 
America relies on fossil fuels for 80 percent of its energy. By 
2050, what percentage do you think that should be in order for 
us to become carbon neutral?
    Representative Raskin. I better not opine on that because I 
don't know, but I will tell you this, and I see where you're 
going. This is a tremendous challenge. Maybe the greatest 
challenge of our lifetimes and I----
    Senator Kennedy. I understand. I'm sorry. They just give me 
a little bit of time here.
    Representative Raskin. Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. Let me ask you this. How many people are 
there in the world? What's the world's population?
    Representative Raskin. What is it now, about four and a 
half billion?
    Senator Kennedy. It's about eight billion.
    Representative Raskin. Is it eight billion?
    Senator Kennedy. Yes. I'm not trying to trick you. I had to 
look it up myself.
    Representative Raskin. I should've updated on that.
    Senator Kennedy. It's eight billion people.
    Representative Raskin. It's eight billion. Okay.
    Senator Kennedy. Four billion people depend on fertilizer 
made by natural gas to eat for them to then have natural gas, 
four billion people would starve to death. What'll we do about 
that?
    Representative Raskin. I mean that's precisely the 
challenge that we need to be confronting and that we should've 
been confronting all these decades. How do we disengage 
gradually from one model of energy consumption and move into 
another so that we are meeting the public health goals that are 
urgent, as the distinguished Senator from New Mexico just----
    Senator Kennedy. Are you familiar with what's called a 
boreal forest?
    Representative Raskin. Boreal? No.
    Senator Kennedy. These are forests in the northern most 
part of the world, just below the Artic in North America and 
Eurasia. There are millions of acres burned there naturally 
every year. The fires are less today than they were 150 years 
ago, but obviously, forest fires produce carbon. And I was 
reading a study of this weekend--I want to get my facts 
straight here. They said the carbon released by these naturally 
occurring forest fires in boreal forests, nobody lives there.
    Let's see. Wildfires in the boreal forests in North America 
and Eurasia in one year, 2021, released double the amount of 
all global CO2 produced in 2001, and three times as 
much as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is projected to 
reduce by 2030.
    My point is that the Inflation Reduction Act is going to 
end up costing about $1.2 trillion. Presumably, their estimates 
about how much carbon it will reduce by 2030. American people 
are going to spend a lot of money, $1.2 trillion, for what? The 
carbon released by naturally occurring boreal forest fires in 
2001 is 3 times the amount we'll save by asking the American 
people to spend $1.2 trillion of their money on the Inflation 
Reduction Act.
    Now, unless you're reason that your parents drink, that 
doesn't make sense, does it?
    Representative Raskin. So, thank you. I mean, that's a 
trenchant question, Senator. I've heard these comparisons 
before between natural greenhouse gas emissions, which are 
obviously a product of forestry and agriculture and the 
agricultural revolution and what we contribute through 
industrial greenhouse gas emissions. But I think it's a bit of 
a distraction from the real issue because we take for granted--
--
    Senator Kennedy. But these are peer-reviewed studies, 
Congressman.
    Representative Raskin. I know and the peer-reviewed studies 
show----
    Senator Kennedy. The forest fires exist. I promise you.
    Representative Raskin. Oh, no, I'm not doubting the science 
for one minute. I'm saying let's take the science for granted. 
Let's take nature for granted. Thank God that we have forests 
and we have greenhouse gas emissions that come agriculture and 
so on. All of that is something that we take for granted. Okay?
    Now, we also, however, can reduce agricultural greenhouse 
gas emissions through looking at industrial livestock 
practices.
    Senator Kennedy. But that's not my point. My point is--I'm 
going way over. This is my last question.
    Representative Raskin. Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. We spend all this money. Okay, it's going 
to cost America about $1 trillion a year to make us carbon 
neutral by 2050.
    Representative Raskin. Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. We don't lower world temperatures a 
scintilla of a degree if you look at the boreal forest fires, 
so what'd we do?
    Representative Raskin. Oh, I got you. But would you dispute 
that it would be far worse if we do nothing? In other words, if 
we stay on the path that Big Oil would have us stay on, are you 
denying that we would be in a situation where the Earth's 
temperature goes----
    Senator Kennedy. But that's not your goal in trying to make 
us carbon neutral is to be--it's a zero sum game. Your goal is 
not to make it better. Your point is, as I understand it, that 
the world will end if we don't achieve the carbon neutrality.
    Representative Raskin. Right. We want to prevent calamity. 
We want to make our one planetary habitat as livable as 
possible, right?
    Senator Kennedy. Do we need to spend trillions of dollars 
fighting the boreal forest fires?
    Representative Raskin. Well, let's go back to the Inflation 
Reduction Act, which you invoked before. Most of the money 
which you're describing as being spent on climate change 
measures was actually tax incentives for the stimulation of 
renewable energy.
    Senator Kennedy. Agreed. But they're not stopping the 
boreal forest fires. I mean, we spend all this money and we 
reduce carbon and the boreal forest fires just spit out three 
times the amount of carbons. What's the point?
    Representative Raskin. I would love to read a peer-reviewed 
study on that. I mean if we need a boreal forest----
    Senator Kennedy. Read the Economist magazine. They talk 
about it all the time.
    Representative Raskin. All right. I will check that out, 
but I mean is the suggestion that we need boreal forest fire 
department?
    Senator Kennedy. I'm asking you. I mean, what you all's 
position is--I get it. Nobody's perfect. Oil and gas is bad and 
they're destroying the world and let's get rid of them.
    Representative Raskin. Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. Okay. If we do that, that's going to cost 
a lot. If we do that, is the world going to be okay? No.
    Representative Raskin. I got you. I see where you're going. 
But if I might, Mr. Chairman.
    Senator Kennedy. I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman.
    Representative Raskin. If I could just take your beautiful 
state, which is very close to my heart. I lived in New Orleans 
a couple of times.
    Senator Kennedy. Come back and spend money.
    Representative Raskin. I definitely will. I plan to do 
that. Louisiana has traditionally dealt with hurricanes, but is 
now experiencing hurricanes of much greater velocity and much 
greater ferocity under the climate change conditions.
    Senator Kennedy. Not really.
    Representative Raskin. Then, again, perhaps the science 
that I've been seeing is----
    Senator Kennedy. The damages are higher because Louisiana's 
wealthier and there's more to destroy. But if you look at the 
studies on the intensity, they're about the same.
    Representative Raskin. All right.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Kennedy, Senator Kaine is 
waiting to proceed, if you don't mind.
    Senator Kennedy. We were just having a good talk.
    Senator Kaine. I'm enjoying this actually.
    I'm not complaining.
    Senator Kennedy. I'm sorry. Thank you, Congressman.
    Representative Raskin. Thank you, Senator.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Just for the record, my research while 
Senator Kennedy was speaking is that the total wildfire 
emissions are 1.8 billion tons of CO2 compared to 38 
billion tons from fossil and industry, so we may have a dispute 
over the facts here. But with that, let me turn it over to 
Senator Kaine.

                   STATEMENT OF SENATOR KAINE

    Senator Kaine. Well, thank you, Mr. Chair and to my 
Committee members. I actually was really enjoying that. And 
Rep. Raskin, so good to have you here before us. This hearing 
reminds me of one that I had in the Foreign Relations Committee 
in early 2017 where we were considering the confirmation of Rex 
Tillerson, the former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of 
ExxonMobil to be Secretary of State. And I asked him, Mr. 
Chair, a set of the same questions that this hearing is digging 
into, and he basically said that he couldn't answer them, even 
though he was well aware of what ExxonMobil had done in this 
space with respect to their obfuscation around climate science.
    And at one point, I said, now are you telling me you can't 
answer them, or you won't answer them. And he was very honest. 
He said, yeah, I'm telling you both and really it was more that 
he wouldn't answer them, and I can see why the Committee's 
investigative work has laid out a pretty important record, I 
think, of efforts by these companies to mislead the public.
    But what I want to focus my questions on is the efforts by 
the oil companies to mislead Congress or just not cooperate 
with Congress. And I understand in the House investigation I'd 
like you to talk about this a little bit.
    Representative Raskin, that there were many, many instances 
of refusal to cooperate with the investigation by ExxonMobil 
and others. Could you just describe that event?
    Representative Raskin. Well, when we first sent out the 
requests, as I was describing before, we got a mountain of 
minutia and distracting material, newsletters and press 
releases and so on. We then used our subpoena power to get more 
serious and we got more serious answers, but still we had 
thousands of documents that were redacted in substantial and 
perhaps critical ways. That would be my suspicion. And there 
were entire documents that we never received at all.
    And this is why I closed my remarks by invoking Jared 
Diamond's book Collapse, which is all about how if you have a 
small group in society that's invested in a particular model 
that's dangerous to everyone and they're allowed to get away 
with it that becomes a telltale sign of potential collapse of 
the society. And so, when the United States Congress comes 
calling, you owe it to the Congress, the representatives of the 
people, to give the information.
    The Supreme Court has repeatedly found--you guys know these 
cases, I'm sure. McGrain v. Daugherty is one of them, but the 
Supreme Court has been adamant that we have the right to get 
the information that we want in order to legislate. We're the 
representatives of the people.
    Senator Kaine. I want to ask about one particular reason 
asserted by at least one of the companies and maybe more for 
not producing documents that I found kind of Alice in 
Wonderland-like. We are not going to give you these documents 
because sharing information would violate our First Amendment 
rights.
    Now, you're a constitutional law professor. And by my 
recollection, the First Amendment with respect to speech says 
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. It 
is a right. Whether or not the First Amendment should've been 
applied to corporations, we'll set that one aside. It has been 
applied and so corporations have a right to speak, but the 
notion that a corporation would claim their First Amendment 
gives them a right not to share information, to hide 
information that they're embarrassed by, even in the face of a 
Congressional subpoena, strikes me as like that's the opposite 
of the First Amendment.
    Representative Raskin. I think you're right. I mean, giving 
them their due, the Supreme Court has found in cases like West 
Virginia v. Barnett that there is a right not to speak against 
conscience, but the Supreme Court has always found that turning 
over documents is an objective act that doesn't compel you to 
do something against your own political ideas. So, that would 
obviously lead to the end of our civil and criminal discovery 
system if the First Amendment gave you the right not to turn 
over documents.
    Senator Kaine. Well, I was a trial lawyer. While I'm not 
one of John Kennedy's acumen or flamboyance, but I was a pretty 
good one.
    Senator Kennedy. I deny everything.
    Senator Kaine. But I will say you can always tell an 
objection is made if it is an extremely unpersuasive, novel, 
imaginative, unsupported objection, you can always tell there's 
something they really don't want you to see. And I think that 
the investigation contains an awful lot of material that the 
public needs to see, but I can only imagine the extent of the 
iceberg under the water that you are not allowed to see. And 
with that, I yield back, Mr. Chair.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you very much, Senator Kaine. 
Next is Senator Johnson, who'll be followed by Senator Van 
Hollen.

                  STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHNSON

    Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Congressman, welcome.
    Representative Raskin. Senator.
    Senator Johnson. Are you aware of the World Climate 
Declaration--There is no Climate Emergency? It's signed by now 
over 1,800 global scientists, professionals?
    Representative Raskin. There is no Climate Emergency?
    Senator Johnson. Are you aware of that declaration?
    Representative Raskin. I'm not aware of that one. I assume 
I'm aware of similar.
    Senator Johnson. I entered it into the record. I'd 
recommend you read it.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Without objection, it will be entered 
into the record.
    Senator Johnson. I already did it, but we'll enter it into 
this one too. I thought one of the interesting statements is 
there is the obvious that CO2 is plant food. If you 
want a green planet, you need some CO2. But anyway, 
you ought to take a look at that. By the way, I'm not a climate 
change denier. I'm just not a climate change alarmist like you 
and the Chairman.
    I would call myself a climate change realist. In your 
testimony, you say my watery home state of Maryland with more 
than 7,100 miles of coastline is strikingly vulnerable to the 
effects of climate change and the rising seas levels. So, 
that's one of the biggest alarms of the climate change folks is 
that the sea level rise would just wipe out coastlines. 
Correct?
    Representative Raskin. Yes.
    Senator Johnson. Okay. So, are you aware of how much the 
sea level has risen in the Bay of San Francisco since the last 
glaciation period of some 12 to 20,000 years ago, which is just 
a blink of the eye in geological time. Do you know how much the 
sea level's risen in the Bay of San Francisco in that time?
    Representative Raskin. I do not know that one.
    Senator Johnson. Do you want to just take a guess?
    Representative Raskin. No, because I'm not guessing very 
well today, so no.
    Senator Johnson. It's 390 feet. Do you think there's 
anything mankind could've done to prevent that level of sea 
level rise of 390 feet, and just again, 20,000 years?
    Representative Raskin. Well----
    Senator Johnson. I mean, do you think there's something we 
could do about that?
    Representative Raskin. No.
    Senator Johnson. Okay. Good. That's the answer. No, there's 
nothing we could do about that. And by the way, the Chairman 
mentioned witnesses brought before this Committee have--let me 
tell you what some of them have said, Majority witnesses.
    When I asked a Majority witness about 80 percent of world 
power--you know, in the U.S., globally is created by fossil 
fuel. I asked to you believe that either India or China are 
going to give up their coal-burning plants. And the Democrat--
the Majority witness said, no, and neither are we because we 
simply can't. So, I'm kind of getting back to Senator Kennedy's 
point is literally there's nothing we can do about this, other 
than adapt.
    Another witness claimed that we've spent about $5 
trillion--and this is before the Inflation Reduction Act, which 
by the way is $400 billion of the tax credit. Goldman Sachs was 
about $1.2 trillion, so that's about $6 trillion we've already 
spent combatting climate change. The question I have for you is 
has all that spending done anything to impact climate change, 
$5 to $6 trillion already spent?
    Representative Raskin. Undoubtedly, it has.
    Senator Johnson. Where's the proof?
    Representative Raskin. Well----
    Senator Johnson. I mean, you're here before the Committee--
you know, we've had 16, 17 hearings now. Again, climate change 
alarmism.
    Representative Raskin. Yes.
    Senator Johnson. You know, we're going to destroy our 
planet. It's not going to keep lasting. We've got to do 
something now. We've been doing $6 trillion worth. I haven't 
heard any reduction in the alarmism here whatsoever.
    Representative Raskin. Well, I mean you describe yourself, 
I think, as a climate realist.
    Senator Johnson. Realist.
    Representative Raskin. But it sounds to me more like you're 
a climate fatalist. That there's really nothing that can be 
done. The focus of the hearing today, of course, is on the Big 
Oil industries attempts to obscure the problem for many decades 
and then to undermine any potential solutions. But if you start 
with the----
    Senator Johnson. Are you aware of the Vostok ice core 
samples?
    Representative Raskin. I'm sorry?
    Senator Johnson. The Vostok ice core samples. Okay, this 
was the most famous analysis over 440,000 years. Shows five 
very distinct cycles. Do you know what the temperature 
variations of those cycles was?
    Representative Raskin. Seasonally, you mean, or do you mean 
over time?
    Senator Johnson. No, over geologic time, 440,000 years.
    Representative Raskin. Well, there've been Ice Ages and I'm 
sure it's dramatic.
    Senator Johnson. And do you know what the temperature 
variations revealed on those things is?
    Representative Raskin. Please share.
    Senator Johnson. 22.7 degrees Fahrenheit. And oh, by the 
way, they didn't really talk about this, but CO2 
ended up being a lagging indicator to temperature, which would 
imply that as the globe warms all the CO2, most of 
it that's locked up in the ocean gets unlocked and so it's 
temperature that causes CO2 to rise as opposed to 
the exact opposite.
    Again, orbital forcing, there's all kinds of other theories 
about this. What I'm saying is it's not settled science. So, 
why are we projecting spending trillions of dollars to impact 
something that we really in the end can't change? That's my 
point.
    Representative Raskin. I mean, I think the claim that the 
science is uncertain is itself a lagging indicator. I mean we 
heard that for decades from Big Oil that we just couldn't know. 
That there's a study on this side. There's a study on that 
side. I think the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence--
--
    Senator Johnson. Alarmist. Yes, I realize that.
    Representative Raskin. The overwhelming weight of 
scientific evidence is on the conclusion that man-made causes 
are behind climate change.
    Senator Johnson. Check out these 800 scientists lead by two 
Nobel prize winners in Physics, check out their World Climate 
Declaration. There's no Climate Emergency.
    Representative Raskin. I will definitely check that out and 
I'll get back to you on it. I mean, again--and this is 
difficult for those of us who are not scientists because all 
that we can do, or at least all that we can reasonably do is 
depend on the scientific authorities that are part of our 
government and they're a part of the United Nations and that 
are rendering the conclusions that we can count on. But I'm 
very happy to read any kind of dissenting views. I really am.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Next is Senator Van Hollen.

                STATEMENT OF SENATOR VAN HOLLEN

    Senator Van Hollen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Congressman Raskin, great to see you and thanks for all 
your work in the area that's the subject of the hearing today 
and for all you do for the great state of Maryland.
    Just a follow up on that question, isn't it the case that 
your investigation revealed that the Big Oil companies 
themselves knew that producing the massive amount of greenhouse 
gas emissions that they did would contribute to global climate 
change?
    Representative Raskin. Yes. They engaged in the science 
themselves. They were in the very first wave of scientists who 
were looking at it. They used objective scientific measures and 
analysis and they came to the conclusion that their combustion 
of fossil fuels leads to climate destabilization and global 
warming. And only later did they come to the kind of rhetoric 
suggesting that all science is equal and we can throw a dart on 
the wall and figure out just as well what's happening. That was 
not their initial take on this problem.
    Senator Van Hollen. Right. I mean, I think the point is 
that we continue to hear voices who deny the science that the 
oil companies themselves looked at back in the day before they 
turned to a deliberate strategy of denial, right?
    Representative Raskin. And they continue to use it for 
their own internal business planning purposes. I mean, you can 
be certain that they're not fooling around with fake science 
when it comes to their own business projections and their own 
plans for the future.
    Senator Van Hollen. Right. So, look, there are some who 
argue that the house is on fire, but we shouldn't do anything 
about it because it's going to keep burning and just eventually 
burn to the ground. I think most of us recognize that what 
makes sense for all of us and for humanity is to try to put out 
the fire before it consumes the entire planet, destroys our 
economies, and does other damage. So, I wanted to ask you about 
the whole notion of what economists call externalities because 
I put forward a proposal it's right now a white paper called 
the Polluters Pay Climate Fund legislation. I'm pleased that 
both the Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senator Whitehouse, Senator 
Merkley and others are part of this effort, which we will 
eventually convert to legislation. And Mr. Chairman, I would 
like to put the white paper on the Polluters Pay Climate Fund 
Act into the record.\5\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \5\ Statement submitted by Senator Van Hollen appears in the 
appendix on page 453.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Chairman Whitehouse. Without objection.
    Senator Van Hollen. So, there's going to be a lot of 
litigation. There already is, both in local jurisdictions, 
Baltimore City, State of Maryland, using the model of tobacco 
companies and I think that those cases should be pursued. But 
there's also another approach here that's not to the exclusion 
of those efforts, which is to apply the Superfund model.
    And essentially, the Superfund model was if you broke it, 
you pay for it, right? Why should the public be having to pay 
all the costs of harm that is due to the actions of Big Oil 
companies and other major emitters? And the idea behind the 
Superfund is pretty much the science is clear. In this case, 
the damage done by greenhouse gas emissions is clear, so there 
should be a strict liability standard, effectively. A polluter 
pays standard.
    You mentioned, for example, the cost just in the City of 
Annapolis, $4 billion to help raise the dock, $27 billion over 
time. That's just one small example. So, this proposal would 
look at the very largest emitters, so we're talking about 25 to 
30 of the emitters here in the United States or anybody who's 
doing business here in the United States. Could you talk to the 
importance of pursuing a polluter pays approach.
    Representative Raskin. Well, thank you, Senator Van Hollen. 
I have not familiarized myself with the details of your 
proposal and I would love to check it out, but it certainly 
sounds like it addresses the major problem, which is what the 
economists called the tragedy of the commons. I mean who owns 
the sky? Who owns the climate? Nobody does. But who uses the 
climate, who uses the sky as part of their business model? Big 
carbon does. And of course, all of us are implicated in it to 
the extent that we drive cars and use fossil fuels, which we 
do, but they're the ones who have profited from it and been 
deeply invested on a long-term basis in it. And yet, they're 
not asked to pay for either the short-term, the medium-term, or 
the long-term effects of climate destabilization.
    So, when you say polluter pays, I take it what you're 
getting at is that the companies that are profiting handsomely 
from this business model have to pay for the costs associated 
with it, which is just a basic principle of good public policy. 
You want the industries that are causing particular social 
problems to be forced to be held financially accountable for 
them.
    Senator Van Hollen. Well, that's exactly right. And as you 
know, these companies, the biggest companies, have profited 
greatly off of this. And the concept behind here actually is 
those who polluted the most should pay the most for cleaning up 
the damage and harm they've done, and I'm pleased to have 
worked with an organization I know you're familiar with, the 
Chesapeake Climate Action Network in developing this proposal. 
Look forward to working with you and we've got some other House 
members engaged as well. So, thank you for all the work that 
you've done to bring us to this point. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you very much. Senator Merkley.

                  STATEMENT OF SENATOR MERKLEY

    Senator Merkley. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And 
first, I'll speak to the issue of forest fires because we 
really have seen that the longer, drier, hotter summers that 
occur in my home state of Oregon are producing a lot more 
fires, a lot more destructive fires. We've seen that happen in 
Canada. We've seen it happen in Alaska. We've seen it happen in 
Australia. So, we really have a feedback loop there that I want 
to draw attention to where climate change is driving more fires 
and fires are producing more carbon.
    It's not a helpful feedback loop, but it's also that the 
current fires are not the same as the natural fires before we 
put so much carbon in the air to change the climate to produce 
these long, hot summers either. They also produce more lighting 
strikes, which means more fires are lit in that fashion. So, if 
we want less forest fires, we better curb the carbon 
contribution.
    I wanted to turn to any information you'd like to share 
about the feedback loop--a different feedback loop--in which 
the profits from the fossil industry are pumped back into 
political campaigns, not just publicity and misinformation 
campaigns, but actually into political campaigns to essentially 
use democracy to elect champions for the fossil industry to 
help continue to manifest the misinformation, disinformation, 
and opposition to taking on this very serious challenge.
    Representative Raskin. Well, thank you, Senator Merkley. 
Just on the negative feedback loop, you're absolutely right. If 
you look at the last 10 years of temperature, I believe that 9 
of the 10 are the hottest recorded years in human history with 
each one basically being hotter than the last one. So, it's 
very clear that as the Earth gets warmer, for example, with 
respect to forest fires, we get more forest fires, production 
of more greenhouse gas emissions, and then greater climate 
change and so we are in a negative feedback loop there very 
much.
    But it also does apply in the political sphere, as you're 
suggesting, the tremendous profits that are made by Big Oil and 
Big Gas have been rechanneled into the political system and 
some of it is through academic studies as we discussed, 
hundreds of millions of dollars went in that direction, some of 
it goes through just general public relations and propaganda 
efforts and some of it goes directly into the political system 
through campaign contributions and campaign expenditures and I 
think your chairman has been very focused on the role that 
Citizens United has played in this process by essentially 
transforming every corporate treasury in the country into a 
potential political slush fund for the CEOs to spend as they 
will.
    Senator Merkley. Well, it's a big challenge and the fossil 
fuel industry had about $300 billion of net profit last year. 
Even 1 percent of that reinvested in the political campaigns 
result in a significant corrupting factor in terms of the 
vision of government by and for the people versus by and for 
the powerful.
    I want to turn to plastics. Plastics are largely made from 
fossil gas, which is a more accurate way to describe their 
methane gas and to use the industries preferred term of natural 
gas. And one of the big goals of the industry is as they see 
people using less gas for home heating, less fossil gas for 
home heating is, well, where can we expand. So, there's a 
vision of tripling plastics production over the next couple 
decades, thus, tripling the use of fossil gas for that purpose. 
We see in this area misinformation and disinformation as well. 
And did your investigation touch any on the misinformation and 
disinformation regarding plastics?
    Representative Raskin. I don't want to say that it did not, 
Senator, and there was and is so much to absorb that I can't 
remember, but I'm definitely happy to get back to you on that. 
I mean, there's certainly a lot of mention of plastics, which 
are an essential part of the problem, obviously, but I don't 
remember about specific efforts to mislead and deceive related 
to plastic.
    Senator Merkley. Great. I will appreciate any additional 
work you may do in the future to help touch into that plastics 
space as well because very closely related to the broader 
misinformation/disinformation campaign. And the more we know 
about the impact of plastics on ecosystem health and on, of 
course, trash, but now micro and nano plastics affecting our 
human bodies and plastics are an endocrine disruptor, so it's a 
big deal and there's a lot of misinformation going there in an 
effort to promote a future of a lot more plastics damaging our 
ecosystems.
    Representative Raskin. And they're huge. I know plastic 
dumps that have essentially formed in different oceans, the 
conglomerations of plastics.
    Senator Merkley. Absolutely true. And it's almost 
impossible to get it out. If you think of floating bottles, 
people think we can get that out, but getting micro and the 
nano plastics out of the ocean, not doable.
    I want to turn to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), 
and CCS is often promoted as well, we can burn fossils and then 
we can capture the carbon out of the smokestack, if you will, 
and we can store it in the ground, so stop worrying. Is CCS a 
magical cure to the challenge of carbon combustion, fossil fuel 
combustion or is it basically part of a misleading strategy, 
kind of like the algae strategy referred to that is intended to 
make people say don't worry; be happy?
    Representative Raskin. Well, I don't want to write it off 
completely, but certainly we found that the way it was treated 
by the oil and gas companies was as a shiny, flashy object that 
would capture public attention, but did not actually command a 
serious investment of the resources in capital expenditures of 
the oil and gas companies. So, they certainly are not treating 
it as any kind of panacea and it does seem to be part of a 
pattern where the big oil companies, rather than focusing on 
the things we know we can actually do and get one, focus on 
things that can't be done.
    So, we know that wind and solar and other renewable energy 
sources are right now the best pathway out of this, but we saw 
the focus on algae, for example, instead which looked to me 
very much like a marketing effort.
    Senator Merkley. Thank you very much.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you very much, Senator Merkley, 
and thank you for your very impressive work on the plastics 
issue.
    Congressman Raskin, thank you very much for being here. In 
a moment, we will release you, gratefully, for your time, and 
take a short recess while the signs are changed and the chairs 
are changed and the room is set up for the second panel.
    As I understand it, if Senator Johnson sends you the 
document that he suggested he would, you will be kind enough to 
favor him with a reply?
    Representative Raskin. And I will share that with the 
entire Committee and would love to talk to my friend, Senator 
Kennedy, more about what's going on in the Bayou and on the 
Louisiana Coast and what can be done about it.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you. And I look forward to 
working with you in the months and years ahead to plow through 
these redactions and multiple incidences of noncompliance so 
that Congress can actually get to the bottom of this and press 
through what I believe are ill advised and perhaps even ill-
intentioned assertions of privilege. Unfortunately, the 
companies have the advantage because they have the documents, 
they assert the privilege, they don't provide them, and we have 
to fight our way through legal argument about all of that, but 
I think we need to, and I look forward to working with you to 
get that done in the years ahead.
    Thank you very much for being here. We'll stand in recess 
while the staff set up the room and then I'll gavel everyone 
back into order in a few minutes.
    Representative Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    [Whereupon, at 10:38 a.m., Wednesday, May 1, 2024, the 
hearing was in recess.]
    Chairman Whitehouse. Let me call the hearing back to order 
and ask the various witnesses to take their seats at the 
witness table. I will go ahead and introduce our next panel of 
witnesses. We have four witnesses on this panel. One is nearby, 
so she'll be here in time for the questions and for her 
testimony.
    Our first witness will be Dr. Geoffrey Supran, who serves 
as Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy and 
as Director of the Climate Accountability Lab at the University 
of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth 
Science. Dr. Supran's research focuses on the history of 
climate disinformation, including fossil fuel interests early 
understanding of the scientific evidence of climate change.
    Prior to joining the University of Miami, Dr. Supran was a 
research associate in the Department of the History of Science 
at Harvard University from 2019 to 2022. He previously served 
as the Director of Climate Accountability Communication for the 
Climate Social Science Network, an international community of 
more than 300 scholars in 25 countries that is headquartered at 
the Institute for Environment and Society at Rhode Island's own 
Brown University.
    Our second witness is Sharon Eubanks. Ms. Eubanks is an 
accomplished attorney, who served as lead counsel on behalf of 
the United States Government in the largest civil Racketeer 
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) enforcement 
action ever filed, United States v. Phillip Morris USA, et al. 
In that landmark case, the U.S. District Court for the District 
of Columbia found that the tobacco industry had ``engaged in 
and executed and continues to engage in and execute a massive 
50-year scheme to defraud the public.''
    That litigation held tobacco companies accountable. They 
were ordered to make corrective statements on five topics about 
which they had historically deceived and misled the public.
    While at the Department of Justice, Ms. Eubanks earned the 
U.S. Attorney General's John Marshall Award for outstanding 
legal achievement and the Stanley D. Rhodes Memorial Award.
    Our third witness is Dr. Ariel Cohen. He is the Managing 
Director of the Energy, Growth, and Security Program at the 
International Tax and Investment Center and a nonresident 
senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. His scholarship focuses 
on emerging markets and natural resources, energy policy, and 
gross output (GO) economics.
    For more than 20 years, Dr. Cohen was a senior research 
fellow in international energy policy at the Heritage 
Foundation.
    Finally, we're joined by Michael Ratner, a specialist in 
energy policy for our Congressional Research Service (CRS).
    Prior to joining CRS, he was a fellow at the John W. Kluge 
Center at the Library of Congress and previously served as an 
analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He also had 
advised Coastal Power Company and Power Finance Corp. (PFC) 
Energy and he worked for energy giant Enron between 1999 and 
2003.
    Thank you all for being here today. As a reminder, each 
witness has up to 10 minutes for your opening statements. Your 
entire written testimony will be made a matter of Committee 
record. Dr. Supran, to you for your remarks.

   STATEMENT OF GEOFFREY SUPRAN, Ph.D., ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, 
    ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND POLICY, AND DIRECTOR, CLIMATE 
ACCOUNTABILITY LAB, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI'S ROSENSTIEL SCHOOL OF 
           MARINE, ATMOSPHERIC, AND EARTH SCIENCE \6\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    \6\ Prepared statement of Dr. Supran appears in the appendix on 
page 84.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Dr. Supran. Thank you for having me here today. Research by 
scholars, journalists, and non-government organizations (NGOs) 
has shown time and again that Big Oil is the new Big Tobacco. 
They always follow the same four-step playbook. First, they 
learn about the dangers of their products, then they scheme, 
then they deny the science and scaremonger about the economy, 
and then they delay action with propaganda.
    My testimony will summarize these four steps, along with 
examples from the documents uncovered by the House and Senate 
Committees.
    So, let's start with Step 1, Oil companies learn about the 
dangers of their products. By 1959, 65 years ago, the American 
Petroleum Institute knew that burning fossil fuels could lead 
to global warming ``sufficient to melt the ice cap and submerge 
New York.''
    During the 1970s and '80s, Exxon scientists did cutting-
edge climate research, warning their executives in 1982 of 
``potentially catastrophic climate impacts.'' My own research 
has statistically shown that between 1977 and 2003, Exxon 
scientists modeled and predicted global warming with shocking 
skill and accuracy. And as the new House documents show, Exxon 
does not dispute these findings.
    Shell has likewise known about the basics of climate 
science and its implications since at least 1975. Yet, instead 
of alerting the public, the fossil fuel industry stayed silent 
as long as possible until what Exxon privately called a 
``critical event'' in 1988 when National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration's (NASA) chief climate scientist testified to 
Congress that he was 99 percent certain human-caused global 
warming was underway.
    Step 2, oil companies scheme. In response, the fossil fuel 
industry devised a public relations (PR) strategy straight out 
of Big Tobacco's playbook: to weaponize science against itself. 
That year, 1988, Exxon set out to ``emphasize the uncertainty 
in climate science.'' Or as a leaked memo put it in 1988, 
``Victory will be achieved when average citizens and the media 
recognize uncertainties in climate science.'' The plan's 
architects were Exxon, Chevron, API, utilities companies and 
their front groups.
    The joint investigation's new documents show that this sort 
of public affairs approach to the climate crisis--of putting 
spin before science--continues at oil companies to this day. 
From the late 1990s onwards, oil companies and their trade 
associations abetted by front groups as well as PR, consulting, 
and law firms have waged a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar 
campaign of disinformation, lobbying, propaganda, and the 
colonization of academia to sabotage science, scare and confuse 
the public and politicians and undermine climate and clean 
energy policies.
    This brings us to Step 3, oil companies deny science and 
scaremonger about the economy. The fossil fuel industry has 
spread this disinformation in four ways, by doing it themselves 
and also by funding contrarian scientists, organizations, and 
politicians to do it for them.
    First, no company has itself denied climate science and 
exaggerated economic concerns more than Exxon-Mobil. In the 
early 2000s, for example, they ran ads disguised as editorials 
with language like ``unsettled science'' and ``economy 
wrecking.'' Many contradictory reports 5 years earlier by the 
U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coauthored by 
Exxon's own chief climate scientist, which had confirmed humans 
had caused global warming.
    In total, our research shows that from 1996 to 2017 Mobil 
and Exxon-Mobil publicly contradicted mainstream science at 
least 45 times. And yet, in his 2021 testimony to the House 
Oversight Committee, Exxon CEO, Darren Woods, repeatedly 
affirmed that the company's public statements about climate 
change has always ``been consistent with the general consensus 
in the scientific community.''
    As a scholar of disinformation, I do not use the word 
``lie'' lightly, but no other word adequately describes the oil 
industry's brazen efforts to mislead the public about its 
history of misleading the public. This deceit is consistent 
with the oil industry's obstruction of the Committee's 
investigation as documented in today's report.
    Second, the fossil fuel industry has funded contrarian 
scientists and economists. For example, astrophysicist Willie 
Soon published academic articles in exchange for $1.25 million 
from Exxon, API, the Koch Foundation, Southern Company, and 
Chevron's Texaco. His articles wrongly blamed sunspots for 
warming and claimed, ``too much ice is really bad for polar 
bears.'' He became a champion of climate deniers in Congress 
and the media.
    API, likewise, hired economic consultants to publish 
reports exaggerating the costs and ignoring the benefits of 
climate action. The oil industry used these reports to oppose 
climate policies throughout the 1990s. Two decades later, 
President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, 
citing the same flawed economic arguments by the same oil 
industry-funded consultants.
    Third, Big Oil has used third-party allies to do its dirty 
work, leveraging a global network of over 160 organizations and 
5,000 individuals. Exxon alone gave $39 million to 73 climate 
denying politicians between 1992 and 2017. For example, Exxon 
together with BP, Chevron, Shell, and API were all members of 
the Global Climate Coalition which spent $13 million 
campaigning against the 1997 United Nations (UN) Kyoto protocol 
and were so successful that President Bush ``rejected Kyoto in 
part based on input from you.''
    As part of its campaign, the Coalition accused individual 
climate scientists of corruption and malpractice. This hostile 
approach to critics is echoed by my own experiences as well as 
by the new House documents, which revealed Shell, Exxon, BP, 
and API all tracking activists' activities and an Exxon manager 
demanding that a Reuters reporter ``kill the story.''
    Finally, the fossil fuel industry has funded climate 
denying politicians. For instance, former Senator Jim Inhofe 
described global warming as the greatest hoax ever perpetrated 
on the American people. Inhofe took almost $2 million in 
campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, including in 
2015 when he tried to refute record temperatures by producing a 
snowball on the Senate floor.
    This is not a coincidence. It has been statistically proven 
that the more Congresspeople vote against the environment the 
more money they get from oil companies. On top of campaign 
donations, between 2000 and 2016, fossil fuel interests also 
spent $2 billion lobbying Congress, including against climate 
legislation. They've outspent environmental groups by 10 to 1.
    This brings us to Step 4. Oil companies delay climate 
action with propaganda. In the mid-2000s, the fossil fuel 
industry began to shift its strategy from outright denial of 
science to more subtle and insidious forms of propaganda. They 
went from denial to delay and yet their end goal remains the 
same--and that's to stop action on climate change.
    As an Exxon manager explained, there was ``an effort to 
carefully reset the corporation's profile on climate positions 
so it would be more sustainable and less exposed.'' From 1986 
to 2015, BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and Conoco-Phillips 
together spent $3.6 billion on advertising. Today the oil 
industry's climate messaging is dominated by what we call 
discourses of delay, two of which I'll discuss now.
    The first is greenwashing. Just as the fossil fuel industry 
misled the public about climate science, it is now misleading 
us about its commitment to be part of the solution. The new 
documents are full of cases of oil companies strategizing how 
to publicly present themselves as ``greening,'' even though the 
oil and gas industry spent just 2.5 percent of its budget on 
clean energy in 2022.
    Take BP, which in the mid-2000s spent $100 million per year 
rebranding itself as ``Beyond Petroleum'' only to U-turn on 
that commitment. We now see that in 2021, even BP's own PR 
consultants were warning that this rhetoric is greener than its 
actions. This is greenwashing 101, talk green, act dirty.
    The new documents, likewise, show an Exxon vice president 
privately acknowledging that they were ``getting too far out 
there on their original algae ads,'' spending a full quarter of 
their algae biofuel budget on ads trumpeting a technology that 
by their own internal admission is ``still decades away from 
the scale we need.''
    The other discourse of delay I want to highlight is fossil 
fuel solutionism, whereby the oil industry relies on unproven 
or uneconomical technologies like CCS and offset schemes to 
argue fossil fuels are essential to addressing climate change, 
despite no company having a business plan consistent with the 
Paris Agreement.
    A clear example from the joint investigation is a 2017 BP 
email that prioritizes ``promoting and protecting the role of 
gas,'' even though in another BP document the company admits 
that ``gas doesn't support climate goals when you take methane 
emissions into account.'' BP's solution, a $1.1 million PR 
campaign that included funding white papers from Princeton and 
Imperial College ``highlighting the role of gas as a friend to 
renewables.'' This has all the hallmarks of what we call the 
fossil fuel industry's invisible colonization of academia.
    In conclusion, there is overwhelming evidence that fossil 
fuel interests have deliberately used disinformation, lobbying, 
propaganda, and academic influence to stop action on climate 
change for decades. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change (IPCC) has concluded, they have been successful. The 
memos uncovered by this Committee give us new evidence of this 
long history, exposing even more skeletons in Big Oil's closet.
    They confirm our worst fear, which is that fossil fuel 
companies have failed to change their stripes since Paris and 
that their efforts to delay climate action continue. Thank you 
very much.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you very much Dr. Supran. Ms. 
Eubanks.

     STATEMENT OF SHARON EUBANKS, FORMER DIRECTOR, TOBACCO 
        LITIGATION TEAM, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE \7\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    \7\ Prepared statement of Ms. Eubanks appears in the appendix on 
page 60.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Ms. Eubanks. Thank you very much for this opportunity to 
speak with you about climate change liability. I'm Sharon 
Eubanks and I used to be a director at the Department of 
Justice Civil Division. I was in charge of the racketeering 
case that the government filed there in 1999.
    Following a 9 month trial in that case, U.S. District Judge 
Gladys Kessler ruled in favor of the Justice Department, 
finding that the tobacco industry defendants were liable for 
racketeering violations spanning a period of 50 years. Judge 
Kessler wrote detailed factual findings in the tobacco case, 
and they reveal a striking similarity to the behavior of the 
petroleum industry today.
    For example, Judge Kessler found that the tobacco companies 
engaged in a massive public relations campaign to fraudulently 
deny and distort the health consequences of smoking and 
secondhand smoke. Both industries funneled money into promoting 
fake science. Exxon knew that the reality of climate change 
back in the 1970s and before that as well. And they later 
invested in telling the public that climate change was not 
real.
    Similarly, Judge Kessler found that the tobacco defendants 
actively concealed adverse scientific findings, entered into 
agreements not to conduct research and used lawyers to control 
research so that if it would serve the purposes of litigation 
and public relations. That was the research they wanted done.
    The fossil fuel industry concealed its well-known facts 
about the cause of climate change and instead deployed 
significant resources in an effort to sow doubt about the 
science. Both industries fought hard against regulation. The 
petroleum industry is quite aware of the possibility that 
regulations might move us toward low carbon transportation 
directly affecting the bottom line.
    Both industries lied to the public and regulators about 
what they knew about the harms of their products and when they 
knew it. The deceptive advertising and the PR of the fossil 
fuel industry is now under intense legal scrutiny. More than 
1,800 lawsuits have been filed regarding climate liability 
worldwide. Many of these cases concern the misleading fake 
science that the industry purposefully distributed to the 
public for decades.
    Denying that its product was the leading cause of global 
climate change, Exxon, in fact, knew the reality of climate 
change in the late 1970s and later invested substantially in 
telling the public that it was not happening. That climate 
change was not real. The similarities between the conduct of 
the tobacco industry and the petroleum industry form a solid 
and appropriate basis for investigating the petroleum industry. 
Furthermore, we should not waste time in wringing our hands. We 
have documents that lay out what is currently happening.
    There exists solid evidentiary basis to support more 
information being gathered on these companies. Just as the 
Department of Justice investigated the tobacco industry and 
ultimately filed a civil racketeering case, complaints against 
the industry have similarities in the fraudulent acts in the 
government was successful in the tobacco case. So there is 
certainly an adequate legal foundation for litigation against 
this industry and individuals and as groups.
    Many of the cases filed against the fossil fuel industry 
focus on deceptive marketing in the form of greenwashing. 
You've heard others talk about greenwashing here this morning. 
This is different from green marketing. That's important. With 
green marketing, companies that have genuinely sustainable 
products are and should remain free to market them accurately. 
But the oil industry is not a sustainable business. On average, 
less than 1 percent of its capital goes into low-carbon 
projects. This fact notwithstanding, the oil industry continues 
to misinform the public about their efforts to address the 
harms of climate change.
    Little has changed in recent years. The companies continue 
to mislead and there's a great amount of deception the 
companies continue to engage in, such as greenwashing and 
doublespeak. A robust and growing body of documentary evidence 
demonstrates that the major oil and gas companies, whose 
products are substantially responsible for the global 
greenhouse emissions and the resulting climate emergency we now 
face. These same companies had early and repeated notice and a 
knowledge of climate risks at the point in time that they had 
plenty of time to develop ways to avoid or to reduce these 
risks. Instead, they chose to mount a campaign of 
disinformation and denial.
    Just as it was in the case with the tobacco industry, the 
petroleum companies' internal documents tell the story. In 
1998, a memo entitled ``Global Climate Science Communications 
Action Plan'' and nicknamed the ``Victory Memo,'' outlines a 
multiyear, multimillion-dollar scheme to create uncertainty 
about well-established climate science. The plan outlined in 
the Victory Memo is elaborate, involving a multiyear, 
multimillion-dollar scheme to create uncertainty about well-
established climate science.
    The idea is to recruit and train a team of scientists to 
debunk global warming on radio talk shows, press briefings, 
campus workshops, and other types of public research. While the 
petroleum industry, writ large, is deeply involved in the 
deception, Exxon-Mobil was a leader in the field, following the 
tobacco's playbook to a tee. Exxon-Mobil funded climate change 
denial long after its own scientists knew and determined that 
the climate change was real. Exxon-Mobil's manufacturing 
campaign was not conducted alone, rather it associated with 
other groups and organizations to carry out the message of 
doubt. Kind of like that board with all the organizations on 
it, the dark money board. That was Exxon's approach to a lot of 
things to bring in other companies to work with them that way.
    Exxon-Mobil misled investors and the public about the risk 
of climate change all for the reaching of the bottom line, 
which is it was all about money. That's not to say that others 
weren't equally involved, or involved at least, but Exxon was, 
let's just say, the leader of the pack. And the behavior and 
goals of the tobacco industry and the petroleum industry are 
quite similar and for this reason there are many similarities 
in their liabilities.
    Both industries lied to the public and regulators about 
what they knew about the harms of their product and they lied 
about when they knew it. For example, Exxon-Mobil, like the 
tobacco industry, engaged in a decade's long conspiracy to 
deceive the American public and funded a climate denial program 
years, many years after its scientists had established that 
manmade climate change was real.
    At the time of tobacco, the oil companies' campaign of 
misinformation was conducted by individual companies and by 
trade groups, advertisers, and other proxies that spread the 
message of doubt. Also, like tobacco, in-house scientists 
confirmed present and future threats to the public, while the 
companies and their proxies publicly disputed the distorted 
scientific findings. In particular, the dangers of carbon 
pollution and climate change.
    The campaign of climate change denial had the intended 
effect of delaying the actions that might resolve the issues, 
including government regulatory actions while the public bore 
the effects of the delay.
    At the core of liability issues for the fossil fuel 
industry is that no company has acknowledged, just as the 
tobacco companies refused to acknowledge, that the product is 
the problem.
    Thank you very much for your time. I've received no 
financial compensation or anything of any value from any person 
or from any organization for my time or testimony given in 
these proceedings. I look forward to your questions.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you, Ms. Eubanks. Next is Dr. 
Cohen.

   STATEMENT OF DR. ARIEL COHEN, SENIOR FELLOW, THE ATLANTIC 
 COUNCIL, AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, ENERGY, GROWTH, AND SECURITY 
        PROGRAM, INTERNATIONAL TAX INVESTMENT CENTER \8\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    \8\ Prepared statement of Dr. Cohen appears in the appendix on page 
340.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Dr. Cohen. Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of the Committee, 
Senators, and staff, our nation today faces grave technological 
and policy challenges when it comes to energy. The transition 
to renewable energy is a multidecade, massive Industrial, 
economic, and societal transformation.
    I do believe it's unstoppable. The question is are we 
throwing the baby with the bath water. As it was the case with 
railroads, cars, telephone cables, contraceptives, and later 
space travel and genetic engineering, we do not fully grasp all 
the far-reaching consequences of this phenomenon, as Professor 
Alexander Mirtchev of George Mason University posited in his 
definitive The Prologue: The Alternative Energy Megatrend 
volume. However, U.S. has come a long way from 2005 when our 
energy imports peaked, we became a net energy exporter in 2019. 
Our national and continental energy security has improved due 
to shale oil and gas production, growing exports of liquified 
natural gas, LNG, and increased electricity generation from 
renewables.
    When it comes to the impact of economic and technological 
progress of the environment, there's no doubt that this is a 
global and not national issue. Colleagues here mentioned India, 
China, and other emerging markets, developing countries that 
are not taking guidance from this august house from the 
Congress, in general, or from the Department of Energy (DOE) 
and the Environmental Protection Agency, nor are they subject 
to the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts.
    When it comes to renewable energy, we must find out what is 
the optimal way to a zero-emission world where everybody can 
progress and prosper. The prosperity of the United States and 
of the West, collectively, has been built on ever cheaper and 
abundant energy. The evolution was from wood to coal to oil to 
gas to nuclear, now to renewable energy. But can we, for 
example, impose this leapfrog to countries that 10, 30, 50, 70 
percent of the population have 0 electricity. There is a huge 
danger, moral hazard in trying to impose that on them.
    Unfortunately, at this juncture, the energy field is rife 
with politicization. There's tremendous pressure to find a 
quick fix-it. There are international security dimensions and 
domestic policy pressures, as I said, to find quick fixes. The 
truth is the United States is locked in ferocious competition 
with China over global leadership, including the world energy 
future.
    China is near monopolizing technology for solar panels, 
mining, refining, and evermore rare earth minerals and 
producing more electric cars than the United States. The 
struggle between the desire to go green today and the necessity 
to having heat in winter and energy to fill factories and 
businesses has been played out in sharp relief in Western 
Europe since the February 22 Russian reinvasion of Ukraine.
    Take Germany, they spent =600 billion in what they called 
an Energiewende, the rapid transition to renewables, pouring 
subsidies into wind and solar and the cost may reach =1 
trillion by 2030, causing high energy prices, high taxes, low 
industrial competitiveness, and slow economic growth. And as 
they needed to walk away from 40 plus percent of their gas 
coming from Russia and other misguided policies of Chancellor 
Merkel, the United States, President Biden stepped in and 
promised them our supply of liquified natural gas (LNG).
    Now, the Biden Administration is trying to walk it back. It 
is imposing a freeze or a pause, then a freeze of LNG supply to 
export LNG and we don't know what's going to happen after the 
elections. Today if we miraculously moved entirely to 
renewables, we would need massive amounts of energy storage. We 
don't have it. The amount of energy storage today in the United 
States is 43 minutes, not hours, not days, not weeks, 43 
minutes as opposed to the strategic petroleum reserve that, 
when full, has enough oil for 90 days.
    So, we need baseload sources to meet our ever-increasing 
energy demands. If, for example, we move to entirely EV, 
electric vehicles, fleet by 2035, as the European Union (EU) 
and California suggest, we would need to increase our energy 
production by 50 percent. If this was only the renewables, what 
would happen at night? What would happen when the wind is not 
blowing? The price of such a storage capacity is in trillions 
of dollars. It's in my testimony. I'm not going to bore you 
with the numbers and the energy density of lithium battery 
versus gas, but suffice it to say that the Department of 
Energy, the Biden Administration, Environmental Protection 
Agency all agree that in terms of storage we do not have the 
economic technology to back full transition to renewables, so 
what's left?
    The three sources of baseload energy production: coal, 
which nobody likes. It's very polluting. It's not 
CO2, only CO2. It's sulfur oxides 
(SOX) and nitrogen oxides (NOX). I have 
asthma. I don't want electricity from coal produced anywhere 
near me, but of course, China, India, and others will continue 
producing it. Two is gas, natural gas, and three is nuclear.
    Let's talk about nuclear. I'm told Senator Whitehouse is a 
supporter of nuclear and I fully support that too. It is a 
zero-emission source of energy and it's easy to channel to 
baseload. However, we regulated ourselves out of nuclear energy 
business since the late 1970s. So, in the future, going to the 
future, if we're serious about climate change and measures to 
stop it, we need to go through a nuclear renaissance. We need 
to research new technologies for energy storage because we 
cannot rely on solar and wind today as they are today. And most 
importantly, geopolitically, as we're locked in this 
competition with China, we need to provide available, ample, 
and competitive LNG to our allies in Europe and in Asia.
    That means that, for example, as 20 million tons, 40-
billion-cubic meters of gas are currently sold by Russia to 
Europe and the EU is thinking about sanctions against Russia. 
Our industry should be ready to step in and provide that LNG. 
Ladies and gentlemen, if we stop providing LNG to the global 
market, guess what, Russia, Qatar, Nigeria, Algeria, 
Mozambique, and others, most of them far from being paragons of 
democracy are going to step in. If it's not American molecules, 
it's not going to be solar and wind. It's going to be Qatar and 
Russia.
    To conclude, facing a global systemic challenge which U.S. 
will not be able to solve alone just by banning fossil fuels 
production at home, we and our allies are facing just strategic 
challenges in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Our economy 
and military need reliable and ample supplies of energy and so 
do our allies. We need to manage energy transition at gradual, 
consumer-friendly, business-friendly ways. We need to expand 
electricity generation to meet the growing demand from the 
transportation sector and we need a nuclear renaissance, 
otherwise, undermining American standing, not just an arsenal 
of democracy, but as a strategic energy reserve of democracy 
would undermine U.S. centric international system with gravest 
of consequences. Thank you very much.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you. And finally, Mr. Ratner.

   STATEMENT OF MICHAEL RATNER, SPECIALIST IN ENERGY POLICY, 
               CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE \9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    \9\ Prepared statement of Mr. Ratner appears in the appendix on 
page 347.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mr. Ratner. Thank you. Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking Member 
Grassley, members of the Committee, my name is Michael Ratner. 
I am a specialist in energy policy focused on natural gas 
issues at the Congressional Research Service. CRS appreciates 
the opportunity to testify on the important issues today. I've 
been asked to provide testimony related to the use of fossil 
fuels from broad geopolitical and security perspectives and to 
provide context on fossil fuel consumption and supply.
    Additionally, I will confine my testimony in accordance 
with CRS's enabling statutes and guidelines on objectivity and 
nonpartisanship. CRS takes no position on any related proposed 
or pending legislation or policy.
    According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration 
(EIA) data, approximately 89 percent of the world's primary 
energy consumption, meaning energy used directly or to produce 
other forms of energy, came from fossil fuels in 2022, being 
almost evenly split among oil, coal, and natural gas. To put 
this in perspective, according to the EIA data, global use of 
non-fossil fuel resources, including hydropower, non-hydro 
renewable energy, and nuclear energy currently represents about 
one tenth of supply.
    In 2022, fossil fuels comprised 84 percent of U.S. primary 
energy. This difference highlights the challenges the world 
faces to globally replace fossil fuels as an energy source. In 
2022, 61 percent of worldwide electricity generation came from 
fossil fuels led by coal. In the United States, almost the same 
percent of electricity generation came from fossil fuels as 
well, but with natural gas as the most common fuel.
    The United States is the largest producer, consumer, and 
exporter of natural gas in the world. Being self-sufficient in 
natural gas, which tends to be a regional commodity from a 
markets and pricing perspective has insulated the United States 
from natural gas price rises experienced elsewhere. On January 
26, 2024, the Biden Administration announced a temporary pause 
in the approval process of natural gas export permits to 
countries that do not have a free trade agreement with the 
United States. This pause has the potential to affect future 
liquified natural gas exports and the facilities associated 
with liquifying and exporting natural gas.
    The Department of Energy's non-Federal Transit 
Administration (FTA) permit to export natural gas is one 
component of the federal regulatory process. Two aspects of the 
permit process have brought it to the forefront. The Natural 
Gas Act requires DOE to make a public interest determination, 
but did not define in statute what that public interest 
determination entailed. And two, the only country that the 
United States has a free trade agreement with and is a major 
LNG importer is South Korea. Companies seek the non-FTA permit 
to export to other countries.
    The public interest determination underlies the 
Administration's justification for temporarily pausing the 
permitting process for LNG exports to non-FTA countries. The 
Administration has stated that they are updating the underlying 
economic and environmental analysis used in prior 
authorizations. The statute does not require nor prohibit DOE 
to pause the permitting process in order to reevaluate the 
public interest determination.
    The existing U.S. LNG export capacity is about 15-billion-
cubic feet per day, which represents about 1/6th of U.S. 
consumption. Another almost 30-billion-cubic feet per day is 
already fully permitted for construction and exports to FTA and 
non-FTA countries. This includes approximately 17-billion-cubic 
feet per day of liquefaction capacity that is under 
construction and approximately another 12-billion-cubic feet 
per day of liquefaction that has been approved by the Federal 
Energy Regulatory Commission and DOE, but has not broken 
ground.
    This latter category suggests that there existed before the 
temporary pause some market hesitation for company executives 
that could, in theory, start construction but have chosen not 
to. Individual companies have their reasons for waiting, which 
will vary by company, especially since the projects have 
already secured a non-FTA permit from DOE. They are not 
affected by the pause. The pause only affects projects that 
have not yet secured a DOE permit.
    Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, energy security 
has increased in priority for many countries, particularly with 
regard to natural gas supply. U.S. LNG and gas piped from 
Norway are currently the largest sources of natural gas to the 
European Union and other parts of Europe. Prior to Russia's 
invasion, U.S. LNG accounted for 6 percent of Europe's natural 
gas imports. U.S. LNG share has tripled to 18 percent in 2023. 
This was the largest rise of any country's exports to Europe.
    During the same time period, Russia provided almost half of 
Europe's natural gas imports in 2021 and 15 percent in 2023. 
Part of the decrease in Russian supplies is because Russia cut 
exports to certain European countries that it deemed hostile 
and not cooperating in the purchasing of gas in rubles. Russia 
can and has used natural gas supply for political and economic 
gains because the European market has not been able to change 
its supply sources quickly.
    The Biden Administration's temporary pause in LNG 
permitting has arguably added some degree of uncertainty in the 
market, particularly when looking at the longer term. The 
United States is primarily a market driven economy and company 
executives make decision to invest based, in part, on 
perceptions of the market and a likelihood of a satisfactory 
rate of return on their investment. Government regulations set 
a structure for the LNG companies and any changes can affect 
perceptions of the market positively or negatively.
    Thank you and I look forward to your questions.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thanks very much. I believe that 
Ranking Member Grassley and I are both going to yield to other 
colleagues who are pressed for time and therefore the order of 
questioning will be Sanders, Kennedy, Merkley; is that correct? 
That's correct. Okay, Senator Sanders.

                  STATEMENT OF SENATOR SANDERS

    Senator Sanders. Well, Chairman Whitehouse, thanks very 
much for holding this important hearing and let me thank all of 
the panelists for being here.
    If a large corporation knowingly, knowingly--produces a 
product that gets me sick or kills me, I would assume that we 
have an abundance of laws to prosecute that company and to hold 
them accountable and to demand punitive damages. My dad, like 
so many other people, smoked several packs of cigarettes a day. 
He died I suspect largely because of that, as did millions of 
other Americans who were lied to by the tobacco industry.
    I remember as a kid seeing doctors in white coats on 
television smoking cigarettes, telling the American people how 
favorable and good these cigarettes were while they were 
killing the American people. So, I'd like to ask Ms. Eubanks a 
simple question. If we have an industry that knowingly, and 
that's the point, knowingly understood that carbon emissions 
were causing climate change, knowingly understood that climate 
change will bring devastating destruction to the lives of 
billions of people, what are the legal grounds that we can hold 
them accountable for? Ms. Eubanks.
    Ms. Eubanks. Well, a lot of it would depend on whether it 
was in a state or the federal government. The federal 
government RICO statute, of course, has provisions that we used 
in the tobacco litigation and was a way to bring all of the 
claims under the same umbrella. Conspiracy is a good claim to 
look at in a lot of the statutes that are involved in consumer 
protection laws.
    Senator Sanders. If you were Attorney General of the United 
States, would you proceed in that direction?
    Ms. Eubanks. I would. Yes, no question.
    Senator Sanders. Okay. Any thoughts as to why the current 
Attorney General is not going forward in that direction?
    Ms. Eubanks. It's probably not really appropriate for me to 
comment on that since I don't know anything about what the 
current Attorney General is doing, as I explained in the 
papers.
    Senator Sanders. I don't remember exactly what the 
settlement with tobacco was. It was huge.
    Ms. Eubanks. It wasn't a settlement. I won. It was a 9-
month trial, and the companies were ordered to change the way 
they do business. And I think that that type of Order, not 
involving money, but money's great. Don't get me wrong. That 
could be another part of any end to a case where you're talking 
about what the damages, or the remedies would be. But getting a 
company to change the way it did business that's what we got 
out of tobacco, and it took years.
    Senator Sanders. We also got money. The states, I guess, 
got money.
    Ms. Eubanks. The states got money. Yes. Correct.
    Senator Sanders. Let me ask Mr. Supran a question. What, in 
your judgment, are the similarities between the actions of Big 
Tobacco and what we're seeing with the fossil fuel industry 
today?
    Dr. Supran. Thank you, Senator. Yes, as I said during my 
opening statement, Big Oil is frankly the new Big Tobacco. My 
colleagues and I have published an article called ``America 
Misled,'' where we lay out the evidence for these similarities. 
They're multifold from the strategies to the personnel.
    Senator Sanders. Have they been consistently lying?
    Dr. Supran. The oil industry?
    Senator Sanders. Yes.
    Dr. Supran. They have been consistently misleading the 
public about the realities and implications of their products. 
Yes.
    Senator Sanders. And if you have a huge entity in the 
United States, the fossil fuel industry, the oil companies 
misleading the American people, not allowing us or having the 
information to take the kind of actions that we should've taken 
dozens of years ago, what are the implications of that?
    Dr. Supran. So, it's important to clarify that I'm not a 
lawyer, but as my statement made very clear, we have the 
receipts. We have overwhelming evidence that this industry has 
known since twice my lifetime about the dangers of their 
products, and they knowingly and deliberately created a 
multidecade, multibillion-dollar campaign to confuse----
    Senator Sanders. And the result of that is that countries 
all over the world were very slow moving in attempting to deal 
with climate change; is that correct?
    Dr. Supran. Yes, that's correct. It's enshrined in the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent 
assessment that this history of disinformation and lobbying has 
delayed action on climate change worldwide.
    Senator Sanders. Do you have any understanding of how many 
hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars in damage will 
take place as a result of that misleading campaign?
    Dr. Supran. It's hard to ascribe specific dollar values to 
specific actions because obviously we live in a complex, 
multiconnected society. But at the same time--and also, Im not 
an economist, but economists who have studied this estimate 
that by around 2030 the consequences of global warming could 
include a $240 billion COVID-like economic shock every 5 years.
    Senator Sanders. Every 5 years?
    Dr. Supran. Yes.
    Senator Sanders. Well, in my view, it should not be state 
government or the federal government having to pick up the 
bill. I think it's time to ask the people who caused that 
problem or lied about that situation to pick up the bill. Thank 
you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you, Senator Sanders. Senator 
Kennedy.
    Senator Kennedy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Cohen, let me 
start with you. I'm going to ask a few questions. I think these 
are yes or no or I don't know questions. The last few years, 
unfortunately, the United States economy has experienced 
substantial inflation, is that correct?
    Dr. Cohen. Yes, sir.
    Senator Kennedy. And that inflation is man-made, is it not?
    Dr. Cohen. Any inflation is man-made, sir.
    Senator Kennedy. And that man's name is Joe Biden, is it 
not.
    Dr. Cohen. I cannot answer that, sir.
    Senator Kennedy. Okay. Since President Biden took office, 
average electricity prices in the United States are up 29.4 
percent, are they not?
    Dr. Cohen. I'll have to check the data and get back to you 
on that, sir.
    Senator Kennedy. And isn't it true that electricity prices 
under President Biden have increased 13 times faster than the 
previous 7 years?
    Dr. Cohen. I'll have to check the data, sir.
    Senator Kennedy. Okay. And the National Energy Assistant 
Directors Association--I don't know if you're familiar with 
them. I've checked them out. They're a reputable group. They 
say that the average United States electricity bill will go up 
10 percent this year and 10 percent next year, is that correct?
    Dr. Cohen. Again, I'm not familiar with the data, but I can 
point out, sir, that in Europe----
    Senator Kennedy. I'm not interested in Europe.
    Dr. Cohen. In Europe, prices are 2.5 to 3 percent higher.
    Senator Kennedy. I'm interested in our people right now 
who----
    Dr. Cohen. Our people have----
    Senator Kennedy [continuing]. Having to sell blood in order 
to pay their electricity bill. A substantial portion of this 
inflation in electricity, up 30 percent since President Biden 
took office, is directly related to his energy policies, is it 
not?
    Dr. Cohen. Energy prices fluctuate based on supply and 
demand of all sources of energy. Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. You think it has nothing--is that a yes or 
a no?
    Dr. Cohen. It's a very complicated economic question, sir.
    Senator Kennedy. I understand. Give me an answer. Did 
President Biden's policies contribute to the inflation or 
didn't they?
    Dr. Cohen. Both Republican and Democratic Administrations 
infused the economy with trillions of dollars which contributes 
to the inflation. Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. I don't believe any Republicans voted for 
the Inflation Reduction Act, is that correct?
    Dr. Cohen. I don't know.
    Senator Kennedy. Well, I do, $1.2 trillion, green new deal. 
No Republicans voted for it. You want to amend your answer?
    Dr. Cohen. I'll amend my answer that under President Trump 
and under President Biden trillions of dollars were infused 
into the economy and contributed to----
    Senator Kennedy. Electricity prices went up 5 percent----
    Dr. Cohen [continuing]. The inflation.
    Senator Kennedy [continuing]. Over 4 years and under Biden 
they went up 30 percent over three years, which is better?
    Dr. Cohen. Say again under Trump please?
    Senator Kennedy. Under Trump electricity prices went up 5 
percent. Under Biden they went up 30 percent over three years, 
which is better?
    Dr. Cohen. Clearly, lower rise in electricity prices is 
better, however----
    Senator Kennedy. All right. Dr. Supran, let me ask you a 
couple of questions.
    Dr. Cohen. Okay.
    Senator Kennedy. You're here at the request of my 
Democratic colleagues?
    Dr. Cohen. No, sir.
    Senator Kennedy. No, Dr. Supran.
    Dr. Supran. That's correct. Yes.
    Senator Kennedy. Okay. Dr. Supran, on December 14, 2023, 
you tweeted in support of Climate Defiance. That's an entity 
that the Brookings Institute has called a radical climate 
change group, is that correct?
    Dr. Supran. I don't recall, I'm afraid.
    Senator Kennedy. Okay. Would this be the same Climate 
Defiance that you--I'm looking at your tweet. You tweeted in 
support of them. Would this be the same Climate Defiance that 
called Senator Joe Biden ``a sick fuck''?
    Dr. Supran. I don't know. But as I mentioned----
    Senator Kennedy. Would this be the same Climate Defiance 
that called Senator Lisa Murkowski a murderer?
    Dr. Supran. I do not know. As I said in my statement----
    Senator Kennedy. Would this be the same Climate Defiance 
who told the CEO of Exxon to ``eat shit, Darren''?
    Dr. Supran. I'm not responsible for the statements of other 
people.
    Senator Kennedy. Nice group you're hanging out with----
    Dr. Supran. And I also don't know the answer.
    Senator Kennedy [continuing]. Doc. Here's what your tweet 
says in support of Climate Defiance, ``We do not do online 
petitions. We do not do NGO coalition letters. We do not do 
fucking bus stop ads. We chase fossil fuel CEOs and the 
politicians who do their bidding and we do not apologize.'' Did 
I read that correctly?
    Dr. Supran. That is not my tweet, sir.
    Senator Kennedy. That is your tweet. I'm looking at--here's 
a copy right here. It's right off your website big as Dallas. 
On October 31, 2023----
    Dr. Supran. I'm almost certain that is not my tweet, sir.
    Senator Kennedy [continuing]. You said this on Twitter.
    ``Climate justice was coined by our movements to locate it 
as a struggle against geocidal racial injustice, colonialism, 
and Apartheid. If your climate justice doesn't stand with the 
Palestinians against colonialism and Apartheid, then your 
climate justice has no justice in it.'' Did you say that?
    Dr. Supran. I believe not.
    Senator Kennedy. Here it is bigger than Dallas.
    Dr. Supran. May I please see the documents?
    Senator Kennedy. Yes, sir. Hand the witness his documents 
there.
    Dr. Supran. May I please point out that----
    Chairman Whitehouse. The Senator's time has expired and 
there are other senators waiting.
    Senator Kennedy. I've got a bunch more tweets. Thanks for 
your objective advice, Doc.
    Chairman Whitehouse. You can put them into a question for 
the record and----
    Senator Kennedy. Yes, I'd like to submit all of the good 
Doctor's objective tweets and scientific analysis for the 
record.\10\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \10\ Statement submitted by Senator Kennedy appears in the appendix 
on page 457.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Chairman Whitehouse. That will be done without objection. 
Senator Merkley.
    Dr. Supran. May I clarify one final point?
    Chairman Whitehouse. Proceed.
    Dr. Supran. These are not my tweets. These are retweets.
    Senator Kennedy. Oh, you often retweet stuff you don't 
support, is that what you're telling me, Doc.
    Dr. Supran. I did not say that I don't support this. I 
simply did not tweet it, as you're alleging.
    Senator Kennedy. But you retweeted them, didn't you?
    Dr. Supran. I'd like to make it very clear that this form 
of character assassination is characteristic of the propaganda 
techniques of fossil fuel interests.
    Senator Kennedy. You retweeted that----
    Chairman Whitehouse. Senator Merkley.
    Senator Kennedy [continuing]. Didn't you?
    Dr. Supran. Thank you.
    Senator Kennedy. Are you going to call me a sick fuck?
    Chairman Whitehouse. It's Senator Merkley's time.
    Senator Merkley. Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to note since 
a few things were said about fossil gas, methane gas, 
characterized and also it's liquefaction as liquified natural 
gas that the science is that fossil gas is as damaging to the 
climate, given its life cycle over 20 years and the methane 
leakage, as is coal. So, there's been a campaign to call fossil 
gas clean that isn't justified. And when you do the additional 
energy to liquify it and send it overseas and put it in an 
additional pipe system that also leaks methane, then it's worse 
than local coal.
    And the LNG pause that was referred to it's important to 
remember that there are an additional 17 licensed projects on 
top of the 17 that have already been built and the pause is 
related to the 25th project. So, the implications of saying 
somehow this is crushing the fossil gas expansion is just 
absolutely wrong.
    Now, I want to turn to a document that I'd submit for the 
record titled ``Reputational Risks Associated with the Upcoming 
BP Advocacy Campaign to Protect Cherry Point Refinery's License 
to Operate.'' If I could, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Without objection.
    Senator Merkley. And a second document called ``Creating a 
Better Environment to Help BP Deliver Its Operational and 
Strategic Priorities in Washington State.'' \11\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \11\ Statements submitted by Senator Merkley appear in the appendix 
on page 379.
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    Chairman Whitehouse. Also, without objection.
    Senator Merkley. What's really interesting about this 2018 
document is it lays out BP's plan to defeat a local ordinance, 
a county council ordinance that would've been in pursued in 
November of 2018 that would've made expansion or upgrade of 
Cherry Point Refinery more difficult. And it lays out a 
coordinated plan to get the county commissioners to either 
amend the ordinance or delay it or to give it up, the three 
things that are mentioned specifically in here.
    And they lay out their details. We'll focus on creating 
jobs. We'll focus on that we are pursuing a low carbon agenda. 
And then it proceeds to say, but we need a more comprehensive 
plan for Washington State. So, that more comprehensive plan is 
the second document that I just entered into the record, and I 
think it's a roadmap for often how the oil industry goes about 
trying to create a media campaign, many features of a media 
campaign in order to change how people think about an issue.
    And this proceeds to say that the challenges we face ``will 
only get worse unless we change the public's perception of 
us.'' And it goes on to talk about many pieces of that strategy 
and those include relying on business trade organizations, 
partnerships, reaching out to NGOs, to local Tribes, to 
community organizations to build a coalition of supporters, 
moving a key personnel from Illinois to Washington State, 
participating in a Washington State petroleum association 
coalition in Washington State, increasing their strength in 
outside legal counsel to help fight legal battles, increasing 
the political action committee (PAC) distributions in the 
state, that is political contributions to politicians.
    Doing a special one-time project promoting salmon, salmon 
hatchery as a way of creating, hey, we're the wonderful saviors 
of salmon, spending $300,000 a year on soft persuasion, 
spending $2.5 million per year or as much as $4.5 million per 
year on what is called hard persuasion, that includes a lot of 
advertising campaigns, again, media campaigns. It includes an 
employee contractor education and advocacy program. It includes 
creating British Petroleum social media identities. I'm sure 
exactly what all that means, but I don't know if it's people to 
weigh in on social media. It talks then about additional 
funding for lobbyists in Washington State and so forth.
    So, I wanted to ask you, Dr. Supran, this comprehensive 
document of strategy is this pretty characteristic of how the 
petroleum industry, the fossil fuel industry seeks to really 
change public perceptions and to influence politicians right 
down to the local county level to achieve their objectives of 
expanding fossil fuel refineries, expanding consumption?
    Dr. Supran. Yes. And it constitutes important additional 
evidence to that effect.
    Senator Merkley. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Next Senator Grassley, followed by 
Senator Padilla.
    Senator Grassley. Mr. Ratner, I got some questions about 
how unrealistic some of these goals are, not that they aren't 
worthy goals, but that they're unrealistic. You're a 
nonpartisan energy policy specialist who spent his entire 
career as an international oil and gas expert.
    Before your time in the CIA, you spent 4 years at Enron, so 
you experienced first-hand the impact of corporate fraud and 
corruption. Now, that you've heard claims of a concerted, 
overwhelming conspiracy to defraud the public of climate change 
information, have you seen any evidence to support the 
Democrats' claims of fossil fuel industry deception?
    Mr. Ratner. Thank you, Senator. During the course of my 
career, I've never come across anything to the likes that have 
been mentioned here today.
    Senator Grassley. Okay. Also for you, your testimony notes 
that fossil fuels comprise 84 percent of U.S. energy 
consumption in 2022. What would it mean for the U.S. gasoline 
and international gas prices if all new and expanded oil, gas 
exploration immediately ceased as advocated by some of my 
colleagues, as well as the staff report. That's the report I 
referred to in my opening comments.
    Mr. Ratner. Sure. I think the initial announcement would 
send certain shockwaves and uncertainty to the market that 
basically we're saying the U.S. is going to be pulling out of 
the global fossil fuel industry, whether it's oil or gas and 
petroleum products. And eventually, as that happened, you would 
see upward pressure on prices, globally, for those products.
    Senator Grassley. Okay. And Dr. Cohen, if Democrats had 
their way, they would destroy America's fossil fuel production 
through excessive regulation and limitless taxation at a time 
when Americans can least afford it. In your point of view, what 
is the difference between tobacco and fossil fuel commodities? 
What impact would a massive oil and gas supply reduction have 
on geopolitical conflict and the U.S. economy?
    Dr. Cohen. Senator, as I'm saying in my testimony, an 
abrupt halt to all fossil fuel production of this country would 
be an economic suicide. The fundamental difference between 
tobacco and fossil fuel industry is that fossil fuel industry 
brings a tangible economic good to the economy. Without it, we 
cannot have our transportation, our deliveries, our military 
machines of planes, tanks moving around.
    So, I hope that nobody in their right mind is advocating 
immediate cessation of fossil fuel production.
    Senator Grassley. Would you care to comment on the first 
part of my question about the difference between tobacco and 
fossil fuel commodities?
    Dr. Cohen. As I said, tobacco, the science is establishing 
that the only thing tobacco does is addiction and health harm. 
Fossil fuel, on the other hand, as polluting as it may be, 
produces huge amounts of relatively cheap and concentrated 
energy. And without it, our economy and our society would 
collapse.
    Senator Grassley. I apologize for missing your point on 
tobacco. My last question.
    Dr. Cohen. Yes, sir.
    Senator Grassley. In their staff report, the Democrats 
condemned the description of natural gas as a bridge fuel. They 
call it deception. These are quotes, ``deception, 
disinformation, and doublespeak.'' Is this true?
    Dr. Cohen. I think vilifying an industry that was the 
backbone of U.S. economic growth in the last part of the 19th 
century and for all of 20th century is speaking to a certain 
agenda. The speakers here talked about methane emissions. Yes, 
there are methane emissions, but the leading industry that 
contributes to methane emissions is animal husbandry and 
agriculture. Nobody talks about that. The fossil fuel industry 
produces less methane than agriculture. What are we going to do 
about that?
    Chairman Whitehouse. Thank you, Senator Grassley. Senator 
Padilla. And just for the record, I believe that the deception 
related to the characterization of natural gas as a bridge 
fuel, has to do with the industry's intentions that it actually 
not be a bridge fuel, as the exhibit said that it was a bridge 
fuel. But also, a destination fuel for the long term. So, the 
deception was pretending that natural gas would be a temporary 
bridge fuel in a transition to a clean energy economy when that 
was not actually the industry's intention, just to be clear. 
Senator Padilla.

                  STATEMENT OF SENATOR PADILLA

    Senator Padilla. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Now, colleagues in 
the wake of the Trump Administration's decision to abdicate 
U.S. climate leadership, I'm proud to state that my home state 
of California stepped up. We stepped up to engage directly with 
the international climate community, building coalitions and 
reaching bilateral agreements necessary to continue to advance 
ambitious climate policies at the time.
    And as demonstrated in the Committee documents, Mr. Chair, 
and as you've so well pointed out, large oil companies and 
trade associations have actively worked to undermine those 
efforts and have continued to make investments that are 
inconsistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
    Now, meanwhile, California has continued its global climate 
leadership, leading other subnational governments and 
organizations across the country under the U.S. Climate 
Alliance to keep the Paris targets within reach and to preserve 
our environmental progress.
    Now, in 2022, when it appeared that oil producers 
suppressed supply to drive up prices and rake in record profits 
amid the highest inflation in 40 years, California took on the 
industry by creating an independent watchdog. The Division of 
Petroleum Market Oversight. California also authorized the 
California Energy Commission to stop price gouging and further 
hold the industry accountable.
    The new division will closely monitor the industry daily to 
identify unethical or illegal behavior and refer any violation 
of law, including industry misconduct or market manipulation to 
the State Attorney General for prosecution.
    My first question is for Dr. Supran. Among the documents 
released by this Committee, is there evidence that the oil 
industry coordinated to control prices and exploit consumers?
    Dr. Supran. I have yet to review the documents themselves. 
As indicated, they were only just released. I've reviewed the 
report that accompanied them, so forgive me for only having a 
superficial understanding of the documents.
    Senator Padilla. But based on that report and your 
expertise?
    Dr. Supran. Yes, my impression is that the documents reveal 
that many of the trade associations and third parties that have 
affiliated with these companies have worked often on their 
behalf in some cases to do their bidding, in some cases to do 
their dirty work when it comes to both disinformation and 
lobbying in service of the fossil fuel industry's interests. 
Yes.
    Senator Padilla. Thank you. Follow-up question for Ms. 
Eubanks. From your experience on the tobacco litigation team 
with the Department of Justice, how important is it to have a 
public entity like the Division of Petroleum Market Oversight 
in California to monitor industry and document unethical or 
illegal behavior?
    Ms. Eubanks. That would've been wonderful. We didn't have 
anything like that in our case.
    Senator Padilla. But the value here?
    Ms. Eubanks. Yes, I think it is value in such a thing.
    Senator Padilla. Mr. Chairman, I raise this because--well, 
number one, I'm proud of California's leadership. And number 
two, our colleague, Senator Kennedy was trying to go on and on 
comparing the rise in energy cost between one Administration 
and another Administration when the data is absolutely clear. 
There was decrease in the supply made available completely 
under the control--a choice made by an industry that 
significantly raised prices on consumers and so let's put the 
responsibility where it deserves to be placed and bring forward 
accountability based on that. Dr. Supran.
    Dr. Supran. Thank you, Senator. I do recall now one 
specific datapoint from the new documents, which revealed that 
while Shell Oil Company worked hard to promote a public image 
in support of taxing carbon, it fretted internally about the 
fact that it was part of the Western States Petroleum 
Association, which, as I said, was doing its bidding to try to 
kill off a proposal for a carbon tax in Washington State.
    Senator Padilla. Thank you very much. And Mr. Chairman, in 
closing, just the side-by-side headlines can't make the point 
any clearer. When you have record high prices and record 
profits, we know exactly what's going on. Consumers are smart. 
Thank you.
    Chairman Whitehouse. The Senator's point is well taken. We 
were obviously early on concerned that Big Oil was taking 
advantage, particularly of Putin's invasion of Ukraine to drive 
up prices through the cartel that sets prices for this product. 
And sure enough, when something they can't lie about came 
forward, which is their financial reports reviewed by the 
Securities and Exchange Commission, they reported unprecedented 
and massive profits that had resulted from their price hikes 
and so I will confirm the Senator's point.
    My questions, I guess I'll begin with Dr. Supran because, 
first of all, you spent time at Brown University. And second of 
all, you mentioned the testimony of Jim Hanson, the NASA 
expert. My recollection is that original testimony took place 
before an Environment Public Works Committee hearing chaired by 
Rhode Islander and Rhode Island Republican John Chaffee.
    Dr. Supran. Yes, I think that's correct.
    Chairman Whitehouse. So, there's a Rhode Island beginning 
to all of this, and I wanted to flag that.
    Ms. Eubanks, the Judge in your case was Gladys Kessler.
    Correct?
    Ms. Eubanks. That's correct.
    Chairman Whitehouse. She ended up having to write about a 
1,200-page opinion.
    Ms. Eubanks. Well, it was 1,700 pages and a slip opinion.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Yes.
    Ms. Eubanks. And it takes up an entire volume of West 
Reporters.
    Chairman Whitehouse. I just would note that she passed away 
last March 16th after an extremely distinguished career and her 
diligence in this case really did change the world. You 
mentioned that this was a RICO case. It was a civil RICO case, 
was it not?
    Ms. Eubanks. Yes, it was a civil RICO case. The only 
difference, though, in civil and criminal is the burden of 
proof.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And the penalties.
    Ms. Eubanks. Right.
    Chairman Whitehouse. So, nobody was going to go to jail----
    Ms. Eubanks. Exactly. Exactly.
    Chairman Whitehouse [continuing]. As a result of a civil 
RICO case.
    So, there was nothing that you were doing that was 
criminalizing dissent or disagreement.
    Ms. Eubanks. That's correct.
    Chairman Whitehouse. In fact, what you were doing was 
shutting down fraud, is that correct?
    Ms. Eubanks. Yes, massive fraud.
    Chairman Whitehouse. As found by the Judge and as confirmed 
by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Correct?
    Ms. Eubanks. All the way up. Yes.
    Chairman Whitehouse. So, what was the technical outcome of 
Judge Kessler's decision? What did you win in her ruling?
    Ms. Eubanks. What we won in her ruling was an ability to 
come up with equitable relief that actually would change how 
the companies conducted themselves in business, to stop their 
youth marketing and the lying about the youth marketing, to 
stop the making false statements about the cigarettes, whether 
they're addictive or not. All of those things are elements that 
we proved under RICO that continued into the present, which was 
part of what we had to prove. We also were able to demonstrate 
how the companies worked together, not necessarily as a 
conspiracy because under RICO you cut through a lot of that and 
you're able to----
    Chairman Whitehouse. Show an enterprise.
    Ms. Eubanks. Exactly. I think more than anything else, 
though, more maybe right up there close to the very top, what 
that case did is it revealed the facts. American people want 
the truth. That's what they want more than anything. They're 
smart. They can make decisions about what happens, but they 
need to be given the tools. There was huge effort to prevent us 
from bringing forward the evidence that we had from the variety 
of proceedings, the state cases that had gone forward.
    Chairman Whitehouse. Is it fair to say that Judge Kessler's 
Order in a nutshell ordered that they were forbidden to lie?
    Ms. Eubanks. In a nutshell, yeah. Yes.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And indeed, that they were under an 
affirmative obligation to correct some of the lying that they 
had already done; is that also correct?
    Ms. Eubanks. The corrective statements they were called. 
Yes. Absolutely.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And after that was done, after the 
campaign of lies was ordered to be ended and after the 
corrections were ordered to be made, did it change the tobacco 
industry's behavior?
    Ms. Eubanks. Somewhat. In truth, there are still things 
that may be going on, but there was a joint order that was 
issued just last year, and I haven't heard of any violations of 
that order at this point. But there's a mechanism if there were 
violations to bring forward claims because of the way the case 
was settled, but they resolved those elements of conduct that 
the companies were engaging in and put a stop to a lot of that.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And when they put a stop to a lot of 
that, my observation was that the tobacco industry had to 
change its ways and the result was very significant public 
health improvements that followed because the campaign of lies 
that was enabling the distribution and sales of the product had 
terminated and so they had to go on and we saw smoking begin to 
decline.
    Ms. Eubanks. Well, that's true. We did see a smoking 
decline, but one of the things that wasn't resolved was the 
issues surrounding menthol. And the other thing that came out 
of this, to me, that was so remarkable is that for many years 
the companies reacted and said that we don't want to have 
regulation. We don't want to be regulated by the federal 
government, so guess what, we'll voluntarily agree to this 
stack of things. And then, the government says, okay, that's 
what we'll do because it's so hard to get this done any other 
way.
    But meanwhile, back at the ranch they had built a record, 
and, in that record, it contained all kinds of this is how we 
would regulate tobacco. Once the case was won by us at trial, 
then the parties started talking about, well, how about we sort 
of agree, Philip Morris, in particular, who had a 52 percent 
share of the cigarettes sold in America, saying we're going to 
switch sides here now. We're going to be for regulation.
    Chairman Whitehouse. That was a result.
    Ms. Eubanks. That was a result.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And on appeal, how did you do?
    Ms. Eubanks. Well, we did just fine. The law was there. The 
law was passed. On appeal, we won everything, except for there 
was one tiny little piece where one of the defendants was able 
to get out of the case, claiming that I withdrew from the 
conspiracy. I'm not there anymore.
    Chairman Whitehouse. But Judge Kesseler's decision, other 
than that, was entirely upheld by the Circuit Court of Appeals?
    Ms. Eubanks. Yes, it was.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And the Supreme Court took a look at 
that case and declined to review.
    Ms. Eubanks. They did. Both parties sought cert because 
there was more than one statute that we went forward with. RICO 
was one. We had the Medicare Reimbursement Act and the Medicare 
Secondary Pay of Provisions of the Social Security Act of 1930 
something.
    Chairman Whitehouse. So, a lawsuit that changed the world 
and saved lives. Thank you very much.
    That will conclude the hearing. I want to thank the many 
colleagues who came and participated. I want to thank all of 
the witnesses. Questions for the record, to the extent that 
there are questions for the record, I think Dr. Supran had some 
questions for the record that he will receive from Senator 
Kennedy.
    Dr. Supran. Happy to respond.
    Chairman Whitehouse. And those questions to Dr. Supran will 
be due by 12:00 noon tomorrow. And we would ask Dr. Supran or 
anybody else who took a question for the record, anything that 
comes by noon tomorrow, to respond to those within 7 days. With 
no further business to come before the Committee, the hearing 
is adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 12:04 p.m., Wednesday, May 1, 2024, the 
hearing was adjourned.]

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