[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 28 (Tuesday, February 11, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S982-S984]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here again, as the Senate returns 
to regular business, to call us again to respond to the threat of 
climate change. Here on the floor today, things seem back to normal. 
The floor is empty. We have a Senator instead of a Chief Justice in the 
chair. The quorum calls descend between the speeches. Our new pages are 
figuring out the nonimpeachment routines of the floor.
  Outside of the Senate, things are anything but normal. The threat of 
climate change worsens by the minute. Carbon emissions continue to rise 
globally. We hurtle toward calamity. Yet we do not act. What is 
stopping us? The biggest, most powerful, most motivated force 
preventing climate action is the fossil fuel industry, and, of course, 
it would be. The fossil fuel industry reaps the biggest subsidy in the 
history of the planet. The International Monetary Fund estimates the 
global subsidy for fossil fuel in the trillions of dollars every year. 
In the United States alone, the fossil fuel industry got a $650 billion 
subsidy in 2015, according to the most recent report from the IMF. That 
is about $2,000 from every woman, man, and child in the country.
  You wrote the check, and they will spend big bucks to defend that 
subsidy. In fact, to maintain their grip on that subsidy, fossil fuel 
companies deploy lots of propaganda on the American people. They swamp 
us in advertising. The game isn't just to sell you more gas. It is much 
bigger than that.
  Professor Robert Brulle of Drexel University--now in Rhode Island at 
Brown University--together with his coauthors, wrote a recent article, 
``Corporate Promotion and Climate Change,'' looking at oil companies' 
carefully crafted public relations campaigns deployed way back since 
legendary muckraker Ida Tarbell chronicled the greed and cruelty of the 
Standard Oil Company. To offset their reputation for greed and 
nastiness, ``fossil fuel companies have attempted to burnish their 
image in various ways,'' Brulle and his colleagues write, ``[including] 
contemporary multimedia promotional campaigns . . . to project the 
corporation as a positive, responsible, and legitimate social actor.'' 
Hah.
  The public began to catch on to the harms of industrial pollution in 
the 1960s and 1970s, and Big Oil deployed public relations campaigns to 
stem the public opinion tide.
  One example Brulle uses is Mobil Oil, pre-ExxonMobil merger. In 1970, 
Mobil began buying space on the opinion page of the New York Times. 
They called these things advertorials--not advertisements, not 
editorials, but

[[Page S983]]

advertorials. They ran in the same section as real opinion pieces. 
Every Thursday, those ads promoted Mobil's image as a good corporate 
citizen and boosted its public policy priorities, like reduced 
regulation of Mobil's operations. Meanwhile, Mobil worked hard to place 
rosy ``earned media'' stories on airwaves and in print. ``Between 1975 
and 1977 alone, Mobil representatives appeared on 365 TV shows, 211 
radio shows, and gave 80 newspaper interviews,'' the study authors 
observe.
  I will pause to note some good news, which is that, just recently, 
The Guardian announced that it will no longer accept advertising that 
props up fossil fuels like oil and coal. The Guardian urged its 
colleagues in the media to do the same. Acting chief executive Anna 
Bateson and chief revenue officer Hamish Nicklin said in a statement: 
``Our decision is based on the decades-long efforts by many in that 
industry to prevent meaningful climate action by governments around the 
world.''
  Welcome to our experience here in the Congress. As we have seen here 
in the Congress, the fossil industry companies have done that with dark 
money, they have done that with raw political muscle, they have done 
that through fake science, and they have done it through advertising 
campaigns. So bravo to The Guardian for shutting off that spigot of 
fossil fuel nonsense. I hope American media outlets follow suit.
  Dr. Brulle then turns to recent decades. Using spending figures from 
1986 to 2015, he and his scientists find that corporate promotional 
spending for the five major oil companies in the United States--
ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron-Texaco, BP, and ConocoPhillips--totaled 
nearly $3.6 billion. That is an average of $120 million per year, and 
the trend is upward.
  After $35 million in spending in 1996, from 1997 to 2004, annual 
spending rose to an average of $102 million per year. Then Brulle and 
his team chronicled that spending averages leaped again between 2008 
and 2016 to an average of $217 million per year.
  These spending figures themselves are pretty eye-popping, but what is 
important here is the patterns of spending. Brulle and his coauthors 
write:

       The bulk of this spending . . . corresponds to the 
     increased public and congressional attention to climate 
     change in recent years. Not unexpectedly, the major oil 
     companies spent $315 million in 2010 alone, which is when the 
     highest possibility of binding climate legislation occurred.

  That is no coincidence. Here in this building, something was 
occurring that the fossil fuel industry saw as a threat.
  Brulle and his colleagues continue:

       This high level of corporate promotional spending took 
     place in response to the legislative battle from 2009 to 2010 
     over the House of Representatives' passage of the Waxman-
     Markey climate bill and the subsequent Senate consideration 
     of the Kerry-Lieberman climate legislation.

  This pattern shows Big Oil's purpose: to block climate action in 
Congress.
  While we are talking about that period, right over there in the 
Supreme Court, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others, on behalf of 
their Big Oil funders, urged the Supreme Court to open up our politics 
to unlimited special interest spending, and the five Republican 
Justices on that Court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, did. From that 
decision forward, we have seen a disaster in the Senate on climate 
legislation. Before that decision, we had four or five bipartisan 
climate bills going in the Senate at any given time. We had a 
Republican candidate for President--John McCain--who campaigned for 
President on a strong climate platform. But right after that decision 
came out, right after the fossil fuel industry got handed that huge new 
hammer to knock any dissent on climate out of the Republican Party, 
they did so. We have had a lost decade since then. So it is not just 
their advertising, but their PR spending certainly helped the fossil 
fuel industry block the Waxman-Markey bill and obstructed efforts since 
to solve the climate crisis.

  Another study by Professor Brulle just last month chronicled the full 
sweep of this industry's fight against climate legislation. Brulle 
describes how this polluting industry used ads, webs of phony front 
groups, bogus science, and that massive Citizens United political and 
PR artillery to fend off any meaningful action by Congress.
  Professor Brulle breaks this process down to its component parts; 
one, shaping the direction of research efforts into nonthreatening 
areas; two, concealing information about the harmful aspects of a 
corporate product; three, attacking scientific findings and the 
scientists who produce research that threatens corporate interests; 
four, packaging their own carefully constructed interpretations of the 
science to appear legitimate; and, five, aggressive efforts at spinning 
the media to promulgate favorable press.
  A typical example of the first tactic is oil company ads touting 
research and investments in alternative low-carbon fuels or renewable 
energy. For instance, we have seen ExxonMobil ads touting ExxonMobil's 
research into algae biofuels, and we have seen BP ads touting renewable 
energy under its label ``Beyond Petroleum.'' ``Badly Polluting'' would 
be a better term.
  So how much do these renewable investments represent? According to 
Reuters, Exxon will spend roughly $30 billion this year--$30 billion 
this year--in capital expenditures. That is Exxon's capital budget. 
Investments in green technologies round to zero percent of Exxon's 2020 
capital expenditures. You see the ads, but that investment, they call 
it, rounds to zero percent of ExxonMobil's capital investments.
  BP will spend more than $15 billion in capital expenditures. Its 
renewable energy investments is 3 percent--3 percent--of that.
  I challenge Exxon to disprove that it spent more on advertisements 
touting its renewable investments than it does on the renewable 
investments themselves. These investments are a prop for an advertising 
campaign, like the Potemkin villages that were built for the czar when 
he was taken out of Moscow to go see how happy the peasants were, and 
they built phony villages near the railroad with dressed-up peasants to 
dance and wave at the czar so he wouldn't know that revolution was 
coming and that fury and anger raged through his country. This is a TV 
version of a Potemkin village.
  You go through National Airport right now, you will see the most foul 
nonsense up on the walls of that airport designed to convince people 
passing through National Airport at our Nation's Capital that these 
companies are responsible about climate change. People walking in 
forests looking natural, the phony-baloney investments designed to prop 
up ad campaigns, they are immense in the PR space. You can see why the 
Guardian will not take this poison any longer.
  For decades, these ads blared these phony articles at the newspapers. 
Their paid-for pundits populated the talk shows, just as the fossil 
fuel companies polluted our atmosphere and our oceans. While they did 
this, they knew better than anyone what they were causing.
  Back in 1982, Exxon projected that by 2019, atmospheric 
CO2 would reach between 390 and 420 parts per million. Sure 
enough, as 2019 drew to a close, guess where carbon dioxide in our 
atmosphere was. It had just crossed 410 parts per million. They 
predicted this, and they were right. But instead of acting on what they 
knew, they rammed all this public relations nonsense--this has been the 
atmospheric carbon dioxide climb. But instead of reacting to this in a 
responsible way and trying to really do something with renewable fuels, 
they did fake renewable investments to prop up advertising campaigns to 
convince the public that they were on it. These are the phrases right 
now from the American Petroleum Institute: We are on it. Don't worry. 
Don't get mad. Don't get involved. We are on it.
  And then they shower this body with money and with threats, powered 
up by Citizens United from the five Republican judges across the street 
there.
  Not only did Big Oil correctly model this increase in CO2 
in our atmosphere that their product would cause, they also understood 
what this meant. They predicted the hotter temperatures. They predicted 
the melting ice sheets. They predicted the rising seas that Louisiana 
and Rhode Island are so menaced by. They predicted the massive damage 
that climate change would cause. Exxon knew its business was ultimately 
toxic to our planet. And the Exxon CEO who led them through this, the 
craftsman and CEO of so many of these campaigns of lies, now sits 
happily on the board of J.P. Morgan--J.P.

[[Page S984]]

Morgan which claims to be seriously and sincerely interested in climate 
response. J.P. Morgan, a major investor that has been warned over and 
over again by now more than 30 sovereign banks of the danger of an 
economic crash from this carbon bubble popping--they give the man who 
led this campaign of lies sanctuary and fees on their board.
  So what is the purpose of spending all that money? The reason Big Oil 
spends billions on its ads is to implant favorable perceptions of 
fossil fuels into what Robert Brulle calls the ``collective 
unconscious,'' and it does that to support its other great influence 
project, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying 
and on elections to control the politics of climate change and to 
ensure that Republicans block any serious efforts to limit carbon 
pollution. That is a scheme that deserves infamy, and it is a scheme 
being perpetrated as I speak, right now, today.
  Right now, the American Petroleum Institute--the largest trade 
association for the oil and gas industry--has a seven-figure ad 
campaign called ``We're On It.'' They run ads on the internet, on TV, 
and on billboards--the ones I mentioned all over the DC airport--
designed to fool the public and policymakers that the oil and gas 
industry is ``on its'' carbon and methane emissions problem. Not only 
are they not on it, they are cheating about even reporting their 
methane leaks.
  This is an ad in the Washington Post's ``Energy 202'' newsletter just 
last week. It reads: ``Let's create climate solutions together.'' 
Content from the API.
  Seriously? What a joke. API, the same trade association that is 
furiously lobbying against efforts to control methane pollution from 
oil and gas facilities don't even want to report it fairly. When Trump 
got in, job one was to take down the methane leakage reporting 
regulation that was coming. They are lobbying for expansion of offshore 
drilling, and they are lobbying against any price on carbon to offset 
that $650 billion subsidy, and they want to create climate solutions 
together? It is unreal--unreal.
  Let's take a walk back into history. In 2006, here in Washington, in 
the U.S. district court, a judge named Gladys Kessler wrote a long, 
long opinion--well over 100 pages. It was a commanding opinion, and it 
was an opinion that was upheld afterward by the U.S. court of appeals. 
It was an opinion in relation to a case that had been brought by the 
U.S. Department of Justice.
  The U.S. Department of Justice had sued the tobacco industry, and 
they had asked Judge Kessler to find the tobacco companies' PR efforts 
fraudulent and to order them to knock it off. They were committing 
fraud. Stop it. You are lying to people, enough already.
  In her opinion, Judge Kessler found in favor of the U.S. Department 
of Justice. Indeed, she found the tobacco companies' fraudulent PR 
campaigns to have amounted to racketeering. It was a civil racketeering 
lawsuit. I will quote her decision here. She said the tobacco industry 
``coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, 
scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared 
objective--to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and 
expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the 
public.''
  So swap out ``cigarettes'' and plug in ``fossil fuel,'' and you have 
described exactly what big oil companies do: coordinate their public 
relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of 
a shared objective to maximize industry profits by preserving and 
expanding the market for fossil fuel through a scheme to deceive the 
public.
  What the fossil fuel industry is doing is precisely the conduct that 
was racketeering activity when done by the tobacco industry, but don't 
expect Bill Barr's Department of Justice to pursue any type of legal 
action like that. The fossil fuel industry is too strong, and the fix 
is too far in.
  This is all rotten stuff. It is gross. It is banana republic 
behavior. It is not what we expect here in the United States of 
America.
  It is on us. It doesn't have to be this way. We can stop it. We have 
the power here in the Senate to shake off the malign influence of a 
desperate and greedy industry and actually tackle the defining issue of 
our time, like Americans should.
  So let's have a real debate on a real climate change bill. Let's 
surprise the world and pass something big and bold. Let's wake up to 
the threat of climate change and get ahead of its consequences before 
the situation becomes irretrievable.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. McSALLY). The Senator from Alaska.