[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
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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.
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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.