It didn’t take long after the witness list was published for a Congressional hearing coming this week for our team to recognize that it looked awfully similar to one we attended back in 2016. In fact, it looks almost identical. If you want a preview of Wednesday’s events, feel free to watch their dress rehearsal. We hope they’re able to muster some better furniture than those sad card tables this time around.
The House Oversight Committee Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is planning to hold a hearing on Wednesday looking into the “Industry’s Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change.” As the title of the proceedings suggests, the House majority has lined up the usual suspects from the “Exxon Knew” campaign to testify, including Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and plaintiffs’ attorney Sharon Eubanks, among others. To no one’s surprise, the hearing memo cites InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Union of Concerned Scientists – three Rockefeller-funded organizations that have played significant roles in perpetuating the debunked “Exxon Knew” campaign.
Kathy Mulvey, Ed Garvey, Naomi Oreskes, and Natasha Lamb testify in 2016, while Kert Davies stands tall in the hall.
So why would the Democrats hold the very same hearing again now? Simple. “Exxon Knew” activists want to hold a hearing the same week that the New York attorney general case against ExxonMobil goes to court. Perhaps because the New York case no longer has anything to do with “Exxon Knew” or even the long-debunked allegations of somehow hiding climate change from the public, these activists and their allies in Congress are desperate to keep their unsubstantiated narrative alive and are calling this hearing as a last-minute Hail Mary. (See: today’s New York Post editorial: “The incredible collapsing ‘#ExxonKnew’ climate change lie”)
The 2016 hearing included a familiar but slightly different cast of characters. Oreskes and Ed Garvey are returning favorites (though if you ask us, their debut performances felt uninspired). 2016’s attempt also featured Kathy Mulvey of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Natasha Lamb of Arjuna Capital, an activist shareholder group. Lamb isn’t able to make this year’s show because she’s been called as a witness in the New York trial. As the screen capture at right shows, notorious anti-energy propagandist Kert Davies was also lurking conspicuously in the background (he’s the tall one). Davies has recently come under fire for how he conducts his business and the dark money funding he relies on to fund it.
In fact, it was at the hearing in 2016 that Sharon Eubanks and Naomi Oreskes revealed that they had gone in behind closed doors to request then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to investigate ExxonMobil. Four years later, the original allegations they attempted to level against the company have failed and the case morphed into something very different: an accounting question.
The case against ExxonMobil has always been about generating headlines and attention in the press. That’s why they will be back in Washington D.C. to do a retread of the old hearing. But as we have pointed out time and time again, the “Exxon Knew” narrative has long been debunked, with leading voices opposing this well-funded campaign, including USA Today, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
Nevertheless, this week’s hearing gives us the opportunity to review how these activists have perpetuated the “Exxon Knew” campaign – fueled at every step by powerful interests like the Rockefellers.
Naomi Oreskes – A Key Mastermind Behind the “Exxon Knew” Campaign
Recall that Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt, was one of the masterminds behind the 2012 La Jolla Conference. The conference was hosted by the Climate Accountability Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists to strategize how academics, activists and lawyers could entice local governments and state attorneys general to go after energy companies, learning from the successful attempt to prosecute the tobacco industry under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act in the 1990s.
As part of the “Exxon Knew” campaign, she published a study accusing ExxonMobil of sowing doubt on the effects of climate change through a series of New York Times advertorials. The study was bankrolled by the Rockefeller Family Fund and broadly criticized by one of the foremost experts in content analysis for being “unreliable, invalid, biased, not generalizable, and not replicable.” Energy In Depth also found that Oreskes’ paper was riddled with errors and largely compared the research of Exxon to the advertorials of Mobil when they were still separate companies.
But perhaps most relevant for this hearing is that Oreskes spoke to attorneys general on numerous occasions about taking legal and investigative action against ExxonMobil, according to her witness testimony at a 2016 Congressional Progressive Caucus :
“I was invited about a year or so ago to New York to speak to the staff of the New York attorney generals’ office mostly about the work we did in Merchant of Doubt … And I also participated a few weeks ago in a meeting in Boston with some colleagues from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which also involved the staff of attorney generals offices from a number of states who came to listen to again factual presentations about climate science, history of climate disinformation and also a presentation by Sharon Eubanks who had led the US Department of Justice prosecution of tobacco industry under the RICO statues.” (emphasis added)
As mentioned above, the ”Exxon Knew” team was successful in persuading the New York attorney general to bring an investigation against the company. But that effort fell flat as the attorney general’s case now has nothing to do with the original claims laid out by Oreskes and team; After reviewing over four million pages of ExxonMobil’s internal documents dating back decades, the attorney general reviewed failed to find any evidence of the company misleading the public on climate change. But Oreskes is never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Sharon Eubanks – Here to Promote the “Big Oil is the Next Big Tobacco” Narrative
Sharon Eubanks, another top “Exxon Knew” activist, aided Oreskes in briefing attorneys general and lectured at the La Jolla conference on the importance of obtaining internal documents from energy companies, noting their importance in the racketeering case against tobacco companies, which she oversaw.
In 2016, Eubanks attended a follow-up strategy session at the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) headquarters in New York City. The RFF meeting sought to “establish in the public’s mind” that energy companies are “corrupt,” “delegitimize them” and “force officials to dissociate themselves” from the industry, according to a leaked agenda. The meeting was attended by a “who’s who” of “Exxon Knew” leaders, including key agitators from 350.org, Conservation Law Foundation, Greenpeace, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and plaintiff’s attorney Matt Pawa.
Later that year, Eubanks worked alongside Pawa and Steve Berman – who both were subsequently hired to represent plaintiffs in litigation against energy companies – to pitch then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan opening an investigation against ExxonMobil.
Ed Garvey and Martin Hoffert – Former ExxonMobil affiliates, now “Exxon Knew” activists
Ed Garvey was hired by ExxonMobil in the late 1970s to develop a research project to measure CO2 concentrations in the air and ocean. The engineer also spoke at the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s 2016 hearing attempting to link fossil fuel companies with the tobacco industry. There, he admitted, like Oreskes, to speaking with state attorneys general about climate litigation, indicating his coordination with the broader “Exxon Knew” campaign:
“I have been contacted by the State of New York AG office.”
Martin Hoffert also worked with ExxonMobil on climate modeling in the 1970s and 80s. However, his testimony – like Garvey’s – will be far from impartial. Hoffert and Garvey both provided commentary for InsideClimate News’s (ICN’s) Rockefeller-funded hit series on ExxonMobil. The investigative series titled “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” featured excerpts from internal company documents, which InsideClimate News insinuated were extremely risky to obtain. In reality, however, these documents had been publicly available in libraries and online for years. Hoffert also contributed to the Los Angeles Times’ sister series to ICN’s – also sponsored by the Rockefellers.
Conclusion
Of course, the “Exxon Knew” team wants to try and make waves during the trial in New York. They are the ones that persuaded then-AG Schneiderman to launch an investigation into the company and want to use this trial to bolster media attention for their smear campaign against the company. Even though the New York case has nothing to do with the “Exxon Knew” narrative, the activists are doubling down, hoping to catch the media napping.
