Activists called a hearing this week on Capitol Hill in a desperate attempt to drive attention and enthusiasm to their flailing “Exxon Knew” campaign. But those same activists, including Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes and attorney Sharon Eubanks quickly found themselves on their heels as they struggled to respond to questions about their academic integrity and coordination with anti-energy groups. Much of the tough questioning followed lines of inquiry originally reported by Energy In Depth.

The testy exchanges in the hearing room occurred as Bloomberg reported on the New York attorney general’s trial against ExxonMobil, which noted that the “Exxon Knew” argument was falling apart after the attorney general failed to find any evidence to support their claims. “But when New York state finally got its hands on some 4 million pages of documents, they weren’t enough to make the bigger case: that Exxon lied about climate science or the future value of its yet untapped assets,” Bloomberg’s Erik Larson wrote.

Oreskes Catches Heat on Debunked Study

Naomi Oreskes, a master of manipulating research to fit her predetermined anti-energy narrative, found herself in the crosshairs during a hearing designed to give her a platform to attack energy companies. Rep. Carol Miller (R-WV-03) opened her questioning by immediately focusing on Oreskes’ deeply flawed “study” attacking ExxonMobil’s climate history.

“Do you acknowledge that there is a flaw in your study where two-thirds of the advertorials cited are from two different companies?” Rep. Miller asked, referencing Energy In Depth’s 2017 investigation of Oreskes’s study, which found:

But their sample of public documents is small – 36 “advertorials” published in the New York Times between 1989 and 2004. According to Supran, “These are op-ed styled advertisements that the company took out for 29 years, every Thursday in the bottom right corner of the op-ed page of the New York Times.”

But there are a number of problems with this. The first and most obvious: ExxonMobil was formed in late 1999, 10 years after the earliest of the advertorials referenced by the study was published. In fact, of the 36 advertorials rated by Supran and Oreskes, only 11 belonged to ExxonMobil – the other 25 were published by Mobil (a different company from Exxon, remember) before the merger. Remove the Mobil submissions from the mix, and the universe of applicable advertorials is reduced by 70 percent.

In other words, “the researchers largely compared the climate research of one company with the advertorials of a different company.” Rep. Miller pressed Oreskes further, asking if she could even state the year Exxon merged with Mobil. Neither Oreskes, nor her partner on the study Geoffrey Supran, could name the year the companies merged, which is concerning for two “expert” historians who supposedly did a deep dive on ExxonMobil’s history.

Ranking Member Chip Roy (R-TX-21) also had some tough questions for Oreskes:

Rep. Roy: “Dr. Oreskes, a quick question. Would you agree with the statement that scientific studies should be conducted in a manner that doesn’t dictate results and with a methodology that avoids bias by researchers, as a general matter? Yes, no?”

Oreskes: “Yes.”

Rep. Roy: “Is it true that in 2015-2016, before you conducted the report that has been discussed a lot, that you tweeted ‘Did Exxon deliberately mislead the public on climate change? Hello, of course they did’ and that you tweeted ‘Exxon’s actions may have imperiled all of humanity. It’s time to divest.’ Yes or no, did you tweet those things prior to your report?”

Oreskes: “I believe it was after the report but I could check on that.”

Yet again, Oreskes displayed a disturbingly tenuous grasp of even her own history, as the tweets in question were posted in 2015 and 2016, respectively, one to two years before she published her study. (Though to be fair, the second tweet was actually her co-author’s).

Rep. Roy also noted that Oreskes’s study was funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund, which has funded the entire “Exxon Knew” campaign and whose executive director published an op-ed in the New York Times this week confirming that his organization is aggressively funding research in support of climate litigation against energy companies.

Committee Members Question the Logic of ‘Exxon Knew’ Arguments

Rep. James Comer (R-KY-01) spent his allotted time questioning the underlying logic behind several arguments that are central talking points of the “Exxon Knew” crew. Noting that the activists behind this campaign regularly accuse ExxonMobil of conducting cutting edge scientific research on climate change and then somehow managing to hide that research from the public, Rep. Comer asked the two panelists who had helped conduct that research at Exxon whether their work had even been published in peer-reviewed journals. They both responded in the affirmative, leading Rep. Comer to conclude:

“Mr. Chairman, the New York Attorney General and many others leading climate change litigation efforts across the country would have us believe that the oil and gas industry hid key science for decades from the American public. Publishing work that is consistent with academic research in scientific journals seems like an odd way to go about hiding anything.” (emphasis added)

Turning his attention to Mandy Gunasekara, an environmental lawyer and former senior EPA official, Rep. Comer asked her if climate lawsuits against energy companies are in the public interest.

Gunasekara: “No I don’t. I don’t believe they’re good for the American people. And when it comes to what they purport to do which is improve the environment, it has no relative impact. Whether you’re talking about these frivolous lawsuits, protesting the Keystone XL pipeline or encouraging divestment – that has no real impact on the environment and it does nothing to advance the interests of the American people.

Comer: “Well then how does taking money from companies that are driving innovation and giving it to trial lawyers help the American people?”

Gunasekara: “I don’t think it helps them at all. I think that drivers of innovation are where the solutions to any current and future challenges will come and it’s in the best interest of policymakers and the American people to seek out and support these institutions, not to demonize them in the ways that we’ve seen from this relative campaign.” (emphasis added)

Activists went into today’s hearing hoping to build the case for forcing energy companies to pay for climate change. They walked out of it battered and with their academic credibility called into question.