UPDATE (4/30/24):
Today, Joint staff from the Senate Budget Committee and the House Oversight Committee released their long-awaited report concluding a “nearly three year-long” investigation into oil companies. Spoiler alert: as E&E News put it the first time around, the investigation continues to show that “oil and gas companies, for the most part, want to continue producing oil and gas.”
Original Post:
After a year of hints and winks to activists, Senate Budget Committee Chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) appears to be continuing the former House Oversight Committee’s “Big Oil” investigation with a new hearing on Wednesday.
Of the previous investigation, Politico wrote that “the biggest winner in these hearings so far has been the political theater.” Expect more of the same this year, too.
Déjà vu: How we got here
Much like the New York Attorney General’s defeated climate lawsuit, the House Oversight Committee’s 2022 investigation into oil and gas companies – led by Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and subcommittee Chair Ro Khanna (D-CA) – was high-profile, activist-backed, meandering, and ultimately underwhelming.
The investigation switched focus several times from the companies’ climate statements, to their commitments to produce core products, and finally to their profits. It ended unceremoniously after Russia invaded Ukraine, forcing policymakers and American businesses to shift their focus to a global energy crisis.
After the Democrats lost control of the House in 2022, Sen. Whitehouse committed to picking off right where the Oversight Committee left off (hint: they didn’t make it far). But despite stretching the purview of the Senate Budget Committee to focus almost exclusively on climate change, Whitehouse has yet to formally relaunch any investigation into energy companies.
Here are a few key points to keep in mind ahead of Wednesday’s hearing:
Some of the promised and long-alluded documents were released to the public to little fanfare, with the Committee even admitting that the records wouldn’t have much “immediate impact.” As E&E News reported, “Unsurprisingly, the Committee found that oil and gas companies, for the most part, want to continue producing oil and gas.”
But the vast remainder of the documents seem to be lost in the Capitol tunnels. Last year, Sen. Whitehouse and Democrats on the House Oversight Committee engaged in a strange back-and-forth in the press regarding the whereabouts of the files, which apparently were not transmitted from the House to the Senate even before Republicans took control of the House.
Former Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney even told the Washington Post she had been the target of a “smear” campaign from her Democratic colleagues on the Senate side regarding the documents, which she said were “available” for Sen. Whitehouse to look at “any day.”
Although Democrats fumbled the handoff between Congressional chambers, the Oversight Committee had no trouble passing the documents along to external activists supporting climate lawsuits against oil companies. NBC News revealed that this was Rep. Khanna’s goal anyway, raising questions about the Committee’s use of time and resources:
“Khanna said the millions of documents acquired by the committee will be handed over to those with more resources who can act on the information.”
Shortly after the investigation wrapped, the Rockefeller-funded Center for Climate Integrity cited the documents obtained by the Oversight investigation in an amicus brief supporting the D.C. attorney general’s climate lawsuit.
The Oversight Committee investigation had no shortage of activist support – and it looks like the 2024 version will continue this trend.
When the Oversight investigation kicked off, Rep. Khanna boasted to The Hill that the Committee had enlisted the support of “a lot of people” involved in planning the 1990s tobacco oversight hearings led by former Representative Henry Waxman. It was later revealed that Khanna had enlisted Waxman alumni Phil Schiliro and Phil Barnett of the Arabella Advisers-funded nonprofit Co-Equal, a firm that helps “train understaffed congressional offices and committees” on how to conduct oversight.
Reminder: the use of donor-funded staff and resources to conduct official Congressional business, including the issuance of subpoenas, was the subject of a formal ethics complaint and a public records lawsuit, the Daily Signal reported:
“House Democrats are using privately funded staff to investigate oil companies for spreading ‘disinformation’ on climate change, a possible violation of federal law and the chamber’s own rules, a lawsuit alleges.”
Activist academics Geoffrey Supran and Robert Brulle also disclosed to the media that they provided assistance to the Oversight Committee. Supran, who has published a series of spurious, donor-funded research papers to support climate lawsuits, will be testifying at Wednesday’s hearing, raising the question of whether he is also working with the Budget Committee behind the scenes.
Oddly enough, in a September 2022 interview with HEATED, Rep. Khanna denied coordinating with activist groups, despite several admissions and confirmations from himself and those groups, saying:
“There were a couple articles planted about us using outside resources for hearings, which we didn’t.”
What third parties is the Budget Committee working with? Sen. Whitehouse and his Committee should commit to transparency in their re-run of the Oversight investigation.
It’s no surprise that documents obtained by Congressional subpoena ultimately ended up in the hands of environmental activists. This exact strategy was outlined in the report summarizing the 2012 meeting at La Jolla where activists, academics, and lawyers strategized different methods to obtain internal records that could influence public opinion and public policy.
“First, lawsuits are not the only way to win the release of documents,” the report says. “As one participant noted, congressional hearings can yield documents.”
Sharon Eubanks, a former Department of Justice attorney who will testify alongside Supran at Wednesday’s hearing, was actually present at the La Jolla meeting. Eubanks was a lead prosecutor for the RICO case against tobacco companies and later tried to convince state attorneys general to apply the same strategy against energy companies, to no avail.
Quotes from the La Jolla report show Eubanks to be a supporter of the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach to legal action. Downplaying other La Jolla attendees’ concerns that experimental litigation could backfire and set bad precedent, Eubanks said:
“if you have a statute, you should use it […]no matter what the outcome, litigation can offer an opportunity to inform the public.” (emphasis added)
These comments show the litigation campaign for what it is: activist-backed, donor-funded lawfare to change public perception.
Bottom Line: After a total nothingburger in 2022, fringe Congressional Democrats continue to waste taxpayer dollars to execute a political vendetta against American energy companies. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting different results. We’d be happy to lend Sen. Whitehouse a dictionary.
