A United States congressional committee has accused oil companies of spreading what it describes as “disinformation” and “lying” about their climate change mitigation efforts by obscuring their long-term investments in fossil fuels.
The House Oversight Committee released internal industry documents from major oil companies on Friday that it said showed that the firms were not acting on their public pledges to reduce emissions and instead engaging in “greenwashing”.
“Today’s new evidence makes clear that these companies know their climate pledges are inadequate but are prioritizing Big Oil’s record profits over the human costs of climate change,” the panel’s chairwoman, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, said in a statement.
“It’s time for the fossil fuel industry to stop lying to the American people and finally take serious steps to reduce emissions and address the global climate crisis they helped create” the statement further showed.
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The panel said a “key part” of the oil companies’ climate plans has been to sell off or divest, oil and gas fields to smaller firms to lower their own emissions – a move that simply shuffles those emissions to the next company and “will not actually reduce emissions”.
“Even as it publicly announced support for Paris Agreement goals, BP continues to invest in a future dependent on fossil fuels,” the committee also found.
The corporation described its intention to considerably “expand development in regions with oil potential” in the US and to “concentrate primarily on projects in current basins that yield the best rate of return” in an internal review document that was cited.
As part of its larger inquiry into “the fossil fuel industry’s role in disseminating climate disinformation and blocking action on climate change,” the committee got the records through subpoenas from Congress.
In an internal email, “one BP executive asserted … that BP had ‘no obligation to minimize GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and that the company should only ‘minimize (GHG emissions) where it makes commercial sense,” the panel said on Friday.
“The same BP executive concluded that ‘the benefits of any proposal to adopt a lower GHG option needs to be balanced against the cost to do so.’”
BP did not respond immediately to a request for comment from the Reuters news agency.
At Shell, spokesperson Curtis Smith, in an internal email released by the panel, said about divesting from assets in Canada’s oil sands, “True, we transfer CO2 liability when we divest.”
Story was adapted from Aljazzera.
