It’s about time Big Oil was held to account
The U.S. Congress is summoning executives of big oil companies such as BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell and others to testify on October 28 about their decades-long misinformation campaigns about the climate emergency.
The process is modeled after the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which in the 1990s succeeded in holding the big tobacco companies accountable for the misinformation they had helped create denying the harmful effects of tobacco, forcing them to settle for large settlements. As a result of this and similar lawsuits, Big Tobacco found it harder to advertise or sponsor events, and began to be seen as a product that was clearly harmful to health, leading to significant reductions in its consumption globally.
The big oil companies have known about the implications and harmful effects of their product on the climate for more than half a century, and consciously dedicated themselves to hiding it and spreading false information, rewarding politicians who opposed environmental legislation, lying about alternatives such as electric vehicles, using social networks to discredit the evidence of the climate emergency, making us believe that it was the users who were responsible for the problem, and using basically the same techniques pioneered by the tobacco industry. While the scientific evidence about the seriousness of the climate emergency…
