Recently United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability completed its three-year investigation into how U.S. oil companies sought to avoid accountability for climate change.
The report — tellingly titled Denial, Disinformation and Double-Speak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change — explores Big Oil’s decades-long campaign of deception and denial finding that:
“Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and [that they] then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science”.
Of course they did. If any major industry found out that their products damage the environment, consumers or any other major part of our economy, their first reaction is to go on offense, and deny, deny, deny. The major goals of the corporations that comprise this industry are to (1) generate profits, (2) funnel those profits to their employees and shareholders, and above all, keep doing (1) & (2) for as long as they can. Being unflinchingly honest is not in their playbook.
