When Hawai’i brought suit against major fossil fuel companies for their role in the climate crisis earlier this month, it was momentous on several accounts. It marked the tenth such case brought by a US state. And this suit came just days after the Trump Administration attempted to quash the state’s case “before it ever sees the light of day,” said the Hawai’i Attorney General Anne Lopez. Calling the climate crisis an “existential threat” to the entire region, Lopez proclaimed: “This lawsuit is in direct response to that threat.”
As the federal Department of Justice attempts to undermine states’ rights to seek justice and relief, lawyers, scientists, and corporate accountability advocates remain undeterred.
UCS has been at the forefront of pushing for accountability from major fossil fuel corporations: providing extensive evidence that the industry both understood the harms their products were causing to the planet, and instead of taking urgently needed steps toward remedies, pursued profits via deceit, deception, and destruction.
For the last decade, that work at UCS has been led by Campaign Director Kathy Mulvey who has spent her entire professional career taking on corporations that treat public health with reckless abandon—and, notably, has a record of winning.
Mulvey is part of the team behind the latest UCS report, Decades of Deceit, chronicling the 60-plus year history of fossil fuel companies knowingly disregarding their own science on climate change and perpetuating lies and deception. With even more suits from tribes, counties, cities, and states in the works, this report provides an essential backdrop for understanding, well, just how strong the case is against fossil fuel companies for climate fraud and damages.
AAE: So, let’s start there—The Hawai’i suit means one in five states are suing Big Oil for their role in the climate crisis. How strong is that case?
KM: The short answer is incredibly strong. You only need to look at the actions of fossil fuel companies right now: they’re running scared.
The reality of fossil-fuel driven climate change is here. We’re experiencing it in our day-to-day lives. And a fast, and fair, phaseout of fossil fuels is urgently needed to bend the emissions curve down and limit those extreme weather events that are drastically harming frontline communities here in the US, and especially across the Global South.
The fossil fuel industry has engaged in a decades-long campaign to confuse the public, and block action around climate. There is little doubt that the actions of fossil fuel corporations and their surrogates, these choices, are in large part responsible for the climate realities we face. It’s why Danger Season this year very well may be the most dangerous yet. And what this report does is offer a look at that responsibility.
And bringing these facts into public conversation couldn’t be more urgent in this moment when the industry has so many friends in power in this current administration. Corporations like ExxonMobil and Shell are looking to thwart efforts at holding them accountable for climate deception and damages, efforts which have been gaining a lot of momentum in recent years. All the while, fossil fuel companies are doubling down on the tactics of deceit and destruction that this report chronicles. They’re desperately trying to maintain a stranglehold on the energy sector and making it harder to protect people in the future.
Q: And you see an opportunity in this moment for accountability?
KM: Public understanding of these cases—and the facts behind them—may prove critical to broader efforts to advance climate accountability.
At UCS, our corporate accountability work on climate change has focused on documenting and exposing the industry’s disinformation and deception campaigns, showing how they employ some of the same strategies as the tobacco industry—even going as far as deploying the same front groups and scientists to speak on their behalf. I recognize these tactics well, having spent the better part of two decades working to stop the tobacco industry from spreading a preventable global epidemic while obstructing policies that could have protected people. And in that space, I saw just how critical it was to equip people with the facts.
When assessing the gross misconduct by an industry of this magnitude, we need to have a broad societal conversation about what we will accept, and what we won’t stand for. But we can’t have these conversations without the evidence in hand, and that’s what we’re aiming to do with this report—provide the scientific basis and the historical context for these conversations, and underline what’s at stake.
The report lays out quite clearly the industry’s culpability and our collective responsibility to act.
Q: You said earlier that the industry is running scared. What’s got them spooked?
KM: Major fossil fuel companies are running scared because they have so much to hide. This report compiles evidence going back more than 60 years, showing what these companies knew about the potential harm of their products to the environment, and cataloguing what they’ve done in spite of what they knew. We show how those tactics have played out over decades and are still evolving to this day.
This report draws from hundreds of pages of documents in the public domain—and yet we have reason to believe this is just a fraction of the evidence that may be out there.
As the number of legal challenges against the industry continues to rack up, top executives of these companies know better than anyone else what evidence they’d like to keep hidden. Imagine the trove of documents that they could be forced to turn over as these lawsuits move forward. It’s no wonder the industry has used every procedural tactic in the book to stall these climate deception and damages claims.
This is not a group of corporations that’s used to being on the defensive. And now the fossil fuel industry is seizing the opportunity of a friendly administration and Congress to attack states and civil society using public resources—for example, by suing Hawai’i for having the temerity to act to protect its residents and hold polluters accountable.
This is the latest step in a deliberate scheme to manipulate public policy and co-opt governmental institutions, just so the industry can preserve itself and its dangerous, deadly business.
Q: And this tactic feels familiar to you?
KM: It is so familiar to me as someone who for many years worked at the organization Corporate Accountability, where we saw the tobacco industry with very similar motivations—to put corporate profits above public health—scheming to cover up evidence of the harms of tobacco use, to obstruct and delay public policy advances that would have prevented kids from getting addicted to their products, and using surveillance tactics against public health advocates and public interest organizations working to hold them accountable.
When states started taking the tobacco industry to court to recover the massive costs of treating people with tobacco-related illnesses, it was a turning point. Until then, the deep-pocketed industry had never lost a case. But through these lawsuits they were forced to cough up millions of pages of formerly secret corporate documents revealing how they knowingly misled the public, end some of their most effective promotional tactics, shut down their lobbying and fraudulent science shops, and pay billions for the public health harms they caused.
Q: What exactly did fossil fuel companies know?
KM: This report shows that the major oil industry executives were briefed about the dangers of fossil fuel use and climate change in the late 1950s, and by the early 1980s, many of the major oil and gas companies convened a climate and energy task force.
And honestly, reading through some of the industry research from the late 1980s, you might have a hard time distinguishing it from the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These documents discuss the existential threat posed by fossil fuel-driven climate change with a great deal of specificity and frankness.
For example, there was a 1980 presentation to that industry task force that said, “No leeway” on time to act. There’s an internal Exxon memo in 1982 that said, “Potentially catastrophic events.” And then there was a Shell report in 1988 that said, “by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.”
And then these companies turned around and spent decades denying the science!
This report paints a picture of a vast, long-term campaign of deceit by the fossil fuel industry. These corporations have lost the public trust. And all of us have power in this moment, backed by the evidence in this report—the power to pressure the fossil fuel industry to stop lying, get out of the way of science-informed public policy, pay an equitable share of the costs they’ve imposed on all of us, and act to accelerate a fair and fast phaseout of fossil fuels.
Q: And we have that power? How do we actualize it?
KM: Look, I know the road to accountability can feel daunting and long—especially when reckoning with the reality that, had these companies acknowledged the science they knew and understood instead of lying, we’d be in a remarkably different place.
Tobacco executives hatched a secret plot to deny the harmful effects of their products in the 1950s. It would be decades before the landmark settlement of state lawsuits won major changes in industry practices, and before the nations of the world agreed to ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and protect their public health policies from tobacco industry interference. When truth and science win, we can save millions of lives.
This Danger Season, when we’re dealing with extreme heat, or lose power from an extreme storm, we should be talking to our neighbors about Big Oil’s bad actors and long history of deception and deceit.
We can also push big banks, investment firms, and pension funds to stop fueling the climate crisis and instead finance a just transition to a clean energy economy.
UCS will be participating again this year in Summer of Heat on Wall Street to pressure financial institutions to stop financing companies engaged in fossil fuel expansion; safeguard human rights, Indigenous sovereignty and the rights of workers; and acknowledge and repair the harm they’ve caused.
We want to make sure this information gets up to the folks who enforce the laws of our states. It’s important for legislators at every level to hear from their constituents that holding Big Oil and its enablers accountable is a priority.
You can take action today to hold them accountable. Write to your state attorney general today and let them know you support efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its climate damages and deception.