House panel ups scrutiny on oil companies' climate pledges, calls for more accountability

House Committee on Oversight and Reform Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney committed Feb. 8 to using every tool at her disposal to get to the bottom of the oil industry's role in contributing to climate change and put an end to the climate disinformation campaign she accused it of perpetuating.

A hearing convened by her committee sought to assess climate pledges made by leading oil companies BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, and early on made clear Democrats' concerns that the pledges were simply greenwashing with no real plans to take near-term action to significantly reduce emissions.

"Big Oil intends to continue its playbook from the past four decades, fighting meaningful action to prevent climate change while engaging in a PR campaign to deceive the public," Maloney said. "This committee will not stand for it."

The New York Democrat called recent climate pledges made by the major oil companies "empty promises," and called out their board members for declining to appear at the hearing to explain their pledges. However, she said the committee would convene another hearing in March for those board members to answer questions about the pledges.

"If they do not agree to appear, the committee will use every tool at its disposal to get the information we need," she said. "The American public and all generations to come deserve accountability."

No smoking gun

Committee Ranking Member James Comer, Republican-Kentucky, accused his Democratic colleagues of trying to put oil companies out of business with an investigation that has yet to find any smoking gun, despite the industry providing more than 400,000 pages of documents and oil industry executives sitting for more than six hours of questioning last October.

"The oversight committee should focus on rooting out waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in the federal government, not investigating the implementation of pledges made by private companies that don't even go into effect for almost 30 years," he said. "We should conduct real oversight of the Biden administration's disastrous policies that have led to surging gas prices and inflation. However, Democrats are not interested."

Comer and other GOP members harped on President Joe Biden's climate agenda, cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and "failed energy policies" as the reasons for high energy prices and soaring inflation, accusations that Democrats were quick to rebut.

"The Biden administration is leading us down a dangerous path at a time when our energy independence is more crucial than ever," Comer said. "I hope that we can move on from the demonization of private companies and instead focus the committee's attention on combating the ever increasing number of crises the Biden administration has created."

He added that the committee minority would be inviting Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to participate in the March hearing and explain the administration's plans for combatting rising energy prices.

Pledges fall short

Witnesses at the hearing mostly bashed the oil companies' climate pledges for falling far short of what scientists have said is necessary to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Among their gripes were that the pledges relied on unproven technologies and ignored the vast majority of the companies' greenhouse gas emissions by focusing only on Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions that come from the actual drilling and production of oil but leaving out Scope 3 emissions that encompass all of the oil they sell.

"If we are to meet this monumental challenge, we will need all hands on deck," said Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. "We cannot have industry and their PR firms working at cross purposes. That means holding fossil fuel interests accountable for the damage they've already caused and preventing them from doing more damage through delay tactics such as deferred carbon reduction pledges and empty promises of offsets and unproven carbon capture technology."

Mann said it also means that the political willpower has to be there for policymakers to "incentivize the energy industry to move toward clean and renewable energy today, rather than kicking the can down the road."

Tracey Lewis, policy counsel for consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, asserted that the "latest industry tactic is to emphasize carbon capture storage schemes, an expensive and energy-intensive and unproven technology that has repeatedly failed to deliver despite substantial government support."

Lewis further laid out how fossil fuel companies use climate pledges to greenwash their actions.

"They exclude most of their total emissions and shift responsibility to consumers," she said. "They rely on false solutions like carbon capture and carbon sequestration. Their targets cover only a portion of their business operations [and] they promise to become more efficient polluters."

'No impact'

The committee minority's invited witness, Katie Tubb, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, tried to stir the conversation toward the need for the White House to do more to get a handle on rising energy prices.

"A realistic view of global warming must acknowledge that the commitments of these several companies will have no impact on global temperatures by the end of the century, whether they achieve them or not," Tubb said.

"Regardless of one's opinions on global warming science or policy, the ongoing energy price crisis has sharply brought to the floor why these conversations about energy policy and climate policy matter," she continued. "Rather than interrogate these companies engaged in the yet legal activities of producing and selling oil to American and global customers, Congress should be seeking to understand the ongoing energy price crisis, finding the vulnerabilities it has exposed and examining policy tools to eliminate barriers for the efficient functioning of energy markets."