New documents show oil executives promoted natural gas as green — but knew it wasn’t

Read the full story at Grist. See also the investigation’s final report.

A congressional hearing on the fossil fuel industry’s “evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change” turned into a spectacle on Wednesday morning as lawmakers in Washington, D.C., grilled a panel of experts on wide-ranging — and often irrelevant — topics. The thousands of internal oil company documents released before the hearing, however, contained some bombshell findings…

The hearing was the outcome of a three-year congressional investigation that sought to uncover new information about fossil fuel companies’ history of spreading disinformation about climate change. The first hearing, in October 2021, focused on an early chapter of that history, the 1970s, and drew testimony from executives of BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell, as well as two industry lobbying groups — the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce.

Now, lawmakers have turned their attention to recent history. Ahead of the hearing, they released some 4,500 subpoenaed documents dating back to 2015 that show how oil companies’ internal discussions about the Paris Agreement, methane emissions, and investigations into their own climate denial have diverged from their public statements. The new evidence, summarized in a 60-page report, could be critical for lawsuits alleging that oil companies lied to the public about climate change, since they provide evidence of ongoing deception.