Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee and Environment Subcommittee held a hearing on Big Oil’s climate pledges, and whether they were in any way adequate, meaningful, honest, or well-intentioned — or just the latest move in a decades-long disinformation campaign.
During the three and a half hour hearing, most of the witnesses, like Public Citizen’s Tracey Lewis and climate scientist Michael Mann, were very clear about the damage done by the industry’s millions of dollars of funding for decades of disinformation. And the Democratic members appeared prepared to tackle the issue, with (sometimes too-) long questions detailing the industry’s deceptions, the Republican party’s denial, and the real-life harms of disinformation.
But because Big Oil board members declined to attend (at this time) there wasn’t a whole lot of grilling going on, as in their stead they sent a front group stooge, this time the “whipping boy” was (industry-funded, MAGA-usurped) Heritage Foundation’s Katie Tubb.
Tubb wasn’t there to defend the disinfo industry of which she is an active part. What became painfully clear was that she was there so that after a Republican gave a four minute speech about how very angry they are that the noble oil and gas industry is being demonized by mean nasty “Democrat” socialists, they could ask Tubb if she thought high energy prices are good or bad and if dirty energy in Russia and China is worse than clean American fossil fuels.
She would say 'high prices bad, American fracking good,' and try to find a reason to mention something about “Energy Freedom” the new rebrand of “American Energy” that takes Canadian and Mexican oil into account, and of course little different from when they wanted to call it “Freedom Gas.” (But just as stupid.)
The disrespect for Tubb probably wasn’t personal, though it kind of seemed that way, what with at least two of the Republicans not even bothering to get her name right and repeatedly calling her “Tubbs.” (One of the Democratic members made that mistake, but then apologized and corrected themself.) But it seems the GOP just doesn’t care about what its witnesses actually say, and merely uses them as rhetorical set pieces.
The second Republican to give an opening statement was South Carolina Republican Ralph Norman. He clearly has a bad case of Fox News brainworms, saying something about “our cities are on fire” and that Biden “doesn’t know what month it is”, and also very clearly lied about the testimony of a prior witness. That, or didn’t actually bother to listen to it.
Because key to the Republican counter-programming was the shameless pivot to energy prices and inflation, essentially blaming the cancellation of KXL plus a mystery scapegoat assortment of policies that don’t exist or haven’t yet been enacted, for the existing prices. Somehow the Green New Deal is so powerful that, once passed into law, it will go back in time to retroactively cause these price spikes that have nothing to do with the economic ups and downs involved with a global economy navigating a global pandemic — or even the volatile nature of fossil fuel prices themselves.
And so in referencing last year’s hearing on this issue, Norman said at the last hearing like this they heard from “an unemployed Keystone pipeline worker. Out of a job, does not have a paycheck.”
Someone being out of a job for over a year would be tragic. If it were true. But it’s not! According to that no-longer-out-of-worker pipeline worker! At that very hearing Norman describes!
“Now, I have got to be truthful, and I have got to be fair”, Mr. Crabtree told Republicans last time around, when multiple Representatives asked him exactly when he was laid off, despite his addressing it in his opening statement, “I have got to work since then, but most of the work that we are doing now is kind of maintaining the aging infrastructure of the pipeline systems that we have in this country now.”
Which means he does have a job, and does have a paycheck, and Rep. Norman is being neither truthful nor fair, according to the testimony of the Republican-picked witness he cites.
Even when in a hearing challenging disinformation from the oil industry, deniers apparently can’t help but deliver more oil industry disinformation.