There are few things in this world that the CEOs of powerful companies truly fear. With more money than they could ever need, the influence it buys and the power it gives them, they're immune to nearly all of life’s most daunting and anxiety-inducing dilemmas. Nearly. There is one thing that, clearly, and rightfully, terrifies them. It seems simple, just a white board and dry erase marker. But it’s the person wielding them that strikes terror in the hearts of CEOs everywhere: California Rep. Katie Porter.
Over the past few years, Porter has used the whiteboard to show just how corrupt, ignorant and ignoble the often slickly-PR-trained executives are, and how their companies exploit the public. Recently, she’s turned her fearsome math on the fossil fuel industry. For example, in a recent hearing an oil executive got “bulldozed” by Porter for claiming the industry didn’t get special tax treatment. In a clip that’s gotten 90k likes on Twitter, Porter listed a few ways it absolutely does, told him to stop patronizing her, and offered to have Congress make his lie correct and get rid of that preferential treatment. (She also basically secured free COVID-19 testing for everyone in the U.S.)
So when we heard that Porter had invited more oil CEOs to find out what they’d done with the $115 billion in public bailout funds they’d gotten, we were giddy with anticipation! After all, 77 of the biggest polluters got $8 billion in tax bailouts, but then still turned around and killed nearly 60,000 jobs that money was intended to protect.
Unsurprisingly though, the CEOs invited declined to show up, forgoing the chance to tell Americans why they deserved that bailout, and all the great things they did with it. Oh, and also avoided getting murdered on C-Span by Porter and her white board. Porter had been eager to ask, for example, why Devon Energy laid off nearly a quarter of its entire workforce after gobbling up $220 million in relief program funding.
But who did show up to the hearing on Big Oil’s behalf? Alex Epstein, who fashions himself a philosopher (though his arguments are more like playdoh, than Plato’s) but in reality is just a sleazy fossil fuel PR man who runs a for-profit “think tank,” and runs around talking about how he loves fossil fuels. Literally. “I heart fossil fuels” is his whole schtick.
In his opening statement, he said that climate policy is “giving unjust punishments to the incredibly life-giving oil and gas industry. If we can liberate this industry, America and the world will be far better places to live.”
While the Republicans obviously lapped up this liar-for-hire’s slick pitch ignoring the fact that fossil fuels are heating the atmosphere and literally killing people and focusing solely on how pretty the rainbow in an oil slick can be, Rep. Jared Huffman was quick to point out the reality.
The CEOs invited refused to show their own faces, so instead they sent the “fresh face” of Big Oil’s “disinformation campaign: A young, relatable guy in a t-shirt, no less, putting hipster gloss on a thick layer of sophistry hatched in one of the Koch-funded industries that pay him to bestow the banner of morality, no less, on their industry."
Huffman almost made up for the lack of a classic Porter whiteboard moment though, calling out how the industry, “instead of investing in clean energy, they’re investing in PR.” He went on to drive a stake through the heart of Epstein’s “see no evil” philosophy, saying it’s like “telling Mrs. Lincoln that if she just looked at it right, that night at Ford’s theater wasn’t so bad.”
Sick burns at Epstein’s expense aside, the reality is that there is no real defense for the fact that fossil fuels kill millions of people every year, and that the industry sucked up millions of dollars meant to save jobs during the pandemic and used it to give big bonuses to CEOs, and gave out pink slips to thousands of workers anyway.
Instead, Epstein wanted to talk about how we should “liberate this industry.” Which is an interesting choice of words, illustrating how Epstein very deliberately co-opts the language of progressivism and liberation, while selling a deeply regressive message about a product that disproportionately hurts communities of color.
Even the name of his for-profit PR company does it: the Center for Industrial Progress. Why? Because if there were even a shred of honesty about what he does, why and for whom, then there’d be nothing to distinguish this “young, relatable guy in a t-shirt” from the other industry-funded hacks arguing that it’s fine for Black and Brown kids to get asthma from fossil fuels, because that pollution’s making someone rich!