On Wednesday, the UK’s Channel 4 news aired footage of ExxonMobil lobbyist (for now) Keith McCoy, in what he believed to be a Zoom call with a headhunter, but was actually an undercover Greenpeace investigator.
In the video, McCoy brags about Exxon’s access to Senators, which the company is using to shape the bipartisan infrastructure negotiations to its favor. Beyond the potential interview-bluster, McCoy also, in what may be a first for an Exxon employee, admits that “Yes,” they did “aggressively fight against some of the science.” And did they also “join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts?” McCoy appears to ask himself rhetorically, answering affirmatively again: “Yes, that’s true.” (But “there’s nothing illegal about that,” he continued…)
So when lawsuits allege that the company worked with a network of covert anti-climate advocacy organizations, “yes,” they can quote an Exxon lobbyist in saying, “that’s true.”
In a follow-up piece published Thursday where he also talks about plastics and natural gas as the future of the industry, McCoy describes how Exxon responded to concerns that PFAS “forever chemicals” would be regulated. Instead of engaging publicly, because they publicly deny that they manufacture the dangerous chemical, they got the American Petroleum Institute on the case. He explained that once environmentalists “start talking about how this is an ExxonMobil chemical and ExxonMobil is poisoning our waterways, the debate is pretty much over.”
To prevent that, they “go in under the umbrella of API” so that “it’s just associations, no companies” and “you start to build out a coalition of associations,” which retain control because “companies feed into that privately when we have meetings, but the public face of it are the associations.” And what does that face look like? The standard industrial science denial discourses of delay, talking about how it’s not feasible to replace PFAS, and buying time by suggesting we just wait and study the issue further before making any sudden moves to prevent harmful pollution from reaching waterways where we have no way to remove them.
“Lo and behold,” McCoy recounted, “we got a study, we got it passed. And that completely lowered the temperature and there has been very little talk about PFAS. There have been some bills introduced but there hasn’t been a lot of talk about it because you can point to, well, there’s a study going on. Let’s wait for the results of that study before we start moving forward on this.”
McCoy was also not coy about the company’s preference for evading accountability from lawmakers, explaining how they “don’t want it to be us” enduring congressional grillings. Instead, the “tough questions” are punted to their “associations,” who serve as “the whipping boy for some of these members of Congress.”
He went on to explain that just earlier that week, “our CEO was invited to a hearing from a member of congress who we know is just going to rip him to shreds.” We assume this was in reference to the May hearing convened by Rep. Katie Porter to look into how the oil and gas industry (mis)spends public funding it gets, which would make pro-oil-PR-man Alex Epstein the “whipping boy” in question. (And sure enough, this past Wednesday he was hard at work at another hearing, this time defending a highly polluting coal plant in Puerto Rico by claiming that really it’s nature that’s the enemy, that he knows better than people that live there, and then later shouting debate me, coward at three Congresswomen who’d ignored him.)
Epstein’s apparent relish for his role as Big Oil whipping boy at the hands of Reps. Porter, Talib and Ocasio-Cortez aside, in other Congressional matters, McCoy made it obvious that ExxonMobil’s support for a carbon tax is only because they believe “it is a non-starter.” So why do they support something that McCoy says “is not gonna happen”? Because “it gives us a talking point. We can say well what is ExxonMobil for? Well we’re for a carbon tax.”
Most folks weren’t exactly surprised at these revelations about ExxonMobil, since it’s been sort of obvious to everyone paying attention that this was their strategy and the way Washington works.
But apparently it was a shock to Alex Flint of the Alliance for Market Solutions, one of the flourishing crop of conservative pro-carbon-price groups (falsely claiming to be an “alliance” instead of the more-common “coalition” to make it seem like it’s the sort of “coalition of associations” McCoy describes, as a way to inflate their perceived clout.) In light of the news that ExxonMobil’s own lobbyist doesn’t think their support for climate action is genuine, Flint said they still “believe ExxonMobil’s commitment to addressing climate change is genuine.” That makes him almost the only one still committed to the ruse, with the exception of the Chamber of Commerce’s Neil Bradley, who expressed similar sentiments.
Despite their positioning as the more Reasonable Conservative Climate Group that doesn’t deny the reality of climate change, Axios noted that AMS is supported by Exxon, which might explain this egregious display of denying the reality of a company causing climate change.
So whether or not Flint knows, or can admit to himself, that AMS is one of the “shadowy groups” Exxon uses as an “umbrella” to “aggressively fight” real action by pretending to promote a policy it considers “a nonstarter” and “a talking point” … that is what AMS is actually doing.
“Yes, that’s true.”
