Geoff Dembicki - The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change

For Kara and Yoko

MIDWAY THROUGH a historic congressional hearing about whether some of the worlds largest oil companies lied to the public about climate change, I noticed something odd. It was October 28, 2021, and I was watching the event through a livestream on my laptop in my small Brooklyn apartment. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform had that day hauled in the heads of Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron, and the American Petroleum Institute for questioning. Democrats wanted answers about a multidecade campaign led by the oil and gas industry to convince millions of people that the climate emergency doesnt existand that even if it does, there is no point in fighting it. But Republicans had called in their own witness to testify: a welding foreman from Fouke, Arkansas. Neil Crabtree was there to say hed lost his job on a canceled pipeline that would have stretched from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast. What did that have to do with a hearing in Washington, D.C., about Big Oil disinformation?

Like the dozens of other climate journalists covering this event, I felt pressure to get the facts right. At the same moment that oil executives were being grilled, the Joe Biden administration was trying to pass a multitrillion-dollar spending package through Congress that contained tax credits supporting clean energy and electric vehicles, penalties for harmful methane emissions, and a policy pushing electric utilities to phase out natural gas and coal. If this Build Back Better Act became law, it would be the most substantial action ever taken by the United States on climate change.

I knew from reporting about climate change for more than a dozen years that during moments of great possibility, the roar of disinformation is at its loudest. This book will chart many such high-stakes moments. And now another one had certainly arrived. This is our last best chance to pass meaningful climate legislation, Danielle Deiseroth, senior climate analyst at the progressive polling organization Data for Progress, told me of the Biden agenda. If we delay action any longer, were going to be really screwed.

Finally, at least, oil executives were being called out for their tactics by Americas top lawmakers. Today, the CEOs of the largest oil companies in the world have a choice: you can either come clean... and stop supporting climate disinformation, or you can sit there in front of the American public and lie under oath, said Democratic representative Ro Khanna. The CEOs answered impassively. I dont believe companies should lie, and I would tell you that we dont do that, Exxons Darren Woods said in response to Khanna.

Amid the rich, polished executives, Crabtree couldnt help but stand out. The pipeline worker from Arkansas wore his suit and tie awkwardly. His voice wavered as he explained that he had been hired to help build the Keystone XL pipeline, a project designed to bring 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada into the United States. Because this oil would have been derived from an especially polluting petroleum deposit called the Canadian oil sands, which are sometimes referred to as tar sands, Keystone had been the target of years of environmental protests. Biden canceled the project on his first day in office.

I lost my job, Crabtree said. There seems to be no thought given to the hundreds of thousands of workers in this industry or the millions of products that we use every single day that are provided by fossil fuels.

Crabtree presented a sympathetic figure, an honest and hardworking American seemingly chewed up by the political machinations of Washington. But I sensed there was more to his story.

With the hearing on in the background, I searched Crabtrees name. One of the first results was the website for a group called Americans for Tax Reform. On the site there was a self-recorded video of Crabtree inside a vehicle. Instead of a suit, he was dressed in a hoodie and baseball cap. Canceling this Keystone Pipeline to make a group of people happy has had real life consequences, he said. We got people who cant work now, cant provide for their families. I saw that underneath the video there was a special request that people send more such videos: Americans for Tax Reform is collecting personal testimonials of Americans hit by President Bidens policies. Crabtrees appearance at the hearing was starting to make more sense.

Thats because Americans for Tax Reform isnt just some ordinary conservative group. It was one of the authors of the climate change denial playbook. The organization helped create an action plan in 1998 along with Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and others to flood mainstream media with disinformation about the scientific consensus on global warming. A leaked document lays out the strategy in detail: Develop and implement a national media relations program to inform the media about uncertainties in climate science; to generate national, regional and local media coverage on the scientific uncertainties, and thereby educate and inform the public, stimulating them to raise questions with policymakers.

Not much had changed in the nearly twenty-five years since then. Not long after Joe Biden was elected on a platform to invest trillions in green industries, create millions of new jobs, and drastically lower U.S. emissions, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, a well-known Republican operative named Grover Norquist, coauthored an op-ed in the Washington Examiner declaring war on the extreme Lefts big-government climate agenda. Crabtrees testimonial was part of a carefully coordinated media campaign that Norquist dubbed #BidenKilledMyJob.

Several months later, Crabtree was broadcasting live as a witness at the House congressional hearing on climate disinformation. After he was done, as CEOs like Exxons Woods were asked to account for spreading scientific denial, Republicans steered the conversation back to Crabtree. Its critical that this committee examine the pressing concerns of American citizens, said James Comer, a Republican Congress member from Kentucky who once said, I do not believe in global warming. Crabtrees remarks were carried by mainstream outlets like the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian, Reuters, the BBC, and the Daily Mail, but none highlighted his ties to the machinery of Big Oils climate crisis denial.

There is no reason to suspect that Crabtree was lying about losing work on Keystone XLand he might not have even been aware of Americans for Tax Reforms history of denying climate change. But the media attention his testimony received was a victory for Republicans, the oil and gas CEOs testifying under oath, and the Canadian oil sands industry. Once again, these forces were intentionally distracting the public from the bigger picture: that the stable climate upon which all human life depends is being altered beyond recognition.

It was disheartening to see this playbook still being used decades after its creation, because my research had educated me to how, time and again, such tactics laid waste to humanitys easiest, best chances to fend off climate catastrophe. Now I could see nothing but lost years, a window of opportunity spanning more than half a century, repeatedly and forcefully shut by powerful interests whove known and suppressed the truth.