Some days it is hard to know what to even say about some of the craziness that comes out of Washington, DC related to energy. On the very day that Democrats on the House Oversight Committee were berating the CEOs of “big oil” companies ExxonMobil
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, Chevron
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, Shell and BP for having the gall to continue to invest in drilling for oil rather than building windmills and solar arrays, a senior diplomat at Joe Biden’s State Department lectured the very same companies that they have a responsibility to “ensure that oil markets and gas markets are balanced” during a time of skyrocketing global and domestic demand.
As reported by Bloomberg Government, Amos Hochstein, senior adviser for energy security at the U.S. Department of State, told the IEF gas forum Thursday that “Relying solely on contractual levels to supply the market is not going to be enough when we go through a disruption period.” Hochstein added that producers have a responsibility to increase oil and gas production where possible “during certain periods when there is a supply crunch, that is the responsibility of suppliers to be able to meet global demand.”
Making matters even more confusing, Hochstein wasn’t the only senior Biden official demanding oil producers produce more oil on Thursday. Reuters reports that National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was telling reporters that “We have a fundamental interest in seeing global energy supplies in both gas and oil at sufficient levels to support the global economic recovery and not to stall. We want to see sufficient supply to keep up with recovering demand. And we would like to see energy suppliers take measures to ensure that that is the case.”
As Hochstein and Sullivan made their remarks demanding oil producers produce more oil, the President himself was aboard Air Force One on course to Europe, where he will join the world’s elites in attending the UN’s COP26 climate summit that convenes on Sunday in Glasgow. There, Mr. Biden will no doubt boast of his efforts to restrain and marginalize the U.S. oil and gas industry and of his plans to spend hundreds of billions of additional dollars on new and expanded subsidies for renewables and electric vehicles.
Meanwhile, over in the House of Representatives, California Democrat Katie Porter was slamming the “big oil” CEOs for producing too much oil and gas, and using jars of M&Ms and bags of rice to illustrate her point.
Honestly, if all of this weren’t taking place in real time, you just could never make any of it up.
Apparently having failed to get the Biden administration memo that it was time to try to cajole “big oil” to produce more oil, Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, set the tone for the hearing at the opening, calling the CEO of Exxon a liar and comparing him and his fellow chief executives to the CEOs of the tobacco companies of the 1990s. Calling people liars and comparing them to tobacco executives is not exactly a textbook example of an effective means of persuasion.
But of course, persuasion was not the goal of this hearing. As the New York Times
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reported in 2016, this hearing was a piece of a continuing strategy to destroy the public reputation of the domestic oil and gas industry that was laid out at the 2012 La Jolla Conference where activists, lawyers, and academics mapped out a strategy to take down the energy industry. In the report issued after that gathering, one activist said that “It was widely agreed that, in the case of tobacco control, a turning point in public perception came at the 1994 ‘Waxman hearings’ on the regulation of tobacco products. On this highly publicized occasion, a broad swath of the populace became aware that the heads of the major tobacco companies had lied to Congress and the American public. Naomi Oreskes said tobacco litigation helped make this public narrative possible.”
Cong. Maloney’s hyperbolic and frankly absurd comparison of the oil executives to the tobacco execs makes more sense when understanding this context. In its 2016 report, the Times also notes that the lawsuits filed against Exxon by then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and several other state attorneys general were a part of this same strategy, saying “Since November, several attorneys general, beginning with Eric T. Schneiderman in New York, have sent extensive subpoenas to Exxon Mobil seeking internal documents related to climate change. The state attorneys general have said that while they consult widely in preparing an inquiry, the decision to proceed is based on the merits of the case alone.”
That New York case brought by Schneiderman was eventually thrown out by the state’s supreme court.
Democrat Rep. Ro Khana, who co-chaired the Bernie Sanders presidential effort in 2020 and is a member of the Oversight Committee, previewed hearings just like this one during an interview on MSNBC in September, noting that advisors to former Cong. Waxman were advising him and other Democrats in organizing and conducting them: “We want to have big oil hearings, like Waxman had the big tobacco hearings,” Khana told host Chris Hayes, “In fact, people advising Waxman actually are helping us craft the investigation.”
Oh.
Like it or not, this is the world in which we live: A world in which congressional hearings are structured in a way to intentionally inhibit any in-depth exploration or discussion of serious issues like climate change and energy; a world in which hearings like this one are a part of a 9-year strategy to destroy a key U.S. industry; a world where score is kept by how many 10-second sound bites can be repeated endlessly across Twitter and and Facebook once the hearing is over.
And also apparently, a world in which the right hand of the Democratic Party in the nation’s capital doesn’t know what its left hand is doing or saying on any given day.
For the CEOs of these companies, you have to wonder what their takeaways might be from the conflicting messages they received from congressional Democrats and Biden officials Thursday. Are they and their companies vital cogs in the world’s ability to satisfy expanding global demand for oil and natural gas? Or is the lesson that they are villains on a par with the tobacco executives of the 1990s, as Cong. Maloney contends?
Given the background of how and why hearings like this one are now being held and why more will no doubt be organized by congressional Democrats in the future, their main takeaway should be that they are targets for extinction. If they believe that any amount of dollar investments in “green” initiatives will placate those driving them in that direction, they really need to pay closer attention.
