MSNBC’s Katy Tur hosts Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Jamie Raskin to discuss new report on Big Oil’s climate disinformation efforts
Whitehouse: “What we found is that the well-known campaign of the Big Oil companies to deny climate change, to treat it as a hoax, to question the science, all of that nonsense has morphed into a new campaign in which they pretend they care about climate"
Published
Citation From the May 1, 2024, episode of MSNBC's Katy Tur Reports
KATY TUR (HOST) : Joining us now, the man you just heard, Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland; also with us, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Sen. Whitehouse is the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, which held today's hearing. So, Senator, I will begin with you — explain what you found.
SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI): What we found is that the well-known campaign of the big oil companies to deny climate change, to treat it as a hoax, to question the science, all of that nonsense has morphed into a new campaign in which they pretend they care about climate change, but when you look under the hood and get into their documents, you can see that they are set up to oppose reaching the Paris climate goals, set up to try to lock in natural gas forever, and, in a whole variety of ways, depart from what their public-facing statements are.
TUR : How are they doing that, exactly, Congressman Raskin — what are they saying, and where are they saying it?
REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): Well, we reviewed millions of pages of documents that were discovered by the House Oversight Committee Democrats. And there are lots of different techniques that they're using. Some of it is they will in public say they support, for example, the Paris climate accord, and then behind the scenes, they will say, “Well, we don't really have to do anything to move toward complying with the Paris climate accords and doing our part.”
They will run, you know, just endless amounts of TV commercials about algae as a potential solution to our climate crisis — spending half as much money on ads as they actually spent on investing in algae research — then they pull up the stakes on the whole enterprise and just let it go. But meantime, you’ve got millions of people who think they have some great new algae breakthrough. Meantime, they're not really doing anything to break from the carbon model, which is, you know, a dagger at the throat of humanity at this point. We know the renewable energy systems that they should be investing in today, but they're not doing that.