[Previous posts in this series: #1 / #2]
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This blog, like my book, has been aimed at members of “the climate coalition” — i.e., the set of people who are open to the idea that the present and future costs of climate change are serious enough to warrant strong policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.[1] Today I am making a plea for something that is anathema to most of my fellow members of that coalition: namely, that we all ought to be more curious and less judgmental about oil companies.
If this is an idea you are open to considering, read on. If you are not open to considering this idea, you can test your ability to refute it by reading on. 😉
Among people who conceive of climate policy as a moral struggle, many feel most certain about their contempt for oil companies. And the reason is that research scientists at some of the biggest players in the oil industry — ExxonMobil, Chevron, and a Shell Oil subsidiary among them — had modeled the basics of climate science, very accurately, as early as the 1970s and 80s. Yet in the 1990s and 2000s those same companies sowed public doubt about climate science via public ad campaigns and other lobbying.
The Narrative
For many, that history is enough to paint a contemptible picture of those oil companies in their mind’s eye. And the instinct to generalize has led some to attach those feelings of contempt to the entire oil industry, in part because trade associations participated in the efforts to sow doubt about the science. Of course, support of a particular organization or politician does not imply endorsement of every position the organization or politician takes.[2] But we tend to recognize that truth about ourselves more easily than in our adversaries.
Furthermore, from that history of company dissembling on climate change many on the left also came to believe a less well-grounded narrative: that oil industry disinformation is the reason why the United States does not now have a national policy imposing strong limits on carbon emissions. That causal narrative features in lawsuits and legislation trying to hold crude oil producers liable for climate damages caused by emissions from the use of products made from crude oil. It also excuses our own choices to use products made from crude oil — fuels, plastics, specialty materials, etc. — while condemning oil company executives’ choices to continue to produce fossil fuels (rather than pivot to clean energy production).[3] After all, they prevented collective action that would wind down use of their products, right?
Wrong.
In Climate of Contempt I explain why that causal narrative is an unwarranted leap of logic. The short version is that: (1) durable regulatory legislation requires strong majority support in Congress, and (2) by the time the world’s scientific community was ready to express a high degree of confidence that human activity was causing global warming, ideological polarization and partisan hostility made mustering a congressional majority for strong climate policy impossible.[4]
Nevertheless, it is easy to see why belief in that causal narrative helps some cultivate an especially bitter contempt for the oil industry and the people who run it. To those critics, the oil industry looks less like an economic actor responding to incentives and more like a soap opera villain who uses deception to get what it wants at the expense of everyone else’s interests. I suspect that reasoning is the basis for some of the rhetorical hyperbole cited in my book, such as labeling oil company execs “craven psychopaths” or charging them with “genocide.”
Some journalists on the energy and climate beat cultivate these feelings of contempt among their readers. For example, Amy Westervelt and Sammy Roth try to “name and shame” businesses that accept oil company advertising. Writer Kate Aronoff suggests that fossil fuel executives be tried for “crimes against humanity” and their companies prosecuted for (climate) homicide. Some energy and climate scholars agree. A 2024 piece in Harvard Environmental Law Review argued for prosecuting oil companies for “climate homicide,” echoing activists who have lobbied to create a crime of “ecocide” under international law. And the “oil companies’ did it” causal narrative is one of the pillars of a much larger scholarly literature advocating nationalizing the U.S. oil industry[5] and/or imposing civil liability for climate harm on oil producers.[6]
If you believe the “oil companies did it” causal narrative, and are willing to make uncharitable inferences about why they did it, this hyperbole seems understandable. But as the basis of a moral indictment, it omits some things.
Corporations are animated by people
Beyond its dubious account of early 21st century congressional politics, there are at least two other reasons why that narrative provides a less than firm basis for the moral indictment of the industry. (The legal case will be sorted in the courts; indeed, the Supreme Court may be weighing in on some of these questions soon.[7])
First, the oil industry’s treatment of its internal climate modeling was not as furtive as climate activists often suggest. Unlike tobacco company research into smoking, oil industry scientists published their climate modeling in peer-reviewed journals between 1985 and 2003. And while that modeling turned out to be very accurate, it was part of a larger literature that was more equivocal back then, which is part of the reason why the IPCC was not yet ready to point a highly confident finger at fossil emissions as a driver of global warming. This made it easier (psychologically) for industry leaders to question their own scientists’ models. For example, Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize winning account of the way ExxonMobil grappled with climate science suggests that then-CEO Lee Raymond sincerely disbelieved what his own researchers had to say about climate change.[8]
Of course, we can fault Raymond for succumbing to self-interest bias. But that brings us to the second caveat. Among people who understand climate science, it is not necessarily immoral to oppose carbon emissions regulation because doing so involves tradeoffs that different (reasonable) people can weigh differently.
Some of the people who work for major oil companies may see “decarbonizing” the economy not only as a threat to their bottom line, but also as a threat to the public interest. Some may simply be more optimistic about future technologies enabling climate adaptation. For some, the social benefits of petroleum products are especially salient. Those benefits, of course, go well beyond providing inexpensive energy to people, and include the life saving petroleum products in health care, public safety, and the clean energy industry, among many other important economic sectors.
In this way, the relative salience of the various social benefits and social costs of hydrocarbon production may be very different for people in or near the oil industry than for most climate activists. No doubt, each group believes the other has it wrong, or is engaged in motivated reasoning. My best own guess is that charting a path to net zero emissions will likely yield very large net benefits to society, and that large emissions reductions (e.g., by 90%) will almost certainly do so. But I also believe that, given the techno-economic uncertainty involved and the ways different people value the reliability/affordability/environment tradeoffs, reasonable people can disagree about that question — even if their respective views advance their self-interests.
Therefore, the best logical rejoinder to these (and most) opponents of the energy transition is not to ascribe immorality to them, or to deny the importance of the petroleum product benefits they cite. It is instead to call out their opposition to the transition as a false dichotomy. Policy that mandates a path to net zero carbon emissions — with escape hatches to protect affordability and reliability — can yield the best of both worlds: both reduced emissions and time to develop substitutes for the thousands of products made from a petroleum molecule, as well as better, cheaper technologies for carbon removal.
Unfortunately, many activists (and some academics) see that position as a smokescreen designed to protect the status quo. It is not, at least not for many who urge it, including many whose votes Democrats seek to win. Activists too often conflate reducing carbon emissions with vanquishing the fossil fuel industry. But that stance makes political enemies of an industry whose expertise could advance the energy transition, and of moderate members of the climate coalition.
In behavioral ethics there is an axiom: “the situation dominates the disposition.” Everyone — businesses and individuals alike — responds to their incentives and social pressures. Those incentives change over time. Some people choose gas-powered vehicles, a gas heating system, and other products made from a petroleum molecule because they have lower sticker prices. Oil companies choose to produce oil rather than renewable energy because the former is more profitable. So, when Shell Oil cancels its plans to build offshore wind farms for economic reasons, that is no more morally condemnable than when Orsted or a small clean energy start-up makes the same choice for similar reasons.
In Climate of Contempt I put it this way:
Do businesses or highly paid people have a greater ethical duty to incur the financial or career costs that produce climate benefits? Is there a personal wealth threshold above which that greater duty exists? … Some climate activists label Taylor Swift, Jay Z and other celebrities ‘climate criminals’ for their use of private jets; others call executives who work for large oil companies ‘climate villains.’ … [But g]iven the set of incentives businesses face, an observation by the Stanford University climate scientist Ken Caldeira rings true: ‘It is surprising … how much corporate decarbonization activity is being driven by reputational concerns, customer preference, and the simple desire of people to do good.'[9]
Recognizing that companies make choices to adapt to their policy environments, the task for the climate coalition is to try to shape that environment in ways that steer them toward lower emissions. In the Biden years oil companies prepared to pivot to an energy transition economy; under Trump 2.0 they are putting those plans on hold. But the biggest oil majors no longer deny the accuracy of climate science, and have developed expertise in some of the technologies that are likely to be part of a greener energy future.
Conclusion
It is true that oil company lobbying against carbon emissions reductions misled people about the climate consensus. And as I note in my book, some of the rhetorical techniques used by oil industry trade lobbyists in the 1990s and 2000s were indeed despicable.[10] But if we turn a blind eye to the full technical, historical and human context in which that lobbying occurred, we misunderstand that history.
Still, I don’t really expect to change people’s moral judgments, particularly those that are so deeply and widely held. If my book’s more extended treatment of the scholarship on these questions couldn’t do it, this blog post probably can’t either. But surely we can see that two decades of drumming up moral outrage toward industry adversaries doesn’t seem to be working politically. Meanwhile, the controlling faction of the GOP is turning sharply against the energy transition. And right now they are winning enough races to stymie progress. When we on the left hold on to a view of regulatory politics that focuses on who we hate, we waste time and energy. — David Spence
NEXT POST: Democrats
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[1] I do not minimize climate harm or urge the futility of national action to fight a global problem in ways that are increasingly common among critics of climate activism. To the contrary, it seems evident to me that the costs associated with the exacerbation of severe weather justify the cost of investing in emissions reductions now. And given China’s massive bet on a clean energy future (one they intend to subsidize), acting now to mitigate future harm seems wise for any number of reasons. On the other hand, nor do I see climate change rendering for us an “uninhabitable earth.”
[2] See Climate of Contempt, pp. 133-139.
[3] Both the driver of a gasoline powered car and the oil company executive are caught in an economic system that punishes them for pivoting away from fossil fuels: higher up front costs for the driver, and loss of his job for the executive. But if the executive created that system by controlling the policy process, he is the perpetrator and the driver is the victim.
[4] Climate of Contempt, pp. 97-100. The world’s scientific community consists (and consisted) of many thousands of climatologists and geophysical scientists. The process by which the IPCC reconciled the conclusions their even more numerous studies reached was contentious. Some “merchants of doubt” representing fossil fuel interests questioned the connection between their products and global warming. But they represented a small fraction of both the pool of scientists whose work the IPCC absorbed, and of the scientists who were not yet ready to point a highly confident finger at fossil fuel combustion until the early 2000s.
[5] See e.g., Green & Robeyns (2022), Pollin (2022), and Paul, Skandier & Renzy (2020).
[6] See e.g., Michael Burger (2018), advocating private judicial remedies; and Rachel Rothschild (2024), advocating state legislation imposing climate liability on oil producers.
[7] The cases seeking to hold oil companies liable for climate damages do not rely solely on the “oil companies caused the status quo” claim. The theories of liability are many. Some tie liability to the claim that oil companies could foresee the harm caused by the use of their products, and/or that their use causes a nuisance. Defendants seek pre-trial dismissal arguing, among other things, that these are political questions best resolved by the policymaking branches, and/or that courts cannot provide effective redress for plaintiffs’ harm. If they get to trial, the plaintiffs face the task of persuading the fact-finder that production of oil and gas was the proximate cause of the climate harm suffered by the plaintiffs, even though it was the defendants’ customers who emitted greenhouse gases by burning the purchased products in factories, power plants and vehicles.
[8] Coll, Private Empire (2012), pp. 87-89.
[9] Climate of Contempt, p. 199.
[10] See Climate of Contempt, p. 27, describing an ad campaign by the Heartland Institute likening those who “believed” in climate science to the notorious Unabomber, Fidel Castro, and other unpopular people.
