Senior executives from colossal fossils ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron may soon receive subpoenas from a powerful U.S. congressional subcommittee after the investigative reporting team at Unearthed, a branch of Greenpeace UK, revealed Exxon’s continuing efforts to undermine the Biden administration’s climate plans and “aggressively” combat climate science.
The revelations come from a Zoom call with a senior director of the company’s Washington, DC government affairs team, Keith McCoy, in which an Unearthed reporter posed as a job recruiter.
McCoy “told an undercover reporter that the company had been working to weaken key aspects of President Joe Biden’s flagship initiative on climate change, the American Jobs Plan,” Unearthed reported Wednesday. “He described Biden’s new plan to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as ‘insane’ and admitted that the company had aggressively fought early climate science through ‘shadow groups’ to protect its investments.”
In his call with Unearthed, McCoy:
- Revealed that he was in weekly contact with the office of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who’s been widely seen as the Democrats’ biggest obstruction to Biden’s climate and energy transition plan;
- Identified 10 other senators as Exxon’s key lobbying targets, including Republicans John Barrasso (WY), John Cornyn (TX), Steve Daines (MT), Shelley Moore Capito (WV), and Marco Rubio (FL) and Democrats Chris Coons (DE), Maggie Hassan (NH), Mark Kelly (AZ), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), and John Tester (MT);
- Admitted that Exxon’s support for a carbon tax as its main climate policy was an “advocacy tool” and a “great talking point” that will never actually come to pass.
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