Earth to Big Oil: China and the U.S. Inhabit the Same Warming Planet | Opinion

Climate change is an existential crisis for the United States. It poses one of the gravest threats to our national security. It will do massive damage to our economy. And it is severely undermining the stability of our financial system. Indeed, the U.S. home insurance market is already starting to buckle—in ways that may soon affect every homeowner in America—under pressure from climate disasters that pale in comparison to the kinds of climate shocks we will be regularly experiencing in coming years. Big Oil itself has spent decades predicting that the continued combustion of fossil fuels would lead to "catastrophic" climate consequences. And that is precisely what we are starting to see, often with tragically lethal results.

So, the Biden administration's focus on spurring a transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean renewable energy is vital. And by working to block climate policy, the fossil fuel industry is sacrificing American economic, public safety, and national security interests to protect their obscene corporate profits.

But obstructionist arguments against climate action become even more absurd when you consider that Biden's clean energy policies are hugely beneficial to American consumers, workers, and industry, even if you completely discount their vital climate benefits. The numbers speak for themselves. In its first year alone, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has already created over 271,000 new clean energy jobs, and that's just the start; by 2030, 1.3 million Americans will be employed in jobs created thanks to the IRA.

The IRA has also already nearly tripled U.S. battery manufacturing. The administration's new energy efficiency standards for dozens of appliances will save U.S. households and businesses $5 billion per year on their utility bills. And Biden's pausing of any new LNG export terminals shields Americans from a 9 percent to 14 percent increase in gas prices—because, despite industry lies, exporting gas out of the country very clearly increases domestic gas prices.

This raises a really important point about energy costs. Big Oil mouthpieces like to pretend they are speaking on behalf of consumers when they dishonestly claim that climate policies are raising energy costs. But fossil fuel fat cats don't give a damn about American consumers—indeed, they have done everything possible to fleece consumers by artificially jacking up oil prices, including through recently uncovered illegal collusion with OPEC.

Indeed, this price-fixing scheme by Big Oil likely caused more than a quarter of all the inflation that American families experienced in 2021, taking approximately $200 billion out of our pockets so that fossil fuel companies could enjoy even more eye-wateringly record-smashing profits. These price gaugers' shamelessness in blaming higher costs on Biden's clean energy investments—which experts anticipate will cut household energy costs by more than 10 percent this decade—would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous.

But perhaps the most disingenuous claim by climate obstructions is that the Biden Administration's green industrial policy somehow "benefits China" because China currently has an advantage over the U.S. in solar panel and electric vehicle manufacturing. Of course, this dynamic is the direct result of Big Oil's climate deception. As early as the 1960s, the fossil fuel industry was making internal predictions that global warming caused by their products would "have serious consequences for man's comfort and survival"; that there was "no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe"; that such effects would be "sufficient to melt the ice caps and submerge New York"; that climate change could "produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic" for a "substantial fraction of the earth's population"; and that these effects could "bring[] world economic growth to a halt in about 2025."

Despite this knowledge, Big Oil did not take any action to shift their business models to safer energy sources. They did not alert the public about the dangers posed by their products. As we now can prove from countless internal strategy documents, fossil fuel companies actively concealed what they knew and executed multimillion-dollar climate disinformation campaigns (which continue to this day) in order to block or delay the development of clean energy solutions that would compete with their fossil fuel-based business model. And their anticompetitive deception worked, stifling the American ingenuity and entrepreneurialism that could have ensured U.S. dominance of the global clean energy sector.

The reality is that—whether or not we achieve the clean energy transition in time to avert civilizational catastrophe—global energy systems will be shifting from fossil fuels to renewables in the coming years. Big Oil wants us to double down on their obsolete, dirty, and artificially costly products. And former President Donald Trump seems hellbent on helping the industry achieve its goal of undermining American manufacturing and ceding U.S. leadership of the energy systems of the future to China (at least if oil and gas companies provide him with the bribe money he's requested).

The Biden Administration, by contrast, has taken action to ensure that America can compete in and lead the new global clean energy economy. We need more of that approach, not less—and we shouldn't let the coming deluge of Big Oil propaganda convince us otherwise.

Aaron Regunberg is a former member of the Rhode Island General Assembly and senior climate policy counsel at Public Citizen.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.