‘It Felt Like a Wasted Opportunity to Hold Oil Executives to Account’ – CounterSpin interview with Emily Sanders on how not to interview an oil CEO

Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about how not to interview an oil CEO for the July 7, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230707Sanders.mp3

ExxonKnews (6/29/23)

Janine Jackson: A chummy interview of Chevron CEO Mike Wirth by CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin saw the goal of mitigating the devastating harms of climate disruption pitted against the evidently equally important goal of making Wirth more money.

Conceding that many people around the world are desperate for an end to the fossil fuels driving the catastrophe, including supposedly Wirth himself, Sorkin added, “At the same time, I think it would be impossible for you not to want your business to grow.”

So there’s your frame: the life and health of people and the planet on the one hand, endless corporate profiteering on the other. Only question is, how do we balance them?

Chevron has caused the most energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in the last several decades. They took in over $35 billion just last year. But when Sorkin gets its head honcho in a chair, he makes jokes about golf and asks the polluter what he “makes of” climate activists.

You won’t be surprised to hear that our next guest offered that conversation as exemplar in a recent piece titled “How (Not) to Interview an Oil CEO.” Emily Sanders is editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity and founder of ExxonKnews, where that piece appears. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.

Emily Sanders: Hi, Janine. Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: While this friendly chat, at something called the Aspen Ideas Festival, was especially infuriating, it wasn’t unique. Some of the problems with it show up in other media, which is I guess what prompted you to write this piece.

Emily Sanders: “The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas, what needs to be done about it and what the obstacles really are to addressing climate change.”

ES: Yeah, mainstream media has had a very hard time connecting climate change to oil companies, and their decades of pollution and deception about the harms caused by fossil fuels.

And when you see coverage of deadly heat waves and wildfire smoke, for instance, there’s often no mention of things like how the major oil companies are still spending millions every year lobbying to delay the transition to renewable energy, or how Chevron, the world’s most polluting investor-owned oil company, is currently pouring even more money into increased fossil fuel extraction and production, after making record profits last year.

So it’s also not a coincidence that mainstream media is so far behind on this. The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas, what needs to be done about it and what the obstacles really are to addressing climate change.

And that goes back to at least the ’80s and ’90s, when oil companies began placing ads and advertorials, or ads disguised as news editorials, in major outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post that downplayed the reality of climate change.

And even today, as we learned from last year’s congressional investigations and hearings into the industry’s disinformation, companies like Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell are still running advertisements that look like articles in the country’s biggest news outlets, promoting things like algae and so-called natural gas as climate solutions. So they’ve really used the veil of journalistic credibility to help disguise their misleading and deceptive advertising for quite a while.

And we’re seeing that not just with advertising, but with some reporters themselves still failing to name the source of climate inaction, and still unable or unwilling to recognize and call out disinformation, sometimes even parroting fossil fuel industry framing about how we can’t move off oil too quickly, or how Big Oil is working on ways to solve climate change, despite that they’re causing it, without actually challenging those misconceptions.

FAIR.org (11/18/22)

It’s not everyone, and some have gotten better, but it’s certainly still a major problem. And I think we saw that last week with this CNBC interview. And what was particularly disorienting about that interview, I think, was just how divorced from reality it felt at this current, increasingly dire moment of climate emergency.

We have all the evidence now of Chevron’s duplicity. And while this interview was happening, millions of the rest of us in the United States were trapped inside, because of extreme heat or toxic wildfire smoke. That somehow was just not mentioned at all in the interview.

There was no mention of the dozens of communities that are suing Chevron and other oil companies to hold them accountable, including one lawsuit filed just a week before the interview took place, by Multnomah County in Oregon, for a heat dome that killed 69 people a couple of years ago.

And last year’s House Oversight investigation into Big Oil’s ongoing disinformation campaigns and their efforts to delay climate action weren’t mentioned. So there was so much missing context and so many questions that didn’t get asked, so much misinformation that went just completely uncorrected.

And unfortunately that’s nothing new, but it’s really frustrating and infuriating when you have an actual CEO of one of the world’s most polluting and powerful companies sitting in the room, getting treated as if he were a legitimate “thought partner” who’s just trying to balance his business priorities with concerns about the climate. It felt like a real wasted opportunity to hold him and other oil executives to account.

Chevron CEO Mike Wirth

JJ: And as you’ve outlined, we can understand reasons why that doesn’t happen. You point to advertising and that long history of advertorials, and then you go even further back, and there are interlocking directorates of fossil fuel and corporate media industries. They’re on one another’s boards.

So even though we might call for hard-hitting, tough, interrogative reporting, we do understand the pressures that make that unlikely to happen, and the pressures that make it so much more comfortable to have the kind of jokey, “aren’t we all in this together” conversation that we saw between Sorkin and Wirth.

I want to follow up on one point, which is that the least—the least and most, our standards have dropped so far—but you would hope that when the person you’re talking to straight-up lies…. We’re not talking about industry PR deception, but Wirth himself saying things that were false in this conversation and that Sorkin didn’t even follow up on.

ES: Yeah, we heard Wirth tell some flat-out whoppers, like he said the clean energy system is only about 1% built, but actually, last year, renewable energy made up 21.5% of total electricity generation in the US, and that number could be a lot higher if the oil companies got out of the way. But Sorkin just let that one slide.

There were so many other pieces of disinformation, and really actually great examples of the many different ways that oil companies lie and mislead in this interview. And all of those have been exposed in lawsuits, in congressional investigations, journalistic investigations and academic research.

So you would hope that Sorkin would’ve been prepared to challenge them, and that’s what we really need to see from more journalists going forward.

JJ: So you touched on this, but it seems like part of the obfuscation in media is suggesting that various weather events have such multiple complex causes that it’s just impossible to link them directly to fossil fuels.

And you talked about wildfires, which of course they’re much on the mind right now, and I know that fossil fuel lobbyists are working furiously to make sure that people do not associate those orange skies with fossil fuel emissions. And I can already see the memes, like, “Wildfires cause more pollution than fossil fuels, but you aren’t fighting trees!” You can already see the desire to have people disaggregate wildfires and particulates from fossil fuel emissions. So what should we be keeping in mind there?

Scientific American (6/3/22)

ES: There’s actually a growing field of what’s called attribution science, or science that’s able to link specific companies’ emissions to worsening patterns of extreme weather, and even individual weather events.

And, actually, a recent study published by researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists found that more than a third of recent wildfires in the Western US and Canada can be attributed to 88 specific fossil fuel and cement manufacturing companies.

So we’re even seeing more and more of the climate lawsuits against Big Oil citing this type of research as evidence of the damage these companies knowingly caused, like this last lawsuit in Multnomah County cited scientific studies that said the heat dome would’ve been virtually impossible without climate change.

So these companies can say it’s complicated, just like cigarette companies said you couldn’t prove smoking caused cancer, and that there were so many other potential factors involved, but I think the science overwhelmingly tells us a different story.

JJ: You head up the cleverly named ExxonKnews. I wonder if you could tell us, finally, what the goals of that project are. What would, as they say, put you out of business?

ES: I think the goals of that project are to look at the ongoing disinformation that’s coming out of the fossil fuel industry, especially so that other journalists and members of the media, and anybody else who has the opportunity to challenge an oil executive on a global stage or a national stage, can do so armed with the information they need to expose the oil industry for their continuing deception and contribution to the climate crisis.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity, and founder of ExxonKnews, online at ExxonKnews.org. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ES: Thanks so much for having me.

The post ‘It Felt Like a Wasted Opportunity to Hold Oil Executives to Account’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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