Democratic lawmakers accuse big oil companies of ‘greenwashing’
Gas prices are displayed at an Exxon gas station on July 29, 2022 in Houston, Texas. Exxon and Chevron posted record high earnings during the second quarter of 2022 as energy stocks have faltered in recent months.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
A pair of Democratic lawmakers on Friday accused the largest oil companies in the United States of “greenwashing” their public image and not doing enough to decarbonize fast enough to meet climate change targets.
Carolyn B. Maloney, chair of the U.S. House of Representatives’ main investigative committee, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Ro Khanna, a member of the same committee and the chair of the Oversight Environmental Subcommittee, sent a 31-page letter on Friday to the rest of the members of the committee with the latest findings from their ongoing investigation into the fossil fuel industry.
Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and causes global warming. The Oversight Committee began its investigation into what it calls a “climate disinformation” campaign in Sept. 2021 and held a hearing with top executives from oil and gas giants on Oct. 28 of that year.
The letter is the latest installment in the committee’s bid to demonstrate that oil companies are not trying to reduce their CO2 emissions quickly enough, while obscuring their lack of participation.
“These documents demonstrate how the fossil fuel industry ‘greenwashed’ its public image with promises and actions that oil and gas executives knew would not meaningfully reduce emissions, even as the industry moved aggressively to lock in continued fossil fuel production for decades to come — actions that could doom global efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change,” the letter reads.
These efforts are particularly offensive, Maloney and Khanna said, because of the amount of money the biggest oil companies are making right now.
“The fossil fuel industry’s failure to make meaningful investments in a long-term transition to cleaner energy is particularly outrageous in light of the enormous profits these companies are raking in at the expense of consumers — including nearly $100 billion in combined profits for Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP in just the last two quarters,” the letter reads.
The letter also details ways in which the oil companies have made insufficient efforts to decarbonize their businesses, and points to internal documents that show how the companies are continuing to invest in fossil fuel production and increase output.
“Each of the companies has publicly pledged to reach ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by 2050,” the letter reads. “However, experts have found that not one of the net zero pledges from BP, Shell, Exxon, or Chevron are aligned with the pace and scope of cuts necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and avert catastrophic climate change.”
The letter also points to documents that show how the industry is pushing natural gas as a long-term climate solution.
“In 2021, natural gas contributed to 34% of U.S. energy-related emissions and 22% of emissions globally,” the letter reads. “Documents obtained by the Committee show fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups seek to publicly position natural gas as a clean source of energy and part of the transition to renewables, even as the industry is privately planning for expanded natural gas production over the long term.”
Burning natural gas results in fewer greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal or other kinds of fossil fuels for the same amount of energy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but it still releases greenhouse gas emissions. Burning natural gas produces about 117 pounds of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units (a measure of heat). That’s compared with 200 pounds for coal and 160 pounds for fuel oil.
Equally critically, the production of natural gas results in leaks of methane all throughout the production process and methane is a greenhouse gas, too. It’s a different greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but still contributes to global warming.
Oil companies stand firm and deny allegations
The oil companies targeted in this investigation categorically deny the allegations made by the House Committee.
“The Committee’s fourteen month investigation, which included several hours of executive testimony and nearly a half-million pages of documents, failed on all fronts to uncover evidence of a climate disinformation campaign,” Curtis Smith, the media lead for Shell North America, told CNBC. “In fact, the handful of subpoenaed documents the Committee chose to highlight from Shell are evidence of the company’s extensive efforts to set aggressive targets, transform its portfolio and meaningfully participate in the ongoing energy transition.”
Exxon claims the House Committee lawmakers have been disingenuous in their representation of the oil company’s engagement.
“Our CEO has testified under oath on this subject during two all-day Congressional hearings before two separate committees, we’ve been in regular communication with the committee for over a year, and have provided staff with more than one million pages of documents, including board materials and internal communications,” Todd Spitler, corporate media relations senior advisor for Exxon, told CNBC.
“The House Oversight Committee report has sought to misrepresent ExxonMobil’s position on climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by recasting well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign. If specific members of the committee are so certain they’re right, why did they have to take so many things out of context to prove their point?”
The industry trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, says it is focused on both providing secure sources of energy and addressing climate change at the same time.
“Our industry is focused on continuing to produce affordable, reliable energy while tackling the climate challenge, and any allegations to the contrary are false. The U.S. natural gas and oil industry has contributed to the significant progress the U.S. has made in reducing America’s CO2 emissions to near generational lows with the increased use of natural gas,” Megan Bloomgren, senior vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, told CNBC.
The API also pointed to the industry’s focus on developing carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) and hydrogen technologies.
“We are poised to be a leader in the next generation of low carbon technologies, including CCUS and Hydrogen — technologies widely recognized to be critical to meet the world’s emissions reduction targets. API will continue to work with policymakers on both sides of the aisle for policies that support industry innovation and further the progress we’ve made on emissions reductions,” Bloomgren said.
Chevron declined to comment. In June, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth wrote an open letter to President Joe Biden saying that the oil company had produced the highest volume of oil and gas in its 143-year history in 2021. And Wirth pointed out that carbon emissions associated with segments of its oil and gas production was lower than global averages.
“At roughly 15 kg of CO2-equivalent per barrel, Chevron’s Permian Basin carbon intensity is some two-thirds lower than the global industry average. U.S. Gulf of Mexico production has carbon intensity just a fraction of the global industry average,” Wirth wrote. In the letter Wirth also said the oil company was investing $10 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, scale carbon capture and hydrogen technologies, and grow its renewable liquid fuels production.
BP did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
![Is this the Hyundai Santa Fe EV? Well, sort of [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/10/Hyundai-Santa-Fe-EV.jpeg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Hyundai’s midsize SUV is already due for a facelift, including a new design and electrified powertrain. It’s not a pure EV, but the new Hyundai Santa Fe will offer electric-only driving.
Is Hyundai launching the Santa Fe EV?
The Santa Fe is slightly bigger than the Tesla Model Y and one of Hyundai’s most popular vehicles, so an EV version would make sense, right?
Hyundai introduced hybrid and plug-in hybrid powertrains for the 2021 model year. The fifth-generation, launched last year, brought a bold new look, added power, and a new hybrid option.
Now, it’s official, the next Santa Fe will be radically different from the current model. A camouflaged prototype was spotted in South Korea with a few design updates, but that’s not all.
Although it’s still under wraps, a sticker on the side of the vehicle confirms that this Santa Fe is actually an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV). Hyundai announced plans to launch its first EREV in 2027 during last month’s CEO Investor Day.
According to Hyundai, the new electrified vehicle will offer an “EV-like” driving experience, delivering over 600 miles (960 km) of combined range.
The vehicle is still equipped with a battery for pure EV driving, but it also has a gas engine that acts as a generator to extend the driving range when the battery gets low. Hyundai will use in-house batteries, which it claims will offer “full EV power performance with less than half the battery capacity.”
The video from HealerTV takes a closer look at the vehicle to show where the battery and high-voltage lines are located.
Although it’s covered, you can see a few design updates, including new head and rear lights that appear closer to the Palisade.
While Hyundai is preparing to launch the Santa Fe EREV, Genesis is also planning to introduce its first extended-range EV. We caught a sneak peek of the Genesis GV70 EREV earlier this month, which is also expected to arrive in 2027. It will follow the luxury brands’ first hybrid, the GV80, due out next year.
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In the last week, two former Tesla self-driving/Autopilot program leaders have commented on the state of autonomous driving, telling a very different story than their former boss, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk has been notoriously wrong about predicting when Tesla would solve self-driving.
The CEO first announced that “all Tesla vehicles produced since 2016 have all the hardware necessary to achieve full self-driving,” and then claimed, every year from 2019 to 2025, that Tesla would deliver the capability through software updates by the end of each year.
He reiterated the prediction recently, saying Tesla would remove the safety monitor from its robotaxi service in Austin and enable “unsupervised self-driving” in consumer vehicles by the end of 2025.
There’s been a running gag at Tesla about engineers finding out that the company is supposed to deliver something as Musk announces it publicly – leading to a large discrepancy between what Tesla is working on and what Musk claims it will deliver.
Self-driving has been a good example.
While Musk has repeatedly claimed for the last 6 years that Tesla is on the verge of solving autonomy, the people actually working on the technology are not really in agreement. Some of them who left are starting to speak out.
Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former head of artificial intelligence, who led the Autopilot and self-driving programs at Tesla from 2017 to 2022, recently warned that autonomous driving is far from a solved problem.
In a new podcast this week, the AI expect again warned that autonomy is not solved:
He said that he would “push pack” on the idea that what we are seeing in the world of autonomy today, with Tesla and Waymo, means it is a solved problem.
Karpathy said:
“[…] I think basically what takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines and every single nine is a constant amount of work, so every single nine is the same amount of work, so when you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine, and then you need the second nine, and third nine, fourth nine, fifth nine, and while I was at Tesla for five years or so, i think we went through maybe three nines or two nines. I don’t know, but like multiple nines of iteration, there’s still more nines to go, and so that’s why these things take so long […]”
Some data support what the engineer is claiming, as the latest FSD Beta software updates that the Tesla team delivered under his leadership did result in a significant reduction in driver intervention, but the progress has been much less evident since:
The first few ‘9s’ deliver a much greater impact, statistically, than the next ones, even though, as Karpathy pointed out, the next ones are just as important and they are just as tricky as the previous 9s.
While he highlights that there’s still a lot of work to be done, Karpathy did say that he belives Tesla’s approach to be more scalable.
He is not the only former Tesla Autopilot program leader to speak out recently.
Sterling Anderson is recognized as the first Autopilot program leader at Tesla in 2015-2016. He now leads global products at GM, which announced this week that it plans to launch level 3 autonomous driving in 2028.
During the event announcing the new autonomous driving timeline at GM, Anderson took a jab at his former employer:
Our customers have driven over 700 million hands-free miles with Super Cruise without a single accident attributed to the technology. I led Autopilot, and you can’t say that for Autopilot. I think this is the long-term play: we build trust with customers by delivering safe products.
He has a point considering Tesla is currently flooded with lawsuits related to accident that involved its Autopilot or ‘Full Self-Driving’ features.
The GM executive favor the more careful approach to autnomous driving.
Electrek’s Take
As I often point out, there’s what Elon says, and there’s what Tesla’s lawyers say.
Elon’s own lawyers say Tesla shareholders shouldn’t listen to him, calling his statements “mere corporate puffery.” That’s an actual quote.
I do believe that Tesla will achieve unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles at someone point, but I don’t have any evidence that it is close to happen.
As Karpathy said, there are still several 9s to go through before it can be at 99.9999999%, which is needed for level4-5 autonomy, and each of those 9s represent years of work.
I think there’s a clear discrepenacy between how Elon talks about self-driving at Tesla and what people who are actually building those systems, like Anderson and Karpathy from 2015 to 2022, are experiencing.
Elon has been lucky to find Ashok, Tesla’s current self-driving leader, who seems to be perfectly willing to endorse his consistently wrong FSD predictions.
It’s not really surprising when you know that Ashok is the one who produce the infamous FSD demo of 2016. As Karpathy pointed out, we should be doubtful of AI demos.
Looking the prediction markets, people don’t really believe in what Elon is claiming. On Polymarket, people who have been betting on Tesla’s not delivering unsupervised self-driving this year have made a lot of money:
Elon reitereted the goal this week and the “no” answer still gained ground after his claim that Tesla was on track.
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This week on Electrek’s Wheel-E podcast, we discuss the most popular news stories from the world of electric bikes and other nontraditional electric vehicles. This time, that includes Rivian’s new ALSO e-bike, FLIT sells a pound of caviar with its new lightweight folding e-bike, Florida wants e-bike riders to get a license, and more.
The Wheel-E podcast returns every two weeks on Electrek’s YouTube channel, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.
As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.
After the show ends, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:
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Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the Wheel-E podcast today:
Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 11:00 a.m. ET (or the video after 12:00 p.m. ET):
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