Climate Science Deniers and Fossil Fuel Greenwashing: Danger in Trump’s Second Term

President-elect Donald Trump seems hell-bent on filling his cabinet with anti-science extremists, including climate science deniers. While these nominations are dangerous, what's even more disturbing is the opening they create for fossil fuel corporations that have masterminded climate deception campaigns to regain social license. ExxonMobil, Shell, and trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute now profess to accept climate science-even as they exacerbate the crisis by continuing to expand fossil fuel production and kick the climate action can down the road with greenwashing and doublespeak.

In a cynical effort to please climate-conscious investors, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods may choose to keep climate science deniers like DOE nominee Chris Wright at arm's length. But with global temperatures rising, the carbon budget dwindling, and climate-driven disasters affecting people and communities around the world, we cannot afford to accept ExxonMobil, Shell, or other major fossil fuel corporations as the lesser evil-or even worse, as integral to climate solutions.

Trump reignites overt climate denial

During his campaign, Trump sought $1 billion from oil and gas CEOs in exchange for a pledge to reverse environmental regulations and prevent new policies from being enacted. Since Trump's election to a second term, fossil fuel industry interests have published their wish lists-and patrons have been rewarded with appointments to key posts in the administration. And we've already seen a resurgence of outright climate science denial.

Chris Wright, Trump's nominee for Energy Secretary, has denied the well-established connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Liberty Energy, the fracking corporation he heads, describes its Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) focus as delivering secure, reliable, affordable access to energy. Its ESG report downplays the urgency of the climate crisis and misrepresents the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This deliberate distortion of ESG builds on years of anti-ESG efforts by far-right activists including Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed by Trump to partner with fellow billionaire Elon Musk in weakening federal regulations and slashing government spending (notably, oil and gas subsidies are not on the chopping block).

Congressional allies pump up oil and gas

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has continued its attack on ESG investing, most recently in an unhinged report that rallies behind ExxonMobil against an alleged "cartel" of climate-conscious investors. The committee seems to be living in an alternate reality in which investors using market tools to influence corporate strategy is somehow illicit, while fossil fuel companies colluding to fix prices is not. The Judiciary Committee's upside-down world is detached from reality, ignoring both record high US oil and gas production under the Biden administration and the fact that renewables continue to be cheaper than fossil energy.

Representative Jim Jordan's Judiciary Committee embraces anti-climate positions that ExxonMobil itself long ago abandoned, alleging that commitments to reach net zero global warming emissions by 2050 are part of a "left-wing climate agenda." Does ExxonMobil, the nation's largest energy corporation, really need protection by a paternalistic Congress against powerful bullying investors? More likely, ExxonMobil recognizes that to compete in the global market, it must convince investors that it is taking action to reduce heat-trapping emissions and limit the worst effects of climate change. (As my colleague Dr. Carly Phillips has shown, ExxonMobil's recent climate reports are misleading at best, dishonest at worst-textbook examples of greenwashing).

Major fossil fuel corporations lit the fuse decades ago

Climate change denial is no accident. It was plotted decades ago by the fossil fuel industry-for example, in an infamous 1998 memo by a task force of the American Petroleum Institute, which said that "Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognize) 'uncertainties' in climate science." As my UCS colleagues and I wrote in the Climate Deception Dossiers, this plan was eerily reminiscent of the tobacco industry's strategy, succinctly described in an internal corporate memo as, "Doubt is our product…"

The fossil fuel industry's concerted disinformation campaign has been so successful that ExxonMobil, one of the ringleaders, can now claim to accept climate science while cronies like Chris Wright and Jim Jordan continue to stoke doubt.

Fossil fuel interests have been in Trump's inner circle from the jump

In 2016, President Trump tapped ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State. As I wrote at the time, Tillerson was an inappropriate and deeply troubling pick for the post, for countless reasons-here were five of the most distressing ones.

One of those reasons was the ways Tillerson doubted and downplayed climate change. And after his service in the Trump administration, the Wall Street Journal revealed new evidence that Tillerson had dismissed the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (and striving to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius) as "something magical." Worse still, just months before the agreement was signed, Tillerson asked, "Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough?"

Climate scientists, backed by robust research, say so. The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° C found that surpassing 2 degrees C of warming would significantly increase the frequency and severity of climate impacts, including extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and threats to human health and livelihoods. However, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, could substantially reduce these risks, highlighting the critical importance of ambitious global climate action.

In 2017, Tillerson said he disagreed with President Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. He was fired from his position in the administration just nine months later.

ExxonMobil hides behind extremists

ExxonMobil is staking out a different position in the second Trump administration.

2024 wrapped up as the hottest year on record, with warming temporarily reaching 1.5 C. Unlike Tillerson or Trump, current ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods professes to support the Paris Agreement. However, the corporation pushes technological "solutions" that can't bend the emissions curve steeply downward in the critical period between now and 2030.

In December, ExxonMobil released its plan to 2030, which calls for an 18% increase in oil and gas production, thanks largely to growth in the Permian Basin (after last year's acquisition of Pioneer) and offshore Guyana. Woods bragged about reducing ExxonMobil's upstream (exploration and production) emissions intensity by 20% between 2016 and 2023-and says it is aiming to cut emissions intensity 40-50% by 2050.

However, upstream emissions intensity measures emissions per unit of production-and excludes emissions from burning oil and gas, which constitute roughly 85 percent of the heat-trapping emissions attributable to ExxonMobil. So, if production is increasing-as ExxonMobil's is-absolute emissions will continue to climb even if upstream emissions intensity significantly decreases.

The corporation says it is pursuing "up to $30 billion in lower-emissions investment opportunities"-which for ExxonMobil means carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and lithium. Among other projects, ExxonMobil's Low Carbon Solutions business is developing a Texas plant to produce hydrogen from fossil gas (if the tax credit included in the Inflation Reduction Act survives) and a gas-fired power plant to support a data center. (Read more about how data centers' rapidly growing energy use is changing electricity supply and demand-and what it means for energy infrastructure planning-in this blog by my UCS colleague Mike Jacobs).

Fossil fuel lobbyists grab seats at the table

ExxonMobil's Woods was one of more than 1,770 fossil fuel industry lobbyists granted access to the annual UN climate negotiations (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The heads of Aramco, BP, and TotalEnergies were also registered to participate as guests of the host country.

Woods made headlines when he discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement. Although some media outlets credited Woods with supporting climate policy and pushing back against Trump's anti-climate agenda, what he actually said was, "The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit." What I see in the oil and gas industry's participation at COPs is not a commitment to climate action, but the determination-and access-to interfere with a fair, fast, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels by the international community.

What to watch out for in 2025

As 2025 begins, the challenges for climate advocates are at least threefold: 1) mobilizing fierce opposition and marginalizing climate science deniers who secure positions of power in Congress or the administration; 2) inoculating state, federal, and international policymakers against deception and greenwashing by ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel corporations; and 3) defending and expanding the use of ESG investment strategies against bad-faith Congressional "oversight."

With federal climate and clean energy policies likely to be stalled or rolled back, climate litigation is a key arena for progress in the United States. Preserving access to justice through the courts will be essential, in the face of veiled threats against climate-related litigation in Project 2025 and Trump's promise to stop climate accountability litigation against the oil and gas industry.

The fossil fuel industry will attempt to cash in on its political influence in the United States by advancing deregulation, facilitating increased oil and gas production on federal lands and waters, expanding subsidies and other giveaways, blocking mandatory climate disclosure, evading liability for climate damages and corporate misconduct, and stoking political and legal attacks against activists and organizers. As President-elect Trump opens the floodgates to all kinds of disinformation-including climate science denial-some pro-fossil forces will fight climate and clean energy policies directly. But others will more stealthily seek to delay and undermine the transition away from fossil fuels, claiming to support climate action while defining "climate solutions" in their narrow short-term interests. These efforts to regain social license by those most responsible for the climate crisis are particularly insidious.

Both approaches-and the actors who employ them-endanger our health, environment, energy security, human rights, and democracy. Even as we steel ourselves to refute a barrage of lies from top officials in the Trump administration and Congress, we must resist compromising with leaders of an industry that has deceived the public and policymakers for decades, evaded accountability for the harm it has caused, continues to obstruct the urgent transition to renewable energy, and has not earned the public's trust.

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