Mea Culpas Are Great, But Climate Leaders Need to Model Real Accountability

This week, Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010-2016, key architect of the Paris Agreement, and longtime supporter of the idea that fossil fuel companies need to have a seat at the climate negotiations table, had an important realization: the fossil fuel industry will fight against climate action til its dying breath. Writing in Al Jazeera, Figueres came clean about her integral role in supporting the industry's narrative about transition.

"More than most members of the climate community, I have for years held space for the oil and gas industry to finally wake up and stand up to its critical responsibility in history. I have done so because I was convinced the global economy could not be decarbonised without their constructive participation and I was therefore willing to support the transformation of their business model." —Christiana Figueres, in Al Jazeera

What fossil fuel companies have done with their record profits over the past 12 months, however, has changed her mind, Figueres wrote. Rather than investing those profits in decarbonization, fossil fuel companies are stepping back from their commitments to emissions reductions and transition. "On top of that, the industry as a whole is making plans to explore new sources of polluting fossil fuels and, in the United States, intimidating stakeholders who have been moving towards environmental, social and governance responsibility."

I'm sorry, but...yes of course they are! There is a mountain of evidence stretching back more than a century that that's exactly what they would do, and literally not one bit of proof that they'd ever behave differently.

Look, I had a moment in my 20s when I too anthropomorphized companies and thought we needed to give em a chance. People learn the lesson that companies are not in fact people in their own way and at their own pace, and generally I hate the sort of gatekeeper, "I discovered this band," purity test bullshit that is far too commonly found in the climate space. And yet. I think we have to look differently at this situation when we're talking about powerful people. In this case, we are not talking about your mom or the boomer neighbor down the street who's finally waking up to how the world works, we are talking about someone who weilded an enormous amount of power over how literally everyone with the power to do something about climate change has viewed the problem, during the most important decades we had to act. I've been reporting on climate for more than 20 years; during that time, I have talked to hundreds of people who have used Figueres' words and actions to justify continuing to enable fossil fuel industry deception and delay. Still today, folks like John Kerry, Mike Bloomberg, and Bill Gates echo the "we need all hands on deck" reasoning about the fossil fuel industry that Figueres promoted for years. It's wonderful that at 65 she has finally seen the light, but in my opinion accountability starts at the mea culpa. It can't end there, or it means less than nothing.

It's only been a few days since Figueres's big public turn, and listen, it does take cojones to admit that you've been wrong in a big way and to do so very publicly. I applaud that bravery! And I hope in the coming months we can count on Figueres to hip check some of the folks she's provided cover for over the years. Particularly as we hurtle toward a COP deeply coopted by fossil fuel interests, I hope to see Figueres as loudly and prominently criticizing that influece as she once welcomed it.

Petroganda Spotlight

In a few months we'll be launching an online resource that helps walk people through the top 5 or so narratives the fossil fuel industry uses to secure social license and keep regulation at bay. In the meantime, I'll be tracking and highlighting trends in the petroganda sphere regularly in this newsletter. Today, I've got a belter: the first anti-EV ad from an oil company, at least in recent years. Under its Mobil1 brand, ExxonMobil quietly tested the waters with this ad, which according to ad data service Media Radar has so far run only on the History channel. It portrays electrification as onerous, tethering us all to an endless number of cords. The solution? The freedom provided by a combustion engine car, of course!

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This Week's Climate Must-Reads

• Floods, Heat, Smoke: The Weather Will Never Be Normal Again - This great piece from David Wallace-Wells puts into words something I've been thinking and feeling and utterly failing to articulate. It's not the "new normal" it's the "never normal."
• Fossil Fuel Workers Are Dying Inhaling Gases —Despite US Warnings to Big Oil - By Sara Sneath for The Guardian and Drilled. In our first co-published piece with The Guardian, Sara Sneath reports on a heartbreaking practice within the fossil fuel industry: workers being asked to "manually gauge" oil and gas tanks (opening the hatch on top to check the volume and quality of the product) are being gased, resulting in chronic and in some cases terminal health impacts, despite the fact that they could eliminate this risk altogether by installing digital gauges that allow for remote monitoring.
• [Study] Emperor's New Climate Scenarios: A Warning for Financial Services - A really important paper as the anti-ESG clown parade hits a fever pitch. The IFoA has partnered with the University of Exeter to produce this paper highlighting something those of us covering climate for a long time have known for years: to the extent that financial models take climate into account at all, they grossly underestimate the cost of doing nothing. As the authors put it here, ""the results emerging from the models are far too benign, even implausible in some cases. It’s as if we are modelling the scenario of the Titanic hitting an iceberg but excluding from the impacts the possibility that the ship could sink." (Also great coverage of this paper in the FT)
• Europe Targets Missing Emissions that Could Bust Climate Goals - And speaking of faulty models, this excellent piece from Akshat Rathi and Petra Sorge in Bloomberg notes that the vast majority of countries do not count the CO2 emissions of ships and planes beyond their borders, which means there's an enormous amount of emissions not being counted in global tallies that tell us whether we will or won't meet various climate targets.
• [ICYMI] The Tech Tycoon Martyrdom Charade - Longtime tech industry pundit Anil Dash put this out earlier this year, but I missed it and maybe you did too. I think it's increasingly important to understand the isolated and bizarre world of tech titans today to understand what's happening on multiple fronts, including climate.