State lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on ALEC templates from 2010 through 2018. More than 600 of them became law.

In June 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill banning the state from contracting with or investing in businesses that divest from coal, oil or natural gas companies. For Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian—one of the state’s top energy regulators—the message was clear: “Boycott Texas, and we’ll boycott you.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Since the beginning of this year, lawmakers in Indiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia have introduced bills that read a lot like the Texas anti-divestment law, and legislators in a dozen other states have also expressed support for the legislation’s objective.

Mere coincidence? Not at all. The template for the bill, titled the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, was supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobby group backed by corporations and right-wing foundations that provides state lawmakers with ready-made, fill-in-the-blank sample legislation drafted by, or on behalf of, ALEC’s private sector members, including tobacco, fossil fuel and electric utility companies.

The bills in Indiana, Texas and West Virginia are near-verbatim copies of ALEC’s draft legislation, while the Oklahoma bill is a boiled-down version. And in each case, besides Oklahoma, at least one of the bill sponsors is an ALEC member. In Texas, five of the six primary authors of the bill and four of the five sponsors are ALEC members. Wayne Christian, the “Don’t mess with Texas” guy, is a member, too.

The Energy Discrimination Elimination Act is just one of the thousands of pieces of legislation ALEC has disseminated nationwide since its formation in 1973. According to a two-year investigation of “copycat” bills published in 2019 by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity, state lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on ALEC templates from 2010 through 2018. More than 600 of them became law.

What explains ALEC’s track record? A big piece of the answer lies in the way the group spreads disinformation and hides its activities from the general public.

Peddling Disinformation

ALEC’s disinformation starts with how the group describes itself.

Originally called the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators, ALEC falsely claims it is a “nonpartisan” organization that enables private sector members to collaborate with legislators on policies and programs promoting what it calls “Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty”—a classic libertarian mantra.

Nonpartisan? Hardly. Virtually all of the roughly 2,000 state lawmakers, officials and staffers who pay a token fee of $200 for a two-year ALEC membership are Republicans.

Likewise, despite ALEC’s positive gloss, the principles it espouses would establish a corporatocracy. By “free markets,” ALEC means giving free rein to corporations by rolling back public health, environmental, consumer and voting protections; by “limited government,” it means radically downsizing the federal government; and by “federalism,” it means transferring authority from the federal government to governors and state legislatures, which corporations can more easily dominate.

ALEC’s definition of Jeffersonian principles also ignores the fact that Thomas Jefferson had some harsh words to say about undue corporate influence. In a letter to former U.S. Senator George Logan of Pennsylvania, he wrote that we must “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of their country.” That sentiment pretty much flies in the face of one of ALEC’s main reasons for being: representing the narrow interests of its corporate benefactors.

Those benefactors are the real power behind ALEC—a network of nearly 300 companies, trade groups, corporate law firms and private libertarian foundations that pay annual dues of $12,000 to $25,000, plus as much as $40,000 to sponsor an ALEC conference session. Their tax-deductible membership fees grant them direct access to ALEC lawmakers and the opportunity to draft sample bills. Many of these corporations also ply the lawmakers with generous campaign contributions to encourage them to introduce and pass ALEC legislation.

ALEC’s current corporate members include Altria Group (formerly Phillip Morris), American Electric Power, Anheuser-Busch, Chevron, Duke Energy, Eli Lilly, Farmers Insurance, FedEx, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil, Pfizer and UPS. Among its biggest foundation donors are the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Koch family foundations, the Searle Freedom Trust and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, which together donated $9.25 million to ALEC between 2014 and 2019, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group that hosts the ALEC Exposed website. That $9.25 million, the center found, amounted to 60 percent of the known donations to ALEC over that time period.

Step One of ALEC’s Tactics: Orwellian Framing

When ALEC promotes new legislation, it regularly employs the kind of “up is down” framing immortalized by George Orwell in his dystopian classic “1984.” As detailed in the investigation by the three news organizations, ALEC routinely gives its bills deceptive titles and descriptions that hide their true objective, exploiting the fact that lawmakers—and even bill sponsors—often do not bother to read the text of the legislation itself.

A good example is the Asbestos Claims Transparency Act, which lawmakers introduced in at least 17 states between 2012 and 2018 and was passed into law by at least 11 states. Despite its title, the bill does not require companies to disclose information about products containing asbestos or inform those who had been exposed to the cancer-causing mineral about how to get help and seek compensation.

Even when lawmakers do take the time to read bills based on ALEC templates, ALEC uses draft language that is often purposely “unremarkable or technical” to obscure their real-world impact, the investigation by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity found. For example, “[b]ans on raising the local minimum wage were dubbed ‘uniform minimum wage’ laws. Changes to civil court rules to shield companies from lawsuits were described as ‘congruity’ or reforms to make laws consistent. [And] [r]epealing business regulations was disguised under the term ‘rescission.’”

Step Two: Send in the Corporate Deceivers

Next, to indoctrinate—or just mislead—state lawmakers, ALEC provides them access to a multitude of purportedly independent, “neutral” experts who are, in fact, shilling for special interests.

For example, according to the three news organizations’ investigation, Colorado state Senator Jerry Sonnenberg, who introduced the aforementioned Asbestos Claims Transparency Act in 2017, relied on outside experts to explain the bill to his statehouse colleagues. One of the alleged experts, an attorney at a corporate law firm was—unbeknownst to Sonnenberg—the co-chair of ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force. He also was a paid consultant for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, which lobbies for so-called “tort reform” to shield corporations that harm people and the environment from lawsuits. Colorado legislators ultimately rejected the bill, but according to the three news organizations, it was just one of more than 80 bills introduced from 2010 through 2018 specifically designed to “limit the public’s ability to sue corporations, including limiting class-action lawsuits, a plaintiff’s ability to offer expert testimony, and cap punitive damages for corporate wrongdoing.”

The ALEC-drafted Energy Discrimination Elimination Act Texas passed last year is yet another example of the council deceiving state lawmakers. The bill targets the environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards that banks, investment firms and pension funds are increasingly applying to make it harder for fossil fuel companies to obtain insurance, financing and other support if they don’t meet ESG criteria.

It is no surprise that such a law would appeal to legislators in Oklahoma, Texas and other states where the fossil fuel industry holds sway, but why would ALEC lawmakers in other states support it? Perhaps because ALEC has been supplying them with a steady stream of climate disinformation.

There has been a scientific consensus for years that human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—is the primary cause of climate change. There is no debate. Yet, over the last two decades, ALEC conferences have featured fossil fuel industry-funded “experts” who have falsely claimed that the benefits of carbon emissions far outweigh the costs, insisted that carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of global warming, and likened climate science advocates to Nazis. ALEC doesn’t go that far in its official statements, but it continues to falsely assert that the jury is still out on the role human activity plays in global warming.

At the same time, ALEC—which relentlessly denigrates clean energy solutions—has been flooding state lawmakers with sample legislation designed to weaken or repeal state renewable energy and efficiency standards, slash incentives for installing rooftop solar panels, eliminate tax breaks for purchasing electric vehicles, oppose federal efforts to limit power plant carbon pollution, and criminalize protests against pipeline projects.

Equally troubling, ALEC’s climate science disinformation efforts have had a discernible “trickle up” impact on federal policy. More than 60 percent of the 77 “alumni” ALEC lists on its website who are in the U.S. Congress are climate science deniers: nine of the 13 senators, including James Inhofe (R-OK), Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), and 39 of the 64 House members, including Andy Biggs (R-AZ), James Comer (R-KY) and Steve Scalise (R-LA).

Step Three: Exploit Understaffed Legislators

Disinformation thrives when legislators are distracted or not paying close attention, and ALEC takes advantage of the fact that state lawmakers have limited time, salaries and resources.

“States are prime targets for corporations because it’s easier to get things out of state legislatures than Congress,” explained political scientist Darrell West, the Brookings Institution’s director of governance studies, during a conversation I had with him a few years ago. “The biggest problem is state legislators are understaffed.”

Stella Rouse, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, seconded that assessment, noting that the job of researching and drafting bills can be challenging and time-consuming. “The legislative staff issue is huge,” she told me. “They are vital. Legislators want to introduce bills, but when they don’t have a staff—or it is very limited—ALEC provides them with a shortcut by providing a ready-made bill. ALEC provides the expertise that legislatures lack.”

The fact that most state legislatures are part-time and consequently don’t pay lawmakers full-time salaries also strengthens the hand of groups such as ALEC, added West. “Many legislators have to have jobs on the side, so they don’t have a lot of time to put into legislating. That makes them dependent on outside sources.”

Alex Hertel-Fernandez, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, explains that ALEC’s success hinges on more than supplying sample legislation. The author of “State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation,” Hertel-Fernandez told the Washington Post in a 2019 interview that “ALEC also provides research help for bill development, political strategy and talking points, and even the witnesses the legislators can call to testify on behalf of a bill. Beyond these immediate services, ALEC fosters a network through its regular convenings that establishes social bonds between its legislative and its staff and other corporate and advocacy members.” (ALEC’s 49th annual meeting will take place in Atlanta at the end of July.)

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), a nonpartisan, professional development organization, only four states—California, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania—have what could be considered a full-time legislature. Another six—Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin—have nearly full-time legislatures. Lawmakers in another 26 states devote about three-quarters of a full-time job to legislative duties, NCSL found, while lawmakers in the remaining 14 states work only about half-time and are lucky if they have even one staff member.

Step Four: Undermine Democracy

Besides plugging bills to limit consumer rights and thwart efforts to address the climate crisis, ALEC also has been playing a behind-the-scenes role in the voter suppression movement, another front that serves its funders’ goal to impede voters who might support candidates and policies that challenge corporate dominance. To do that, ALEC amplifies the false narrative of widespread voter fraud and seeks to limit federal authority over election rules.

The organization’s anti-democratic efforts began at least a decade ago when it promoted a discriminatory voter ID law — as well as the infamous self-defense law used to excuse the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. Racial justice protests against “stand your ground” self-defense laws, which came under scrutiny after Martin’s death, prompted at least eight of ALEC’s corporate members, including Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, McDonald’s, PepsiCo and Walmart, to quit. In response to the backlash, ALEC disbanded its public safety and elections committee.

The organization, however, never completely abandoned its voter suppression agenda. In 2017, it disseminated a sample bill that called for repealing the 17th amendment, which Congress passed in 1912 to allow voters—instead of state legislatures—to elect U.S. senators.

That constitutional amendment bill didn’t go anywhere—likely because it went too far—but in 2018, ALEC drafted a sample resolution to limit judicial power over redistricting, making it easier for ALEC-dominated legislatures to gerrymander district electoral maps.

More recently, ALEC members have been quietly involved in “block the vote” efforts. More than a year before the 2020 election, ALEC set up a secret working group to address redistricting, ballot measures and election law, and by the spring of 2021, more than 100 ALEC lawmakers in the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas were sponsoring or cosponsoring bills that would make it harder for college students, people with disabilities, and Black and Brown citizens to vote. According to internal documents obtained by the watchdog group Documented, ALEC is also working closely with Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the libertarian Heritage Foundation, on a $24-million campaign to lobby lawmakers in eight states—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin—to pass tighter voting restrictions.

Likely fearing the possibility of alienating its corporate members again, ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson has repeatedly denied that her organization is involved in voting issues, and the group has not posted any sample voting restriction bills on its website, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. To avoid public scrutiny, ALEC has outsourced its voter suppression work to a dark money voter suppression group disingenuously called the Honest Elections Project. Last July, ALEC hosted a two-day “exclusive, invitation-only academy” in Utah for state lawmakers with the Honest Elections Project just before its annual meeting, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. The center reported that the event was at least the second time ALEC partnered with the voter suppression group to “educate” ALEC members.

ALEC veterans on Capitol Hill are also apparently committed to undermining democracy. More than half of the 77 alumni listed on ALEC’s website currently serving in Congress (40 in the House and one in the Senate) were among the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election based on lies Donald Trump and his followers spread about widespread voter fraud.

Little Public Oversight

ALEC’s success depends not only on the fact that overworked legislators can be easily manipulated, but also on the fact that the general public pays little attention to what goes on at statehouses. A 2018 survey by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that only 19 percent of the respondents could name their state legislators and a third did not even know the name of their governor. Nearly half did not know whether their state had a one or two-house legislature.

“Most people say they like their state leaders, and a large majority even remembers learning about state government in school,” Johns Hopkins University political scientist Jennifer Bachner, one of the researchers and director of the school’s Government Analytics program, said in a press release. “Despite this, most people are not aware of who exactly represents them and the significant decisions made by their state government.”

Certainly, one major reason for pervasive public ignorance about state government is the rapid decline of local newspapers, which historically devoted substantially more resources to covering politics than broadcast media. From 2005 through 2020, roughly a quarter of all local print newspapers across the country—about 2,200—closed, the Washington Post reported last November. And “in many places where papers still exist,” the Post pointed out, “a lack of resources prevents them from reporting thoroughly on issues vital to the community—issues [such as] public safety, education and local politics.”

The Post also reported that the number of newspaper journalists dropped by more than half between 2008 and 2020, which has had a significant impact on statehouse coverage. An April Pew Research Center study quantified that loss. It found that the number of newspaper reporters covering statehouses full-time has dropped 34 percent since 2014, from 374 to just 245 this year. All told, Pew found that there are now only 850 full-time statehouse reporters from all media.

Overall, however, the number of reporters covering statehouses increased 11 percent since 2014, Pew found, due to a jump in part-time reporters and the establishment of new, nonprofit news organizations “after years of staff cutbacks in the newspaper industry.” Not all of those nonprofit news outlets, however, are necessarily trustworthy.

One such nonprofit, The Center Square, offers conservative spin masquerading as news, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. The operation, a project of the Franklin News Foundation, offers its stories gratis to newspapers that cannot afford to cover statehouses themselves. Like ALEC, it is supported by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which donated $500,000 between 2019 and 2020, and the Charles Koch Foundation, which chipped in $212,000 between 2016 and 2018.

To make matters worse for bona fide reporters, Republican leaders in GOP-controlled statehouses in Iowa, Kansas and Utah recently passed rules limiting when journalists can report from the floors of their legislative chambers, making it even more difficult for them to ask questions and follow policy deliberations. No surprise, ALEC members are well-represented in each of these states’ senate Republican leadership: two out of eight in Iowa, four out of five in Kansas, and six out of 10 in Utah.

Attention and Activism Are Key to Fighting Back

Given ALEC’s stealthy influence on statehouses, especially the 62 state legislative chambers controlled by Republicans, it is imperative that concerned citizens engage with their legislators and closely monitor ALEC’s activities in their state. As campaigns by civil rights, labor and environmental organizations have demonstrated, it is possible to pressure ALEC’s corporate sponsors to leave the organization, making it harder for ALEC to fund its disinformation campaigns.

Protests organized by Color of Change and other racial justice groups against ALEC’s voter ID and “stand your ground” laws resulted in several high-profile corporate members leaving ALEC. Since then, a brighter spotlight on ALEC’s controversial positions has encouraged a veritable Who’s Who of U.S. businesses to desert the organization, including Amazon, AT&T, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Facebook, General Electric, General Motors, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Verizon and Visa.

ALEC’s scientifically indefensible stance on climate change also has prompted some of its corporate members to defect—even in the energy sector—especially after news organizations and advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) drew attention to ALEC’s flagrant lies. Oil and gas giants BP America, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum and Shell, as well as electric utilities Entergy, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Xcel Energy, have all since severed ties with the organization.

Public interest groups are also turning up the heat on ALEC over its relatively recent voter suppression efforts. In June 2021, a diverse coalition of more than 300 organizations sent a letter to 40 ALEC corporate and trade association members, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Coca-Cola, GlaxoSmithKline and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urging them to quit ALEC “based on its active efforts to restrict the American people’s freedom to vote and spread lies about the integrity of our elections to undermine American democracy.”

As Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1913, three years before he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In other words, you have to force disinformation out of the shadows to vanquish it.

Thanks to efforts to bring ALEC’s disinformation to light, as well as pressure from shareholders, unions and public interest organizations, more than 100 corporate and nearly 20 trade association and foundation members have canceled their memberships since 2012, and ALEC’s annual revenue dropped from a high of $10.35 million in 2017 to $7.97 million✎ EditSign in 2020. When it comes to fighting ALEC’s corporate-friendly, anti-democratic legislative agenda, close attention and continued activism are key to exposing the organization’s true nature and thwarting its ultimate goal of decimating public health, environmental and workplace safeguards to pad the profits of its corporate supporters.

Author’s Note: The organizations that closely monitor ALEC include the Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Media and Democracy (host of ALEC Exposed), Common Cause, Documented, Stand Up to ALEC and True North Research. For more on the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) efforts to counter disinformation, see “What You Can Do About Disinformation.” Lindsey Berger, campaign manager for the UCS Center for Science and Democracy, and Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research, provided research for this article.

Author Bio: Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee kicked off its investigation of the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long climate change disinformation campaign last fall by inviting top executives from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell to testify about their role and subpoenaing their companies for internal documents.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The committee followed up that hearing—during which the executives disingenuously denied funding such a campaign—with another hearing on February 8 focusing on the oil companies’ inadequate plans to cut their carbon emissions. The next round is slated to feature board directors from the same four oil companies testifying on their companies’ climate pledges, followed by testimony from social media companies and advertising agencies about the part they have played in manufacturing doubt about climate change.

But before the committee wraps up its investigation, it would be sorely remiss if it didn’t haul in libertarian industrialist Charles Koch, the Daddy Warbucks of climate disinformation, for questioning.

The 20th-richest person in the world with a net worth of $58 billion, Koch, 86, is the longtime CEO of Koch Industries, a conglomerate that owns oil refineries and pipelines; markets crude oil, coal, chemicals, wood pulp and paper; trades energy derivatives; and boasts annual revenues of $115 billion. The second-largest privately held company in the country, Koch Industries is one of the top 25 U.S. corporate water and carbon polluters, is a defendant in a climate accountability lawsuit brought by the state of Minnesota, and is continuing to operate its businesses in Russia while Koch-backed groups oppose U.S. sanctions imposed on the Kremlin after it invaded Ukraine.

Koch-controlled foundations donated more than $145 million to a network of 90 think tanks and advocacy groups from 1997 through 2018 to disparage climate science and block efforts to address climate change. Since the death of Charles Koch’s brother David in 2019, the Charles Koch Foundation has continued to finance this disinformation campaign, giving more than $17 million to 23 groups in 2019 and 2020✎ EditSign, pushing the Koch grand total north of $162 million. By contrast, the second-largest funder of climate disinformation, ExxonMobil, spent $39.2 million✎ EditSign on some 70 denier groups from 1998 through 2020.

To maintain leverage on Capitol Hill, Koch Industries’ political action committee (PAC), affiliates and employees also contribute significantly more to federal candidates, party committees, outside groups, leadership PACs and 527 groups than their counterparts at BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil or Shell. In the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, Koch Industries’ total outlay of $26.7 million was more than the $21.7 million the four oil and gas companies contributed collectively.

In addition, Koch Industries spent more than $38 million on its Washington lobbying operation during the last two full election cycles, from 2017 through 2020. That’s slightly less than ExxonMobil’s $40.98 million and Chevron’s $39.47 million, but the company enjoyed a distinct advantage over the two oil giants besides outspending them on campaign contributions: President Donald Trump’s transition team head, Vice President Mike Pence—a longtime Koch network veteran who played a key role in promoting the Koch-founded and -funded Americans for Prosperity’s “No Climate Tax” pledge when he was in the House—tapped at least 50 Koch network alumni to work inside the Trump administration. They included Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short. Egged on by Koch devotees both inside and outside the government, the Trump administration rolled back at least 260 regulations, including more than 100 environmental rules.

The Biden administration cleared out the Koch disciples when it took office and is in the process of rolling back the Trump rollbacks, but Koch and his donor network still hold considerable sway over the Republican Party. They will continue to spend hundreds of millions on Capitol Hill and, looking ahead to 2024, a number of Koch network stalwarts are considering a run for president, including Pence, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Florida Senator Rick Scott. The Koch network, with its toxic anti-government bias, will likely cast a long shadow over Washington for years to come.

Decades of Disinformation

For more than two decades, the Koch network has been diligently spreading disinformation to sabotage efforts to transition to a clean energy economy, more often than not by attacking proposed climate policies on economic grounds. Examples of its malfeasance are legion:

• To stop a version of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the Senate after it squeaked by in the House in 2009, Americans for Prosperity persuaded a critical mass of lawmakers to sign its “No Climate Tax” pledge, disingenuously calling the bill “the largest excise tax in history.” Since then, the overwhelming majority of legislators who have received campaign contributions from Koch Industries’ PAC and employees have rejected a carbon tax in amendments and nonbinding resolutions.
• To slow the exponential growth of solar power, the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council has armed utilities and state lawmakers with model legislation against net metering, which credits solar panel owners for the excess energy they generate and return to the grid, claiming that rooftop solar credits will drive up non-solar customers’ electric rates. The Energy Department, however, concluded that the credits will have a negligible impact on monthly electric bills.
• To undermine the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), the Koch network has urged Congress to kill the federal income tax credit for EV buyers. “Congress should not be in the business of picking winners and losers by subsidizing one form of energy over others, regardless of its source,” Philip Ellender, Koch Industries’ president of government and public affairs, argued in a letter to Congress in October 2018. Never mind that the oil and gas industry has benefited from massive annual federal subsidies for more than 100 years.
• After succeeding in prodding President Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, arguing that the accord would threaten the “economic future of our country,” the Koch network is now spearheading a campaign to kill the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan, falsely claiming that it “is the biggest spending bill in American history.”

There are plenty of other examples, but the above sample illustrates the breadth of the Koch network’s reach. Charles Koch and his fellow travelers have played an outsized role scaring the public about the potential impact of climate solutions on their pocketbooks (but at the same time, they spent more than $20 million to promote President Trump’s $1.5-trillion tax cut that largely benefited corporations and the ultra-wealthy). By practically any measure, Koch is as consequential a disinformer as the four oil company executives who testified last fall before the House Oversight Committee combined.

Put Koch Under Oath

If the House Oversight Committee called Charles Koch to testify, it could, for starters, ask him about his views on climate change.

The executives from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell who testified last October downplayed the central role human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—plays in triggering climate change, but after much hemming and hawing they all conceded that global warming poses an “existential threat.”

Koch, for his part, has never acknowledged that climate change is a serious problem and rarely talks about it publicly. On the rare occasion when reporters broach the topic, he responds with… disinformation.

Koch’s most recent public comments about climate change came during lengthy interviews with the Washington Post in 2015 and 2016. Asked if he worried about climate change in an August 2015 interview, Koch replied that he believes “it’s been warming some” but added that “[t]here’s a big debate on that, because it depends on whether you use satellite measurements, balloon[s], or you use ground ones that have been adjusted.” Climate scientists, he added, “have these models that show it, but the models don’t work….”

In fact, all of the measurements Koch cited indicate that there has been a long-term global warming trend due to climate change. And, coincidentally, just a week before the Washington Post published the Koch interview, a peer-reviewed study found that global climate models are even more accurate than previously thought.

In August 2016, the Washington Post ran another Koch interview, during which he was asked if anyone could produce a study that would convince him “that carbon regulation is necessary to heed off disastrous global warming.” “Yeah,” Koch replied. “If we… use the scientific method rather than trying to shut down and shout down and punish anybody who wants to enter into debate about it…. If we’re all trying to find the truth of the matter, then I’m all for that.”

Notably, Koch did try to get to the truth of the matter in his own way a few years earlier. The Charles Koch Foundation donated $150,000 to Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research institute founded in 2010 by Richard Muller, a physicist and self-proclaimed climate science skeptic, to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. Presumably to Koch’s surprise—and dismay—Muller announced in a July 2012 New York Times op-ed that his investigation verified that global warming is indeed real, is “almost entirely” caused by human activity, and is even worse than what the climate science community had concluded at the time.

It would be enlightening for the House Oversight Committee to ask Koch about Berkeley Earth’s findings, especially since after Muller announced them, the Koch network stepped up its campaign to characterize climate policies as being too costly, despite the fact that the consequences of failing to curb carbon emissions will cost infinitely more than taking preventive measures.

In late 2012, for example, the Koch brothers financed “bogus studies” falsely claiming that state standards requiring utilities to ramp up their use of renewable energy would dramatically drive up electric rates. Six years later, in 2018, when the House was about to vote on a nonbinding carbon tax resolution, Ellender—the Koch Industries lobbyist—took the same tack. “A carbon tax would make energy more expensive and raise the costs of consumer products and services on which people depend,” he wrote in a letter to the lawmakers. “It would also make U.S. producers less cost competitive, driving production and jobs to other parts of the world.”

The House passed the resolution, which stated that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy,” by a 229 to 180 vote. Nearly 70 percent of the representatives who voted for the resolution—159—collectively received more than $1.28 million in campaign contributions from Koch Industries PAC and employees during the 2018 election cycle.

Investing in Clean Energy While Trashing It

Koch’s jaundiced take on climate change would undoubtedly be welcomed by the 20 Republican members of the Oversight Committee, 14 of whom are climate science deniers. During the 2020 election cycle alone, Koch Industries’ employees and PAC gave more than $136,000 in campaign contributions to 18 of the GOP committee members, while their counterparts at BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell collectively donated $40,347 to 14 of them.

The committee members who are less beholden to the fossil fuel industry, however, should take the opportunity to press Koch about his company’s seemingly contradictory investments in sectors that his network is still trying to knee-cap, such as electric vehicles and renewable energy.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Koch Industries subsidiaries have invested at least $750 million in a range of battery technologies and battery-related raw materials, chemicals and recycling. Among the Koch conglomerate’s relatively new holdings are New Jersey zinc battery startup Eos Energy Enterprises and Canada’s lithium-ion battery recycler Li-Cycle Holdings, lithium development company Standard Lithium, and Lithion Power Group, a lithium-ion battery startup.

Likewise, Koch subsidiaries have jumped into smart grid and electric vehicle charging technologies. In 2020, Koch Engineered Solutions acquired Sentient Energy, a smart grid solutions company, and last year Koch Strategic Platforms invested in EVBox, a Netherlands-based electric vehicle charging station manufacturer.

Koch Engineered Solutions is also bullish on solar, but not on distributed rooftop solar, which the Koch network has been trying to stop. Last November, it bought DEPCOM Power, an Arizona company that builds large-scale solar power plants, and plans to supply solar farms in the United States and Canada.

Koch Industries’ relatively recent investments in batteries and renewables—which, granted, amount to a tiny percentage of the conglomerate’s far-flung operations—are just the beginning, according to Koch Engineered Solutions President Dave Dotson. “We are believers in the electrification of everything, driven by economics and consumer trends,” he told S&P Global Market Intelligence, “and look for where we can add value across the electric value chain from generation to end-user consumption.”

Dotson’s business strategy should come as a surprise to anyone who has been closely following his boss, and should prompt the House Oversight Committee to ask Koch how his company’s recent shopping spree squares with his network’s ongoing campaign against climate solutions.

An unabashed libertarian, Koch likely would respond that the private sector should take the lead, not the government, on energy—and just about everything else. For Koch, government efforts to manage the economy, protect public health and the environment, and provide social welfare programs are a slippery slope to totalitarianism and must be rolled back, if not eliminated. In his most recent book (co-authored with Brian Hooks), Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, Koch argues that individuals, corporations and nonprofit groups are better suited to solve society’s most pressing problems—including the coronavirus pandemic—than the government.

Koch’s philosophy, however, fails to account for the fact that it was the private sector—specifically the fossil fuel industry—that got us into the dire situation in which we find ourselves today, faced with increasingly severe climate change-driven impacts. Major oil companies were aware their products wreck the climate at least 50 years ago and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since then to manufacture doubt about climate science, disparage renewables and block government action. Now that Koch Industries, as well as some oil majors, see that there is money to be made by diversifying into clean energy technologies, they are slowly adding them to their portfolios but spending a fraction of what they are still dedicating to their oil, gas and chemical operations. It’s much too little, much too late.

If the House Oversight Committee is serious about getting to the bottom of the fossil fuel industry’s longtime campaign to stymie climate policy, it should call Koch on the carpet. By doing so, the committee could shine a light on his prominent role in sponsoring disinformation, as well as expose the threat he and his followers pose to U.S. democracy.

Author Bio: Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In a secret video recording made public in late June, a top ExxonMobil lobbyist—Keith McCoy, who was fired soon afterward—not only conceded that the oil giant's support for a carbon tax is a sham, but he also admitted that the company quietly financed climate science denier groups to stave off government action and maximize its profits—a fact that my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others revealed more than a decade ago.

"Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes," McCoy, then ExxonMobil's senior director of federal relations, said during the interview. "Did we join some of these 'shadow groups' to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

For all his candor, McCoy got at least one thing wrong. ExxonMobil did "join"—in other words, pay—denier groups to spread disinformation to blunt initial government attempts to curb carbon emissions. But McCoy inaccurately used the past tense. In fact, the company continues to fund them.

That videotaped interview caused some major heartburn for McCoy's boss, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, especially since the House Committee on Oversight and Reform has invited Woods—as well as top executives from the American Petroleum Institute, BP America, Chevron, Shell Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to testify at a hearing on October 28 on the "long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming."

ExxonMobil has been at the heart of that campaign. Since 1998, the company has paid a network of seemingly independent think tanks and advocacy groups more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science and stymie government action. Only Charles Koch and his late brother David, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, are known to have spent more.

In 2020, according to ExxonMobil's most recent corporate grantmaking report, the company spent $490,000 on three grantees—the American Enterprise Institute ($100,000), the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University ($140,000), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($250,000). That amount is down from the $790,000 the company reported it spent on nine climate science denier groups in 2019 and a fraction of what it spent in the past, but there's a catch.

True, the company lost more than $22 billion in 2020 and cut back its grants across the board. But another factor for this decline is that ExxonMobil changed how it reports grants. As first reported by Salon, the company only listed grants of $100,000 or more in its 2020 annual giving report. In previous years, it included grants of $5,000 or more. The change reduces transparency and ultimately means there is no way to tell how much the company spent in smaller donations to support climate disinformation in 2020 or compare the grants it made in 2020 with previous years.

Only three denier groups—the same three named in the 2020 grantmaking report—received $100,000 or more from ExxonMobil in 2019. That year, their grants collectively amounted to $625,000. The other six denier groups the company funded in 2019—the Center for American and International Law ($5,000), the Federalist Society ($10,000), the Hoover Institution ($15,000), the Manhattan Institute ($90,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000)—collectively received $165,000. None of those grants, even if ExxonMobil continued them, would wind up in the 2020 report, given the company's new threshold.

Still, it's worth taking a closer look at where the bulk of ExxonMobil's self-reported climate disinformation budget did go in 2020.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, "Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option." The assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that "a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans."

That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to "do everything [it] can to prevent" the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—"from becoming law." And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for "the increased use of natural gas" to make "further progress."

Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.

The American Enterprise Institute

Economist Benjamin Zycher might be considered the climate science denier in residence at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received $4.86 million from ExxonMobil since 1998. Zycher insists that a carbon tax would be "ineffective," has called the Paris climate agreement an "absurdity," and rejects the scientific consensus about the causes and seriousness of global warming.

Zycher published his most recent broadside against climate science in the Summer 2021 issue of National Affairs, a formerly independent conservative policy quarterly that AEI brought in-house in 2019. In his essay, "The Case for Climate-Change Realism," he falsely argued that the "available science" does not support the notion that human activity is "the single most significant cause of climate change" and the "available data" undercut the assessment that extreme weather events are "evidence of an ongoing climate crisis."

As he has in previous articles, Zycher cited roundly debunked hypotheses for the primary causes of climate change, including a shift in northern Pacific Ocean circulation patterns called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which scientists have determined is incapable of causing a long-term warming trend, and "changes in solar activity," when, in fact, the sun's energy has declined since the 1980s while average global temperatures have continued to climb.

This summer was not a fortuitous time to be peddling discredited theories. On August 9, less than two months after Zycher posted his essay, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark, nearly 4,000-page "code red for humanity" report warning that the climate crisis is close to spiraling out of control and human activity is "unequivocally" to blame.

Zycher's main objective? To make a case, no matter how specious, for continued reliance on fossil fuels, which he falsely claimed are less expensive than renewables. Proposals to cut carbon emissions, including the Paris agreement, would have little real impact, he argued, and could "be accomplished only by substituting expensive energy for cheaper energy." In fact, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, it is "now cheaper to build and operate new large-scale wind or solar plants in nearly half the world than it would be to run an existing coal or [natural] gas-fired power plant." To be sure, no one would confuse Zycher for a scientist or National Affairs for a peer-reviewed journal. But he serves ExxonMobil's interests as a seemingly independent expert who continues to express doubt about climate science and the viability of renewable energy, thereby providing cover for climate science deniers in Congress.

George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center

The relatively unknown Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington (GW) University received $140,000 from ExxonMobil in 2020 and $1.2 million from the company since 2013. Director Susan Dudley founded the center in 2009 after serving as President George W. Bush's "regulatory czar" at the Office of Management and Budget and, before that, running the Regulatory Studies Program at Koch-financed Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She currently serves in various capacities for other longtime climate science disinformation groups, including the Koch-founded Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Regulatory Studies Center portrays itself as an "objective, unbiased" policy shop, but—like the Mercatus Center—its primary raison d'être is to weaken and quash government regulations, according to a 2019 analysis by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. The GW center's main tools are reports and public comments it submits to Congress, and although it does not get much mainstream news media attention, it has found a receptive audience on Capitol Hill—and in the previous administration. Much of the Trump administration's deregulatory agenda, Public Citizen found, echoed the center's recommendations, including "dramatically reducing the cost that the government attributes to carbon emissions."

But should the Regulatory Studies Center be lumped in with climate science disinformation groups? In response to the Public Citizen report, as well as criticism from UnKoch My Campus and GW student groups, the center issued a statement in February disputing the charge that it rejects climate science. "Contrary to unsubstantiated claims, no one in the Regulatory Studies Center questions climate science," it said. "In fact, most of the Center's scholars do not focus on environmental or energy issues at all. Those who have written on climate issues address economic and legal questions, not the science."

Whether or not the center directly disputes climate science is beside the point. In the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence, most ExxonMobil-funded disinformation groups have revised their position on the reality of climate change. Instead of challenging the science, their efforts now tend to focus on denigrating renewable energy, overstating the costs of transitioning to a clean energy economy while ignoring the benefits, and preventing government action. That is exactly what the Regulatory Studies Center does. In recent years, for example, it has published papers and filed public comments opposing stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

The center also has enlisted the help of unabashed climate science deniers. In the fall of 2018, for example, it tapped Julian Morris to file a public comment supporting the Trump administration's proposed rollback of Obama-era standards for cars and light trucks designed to increase fuel economy and, for the first time, substantially reduce tailpipe carbon emissions. Morris, president and founder of the International Policy Network and vice president of research at the Reason Foundation—two libertarian, climate science denier organizations—falsely declared in a paper published in March 2018 that the "effects of climate change are unknown—but the benefits may well be greater than the costs for the foreseeable future."

Millions More for Disinformation

The money ExxonMobil donated in 2020 to AEI, the GW Regulatory Studies Center and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents only a small percentage of the company's recent outlays to sway public opinion and blunt government climate action. It is difficult to document all of the company's related expenditures, but they include:

• More than $5 million on Facebook ads in 2020, which is more than half of the $9.6 million that the U.S. oil and gas industry spent on the ads, according to an analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap that reviewed more than 25,000 ads on Facebook's U.S. platform. Many of the ads described natural gas as a "green" fuel source and argued that cutting carbon emissions would drive up energy costs.
• An estimated $10 million in annual dues to the American Petroleum Institute (API) (based on how much Shell Oil recently revealed it paid). The U.S. oil and gas industry's oldest and largest trade association, API is working overtime to block stricter methane emissions standards. McCoy indirectly referenced API during the secretly taped interview when he said ExxonMobil relied on third parties to publicly represent its interests in Congress. "We don't want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing," he said. "It's getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be, for the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of Congress."
• At least $100,000 in annual dues to trade associations (based on what it reported it spent in 2019) that have a long track record of peddling climate disinformation, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
• Nearly $834,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles to 118 of the 139 climate science deniers currently in Congress. Over that same time period, the company reportedly spent nearly $41 million to lobby in Washington, but neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil's other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic of a carbon tax—the company's avowed top priority—with legislators since 2018, according to its quarterly lobbying reports.

So while ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and his colleagues proclaim that they fully understand the threat posed by climate change and are "committed to being part of the solution," the evidence shows they continue to spend tens of millions of dollars every year to promote gridlock in Congress on the issue. The future of the planet as we know it hangs in the balance, but as McCoy acknowledged in his interview, ExxonMobil was—and still is—looking out for its investments and its shareholders' short-term interests, regardless of the long-term consequences.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

When then-ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy conceded in a secretly recorded videoin May that the oil giant voiced support for a carbon tax only because it assumed it would never happen, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said the company was "shocked by these interviews" and stood by its "commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change."

Wood's reaction was reminiscent of Captain Louis Renault feigning surprise to discover gambling at Rick's Café in the 1942 film "Casablanca." After quietly pocketing his winnings, Renault justifies closing down the nightclub by exclaiming, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

Woods was shocked? Really? Just one look at his company's financial records would show that despite claiming to endorse a carbon tax—initially in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill that was under consideration in 2009—ExxonMobil has funneled millions of dollars over the last decade to lawmakers who staunchly oppose the idea.

Backing Climate Science Deniers

One tried-and-true way corporations ensure access to Congress is by making campaign contributions. Although there may not be a verifiable quid pro quo, donations guarantee access, and access guarantees influence.

So, given ExxonMobil's professed support for a carbon tax, one might reasonably assume that the company's political action committee (PAC) and employees would back lawmakers who sponsor such legislation and, over time, withdraw their funding for senators and representatives who stand in the way.

In fact, the opposite is true.

During the video interview, McCoy—who at the time was ExxonMobil's senior director of federal relations—compared lobbying Congress with fishing.

"When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress," he said, "I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out…. And… [then you start to] reel them in…. They're a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them."

The goal, he explained, is to develop a close relationship with legislative staff. "You want to be able to go to the chief… and say, look, we've got this issue, we need Congressman So-and-So to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter," he said. "You name it, we've asked for everything."

Not quite everything. ExxonMobil apparently has not asked for a carbon tax, notwithstanding the fact that the company was one of the founding members of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a bipartisan, industry-supported group, which was formed in 2017 to promote a carbon tax, and a year later, the company pledgedto give $1 million over a two-year period to Americans for Carbon Dividends(AFCD), the council's lobbying arm. Over the last decade, members of both houses have voted on a handful of carbon tax-related amendments and nonbinding resolutions. In every case, a sizable majority who received donations from ExxonMobil's PAC and employees rejected the idea. For example:

• In March 2015, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to pass a budget amendment prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2010, including amendment sponsor Roy Blunt (R-MO), voted in favor of the prohibition.
• In June 2016, the House passed a resolution introduced by Steve Scalise (R-LA) stating that a carbon tax "would be detrimental to American families and businesses" by a 237 to 163 margin. Eighty-five percent of the House members who voted for the resolution had received ExxonMobil political donationssince 2013. By contrast, only 26 of the representatives who voted against the resolution—16 percent—had received ExxonMobil money.
• In July 2018, the House passed another Scalise-sponsored resolution asserting that "a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy," this time by a 229 to 180 vote. During the 2018 election cycle, 75 percent of the representatives who gave the resolution a thumbs up received ExxonMobil donations. Only 23 percent of the 180 who voted against it got ExxonMobil funding.

The disparity between ExxonMobil's PAC donations to supporters of the July 2018 Scalise resolution and its opponents is even more telling, given that PACs—which can contribute as much as $10,000 to a candidate per two-year cycle—more accurately represent a company's agenda than that of individual employees. The ExxonMobil PAC contributed more than $935,000 to 74 percent of the resolution's supporters, but only $109,500 to opponents during the 2018 election cycle. Scalise, the resolution's sponsor, and 37 of his 48 resolution cosponsors received ExxonMobil PAC contributions.

The most recent congressional carbon tax vote took place in the Senate in February during a round of votes on the pandemic relief bill. John Hoeven (R-ND) sponsored an amendment that would have prohibited such a tax. It was rejected on a strict party-line vote: All 50 Republican senators voted for the amendment; all 50 Democratic senators voted no.

ExxonMobil PAC donations to those senators are mostly party-line, too. Twenty-seven of the 50 Republicans collectively have received $233,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. Over that same time frame, the PAC contributed just $62,000 to 11 of the Democrats.

Snubbing Carbon Tax Proponents

In January 2018, ExxonMobil Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Suzanne McCarron reaffirmed the company's support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related climate policies in a blog post on the company's website. ExxonMobil, she maintained, is "committed to being part of the solution."

Nevertheless, during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, ExxonMobil employees and its PAC donated nearly $834,000 to 28 of the 30 senators and 90 of the 109 representatives currently in Congress who, according to the Center for American Progress, still reject the scientific consensus that global temperatures are rising and that burning fossil fuels is largely to blame. The company's PAC funded 16 of the climate science deniers in the Senate and 81 in the House.

Lawmakers sponsoring carbon tax legislation, meanwhile, have enjoyed considerably less support. Over the last two election cycles, climate science deniers in the 117th Congress received six and a half times more from ExxonMobil than carbon tax proponents.

Two carbon tax bills have been introduced in the Senate this session, both by Democrats: one sponsored by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, which has nine cosponsors, the other by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin. Three carbon tax bills have been introduced in the House: one sponsored by Pennsylvania's Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick with one cosponsor, another by Connecticut's Democratic Rep. John Larson with two cosponsors, and a third by Florida's Democratic Rep. Theodore Deutch with 84 cosponsors.

Since 2017, ExxonMobil employees and the company PAC have donated only $127,692 to these carbon tax proponents: $35,486 to eight of the 11 sponsors and cosponsors in the Senate and $92,206 to 33 of the 90 sponsors and cosponsors in the House. The PAC contributed to only three of the senators and 12 of the representatives.

Despite this decidedly lopsided funding pattern, McCoy insisted during the interview that ExxonMobil wants to work with lawmakers on carbon tax legislation. "Put forth a bill and we'll show you that we'll support that bill, we'll help you work on that bill," he said. But, he added, "Nobody wants to do that because it's not politically expedient to put forth a tax for people, it just isn't."

In fact, a number of lawmakers have "put forth a bill" to establish a carbon tax in successive congressional sessions, but the company has shown no support, and neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil's other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic with members of Congress since 2018—the same year it announced its $1 million donation to the Climate Leadership Council's lobbying arm, AFCD—according to ExxonMobil's quarterly lobbying reports.

Staffers working for Rep. Larson and Sen. Whitehouse, who both have been sponsoring carbon tax legislation for years, recently verified that ExxonMobil has not expressed support for their respective proposals. Larson introduced a bill in 2009, the same year that ExxonMobil announced that it favored the policy, while Whitehouse first sponsored one in 2014 and has reintroduced a version of it in every session since.

Out of frustration, Whitehouse and his fellow bill sponsor, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, sent a letter to ExxonMobil in August 2016 criticizing the company for its indifference.

"Regarding ExxonMobil's alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we've seen no meaningful evidence of that," the senators wrote. "None of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil's management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation."

Five years later, nothing has changed on that front. A Whitehouse spokesperson says his office is not aware of ExxonMobil supporting any carbon pricing legislation, let alone the senator's.

But McCoy's revelations did have consequences: The Climate Leadership Council kicked ExxonMobil out of the organization in August; the Union of Concerned Scientists and other public interest groups cited McCoy's comments in a "friend of the court" brief filed in Minnesota's climate science deception lawsuit against ExxonMobil; and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform asked McCoy to testify about his company's campaign to mislead the public "about the dangers of fossil fuels and their role in causing global climate change."

As for McCoy's job status, an ExxonMobil spokesperson told E&E News in late September that "McCoy no longer works for the company."

If McCoy does wind up testifying before Congress, he would serve as the opening act for a hearing that the Oversight Committee plans to hold on October 28 featuring his former boss Darren Woods and top executives from other major oil and gas companies. Finally, under oath, Woods and his colleagues will have to answer questions about their decades-long effort to block government action on climate.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.