The government’s kettle meets Big Oil’s pot on climate confusion

Recently, Senate Budget Chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and House Oversight and Accountability Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) called for a Department of Justice investigation of Big Oil for a long-running “disinformation campaign to mislead the public about the climate effects of fossil fuel.” 

If found guilty, major oil companies — previously involved in state lawsuits alleging similar behavior — could be required to pay billions in damages to the states.

It may indeed be true that elements of Big Oil have sought to avoid clean air regulation or denied the connection between human activity and climate change. But the federal government’s own continuing history of confusing environmental stances makes one wonder if the skillet is calling the frying pan black.

Raskin pointed out that Big Oil’s behavior paralleled that of Big Tobacco’s denial of the negative health effects of smoking. Since being sued and settling with the 50 state attorneys general over the matter in 1998, Big Tobacco is scheduled to pay $246 billion. 

What Raskin did not point out is that the attorneys general encouraged the tobacco firms to collude and raise prices and then enforced a cartel that blocks new tobacco sellers, assures higher profits for the original cartel members and keeps the state payments flowing. Big Tobacco was also given immunity to future state and federal suits; its share values rose markedly with the settlement.

Then there’s the federal government’s own performance on climate change. It’s noteworthy that it was only this past April when the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules that explicitly and because of climate change concerns regulated carbon emissions. In some official sense, carbon has just now been treated as a pollutant.

The United States did not ratify the 1997 Kyoto Accord and commit, as many nations did, to reducing carbon emissions. And while President Biden has personally committed to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement calling for substantial carbon emissions reductions, the Senate has not endorsed the action. The next president can easily reverse the decision, just as President Trump once did.

Politicians talk the climate change talk pretty well, and some might walk it, but how accountable can they hold others when consistent action hasn’t been part of the political playbook? And what if the government has even misled the nation, or at least confused it through policy, on the importance of the linkage between human activity, carbon emissions and climate change?

Looking back, some federal action has been downright strange. As recently as the 1975 passage of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, the United States banned the burning of natural gas to produce electricity and subsidized the production and burning of coal. 

I was on the President’s Council on Wage and Price Stability staff charged with assessing the pending changes. An EPA scientist told me that the resulting, massive increase in carbon emissions could have devastating climate effects. But as result of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, “conservation,” not carbon emissions or true environmental protection, apparently mattered most.

The Energy Policy and Conservation Act also established the first fuel economy standards. They were designed so trucks and similar vehicles would enjoy looser standards than conventional sedans. 

Now, trucks and truck-like SUVs account for 20 percent of the U.S. fleet, which yields far more carbon emissions than might a fleet that had been more welcoming to spacious sedans. Tariffs on foreign-produced pickups imposed by Lyndon Johnson also helped shelter producers of beefy U.S. trucks.

Continuing with its cavalier — if not misleading — attitude about carbon emissions and climate, in 1977, around the time major climate change research was being published, Congress passed amendments to the Clean Air Act favoring producers of dirtier coal in competition with newly developed cleaner coal from the West.

Eastern coal workers’ unions were restive, and Congress required that “scrubbers” — massive air-pollution control devices — be installed on all modified electric generating plants, no matter what coal was being burned. This neutralized Western coal’s advantage, increased the production of dirtier coal and contributed to an increase in carbon and sulfur emissions. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), a powerful coal-country presence, was chairman of the U.S. EPA oversight committee.

This, you might say, happened a long time ago. After all, the first multinational convention on climate change and man was held in 1979. But in other ways, the beat goes on. 

As recently as last month, President Biden used tariffs to block American consumer access to $10,000 Chinese electric vehicles and hybrids that travel 1,000 miles on one tank of fuel and charge.

Sometimes, the politicians who express the deepest concern are like church members who sing in the choir on Sunday but go the way of the world the rest of the week. Who has misled the American public most?

Bruce Yandle is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and dean emeritus of the Clemson University’s College of Business and Behavioral Sciences.