Firefighters in a boat make their way past a car submerged by the floods in Rust im Tullnerfeld, Austria, on September 16, 2024. (Photo: Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP via Getty Images)
“We are deeply worried such events will get worse until oil and gas giants like Shell, Total, Equinor, Exxon, OMV, and ENI are forced to stop drilling for fossil fuels driving climate change,” said one campaigner.
The international climate group Greenpeace on Friday called on European leaders to “reciprocate” the courage shown by first responders in several countries over the weekend by forcing fossil fuel giants to pay for climate damages.
Calling out leaders including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, and Romania Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, Greenpeace campaigner Ian Duff said Central and Eastern European countries should end their “support for fossil fuels and [make] climate polluters pay for this disaster,” as emergency workers rescued people from catastrophic flooding.
The death toll on Monday rose to at least 16, with many more people missing and hundreds of thousands of people displaced in countries including Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia after the low-pressure system Storm Boris dumped torrential rains on the region for days starting late last week.
Two men, aged 70 and 80, drowned in their homes in northeastern Lower Austria after being trapped by rising floodwater, and confirmed deaths in Poland rose to six.
About 70% of Litovel, about 140 miles east of the Czech capital of Prague, was underwater Monday, while a power plant servicing the country’s third-largest city was forced to shut down and leave residents without heat and hot water.
“Greenpeace is horrified by damages brought by floods across Central and Eastern Europe, claiming lives, leaving homes without power and farmers with ruined fields, after being already ravaged by drought,” said Duff, head of Greenpeace’s Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign. “We are deeply worried such events will get worse until oil and gas giants like Shell, Total, Equinor, Exxon, OMV, and ENI are forced to stop drilling for fossil fuels driving climate change.”
In the U.S., the notion of big polluters being required to pay for damages caused by the climate crisis has recently gained traction, with lawmakers introducing a bill in Congress last week.
In Europe, a “polluter pays” principle is followed for many kinds of pollution, but advocates have called for it to be applied to planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
The flooding in Europe comes, as London-based meteorologist Scott Duncan explained on the social media platform X, after “an exceptional summer for the Mediterranean Sea,” with heat records broken—just as scientists have warned this year that record heat in the North Atlantic and other oceans around the globe would mean “a busy hurricane season.”
“Warmer sea surface temperatures allow more moisture to evaporate, like fuel for a storm. The warmer the water, the greater the evaporation,” said Duncan.
Liz Stephens, science lead for the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, noted that in Central and Eastern Europe, “climate change is known to be playing a role in increasing the risk of flooding,” with the World Weather Attribution saying in 2021 that disastrous flooding that hit Germany and Belgium was tied to “a rapidly warming climate.”
Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Stephens added, “have indicated that we have already observed an upward trend in heavy rainfall, surface water, and river flooding, and climate models show high confidence of further increases into the future.”
“The flooding looks set to be the worst in the region since 2002,” she said. “Lessons will have been learned from previous big European floods, but forecasts for some locations are for flooding of unprecedented magnitude, and history tells us that people are often surprised by the seemingly unimaginable consequences of such events.”
Journalist and climate advocate George Monbiot pointed out on Al Jazeera that storms previously described as “once-in-1,000-year occurrences [are] happening several times now in the past decade. We’re seeing a massive acceleration and intensification of extreme weather events, and unfortunately this is exactly what climate scientists were predicting.”
.@GeorgeMonbiot: "I've seen what were described as once in a 1,000 year occurrences happening several times now in the past decade. We're seeing a massive acceleration and intensification of extreme weather events" pic.twitter.com/wzgntdDpbq
Climate action group Friends of the Earthechoed Greenpeace’s demand to “leave fossil fuels in the ground and instead invest in a green future,” and Duff emphasized that communities across Central and Eastern Europe are far from the only ones “reeling from deadly floods and torrential rains,” with Typhoon Yagi causing flooding and landslides that killed at least 250 people in Southeast Asia in recent days and heavy rains across West and Central Africa leading to floods that killed more than 1,000 people.
“The fossil fuel industry,” said Duff, “is worsening weather extremes everywhere.”
The Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project is seen on December 20, 2016 in Houston, Texas. (Photo: Marie D. De Jesus/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
“The fossil fuel industry delays climate action, distracts from real solutions that would end the fossil fuel era, and does everything in its power to squeeze the last drops of profit from a dying industry, at the expense of all of us.”
Among the world’s wealthiest countries, the U.S. leads the way in spending public money on so-called climate “solutions” that have been proven to “consistently fail, overspend, or underperform,” according to an analysis released Thursday by the research and advocacy group Oil Change International.
The group’s report, titled Funding Failure, focuses on international spending on carbon capture and fossil-based hydrogen subsidies, which continues despite ample data showing that the technological fixes have “failed to make a dent in carbon emissions” after 50 years of research and development.
The report details how five countries account for 95% of all carbon capture spending, with the U.S. investing the most taxpayer money in the technology, at $12 billion in subsidies over the last 40 years.
Norway comes in second with $6 billion going to carbon capture and storage, while Canada has spent $3.8 billion, the European Union has spent $3.6 billion, and the Netherlands has poured $2.6 billion into the technology, with which carbon dioxide emissions are compressed and utilized or stored underground.
“It is nothing short of a travesty that funds meant to combat climate change are instead bolstering the very industries driving it.”
Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, told The Guardian that the subsidies amount to a “colossal waste of money.”
“It is nothing short of a travesty that funds meant to combat climate change are instead bolstering the very industries driving it,” said Singh.
While proponents claim carbon capture and storage reduces planet-heating carbon emissions, OCI notes, it was originally developed in the 1970s “to enhance oil production, and this remains its primary use,” with the technology “barely” reducing emissions.
High-profile carbon capture failures in the U.S. include the Petra Nova project in Houston, Texas, which cost nearly $200 million in taxpayer funds and whose captured emissions were later used for crude oil production, and the FutureGen project, “which swallowed $200 million and never materialized.”
“Investing in carbon capture delays the transition to renewable energy,” reads OCI’s report. “Instead of wasting time and money on technologies that do not work, governments must commit to justly and urgently phasing out fossil fuels before it’s too late.”
Despite the lack of data supporting the use of carbon capture, the group said, countries including the U.S. are “preparing to waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on these ineffective technologies, further benefiting the fossil fuel industry.”
OCI highlighted how the U.S. and Canada, while ostensibly fighting the climate crisis, have spent a combined $4 billion in public money to explicitly “pay oil companies to produce more oil,” with the subsidies going to carbon capture for “enhanced oil recovery.”
The report also found that in addition to the $12 billion in taxpayer funds the U.S. has spent on carbon capture and fossil hydrogen—a leak-prone gas produced through energy-intensive processes that cause their own emissions—the government has spent an estimated $1.3 billion on the 45Q tax credit, which allows companies to write off tax for every ton of carbon dioxide they store underground.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) increased the amount given to companies in 45Q tax credits from $35 to $60 per ton, meaning that the subsidy could grow to over $100 billion in the next 10 years.
OCI’s Policy Tracker shows that overall public spending on carbon capture and hydrogen could grow by between $115 billion and $240 billion in the coming decades.
“We need real climate action, not fossil fuel bailouts!” said OCI in a post on social media.
The group’s report also highlights that fossil fuel giants such as ExxonMobil have shifted from carbon capture skeptics to outspoken proponents of the technology—with the company bragging to investors that carbon capture and hydrogen would help its Low Carbon Business Unit make “hundreds of billions of dollars” and grow to be “larger than ExxonMobil’s base business.”
Exxon didn’t launch its carbon capture efforts until 2018, having spent several years and hundreds of millions of dollars on another “climate solution” that ultimately failed: the use of algae to make biofuels.
Since then, Exxon has “pushed for direct government funding for carbon capture, particularly at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE),” successfully lobbying for $12 billion allocated in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill in 2021 for “carbon management research, development, and demonstration.”
Exxon also lobbied for the increased rate of the 45Q tax credit in the IRA and “played a ‘central role’ in drafting a 2019 DOE-sponsored report on carbon capture that determined Congress would need to create an incentive of around $90 to $110 per ton to support carbon capture deployment,” according to OCI.
The Guardian on Thursday reported that Exxon still “chases billions in U.S. subsidies for a ‘climate solution’ that helps drill more oil,” describing how the oil giant hosted an event at the Democratic National Convention earlier this month where senior climate strategy and technology director Vijay Swarup praised the IRA for helping Exxon pursue carbon capture and said: “We need new technology and we need policy to support that technology. We need governments working with private industry.”
Exxon’s enthusiasm for carbon capture, said OCI, is an example of how “the fossil fuel industry delays climate action, distracts from real solutions that would end the fossil fuel era, and does everything in its power to squeeze the last drops of profit from a dying industry, at the expense of all of us.”
One Saturday in April, Dutch engineers manoeuvred a giant drill into position in the reclaimed, industrial extension of the Port of Rotterdam, and began boring a hole under the seawall. Nearby, sections of metal pipe waited to be lowered into the breach.
The operation was a step forward for Europe’s most advanced scheme to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from industry, then bury the planet-heating gas under the North Sea.
After years of delay, a joint venture known as Porthos, an acronym for Port of Rotterdam CO2 Transport Hub and Offshore Storage, is due to begin operating in 2026. It’s a 1.3-billion-euro joint venture between state-owned gas companies Energie Beheer Nederland (EBN) and Gasunie, and the Port of Rotterdam Authority. The CEOs of these organisations are due to join Sophie Hermans, the Netherlands’ minister of climate policy and green growth, and senior European Union officials, for a ceremony on Monday to toast the start of construction work at the site.
At full capacity, Porthos is expected to handle 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 captured annually from facilities operated by its four dedicated customers: Shell, ExxonMobil, and the hydrogen producers Air Liquide and Air Products. That total is equivalent to roughly 10 percent of the port’s emissions, and 1.5 percent of the Netherlands’ current CO2 output. Once captured, the gas will be pumped under the North Sea throughout a 15-year period, or until the storage space reaches a maximum estimated capacity of 37.5 million tonnes.
The cost to the Dutch taxpayer: up to 4 billion euros in subsidies.
Credit: Leon de Korte/Follow the Money.
Porthos relies on a technology known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS, which uses a chemical process to capture some of the CO2 that spews from a customer’s industrial chimneys. This trapped gas is then condensed and pumped through pipelines to underground storage sites, such as certain kinds of geological formations, or disused oil and gas wells.
Nevertheless, the backers of Porthos, and its much larger sister project Aramis — also being developed by EBN and Gasunie, along with Shell and French oil giant TotalEnergies — see them as the first nodes in a planned network of pan-European CCS infrastructure. The aim is to eventually funnel CO2 captured in the industrial heartlands of Germany, as well as throughout the Netherlands, to hundreds of storage sites under the seabed.
To its critics, however, Porthos is emblematic of the way oil and gas companies are securing subsidies for CCS schemes that present an appearance of climate action — but are never likely to attain the massive scale needed to make a dent in global emissions.
As Europe’s flagship project, Porthos is emerging as a litmus test for a critical question in the fight against climate change: Will carbon capture actually help reduce the emissions fuelling the crisis? Or will government backing for these technologies instead serve to preserve the fossil fuel business models that caused it?
Sections of pipe for the Porthos CO2 pipeline, intended to take captured carbon emissions and inject them under the North Sea, await burial at the Port of Rotterdam. Credit: Michael Buchsbaum.
Ambitious Plans
With intensifying heatwaves, floods and fires underscoring the threat the climate crisis poses to Europe, the EU has agreed to slash its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, with an interim target of a 90-percent reduction relative to 1990 levels by 2040. Given the scale of that challenge, and in line with lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, policy-makers have assumed a major role for carbon capture projects in cleaning up industry.
“Reducing emissions is not enough,” reads a European Commission website on CCS. “To achieve our climate ambitions, we will also need to capture, utilise and store carbon.”
Climate campaigners argue, however, that the technology has secured official backing in large part because it helps governments persuade voters they are taking climate action, while stopping short of the kind of rapid, fundamental transformation of economies needed to end the use of fossil fuels.
In May, the EU adopted the Net Zero Industry Act, obligating oil and gas producers to develop 50 million tonnes of annual CO2 storage capacity across the continent by 2030 — roughly equivalent to today’s global total. More ambitiously, the act targets approximately 280 million tonnes of annual CO2 storage capacity by 2040, increasing to a staggering 450 million tonnes by 2050.
Environmental groups such as E3G, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and European Environmental Bureau doubt such targets are feasible, given the thousands of kilometres of pipelines that would have to be built, and the dozens of projects that would have to be designed. A lack of technical and geological know-how combined with potential local opposition could also slow fossil fuel companies’ plans.
“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals —which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), in the introduction to a report on clean energy transitions for oil companies published in November.
Despite the oil industry often citing scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that include significant deployments of CCS, the U.N.-backed body also considers the technology the least efficient, and one of the most expensive, climate tools. In their Sixth Assessment report, the IPCC’s scientists wrote that “even if implemented at its full potential, CCS will account for only 2,4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030 due to its low effectiveness and high cost.”
And Europe is nowhere near close to meeting its carbon capture targets. Today, only 2.7 million tonnes of CO2 is being captured annually across the continent, including in Norway and Iceland, according to the IEA. Porthos’ backers are therefore hailing the project as a crucial step towards fulfilling the continent’s decarbonisation plans — starting with its largest port.
“If we want to reach our climate target, we will need CCS,” Willemien Terpstra, CEO of Gasunie, told DeSmog.
Still, even backers of the technology acknowledge that deployment is lagging. To meet the EU’s target of capturing 280 million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2040 would require 651 projects, said Chris Davies, director of industry group CCS Europe. Each would have to capture more than 400,000 tonnes per year, he told DeSmog.
To date, 50 years after the first CCS projects were started in a Texas oilfield, only about 40 projects are operating globally, with the combined potential to capture just over 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year. However, almost 80 per cent of the CO2 being captured is injected underground to pump more oil — which when refined and burned, adds more CO2 into the atmosphere.
While there is no estimate as to how long it would take to construct hundreds of projects, it is clear that time is running out, Davies said.
Capturing this amount by 2040 requires that construction on all these projects begin no later than early 2038: “So we have less than 5,000 days,” said Davies.
Since Porthos’ backers took a final investment decision last year, no other CCS project “has been given the green light to put a shovel in the ground”, he added.
Cleaning up the Quayside
With docks and quays stretching from its old town centre to the ocean over 40 kilometres away, the Port of Rotterdam covers an area almost twice the size of Manhattan, and handles nearly 440 million tonnes of freight each year, roughly the equivalent of more than 1,200 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other.
Not only is Rotterdam a massive cargo port, it’s also one of the largest hubs for energy in Europe, including oil. Counting oil, coal, and liquefied natural gas, the port boasts that some 13 per cent of all the energy used throughout Europe passes through it.
Most of the oil is destined for one of the port’s four refineries, including the giant Shell Pernis facility, as well as sites run by BP and Exxon. (Reducing emissions from the refineries is one of Porthos’ key aims).
All this activity generates tremendous amounts of carbon pollution: The port emitted 20.3 million tonnes of CO2 in 2023.
The port intends to slash its emissions by 55 per cent by 2030, then achieve climate neutrality by 2050.
The port argues that it can reduce its emissions to its target of 9.3 million tonnes by 2030 by:
Storing up to 5.8 million tonnes of emissions annually by the end of the decade through its Porthos and Aramis projects
Reducing emissions by another 5.7 million tonnes by shutting down, as legally required, itsremaining coal-fired power plants by 2030, building on savings made by previous coal plant closures
Greening its operations with electrification, and “green” hydrogen made with wind and solar
“Porthos and Aramis by far contribute the most to the Netherlands’ CO2 reduction targets…the Dutch goals cannot be met without those projects,” Hans Coenen, Executive Board member of energy company Gasunie, told Follow the Money, the Dutch investigative journalism platform that co-published this story with DeSmog.
The Port of Rotterdam’s only real CO2 reductions so far stem from the shuttering of several coal-fired power plants . Credit: Michael Buchsbaum.
Taxpayers Foot the Bill
Crucially, Porthos will not be capturing any CO2 itself, instead handling and storing CO2 captured by Shell, Exxon, Air Liquide and Air Products. Porthos itself consists of a new 30-kilometre pipeline system leading to a compression station. From there, CO2 will be pumped to a repurposed gas drilling platform 20 kilometres offshore, and injected into a depleting gas field for final storage.
To ensure emissions are captured, in 2021, the Dutch government allocated Shell, Exxon, Air Liquide and Air Products a combined 2.1 billion euros via its SDE++ scheme to subsidise company decarbonisation projects.
As it stands, under a long-running scheme known as the European Emissions Trading System (ETS), these companies are already required to buy credits for each tonne of CO2 they emit.
Although the credits currently trade at just under 69 euros per tonne, the price could almost triple by 2035, according to BloombergNEF.
By disposing of some of their emissions via Porthos, its customers save money by having to purchase fewer credits.
But, if buying ETS “emission certificates” is cheaper for them than storing the gas via Porthos, then the Dutch government will make up the cost difference using up to 2.1 billion euros allocated under the SDE++ scheme.
This means that whatever happens, the companies face limited risk, and potentially large savings, if they capture emitted CO2 instead.
The port says this arrangement enables the companies “to cut back their carbon emissions without weakening their respective competitive positions.”
Alternatively, without state support, “Porthos would not have gotten off the ground and this project would not have been able to contribute to achieving the climate objectives,” Ellen Ehmen, Exxon’s community relations manager in the Netherlands, told DeSmog.
Combining various other EU and Dutch government subsidies associated with the project, with the 1.3 billion euro cost to state-owned companies to build it, and up to 2.1 billion in carbon capture subsidies, the overall cost to the state could approach or even exceed 4 billion euros.
In other words, Dutch and European taxpayers are picking up the bill for cleaning up these highly profitable companies’ carbon pollution.
In March, the Netherlands Court of Audit warned in a report that the way the project has been structured means that the state has assumed a disproportionate level of risk relative to industry.
Coenen, of Gasunie, says that he wasn’t surprised by these findings: “We decided deliberately to accept a low return on investment on Porthos, because we find it important to kickstart the project.”
Experimental Projects
Many climate advocacy groups, academics and policy experts have long warned of the dangers of relying on carbon capture projects, arguing that they provide fossil fuel companies with a justification for pumping ever more oil and gas.
Seeking to allay those fears, the European Commission advised in February that carbon capture should only be used in sectors where industry argues that emissions are particularly difficult or costly to cut, for example steel, cement, aluminium, chemicals and waste-to-energy.
But Porthos’ customers are using carbon capture for very different purposes: they’re either developing never-before attempted “low-carbon” projects that may be deployed at some point in future, or capturing a portion of the emissions now being generated by producing hydrogen used in the port’s oil refineries.
Shell, the first company to agree to partner with Porthos, is slated to become the project’s largest single customer, having committed to deliver 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 annually — captured mainly from its sprawling Pernis refinery complex, Rotterdam’s biggest. Shell also pledged to capture 820,000 tonnes a year from its to-be constructed biofuels facility, which is designed to produce so-called sustainable aviation fuel, as well as renewable diesel made from waste oil.
This so-called HEFA (hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids) plant is “essentially where the Porthos project starts,” said Nico van Dooren, director new business, hydrogen infrastructure, transport and storage with the Port of Rotterdam, during a media tour of the Porthos project in May.
Carbon capture “is the low hanging fruit,” Shell spokesperson Marc Potma said during the tour. “We have always said we believe in CCS for the future, but it’s never going to be the only answer. One must also invest in renewable sources, which is why we invested in the biofuels factory.”
Fellow oil and gas major Exxon’s CCS plans at Porthos are also highly experimental. Exxon says it plans to capture CO2 from a pilot project to test a new technology known as carbonate fuel cells — which the company says could help capture CO2 from industry more efficiently than existing methods, while also generating electricity, heat and hydrogen. This technology has never been proved at scale.
Also the recipient of EU funds, Exxon’s pilot plant is expected to be constructed in 2025, and start operations in 2026. Unlike Shell, Exxon has not announced any plans to use Porthos to capture emissions from its own oil refinery at the port.
Porthos’ two other customers are both large-scale hydrogen manufacturers who are producing the gas for use in oil refining — today one of hydrogen’s main uses.
As part of its participation in Porthos, U.S.-based Air Products announced in November it would build a carbon capture project at its existing hydrogen production facility in Rotterdam. Billed as the largest such facility in Europe, the project aims to help the company more than halve its CO2 emissions within the Port, while supplying most of the resulting hydrogen (known as “blue” hydrogen since some of the CO2 generated during the production process will be captured) for use in the nearby Exxon refinery.
Just weeks later, in December 2023, French rival Air Liquide announced it would also retrofit the company’s existing hydrogen facility in Rotterdam with carbon capture, using a proprietary technology that has only been tested at a smaller facility in Port-Jérôme-sur-Seine, France.
Giant new wind turbines tower over Rotterdam’s oil refineries, holding out the promise of an emissions-free future as they replace coal-fired power. Credit: Michael Buchsbaum.
Aramis Following Porthos
As workers dig trenches and bury Porthos’ pipelines around Rotterdam’s port, Shell and TotalEnergies — together with Gasunie and EBN — are working on the larger Aramis project. They want to funnel and bury CO2 emissions captured in Germany, Europe’s biggest emitter, and send them via a yet-to-be-built pipeline project known as the Delta Rhine Corridor.
By 2028, two years after Porthos is due to come online, the first phase of Aramis is scheduled to transport up to 7.5 million tonnes of CO2 for storage — also thanks in part to EU subsidies.
To connect Rotterdam to Belgium, Gasunie is also working on a so-called Delta Schelde Corridor. “It’s going to be one interconnected system in order to help our industry,” Gasunie’s Coenen told Follow the Money.
Signalling EU support, in mid-June, the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency, or CINEA, awarded Aramis 124 million euros in subsidies under the CEF Energy fund. CINEA also granted 33 million euros in funds to another planned Rotterdam CCS hub, known as CO2next.
The bigger question, however, is whether these projects will be completed on time.
At the end of June, the then Dutch Minister of economic affairs and climate policy, Rob Jetten, told parliament that the Delta Rhine Corridor pipelines wouldn’t be completed before 2032 — dealing a blow to the pace of CCS development.
In early July, Shell “temporarily” paused construction of its crucial biofuels plant that is supposed to produce 820,000 tonnes a year. Shell now says production will only begin “towards the end of the decade,” said Shell spokesperson Wendel Broere.
Sections of the Porthos CO2 pipeline are now being buried around Rotterdam’s industrial port. Credit: Michael Buchsbaum.
A Temporary Solution?
Regardless of when they come online, Porthos and the other planned Dutch CCS projects are generally presented as temporary solutions giving industry time to wean itself off fossil fuels — but how long that transformation will take remains unclear.
With billions of euros being invested, “you just have to count on a few decades,” Gasunie’s Coenen said.
Even as Porthos, Aramis and similar projects inch forward, further questions loom: Who will pay the enormous cost of rolling out the network of carbon capture facilities and pipelines needed to ferry CO2 from Europe’s industry to disposal sites in the North Sea via Rotterdam? And can such a project be completed in anything like the timeline demanded by the EU’s carbon capture targets?
Another unknown is how investing in these and other CCS projects will lead to a reduction in overall emissions — particularly since so many planned CCS projects involve building new fossil fuel infrastructure, such as gas-fired power stations or blue hydrogen facilities, rather than retrofitting existing industries. It is also unclear how subsidising industries to adopt CCS will compel fossil fuel companies to accelerate the shift to renewables.
Berte Simons, business unit director of CO2 transport and storage systems at EBN, the Dutch state-owned gas company, said that companies not only have to start capturing emissions, but stop producing them.
“There needs to be an end date to using CCS from fossil sources,” she said. “The sooner [fossil fuel companies] are able to green their portfolio, the quicker they can start with that, the better.”
For many climate advocates, the danger is that carbon capture will simply prolong business as usual — while soaking up billions of euros in subsidies.
Relying on CCS “isn’t a sensible climate mitigation strategy or even a proper carbon management strategy,” Lili Fuhr, deputy director of the Washington D.C.-based Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate and Energy Program, told DeSmog. “It’s really an escape hatch for an industry with its back against the wall faced with an energy transition that is gaining support and is becoming a reality because renewable energies are so cheap.”
This story was corrected on August 29, 2024 to clarify that the cost to taxpayers could be “up to” 4 billion euros (rather than “at least”), and show the various forms of subsidy included in that figure.
There is a huge global issue that needs but is not getting immediate attention. It’s the climate crisis, that fossil fuels industries knew that they were killing our planet for profit.
We need to understand what’s happening. Let’s start:
Fossil fuel companies knew from 1960s that they were destroying the planet for their profits, to make themselves rich they knowingly destroyed the World. They must have had the attitude we don’t give a fuck for anyone else, we’re going to get rich. They fucking knew. They fucking knew because they had reports telling them that they were desroying the planet for their profits.
These fossil fuel companies knew in the 60s, 80 years ago and they decided to destroy the planet so that they would get rich. That’s Capitalism.
ed: There’s more of course.
80+ years after the oil companies were advised by their own research that they were destroying the planet, they’re still doing it.
dizzy: You’re going to have to object to it soon or it will be too late, you will have missed it. We need an immediate transition from fossil fuels.
dizzy: The world needs an immediate transition from fossil fuels to renewables. The immediacy cannot be overstated …
Far-right industry allies with ties to Chevron have mounted an “unprecedented” pressure campaign calling on the Supreme Court to stop a potentially historic climate deception lawsuit against oil majors from going to trial. Graphic design by Tess Abbot
Fossil fuel interests are deploying unprecedented strategies to hide evidence of companies’ deception and block liability lawsuits before they reach trial.
This article by ExxonKnews is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
In the face of mounting scrutiny from local, state, and federal officials, fossil fuel companies and their allies are deploying a range of tactics to obstruct ongoing lawsuits and investigations concerning evidence that the industry has misled the public about the harms it knew its products would cause to the climate, environment, and human health.
Far-right industry allies with ties to Chevron have mounted an “unprecedented” pressure campaign calling on the Supreme Court to stop a potentially historic climate deception lawsuit against oil majors from going to trial. Republican attorneys general are separately urging the Supreme Court to throw out similar climate fraud lawsuits from five states. Plastics industry trade associations are suing the California state attorney general’s office to block an investigation into whether oil companies lied about plastic recycling. And fossil fuel giants and their trade groups have responded to congressional subpoenas with highly redacted records and “baseless” First Amendment legal defenses.
“I think we’re seeing an escalation by the industry to do anything it can to avoid being held accountable for the consequences of climate change,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of investigative watchdog group True North Research and an expert on dark money special interest groups. “It continues to try to thwart efforts to try to mitigate climate change and it continues to try to stop efforts to get any compensation for the harms it has caused, not just through the burning of fossil fuels but also by the delay and deceit that it has promoted through front groups.”
State and local climate lawsuits, which accuse oil and gas majors of lying about the dangers of fossil fuels and seek to hold them accountable for the resulting damages, are advancing in state courts despite the industry’s efforts. Most recently, a Colorado judge denied nearly all motions by ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to dismiss the City and County of Boulder’s case against them.
It’s the fifth time to date that a court has rejected Big Oil’s efforts to dismiss climate accountability lawsuits — bringing the companies closer to facing trial and potentially billions of dollars in liability. If any of the cases go to trial, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, “it will shine a very harsh light on the fossil fuel companies and it could lead to crushing monetary judgments.”
“Clearly the defendants here are using everything they can think of to derail these cases,” Gerrard said. That attitude has been most evident in Big Oil’s response to a lawsuit from Honolulu, which could be among the first communities to put the companies on trial.
In February, oil company defendants — including Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell — petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Hawai‘i state Supreme Court ruling that allowed Honolulu’s case to move toward trial. The case, the companies argued in their petition, is preempted by federal law and should be dismissed.
But after traditional legal arguments have failed to shield the industry to date, allies seem to be turning to more extreme and novel measures.
Leonard Leo to the Rescue?
In the weeks and months before the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear Big Oil’s petition in Honolulu’s lawsuit, a flood of social media ads and op-eds called for the Supreme Court justices to take up — and throw out — the case.
“To end this nuisance charade, the Supreme Court needs to take up the Honolulu case and declare once and for all that public nuisance is for local issues, not global climate change,” reads the narrator of one such video ad posted to X.
The name behind that ad, the Alliance for Consumers, is part of an organization called the Concord Fund, formerly known as the Judicial Crisis Network. Those groups, Graves and others have pointed out, are projects of billionaire Leonard Leo, head of the far-right legal advocacy group the Federalist Society and known as the architect of the current Supreme Court. CRC Advisors — one of the Leo-backed companies in the effort — appears to have had Chevron, a defendant in Honolulu’s case, as a client.
The fossil fuel industry also helped fund the Federalist Society, and partners at major law firms representing oil and gas companies — including Theodore Olson of Gibson Dunn,the law firm representing Chevron against Honolulu and other communities’ climate liability cases — sit on its board.
Former Hawai‘i Supreme Court Justice Michael Wilson, who served on the state’s highest court for a decade, called the pressure campaign targeting the Supreme Court a “powerful intervention” by “the strongest special interest group in the history of human civilization.”
“This is the most important case in the United States from the point of view that it will allow a jury of citizens to see the fraud and to decide what to do about it,” said Wilson. “This is a high-risk strategy that shows that the fossil fuel industry is desperate.”
Oil companies, which quietly funded front groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to sow climate denial and oppose climate action on their behalf, are now rallying their allies and benefactors to strike at lawsuits that seek to hold them accountable, explained Graves. In April, 20 Republican attorneys general filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the oil companies’ petition.
“The Leo-tied groups are a soup-to-nuts intervention machine, from the Republican attorneys general to the judges he helped put on the court,” said Graves.
In June, the Supreme Court delivered a one-line order asking the U.S. Justice Department to weigh in on the case — an “extraordinary” response at this stage, according to Wilson, considering that the case has not yet gone to trial. If the Solicitor General neglects to weigh in before the election, that response could be in the hands of a Trump administration. Trump has promised that if re-elected, he will “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists.”
A ‘Highly Unusual’ Request
In May, 19 members of RAGA made a “highly unusual” request to the Supreme Court: to intervene in and undermine climate accountability lawsuits filed by five states — California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island — claiming that their cases would impose “ruinous liability” on fossil fuel companies and threaten “our basic way of life.”
The Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over disputes between states — meaning it can hear a case without it first being heard by another court — but such challenges are more commonly brought over issues like water rights, said Gerrard of Columbia’s Sabin Center. “I’ve never previously heard of an instance where there’s an effort to invoke the original jurisdiction of the [U.S.] Supreme Court to swat down litigation,” he said.
RAGA obtains some of its largest donations from the fossil fuel industry — including Koch Industries, Exxon, and the American Petroleum Institute, all of whom are defendants in climate liability cases — according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy.
“These AGs have now placed their allegiance directly with the special interest group that is threatening the survival of future generations,” said Wilson.
The filing argues that “oil and natural gas have supported improvements in environmental quality and have reduced weather-related deaths,” and claims that “America’s air is cleaner than a century ago thanks in part to the increased use of oil and natural gas.”
It isn’t the first time Republican attorneys general have rushed to shield oil companies from accountability for their climate deception — and overtly used climate denialist talking points first leveraged by Big Oil in their defense. In 2016, Exxon sued the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts in an attempt to block investigations into the company’s private research and public communications about climate change, claiming the probe was an attack on their free speech and other constitutional rights.
Republican attorneys general from 12 states filed a 2018 brief in support of the oil giant, arguing that “Climate change is the subject of legitimate international debate.”
“[T]he most undeniable fact about climate change is that, like so many other areas of science and public policy, the debate remains unsettled, the research is far from complete, and the path forward is unclear,” they wrote.
A(nother) First Amendment Fight
Another industry strategy to block accountability is playing out in response to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s investigation into whether Exxon and other petrochemical companies deceived the public about the efficacy of plastic recycling as a solution to plastic waste. In May, the American Chemistry Council and Plastics Industry Association — two major trade groups representing oil and chemical giants including Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, and DuPont — filed a lawsuit against the attorney general in federal court, claiming the investigation violates their free speech rights.
Bonta, who had said he would decide whether to sue Exxon by the summer, responded with petitions asking the Sacramento County Superior Court to order the groups to comply with his office’s subpoenas.
“For years, the plastics industry has engaged in an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics waste and pollution crisis,” Bonta said in a statement. “The continuous delay tactics are failing to comply with our subpoena. Enough is enough: What are they trying to hide?”
Members of Congress have similarly accused the Big Oil companies of trying to obstruct investigations.
When Senate Budget Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and House Oversight Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) referred their years-long investigation into the industry’s climate deception to the Justice Department, the lawmakers wrote that “some companies claimed that the First Amendment or undefined ‘privilege’ protected them from the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena.” The main subjects of that investigation have been Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP, API, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“The companies further obstructed the investigation by significantly redacting or entirely withholding more than 4,000 documents without any valid basis,” the lawmakers wrote, adding that their refusal to comply “provides a basis to infer that there is even more damning evidence of deceptive practices by the companies and their trade associations waiting to be uncovered.”
Fossil fuel companies and the law firms representing them have used a First Amendment defense to try to dismiss the climate accountability lawsuits, claiming company statements on climate change are protected political speech. One of the most prominent voices for that argument have been attorneys at Gibson Dunn, the firm that represents Chevron, and whose partner Theodore Olson sits on the Federalist Society board.
If these “overt” and “brazen” efforts to escape accountability can be overcome, the industry will no doubt face a reckoning, said Wilson, the former Hawai‘i Supreme Court justice. Communities like Honolulu “are being ravaged by climate” and “will apply the rule of law fairly,” he said.
“Hawai‘i is not a place that can be manipulated by the fossil fuel industry. That is a very big threat to the most powerful special interest group that’s now maintaining its power based on complicity.”
