Accountability Is The Most Important Climate Solution BY AMY WESTERVELT – 02 JAN 2023 – 

Source: Accountability Is The Most Important Climate Solution

n December 2022, the House Oversight Committee published a second round of documents received in response to subpoenas issued as part of its investigation into climate disinformation. You can read my analysis of those documents—both batches, all 1500-ish pages of them—over at The Intercept, but I want to draw your attention today to the investigation itself and what it tells us about the need for climate accountability. 

House Oversight Committee chair Rep Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and chair of the Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on the Environment Ro Khanna (D-CA) opened their investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation on the climate crisis in September 2021. They requested various documents, and asked that the CEOs of five top oil companies, as well as the American Petroleum Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, testify before the Committee. The following month, at an Oversight Committee Hearing, some of those executives did indeed testify, but none had complied fully with the Committee’s request for documents, so Rep Maloney announced at that hearing that she would subpoena the withheld documents. Since the start of the investigation the Committee has received around a million documents, but has not had the staff resources to comb through them all or to redact and publish all of the documents that seem important for both policymakers and the public to be aware of.