There are many hundreds of thousands of Americans who make their living in work related to fossil fuels, and I’m not thinking of any of these as enemies.  Heck, one school year I pumped gas to help make ends meet, and, no, I don’t hate myself for it. From oil field hand to pipe layers to refinery engineer or petro-geologist, most people employed in fossil fuel work are normal, work-a-day folk, and I’m all for paying attention to the negative consequences for their employment as we continue our move toward full electrification and, of course, renewable electrification at that.

The good news is that an intelligently designed workforce training and transition program is well-within our abilities to imagine and implement. The bad news is that our being capable of such an undertaking doesn’t guarantee this will happen, unfortunately.

And then there are those involved in the fossil fuel industry who are enemies of the Earth, either because of intent or because they are unwitting. These days, the majority of such people are in the former category, I suspect, and mainly because you’d need to work hard at intentional ignorance to be unwitted. I’m talking about fossil fuel ownership, which means corporations and those people that rest their hand upon the corporate tiller. I’m talking about major stockholders, whether individual or institutional. I’m talking about the Petro-States, those sovereign nations that rely on fossil fuel as a necessary commodity for survival.

I’m talking lobbyists for fossil fuels, and for whom, I can so easily imagine, Dante would be describing a distinct circle of hell, perhaps having the damned repeatedly drowning in crude or constantly be re-crushed by collapsing mountains of coal.

I’m talking lobbyists and those fossil fuel capitalists who direct them.

There was a fascinating article in The Guardian, titled “Double agents: fossil-fuel lobbyists work for US groups trying to fight climate crisis,” by Oliver Milman, published July 5, 2023.

Here is the scope of the problem:

More than 1,500 lobbyists in the US are working on behalf of fossil-fuel companies while at the same time representing hundreds of liberal-run cities, universities, technology companies and environmental groups that say they are tackling the climate crisis, the Guardian can reveal.

The article by Milman is reporting on an article in Forbes (“Something is wrong,”)

And apologies on the link rabbit hole tumble, but The Guardian article is more useful, with effective examples. One such example is that of State Farm, the insurance company that announced this Spring that it will no longer carry fire insurance for California homeowners due to climate change-induced increased fire hazards, and, well, this same company uses lobbyists that advocate for fossil fuel interests in 18 states (and, I suspect, also nationally). Want another example? Syracuse University, known for its fossil fuel divestiture program, employs a lobbyist with 14 distinct gas and oil clients.

Here’s one from my own state [this quote is from the Forbes article]:

The New England Aquarium has taken an activist stance on climate change and has worked with Massachusetts state legislators to file bills dealing with ocean conservation science, blue workforce development, and carbon sequestration. In 2022, the Aquarium’s lobbying firm was the Dewey Square Group, which also lobbied on behalf of Enbridge.

Enbridge operates the largest network of fossil-fuel carrying pipelines in North America and has lobbied to export Canadian tar sands oil through New England. This oil has been called some of the dirtiest oil in the world and these tar sands represent one of the world’s biggest unexploded “carbon bombs,” a resource whose development would jeopardize any chance of limiting global warming to 1.5° C.

Weird, right?

In a Politico’s Power Switch newsletter article, “Pro-Fossil Fuels Backlash from the Right, while Climate Change-supporting Politicians are Nodding Off on the Job,” by Arianna Skibell, on October 2, 2023, and sub-titled “Here comes the EV backlash,” recounts climate change efforts being rolled back and makes for discouraging reading:

The battle against electric cars is turning into a campaign issue for conservative politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, a development that threatens to neuter the climate benefits of moving away from gasoline.

Some European countries and the U.K. have already walked back policies aimed at combating climate change, amid a wave of populist resistance to green initiatives…

Skibell suggests that much of this current pullback is in relation to the passage in August 2022 of The Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other climate change amelioration provisions, offers significant rebates for EV purchases to support the transition away from fossil fuel-based transportation.

Trump, in the U.S., has come out against EVs, attempting to bring in autoworkers in their recent strike. Fortunately, as of this morning, there are reports that the UAW has reached an agreement with General Motors that the EV plants—including the battery production facilities—will be union, and this factor was the main UAW pushback against EVs, although poor news coverage presented this as a rejection of EVs overall.

Some climate change progress is being made, and I know this if for no other reason than the fossil fuel industry is pushing back directly these days. The army of lobbyists are on the move. Not that fossil fuel lobbyists haven’t already been mobilized, and not just lobbyists but other sorts of operatives, too, and much of this hundreds of millions of dollars-scale activity is well obscured by dark money. Five days ago (from this writing), Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, spoke on the floor to provide a glimpse of this sizable hidden influence machinery of fossil fuels, and this should be mandatory viewing. This speech, in his “Time to Wake Up” series that now counts 290 such presentations, the latest titled “The Economic Costs of the Climate Crisis,” talks about the fossil fuel industry’s return on influence investing as a dollar for every penny spent. He talks about the IMF report on direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies, where in the last year in the U.S. alone, such subsidies amounted to close to two-thirds of a trillion dollars.

The climate change movement has got to take its gloves off and start fighting bare-knuckled, because the fossil fuel industry has been fighting dirty for decades and won’t give up its hold on capital assets without a knockout. Maybe we need to start new lobbying firms that don’t work against one client’s goals while serving another’s.

If you know someone who works on combustion engines, or drives a fuel truck, or hits the time clock everyday at a refinery, wish them the best. If you know the C-Suite folks at Big Oil, and the banks and financial institutions and lobbyists and think tanks and PACs that serve them, tell them it is time to save their souls. Like it or not, this is war and the stakes are planetary survival for all on one side, and profit above all other people on the other. Of course, the vast majority of us will not know or ever run into such capital-exulted people, and while it may sound satisfying to punch such S.O.B.s in the nose, the best thing we can do is vote for the politicians who don’t take fossil fuel money, are inured against such influence, and who work toward climate progress.

Oh, and work to get a Supreme Court that works for citizens, not corporations.

Oh, and work to get rid of dark money (or at least arrest and jail those convicted of giving and taking dark money).

Oh, and… just writing this makes me depressed, but solidarity is the key—solidarity and unity of goal.

It is too bad that fossil fuel interests make a habit of sowing confusion, amplifying divisiveness, and peddling influence, but then I don’t recall anyone saying any of this is going to be easy.