The most damning moments from PBS’s “The Power of Big Oil”

The three-part PBS Frontline series “The Power of Big Oil” — about “how fossil fuel companies and their political allies cast doubt and helped delay action on climate change for decades” — surfaced new evidence of Big Oil’s climate deception, including interviews with new industry whistleblowers and former fossil fuel allies, helping to fill in an unsettling picture of how the oil and gas industry led us down the road to climate catastrophe.

Here are some of the most damning comments and important revelations from the cast of characters interviewed in the documentary.

Former oil industry employees and scientists who performed cutting-edge climate research understood the risks of burning fossil fuels as early as the 1970s. They said executives ignored them and chose to manufacture doubt.

Martin Hoffert, a former Exxon scientific consultant who has since testified before Congress about the company’s efforts to downplay its own climate science, minced no words when asked to respond to former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond’s 1996 statement that climate change is an “inconclusive…unproven theory.”

“This person should never be the CEO of an energy company,” Hoffert told Frontline. “He’s using something which is a lie to justify a policy which is bad for the world, and I would have to say that on an ethical basis it’s actually evil. I think he should be ashamed of himself, and I think he should apologize to the world for saying that.”

Former Exxon geoscientist Bill Heins, who was interviewed for the first time about his experiences at the company, said that he was “disappointed,” “angry,” and “disenchanted at the duplicity exhibited by ExxonMobil, to say one thing internally, and to say a much different thing with a much different consequences in the political arena.”

Cornell Professor Tony Ingraffea, an engineer hired by the U.S. government in the early 1980s to help develop new technology to explore for oil and gas through fracking, said that when he and his colleagues published a 2011 report that first identified the dangerous climate impacts of methane leaks, “at first we were pilloried, then we were ignored” by oil and gas trade groups and industry-funded academics.

“I'm worried we wasted the decade, and now we're playing catch-up,” Ingraffea said. “What climate change means to me is looking in the eyes of my grandchildren and wondering what kind of hell they're going to pay.”

Prominent conservatives said Big Oil lied to them.

Perhaps the documentary’s most revelatory moment came from former U.S. Senator and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

Hagel, a Republican, sponsored a 1997 U.S. Senate resolution that prevented the United States from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, a critical international agreement to address climate change. He told Frontline that if oil companies had been truthful about what they knew, “it would’ve changed everything.”

“I was misled. Others were misled,” Hagel said. “When they had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly… they lied.”

Christie Todd Whitman, who was appointed by President George W. Bush to run the EPA in 2001, left her position after it became clear that fossil fuel lobbyists had convinced the administration to reverse its position on placing a cap on carbon emissions.

“I was really blindsided when I found that we were backing out of that pledge,” she said. “I was monumentally disappointed. The administration was extremely close to the energy industry … If President Bush had gone forward with a cap on carbon, it would have made an enormous difference. It would have been a huge signal coming from a Republican administration.”

The oil industry directed economists and front groups to dismantle critical climate legislation.

Koch Industries, protecting its enormous investments in fossil fuel infrastructure, bankrolled dark money front groups and pundits to fight climate action as it came to the fore.

Jeff Nesbit, former head of communications for Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy, told Frontline that his organization was given “marching orders” to create the illusion of grassroots opposition to Clinton-era climate proposals like an energy tax that would have applied only to fossil fuel sources.

“What they told the public and what the policymakers were led to believe was that there was an army of folks who were ready to march in the streets,” Nesbit said.

“But they had no such grassroots army. It was funded and fueled by the corporate interests,” Nesbit said. “What I didn’t know at the time was that it would become the beginning of something much bigger. And that playbook is still in use today.” 

Jerry Taylor, who worked for the Koch-funded Cato Institute from 1991-2014, said his job at Cato was to convince people “that the case against climate action was far stronger than they realized.”

“I look back on the work I did at that time with a lot of regrets,” Taylor said. “If I had known at the time what Exxon Mobil internally knew, as we are becoming increasingly aware, no, I would definitely have been in a different place.”

When the U.S. House in 2009 passed historic climate legislation — the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as Waxman-Markey, which would have established a “cap and trade” plan to reduce emissions — the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity organized Tea Party activists to launch a vehement protest movement against the measure in the Senate. In the face of manufactured opposition, the bill never reached the Senate for a vote.

(Not mentioned in the series: in 2020, the state of Minnesota sued Koch Industries for lying to consumers about the climate damages fueled by its products).

Industry-hired economists explained that the industry’s narratives relied on inflating the economic costs of climate action while ignoring the significant economic benefits of… well, NOT burning the world down.

Paul Bernstein, a former economic consultant at Charles River Associates, told Frontline he was hired by the American Petroleum Institute to publish misleading economic studies about climate legislation in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

“I had misgivings about just telling half the story,” said Bernstein. “What do we get? If we reduce emissions, we get less damage from climate change. And we’re not putting that in there.”

“Yeah, I wish I weren't a part of that, looking back,” he told Frontline “I wish I weren't a part of delaying action. Clearly on the wrong side of history.”