Rep. Raskin on urging DOJ to investigate ‘big oil’ for deception on climate change

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD):

Sure.

Fifty or 60 years ago, they clearly understood that the burning of fossil fuels destabilized the climate and warmed the Earth. And they made a very deliberate decision that, rather than tell government and blow the whistle, they would try to suppress that evidence. And they suppressed the evidence.

And then, as other scientists in other places began to discover the relationship between fossil fuel combustion and increase in the Earth’s temperature and climate change, they denied it and they tried to throw a blanket of uncertainty and confusion over the whole subject.

And even after climate change became a well-accepted and well-acknowledged reality throughout the world of science, they have done whatever they can to try to undermine us making the policy decisions we need to make in order to break from the carbon economy and the carbon model and move to solar energy and wind energy and renewable systems.

So we have very specific evidence of them taking all of those steps, and it goes on even to this day. So we had lots of evidence of it, and we want to turn it over to the Department of Justice. Congress obviously has to work on solutions going forward, as we did in the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

But we want to make sure that this history is not swept under the rug.