A landmark congressional hearing to probe the extent to which the oil industry misled the public about global climate change featured executives of some of the worlds largest fossil fuel companies and industry trade groups further downplaying climate science.

We know the combustion of oil and gas releases greenhouse gases, Darren Woods, CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil, told members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform before misrepresenting the findings of the worlds leading climate science body.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said, has concluded that increased greenhouse gases can contribute to climate change.

What the United Nations scientific body actually concluded in an August report is that human activity namely the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation is the unequivocal cause of climate change, and has already unleashed devastating changes around the globe.

Other industry executives rolled out similarly couched talking points.

We accept the scientific consensus: Climate change is real and the use of fossil fuels contributes to it, said Chevron CEO Michael Wirth.

Climate change is real. Industrial activity contributes to it, said Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry trade group thats played an outsized role in sowing doubt about human-caused climate change and fighting efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

The climate is changing and humans are contributing to those changes, said Suzanne Clark, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has also spent years funding climate misinformation campaigns.

Such statements might have flown in the 1990s. In 2021, it is outright climate denial. The science is unequivocal: Fossil fuels arent just one of many contributors to global warming, but the primary cause of the rapidly worsening crisis.