Capture+Kill
On July 20, 2017, Rex Tillerson, Trump 1.0 Secretary of State, called Donald Trump a (expletive deleted) moron at a meeting at the Pentagon with Cabinet officials. Tillerson, formerly the long-time CEO at Exxon and a close political ally of Putin, only said out loud what the honchos of most oil fiefdoms believe. Tillerson likely got the gig because Vlad made Donnie do it — Rex hadn’t contributed to Trump’s campaign after all.
Tillerson’s State Department gig wasn’t exactly a thrilling tenure: career applications to the Foreign Service declined by over 50% with Rex at the helm. He had been the chair of the Boy Scouts so charisma was likely absent from the scouting report. Rex’s gray hair was matched by his mushroomy whitish-gray face which frowned frequently in public, never more so than while in Trump’s Cabinet. Pale-faced Pootey Put awarded Rex the Order of Friendship (Russia’s boyfriend) when Tillerson was an oil exec eager to drill the Arctic with his great comrade. In solidarity, Rex vigorously opposed Obama’s sanctions against Russia during the invasion of Crimea in 2014.
By appointing Tillerson, Drill, Donnie, Drill was doing a solid for the tyrant he artlessly mimics, dissing Obama and in addition, might have seen Rex as a handy pipeline for shaking down the oil/gas high rollers. But Rex was gone, in disgust, by 2018. The first Trump regime was riven with short, unfaithful hitches.
Trump 2.0 has been different — a younger, preposterous Cabinet, with fewer grayish lumps standing behind him for his manic, surreal pressers (aside from the permanently oxidized Scott Bessent). And this time around the Leader of the Free World is refreshingly candid about grabbing grift from every direction. He loves oil and coal even more the second time around! Give me a billion dollars and you’ll get everything you want, said the Art of the Deal meister in the ‘24 Presidential campaign. The oil kingpins weren’t quite Elon-generous (Donald wined+dined Musk in the heated excitement of the campaign, gave xAI-man the keys to the kingdom, defriended him in a momentary spat then rebefriended — it’s complicated).
To be clear, massive wads of $$ certainly poured in from the fossil fuel magnates. The clubby industry culture has always allowed the main players — whether in the New York boardrooms or the Texas fracking fields — to put aside regional+political differences to bundle the very serious dough that wins most fights in America. Their ponied up+oily Don has been killing the industry’s chief competitors, electric vehicles (EVs) and wind ever since.
Too much proximity might be a liability in the future, though. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in January against Exxon, Chevron, British Petroleum (BP), Shell and the American Petroleum Institute (API), the national trade association for the oil+gas industry. The action accuses these oil honchos of an antitrust conspiracy to suppress renewable energy and EVs in order to unlawfully maintain oil+gas dominance in the energy markets.
The suit seeks to prove that the defendants operated as a cartel to skew the market. The industry leaders “abandoned renewable energy projects, used patent litigation to hinder rivals, suppressed information regarding the hidden costs of fossil fuel, surveilled and intimidated watchdogs and public officials….all to further one of the most successful antitrust conspiracies in United States history.”
Here’s where the obligatory bromide “I’m not a conspiracy theorist” should come in but that’s so tired! What’s wired — the history of oil is one big conspiracy after conspiracy beginning when Standard Oil in the 1870s was able to underprice its competitors because the company got secret rebate deals from the railroad industry. In a short time, Standard gobbled up all competitors in its path. But, yes, conspiracy is a word for kooks.
A century later, Exxon and several oil firms that would later combine under Chevron’s rubric invested in the early design and manufacturing of the hybrid electric/gas motor. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 escalated the price of fuel beyond the scope previously experienced by American consumers. As the auto industry competed ferociously with smaller, dramatically more gas efficient cars manufactured in Europe and Asia, Exxon introduced electric drive technology that would make hybrid, less gas-dependent motors feasible. Predictably, hidebound American auto manufacturers, locked into the gas guzzler culture of its ‘40s+’50s midwest/southern markets, went hard in reverse. But in 1981, a team of Exxon engineers gifted Toyota with a gas/electric Cressida, using an AC motor which was better designed for hybrids than the dominant DC motor.
Soon after though, Exxon decapitated the team that worked on the hybrid motor. They were either fired or reassigned by 1983. By the ‘90s, Toyota launched the Prius hybrid with its AC motor. Wonder how that went?
Lee Raymond was the hangman who gibbeted the Exxon hybrid. He was then the head of Exxon Enterprises, the subsidiary that manufactured the hybrid motor in the ‘80s. After burying the hybrid’s carcass, the jowly, truculent Raymond went on to lead Exxon into the great climate denial wars. Under his reign, Exxon captured and killed technology that would develop new battery film separator material that would be crucial for developing hybrids beyond the early Prius models. It went nowhere, extinguished beneath Raymond’s executive haunches. He ridiculed solar+wind technologies for needing government subsidies to compete conveniently ignoring the billions of dollars the oil sector gets from the U.S. government+states annually.
In 2015, Tillerson, then Exxon CEO — Putin’s familiar and Raymond’s successor (Raymond retired as Chair in 2006, receiving a $400 million retirement package, a pretty decent subsidy) though not yet subjected to DJT’s Executive-in-Chief dimwittery — told an audience that “we looked at the science” and getting an EV on the road “is a very, very daunting challenge.”
Chevron got into the capture+kill act too — why should Exxon have all the fun. In 1994, General Motors acquired a majority share of a company that produced nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) rechargeable batteries. NiMH large format battery packs were an essential element for large scale manufacturing of EVs. A series of rapid-fire mergers+acquisitions took place in late 2000. Texaco bought GM’s stake in the battery pack firm in October of that year; a week later, Chevron bought Texaco for $100 billion, picking up ownership of 125 or so NiMH patents.
Toyota sought to bring the RAV4 EV into the American market in 2001. Chevron whacked Toyota with a patent infringement suit since the RAV4 EV used NiMH batteries. In 2004, Toyota had a hostile settlement imposed on its state-of-the-art EV — the court delayed the RAV4 EV introduction into the North American market until 2010. By controlling key patents, Chevron dealt EVs a commercial setback.
Exxon bought patents that were central to designing and building accessible public charging stations for EVs. In 2005, the company filed a patent application for a multiple vehicle technology service station, certainly more than a hint that this dreamed-of-service-station-of-the-future would include EV charging facilities. Exxon further described this technology in later applications as a “recharging system” for electric-driven vehicles, possibly in order to get the patent, which the company received in 2009. No charging station was ever developed or built under Exxon’s aegis. The patent ran out in 2021, because patent fees were unpaid. In 2012, Exxon acquired a similar Japanese patent which so far remains unused.
Not that this should surprise anyone. In 2019, Exxon head Darren Woods told stockholders that he “doesn’t get the point of EVs.” Matthew Crocker, an Exxon Senior VP, said in an interview with Reuters that if Exxon were to build EV charging stations “we wouldn’t be able to bring our unique capabilities into that space.” Clean cars are not our scene, man.
There’s rich+deep investigations into the fossil fuel industry’s four decades of climate denial, especially the superb work of Benjamin Franta in his important essay Weaponizing Economics: Big Oil and Climate Policy. Remember Exxon scientists by the late ‘70s had calculated in eerie precision the extent of global warming that unrestricted fossil fuel burning would create. In 1988, these 5 defendants and other trade associations created the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). By 1992, the GCC pooled their substantial resources, hired lobbyists, house researchers+scientists and publicists to attack the growing body of climate science being developed by independent academics, most of which tracked closely to Exxon’s own research in the late ‘70s.
By 1995, GCC’s PR firm triumphantly told their clients that over 1,000 stories had been placed across the U.S. media that “turned the tide of press coverage on global climate change science.”
All the defendants contributed to the political+media attacks on climate science. Exxon in the ‘90s ran dozens of anti-climate science ads in newspapers, many designed to look like newspaper editorials. The media blitz was a blizzard of deceptive adverts chock full of deceptive factoids.
Martin Hoffert, an Exxon consultant in the ‘80s, testified before Congress in 2019 that “Exxon was publicly promoting views on climate that its own scientists knew was wrong and we knew this because we were the major group working on it.”
Today, Exxon, Chevron et al run TV, radio, print+digital ads declaiming that they are producing “cheaper, reliable and ever cleaner energy” while their renewable energy portfolios descend increasingly toward zero. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel production side of the ledger aggressively soars upward.
Also, the Defendants+their cartel partners in petrostates have infiltrated climate proceedings like a hot knife through grass-fed butter. At the 2023 COP28 summit, about 2,500 fossil fuel lobbyists were in attendance, twice the number that attended COP27. At COP30 in 2025, that number declined to 1,600 but the proportional share of overall attendees was the highest of all U.N. climate summits. The summit’s final document made no mention of a roadmap to decarbonize the largest economies due to pressure from petro-lobbyists Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and the oil industry at COP30.
Then there’s the spooky stuff.
In April 2024, Amil Forlit was arrested at Heathrow airport under a handy Interpol Red Notice, a world-wide law enforcement request to detain someone wanted for a criminal act in the requesting country. In this case Forlit was grabbed on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department for wire fraud and computer hacking.
More specifically, Forlit, a private investigator, was accused of organizing a hack-for-hire scheme. From 2015-2018, he was paid about $20 million by Washington D.C. firm DCI Group. That firm had long been a public relations and contract lobbying operation for Exxon. In 2019, another private investigator, Aviram Azari, had been indicted as this hacking scheme began to be disclosed in DOJ actions. The targets of the hacking were lawyers+advocates for environmental groups and some government officials in Europe+Africa who were working on a legal strategy that became the basis of the “polluters pay” lawsuits that numerous states have pursued in recent years. Exxon, painting the enviros as collusive conspirators (it takes one to know one) engaged in a political vendetta against the oil company, used the hacked material as a defense against the lawsuits. Azari was sentenced to 7 years in prison in 2023 and forced to pay $4.8 million in fines and restitution.
DCI, which denies any wrongdoing, has been suspected of providing Forlit, the P.I. with targets for hacking. Forlit worked with third-party vendors to conduct the hacking. Several hundred accounts were hacked, including the accounts of children of the advocates.
This week, the U.K. High Court of Justice opened the door for Forlit to be extradited to the U.S. where for hacking+wire fraud he faces prison time of 45 years.
Exxon denies any involvement with the hacking conspiracy.
None of this bad behavior by the oil companies is new or previously unreported. This industry really wrote the book on how to use political muscle to crush competitors+adversaries and continues to this day. Whenever Trump opens up public lands for oil drilling or bribes a foreign company to crash its own offshore wind investments and instead push LNG facilities (looking at you TotalEnergy!), it’s the result of political action by fossil fuel operatives either outside or inside the government. AG Nessel lets recent history make her case — oil companies have acted in concert to suppress+stifle the development of renewables, to deceive consumers about both renewables+the material/scientific source of climate change and to use its market power to further weaken the competing emerging industries. Not to mention the prospect that one company collaborated even in part with an illegal scheme to hack the data of opponents.
Keep in mind, the American Petroleum Institute, founded in 1919, is a ready-made political institution and forum for these oil majors to further their policies of collusion. The API is also a dynamic and well-funded political operation to carry out the colluders’ policy goals.
What is the likelihood of the lawsuit gaining traction? The political climate in Trumpland is of course hostile to opponents of Exxon+Chevron not to mention to the basic principle of anti-trust enforcement. Gail Slater, the DOJ anti-trust chief and J.D. Vance acolyte was bushwacked by Pammy Joe Bondi+ousted from the agency last month. Slater had shone the bare lineament of a spine in opposing a $15 billion merger between Hewlett Packard and Juniper Network because that would create a duopoly of wire-networking services. The bigger the better in the Trump regime as long as Donnie or kin get their slice.
But Nessel’s anti-trust angle is novel+gives some political elbow-room for the long-term campaign against the polluters+broad cancer coalition (petro-Putin, Bone Saw, tyrants of the UAE, Ayatollah Jr. etc). Any strategy that diminishes the power of the fossil fuel industry and more broadly empowers the solar+wind industries is an investment in the post-Trump fight for a healthier planet.