Katie Porter Busts Out a Jar of M&Ms, Huge Bags of Rice to Grill Oil Execs on Fossil Fuel Operations

Congresswoman Katie Porter (D-CA) had to virtually beam into the House Oversight Committee’s Thursday hearing with oil executives, but she made the most of it by using visual aids to drive through her questions to the CEOs.

Darren Woods of ExxonMobil, David Lawler of BP America, Michael Wirth of Chevron, and Gretchen Watkins of Shell were all in attendance to face questions over industrial practices and disinformation about their connections to global warming. When Porter was given her time for questions, she noted that several of the companies claimed to have an interest in investing in renewable energy, so she pulled out a jar of M&Ms in order to ask Watkins about that.

Shell’s 2020 annual report called for between $19 and $22 billion in near-term spending. I’m representing that with this container of M&Ms. Each M&M represents about 50 million in spending. How much has Shell said it will spend on inflatable gas and chemical operations?

Watkins and Porter went back and forth as the congresswoman used the jar to point out the disparity between Shell’s oil, gas and chemical operations, and their spending on renewable energy. She continued using her prop jars to call out Shell’s past promises for renewable energy spending, and eventually held up a vastly depleted jar and said “to me, this does not look like an adequate response to one of the defining challenges of our time…Shell is trying to fool people into thinking it’s addressing the climate crisis, but what it’s actually doing is to continue to put money into fossil fuels.”

From there, Porter turned to Mike Sommers of the American Petroleum Institute, and she asked him how many drilling permits have been authorized by the Department of the Interior, and on how many acres of land. She and Sommers locked horns over her assertions that the permits have gone unused, but she returned to her visual aids by opening up her car, showing off a pile of huge rice bags, and using those as a representation for 13.9 million acres.

To visualize how much land that is, if each grain of rice were one acre, that would be 479 pounds of rice. The American Petroleum Institute even opposed more leasing on our lands. They even sued to stop it, because apparently this acreage wasn’t enough!

Porter went on by pressing Sommers on whether or not he supports putting a pause on leases for federal land.

Watch above, via CSPAN3.