00:00during my time? It's your time. You're welcome. You just interrupted him during my time. You are
00:06welcome to sing. No, he was actually, it was the end of my time. You're welcome to sing or you can
00:11conduct poetry in iambic pentameter. You can blow a kazoo. You can do whatever you wish.
00:17Go ahead and answer the question that you were. Yeah, thank you. I'm a little lost now as to
00:23where we were, but my point was that a fossil fuel producer in a criminal trial would not be able
00:31to say, there's legal doctrine on this, right? You can say there's an intervening third party,
00:36intervening circumstances that disrupt the chain of causation. You cannot say that when the third
00:41party, their actions were completely foreseeable. Like, for example, a consumer using your product
00:46exactly as you intended. You also can't use it when you defrauded them into using your product exactly
00:51as you intended. So, with all respect, the Baltimore judge is wrong. The company can't use that defense.
00:57Sorry? The company can't use that defense when it is on the delivery end of the fraud. It's meritless
01:02in a criminal context anyway. Yeah. And the tobacco case focused on key organizations, not everybody
01:11who smoked and gave secondhand smoke. Lawyers know how to sort through this stuff. And I think that we
01:18really do have to take the harm that is being caused by these companies and protected behind
01:26the $700 billion a year annual subsidy that Congress showers them with every year and that motivates
01:33them to be so influential and so intrusive into Congress, so involved in elections, spending so many
01:42millions of dollars in dark money and indirect money. And in the meantime, just to use the very simplest
01:50example of the articles I put into the record, here comes an insurance crisis that's already fully engaged
02:00in Florida that is hitting southern Mississippi, southern Louisiana, southern Texas. It's hitting all the coastal
02:08states as predicted by the chief economist of Freddie Mac, not a green group, not a Chinese communist
02:14group, as predicted by that chief economist, as predicted by the chairman of the Federal Reserve,
02:21far from green, as predicted by the CEO of American Aon, as predicted by the board of Allianz, the biggest
02:29insurance company on the planet. You can make as much fun as you like of an article that Mr. Arkish wrote,
02:39but that doesn't take away from the fundamental fact that the Earth's natural systems are being badly degraded
02:46by fossil fuel and that the fossil fuel industry knew that this would happen and that for years, knowing
02:54that it would happen, they lied about it, they set up whole organizations to lie about it even more,
03:02they fund an entire armada of front groups whose job is to lie about it, and I do believe that it's
03:12proper to hold a corporation accountable for that kind of misconduct. Mr. Arkish.
03:18Hey, there are two things I'd like to say. One, it does seem like we can all agree on one thing,
03:22which is that groups spending money to influence other people's behavior can be problematic.
03:28Sometimes people don't do things for the right reasons, they do things because they're getting
03:31paid, right? And there is almost nobody in the world with more resources than the fossil fuel
03:37industry to be paying people to do their bidding, and I think it's just important to note that. As
03:42Senator Whitehouse noted, one of them alone, ExxonMobil, last year, almost a billion dollars in profits
03:50a day. Every day, that's more than twice the amount that was on that chart that you held up,
03:55Mr. Chairman, for all the environmental groups. So, right, ExxonMobil, twice that amount every single
04:01day. That's just one of the oil companies. I'm very concerned about spending money on political
04:07influence, and it's a lot more on that side. Second, I just want to say, my understanding of
04:11this theory about China is that, and tell me if I'm wrong, is that China is ahead of the U.S. right now
04:18in manufacturing some aspects of renewable energy, right? Solar panels, batteries, ahead on critical
04:24minerals, right? And I guess the theory is, I guess, therefore, they want to stifle our fossil fuels
04:32so that we're dependent on them for their renewable energy. I don't know why they'd want to stifle
04:36fossil fuels when China is like a huge buyer of U.S. oil and gas. Some of it they burn, some of it they
04:41flip. They flip a lot of the oil and gas at a profit. If we are losing a competition with China
04:50on the technologies of tomorrow, we should be investing in those technologies and funding
04:55them, right? Imagine in the late 50s and early 60s when we were worried we were losing the space
04:59race with the Soviet Union. Imagine if instead of saying, in 1962, Kennedy saying, we're going to go to
05:05the moon by the end of this decade, he said, you know what? We're going to defund all of aeronautics
05:10and stay on the ground. Is that the way to make America strong and great? I don't think so.
05:16And I wish that you would all join the people who are trying to make America strong and great
05:21today and tomorrow by funding the industries and the energy sources of tomorrow that are
05:26cleaner, safer, and cheaper, like renewables.
05:32Thank you to each of the witnesses.
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