Jamie Raskin Names And Shames The ‘Evil Fairy’ Secretly Setting ‘The Country Back’

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) slammed the petroleum industry on Wednesday as he pointed to experts who described Big Oil’s “pattern of lying and evasion” that has “set the country back decades” in its ability to address climate change.

“Instead of acting like Paul Revere and sounding the alarm about climate change, they acted like Maleficent the evil fairy in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and cursed everyone to try to go to sleep for 100 years,” said Raskin during a Senate Budget Committee hearing.

Raskin’s remarks came after that committee and the House Oversight Committee released a 65-page report following a three-year investigation into oil and gas companies’ “evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change.”

The Maryland Democrat described calling a House Oversight hearing in 2019 where scientists and experts testified that the companies “knew” that burning fossil fuels caused climate change as early as 1959.

“The year the first Barbie Doll appeared in the United States, the year Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union — by the 1960s, before Neil Armstrong even walked on the moon, the science of global warming was well understood by Big Oil,” Raskin noted.

The report focused on several companies, including Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce, described as having “obstructed and delayed the committees’ investigation.”

He said, “Our investigation uncovered compelling evidence of aggressive industry deceit, which continued long after Big Oil gave up on its outright climate denialism.”

You can read the committees’ report or listen to more of Raskin’s remarks in the clip below.