Blowing Smoke Up Our #*!: How Toyota, ExxonMobil, and Others are Trying to Shirk Accountability for their Emissions
By Adam Zuckerman
Hot Air Behind Closed Doors
At New York Climate Week’s “Summit in the Sky,” a top Toyota lobbyist advised corporations on how to manage their emissions. It was a closed-door invite-only event at the heavily-fortified World Trade Center, perhaps because I crashed Toyota’s greenwashing presentation at last year’s Climate Week.
Described as a “private panel and networking event,” the hosts promised to bring “together senior sustainability, procurement, and supply chain leaders from large corporations actively managing Scope 3 programs, to tackle the defining challenge of corporate decarbonization: being fully accountable [emphasis added] for emissions that sit entirely outside your direct operations.”
For an aggressive anti-climate lobbyist to talk about accountability during Climate Week feels like a punchline, but when the company is Toyota, it is problematic. The company is doing everything in its power to evade accountability for its emissions. It is the only automotive member of Carbon Measures*, an industry coalition that ExxonMobil created last year in order to water down carbon accounting.
Evading Accountability
As our partners Lead the Charge wrote last week, Carbon Measures launched the very same week that ExxonMobil “sued California over two laws requiring large companies to disclose their emissions and climate-related financial risks” questioning “the accuracy and authority of the GHG Protocol, the framework those laws rely on.” Carbon Measures’ proposed accounting mechanism would shift responsibility away from fossil fuel companies, automakers, and others, and to us, the end consumers. Over 99% of Toyota Motor’s emissions are Scope 3, so excluding those emissions from its calculus would drastically lower the automaker’s carbon impact.
Over twenty years ago, BP coined the term “carbon footprint.” It was a subtle narrative tool to shift climate responsibility away from fossil fuel companies making billions from creating climate catastrophe and toward all of us, who dare to live in the system that they create and uphold. If “carbon footprint” was an attempt to shift narrative responsibility to the consumer, Carbon Measures is an attempt to shift legal responsibility toward us.
Carbon Measures is pulling out all the stops. Just days ahead of Climate Week, the group announced that the disgraced former Colombian president Iván Duque would be chairing a Technical Expert Panel that Carbon Measures is co-creating with the International Chamber of Commerce. Duque, who spent his presidency trying to undermine Colombia’s historic peace deal, left office in 2022 with the lowest approval rating in recorded Colombian history. As scholars note in Science, Duque’s administration “launched a controversial military operation that penalized local communities for their relatively small role in deforestation without prosecuting the well-connected and politically influential actors known to drive deforestation at a substantially larger scale.” With his experience helping the powerful avoid accountability, it is only fitting for Duque to help Carbon Measures shift climate responsibility to consumers.
The same day that Toyota was teaching corporations to be “fully accountable” for their emissions, the president of Carbon Measures spoke at a climate week event. Our allies at Actions Speak Louder, Rainforest Action Network, and Stand.Earth were protesting outside. They called out the polluters behind Carbon Measures for accelerating climate change and shirking responsibility for their emissions.
Business as Usual for Toyota
Avoiding accountability has become Toyota’s modus operandi. Instead of leading on electric vehicles, it has spent years building a massive influence operation to roll back our climate rules, becoming the largest automotive funder of climate deniers in Congress and the most aggressive anti-climate lobbyist in the auto industry. In 2023 it agreed to a $60 million settlement with the CFPB for fraudulent lending practices. It was also facing a massive bribery investigation after the president of Toyota Motor Thailand admitted to paying $18 million to a law firm that later used those funds to try to bribe a Thai Supreme Court judge to overturn a $322 million judgment against the automaker. However, after Toyota donated $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration, the Trump administration annulled the CFPB settlement and ended the bribery investigation.
Carbon Measures is just Toyota’s latest attempt to avoid accountability. We can’t let it get away with it.
* Mitsubishi Corporation is also a member. It owns a roughly 22% stake in Mitsubishi Motors, which is not a member.