On June 10, 2026, Lee Raymond, the CEO of Exxon and then ExxonMobil from 1993 to 2005, passed away. Raymond was, without a doubt, a world-historic figure—a man who helped devise one of the most impactful conspiracies in all of human civilization. Those actions will be the core of his legacy, as demonstrated already by the headlines reporting his death in papers from the other side of the world (“Exxon CEO Lee Raymond, the ‘Darth Vader of global warming’, dies at 87”) to his home state of Texas (“Lee Raymond, former Exxon CEO who denied climate change, dies at 87”).
That’s because Raymond played a lead role in ExxonMobil’s—and the entire oil and gas industry’s—campaign of climate deception, which set us on course for the planetary crisis that is playing out today.
This was a knowing conspiracy. Raymond and his colleagues running fossil fuel corporations understood decades ago that the unchecked burning of fossil fuels would, in the words of their own senior employees’ internal communications, be “globally catastrophic,” do “great irreversible harm to our planet,” have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival,” and cause such destabilization that “civilization could prove a fragile thing.”
Upon learning about the world-historic harm they were causing, Raymond and his ilk could have opted for a less lethal business model. They could have alerted the public and regulators. At the very least, they could have remained silent and let the rest of us solve the civilization-threatening crisis they were creating.
They did none of these things. Instead, they spread climate denial to block the development of clean energy alternatives—or, in the words of a 1988 Exxon strategy memo, they “emphasize[d] the uncertainty of scientific conclusions” to resist the “development of nonfossil fuel resources”—so they could continue wringing profit from destroying humanity’s only habitat for as long as possible. Indeed, they lied about climate science even as they relied on it themselves to adapt their pipelines and offshore oil platforms to the extreme weather disasters they were causing. Truth for them; lies for everyone else.
To the extent they admit the harms of fossil fuels, industry representatives sometimes argue the harms are justified by the benefits. But if they believed that—and if they believed consumers and the public would agree—then they wouldn’t have spent the last several decades lying about climate science and solutions. The time has long passed to commit to renewable energy sources, which can replace the vast majority of fossil fuel use and are cleaner and safer. They’re also more affordable—clean energy is now the cheapest form of electricity, a tipping point that would have arrived much sooner without Big Oil’s campaign of deception and suppression that Raymond helped spearhead.
On Raymond’s death, ExxonMobil stated that his “legacy will forever remain a pillar of this company.” That is undoubtedly true for his legacy of climate deception, which ExxonMobil and its co-conspirators have continued building on to this day. Of course, they have updated their talking points. In place of Raymond’s explicit climate denial, one recent strategy is to portray their companies and fossil fuel products as contributing to climate solutions when they know otherwise. For example, ExxonMobil spent $175 million marketing its development of algae biofuels as the answer to global warming, despite warnings from the corporation’s own scientists that such claims were “completely impossible to achieve.” The details have changed, but the basic move—weaponize disinformation to block a clean energy transition—remains the same. Raymond’s pillar of deception still stands.
When all is said and done, Raymond and his ilk may bear responsibility for more death and destruction than any of history’s worst villains. His co-conspirators are still aggressively working to worsen a climate crisis that may cause hundreds of millions, and possibly even billions, of avoidable deaths.
Unlike the countless victims of climate deception—the mother killed by extreme heat that would have been virtually impossible but for climate change; the family swept away by a climate-exacerbated hurricane; the farmers starving in a drought made 100 times more likely by climate change—Raymond had the privilege of dying of natural causes at the end of a long life. He never faced accountability.
But Raymond was far from the only actor responsible for unleashing climate chaos on our world. His successors are still at large, fueling the same planetary arson he fanned for decades. Raymond may be gone, but his work remains a crime in progress. It must be halted.
This piece was co-authored by my friend and colleague David Arkush, Director of Public Citizen’s Climate Program.
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