Last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods made a claim so brazen it shocked even some of his most ardent critics. Humanity is not on track to meet its climate goals because the world “waited too long” to begin investing in renewable energy, and the public is to blame for it. In his words, “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions.”

This is gaslighting, plain and simple. Everyday consumers are not the reason we “waited too long” to begin transitioning to clean energy. The reason is that fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil spent over half a century defrauding the public with climate disinformation in order to delay or block that transition.

That is not conjecture—the facts are laid out in the industry’s own documents. We now know that Big Oil understood with great precision that the products they were extracting and marketing would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate consequences. By 1968 the American Petroleum Institute (API) was commissioning reports warning that greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel combustion could result in “the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, [and] warming of the oceans.”