Wayne Christian, one of three members of the Texas Railroad Commission (which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry), made several false or misleading statements about the industry’s impact on the environment and climate change.
Christian shared the claims, which he said he had “googled” and which echo claims by climate change deniers, in response to concerns from those testifying during a Commission hearing. He argued that carbon dioxide only makes up about 0.04% of the atmosphere and that humans were only responsible for 3 - 6% of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and therefore “It would make no difference, if man was gone, if we shut down everything, as far as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." Scientists have found that human activity is responsible for about ⅓ of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Christian also claimed that the U.S. is the “cleanest producing nation” of oil and gas, and that “In the last 100 years, we’ve decreased environmental deaths by 98%.” These claims have been debunked in the journal Science.
Commissioner Wayne Christian was previously featured in the Silencing Science Tracker for an op-ed he published in 2018 that questioned the scientific consensus on climate change.