If he means like blaming farmers, who intentionally prevented the publication of research about how eating too much of the food they were producing would most likely kill people by causing diabetes, then yes, he has a point.
They have a point, especially when you consider farmers lobby for things like corn subsidies, which leads to high-fructose corn syrup being nearly free, and added to everything, which leads to obesity.
Or, there's the whole food pyramid thing. The agriculture industry (i.e. farmers) industry lobbies to have the food pyramid reflect their profitable products, telling people to eat 6-11 servings of bread, cereal, rice and pasta every day, and suggesting people limit the fruit and vegetables they eat. Nuts and beans were thrown into the same category as red meat. They then arranged for that food pyramid to be everywhere, even taught in schools, convincing kids that it was a scientifically proven way to eat healthy, when it was largely marketing material from the farmer lobby.
Fundamentally, pollution / climate change is the result of people's lifestyle choices. Oil workers wouldn't extract the oil from the ground unless people were buying it and burning it. Similarly, people wouldn't get fat unless they were eating, and when they're eating the food was grown by farmers. But, take a step back and see the lobbying, the regulatory capture, the lack of choices people have, etc. and you see that both the oil industry and farmers can be blamed for a lot of obesity and climate change.
Taken at face value, I can see the argument here. However, the reality is that the Oil Industry has spent disgusting amounts of money lobbying (bribing) governments and organizations in order to slow or outright kill programs related to clean energy or anything related to weaning off of oil. They are 100% part of the problem. So fuck'em.
...like blaming tobacco companies for lung cancer?
"Hey, you can't hold us responsible if we deliberately make and market an addictive product. It's clearly the fault of the people who purchase and use our product exactly as designed and intended."
Honestly, they wouldn’t be wrong if you look at all the people who hear the word EV and immediately start throwing tantrums.
But they’re mostly making the point that those companies are doing a lot of work to try to tell people that oil is perfectly safe when they know otherwise, discredit competition, and then reap rewards while people have to live in a world where “choice” is largely just which gas station you go to.
In the U.S., we can probably blame farm subsidies for some of the obesity. Every politician supports corn subsidies (mostly because they all think they’ll be president someday and the Iowa Caucus is historically the first step to that). The result is that high fructose corn syrup is artificially cheap as an ingredient and industrial-sized food and soda producers use the fuck out of it.
It’s not so much that corn sugar is worse for you than sugar cane sugar as that “Low fat!” marketed products are often loaded with added sugars (and salt) to make the product more palatable. You can’t expect consumers to sit at the grocery reading over every label.
And all you need to know about diet recommendations in the U.S. are that they’re done by the Department of Agriculture and not the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s as stupid as asking an oil company executive to help decide how we stop digging up carbon-based molecules and lighting them on fire.
I would say its more like blaming the sugar/corn industry for lobbying for subsidies or getting studies that point the finger at fat over sugar as the problem.