It'd be a pretty big lie for them to pull off. It's one thing to spend a few million funding some climate change denying think tanks. It's a whole other level of deception to spend hundreds of millions on a technology in the hopes that others will fall for it.
>the carbon emissions in their production process
This seems like the weakest possible argument. Either the chemical reaction they're proposing generates carbon or it doesn't. It's very easy to validate. Are you expecting them to build an entire "green" hydrogen plant that claims to use a process that doesn't produce co2, but is secretly burning oil? That seems extremely risky to pull off and very easy to discover.
>or that any profits wouldn’t be used in part to fund their political lobbying to prevent action or dodge the consequences of their actions.
So you would rather shoot ourselves in the feet (metaphorically) when it comes to the green energy transition, because you can't stand the thought of the bad guys making money in the process? Do you also think that we should drag out the pandemic a bit longer because a bad guy[1] might be making money in process?
Do the calculation for joules of power to move a fully-loaded tractor-trailer. Do a joule/kg calculation for modern batteries and calculate the series you get due to the rocket fuel problem (it takes a lot of battery to haul your battery).
You find that the towing capacity of that semi is miniscule vs an ICE engine. Same problem applies to heavy equipment (even if you completely dodge the issue that heavy equipment works out where stable power usually isn't readily available).
Hydrogen offers a solution to this that batteries can't offer.
Now, it may be that you're right—that battery-powered semi trucks are unfeasible to build.
But a) this doesn't mean we should go all-in on hydrogen, either, and b) maybe what this really means is that we need to eliminate the semi truck as a common feature of our roads, and do most of our cross-country shipping by rail, which is massively more efficient no matter what means you use to power it. (Yes, that requires more investment in our rail infrastructure, but that would also be a very good thing on several levels.)
[1]: https://www.aar.org/facts-figures a biased source probably
And hydrogen is the same: producing it, transporting it, getting it to end consumers... lots of op ex. Whereas with pure electric you just need wires and batteries, and there is none of the efficiency loss of converting energy into hydrogen and having to transport it as mass and worry about leakage.
But for rent-seeking old-money megacorps, the inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. They can take a percentage of all that waste and complexity as profit.
