Big oil's deceptive climate ads

Source: 5 Examples of Greenwashing

From Inside Climate News

Four of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies have spent the last 25 years deceptively portraying themselves as leaders in addressing climate change while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production and failing to meaningfully rein in their planet-heating emissions, according to a report released Thursday that examined over 300 of the companies’ climate-related advertisements from 2000 to 2025.

These ads collectively serve to mask the harmful impacts of the companies’ operations and to perpetuate a false narrative that the oil industry is an essential partner in the fight against climate change, the Center for Climate Integrity found.

CCI, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization supporting efforts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate harms, said its analysis is the first of its kind scrutinizing hundreds of climate-relevant ads from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell across the first quarter of the 21st century.

It was around the turn of the century, when outright denial of the reality of climate change had become untenable, that the fossil fuel industry pivoted in its messaging and advertising strategy toward promoting false promises and solutions for tackling the problem, CCI says in “Big Oil’s Deceptive Climate Ads.”

The report identifies and discusses seven categories of deceptive advertising during this time period, including overstating actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; exaggerating investments in renewable energy; deflecting responsibility by shifting it onto consumers; and falsely promoting natural gas, carbon capture, hydrogen and algae biofuels as viable climate solutions.

“Big Oil’s climate deception has evolved from lying about the problem to lying about solutions,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement. “For two and half decades now, these companies have sold the public a false and misleading image of their industry as working to solve the climate crisis, all while doubling down on fossil fuels and making the problem worse.”

The analysis draws upon publicly accessible sources such as digital advertising libraries and archives, congressional investigations and reports, and corporate and public relations documents. It adds to a growing body of evidence of a decades-long and ongoing campaign of deception by the industry to deny or downplay its climate impacts, to delay the transition to clean energy and to obstruct climate action.

A joint staff report from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Budget Committee released last year documents how major oil companies use what the Democrats described as deceptive messaging and tactics to promote false promises of new technologies and to mislead about their commitments to reducing emissions and about the climate safety of natural gas. The report marked the culmination of a multi-year investigation that involved hearings and subpoenas and revealed numerous internal company documents.

“As this joint report makes clear, the industry’s outright denial of climate change has evolved into a green-seeming cover for its ongoing covert operation—a campaign of deception, disinformation, and doublespeak waged using dark money, phony front groups, false economics, and relentless exertion of political influence—to block climate progress,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), then-chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a press release accompanying that report.

Greenwashed or deceptive advertising has also been a key part of this campaign, the CCI report says.

“In advertisements targeting the public, these four Big Oil companies repeatedly misrepresented the sustainability of their business practices, deflected responsibility for fueling climate harms, and lied about the viability of their proposed climate solutions, from carbon capture and storage to algae biofuels,” the report concludes.

Inside Climate News reached out to BP, Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil for comment. None immediately responded. Companies such as Exxon have pushed back in court against allegations of deceptive advertising by claiming the allegations are attacks on their protected free speech rights.

Ads touting the companies’ emission-reduction initiatives, the report found, tend to overinflate the impact of these actions and create a misleading impression that the companies have dramatically lowered their overall emissions. But in reality, the actions typically are limited to oil companies’ operational emissions, such as reducing flaring, and do not account for emissions generated by their products, which make up the vast majority of their carbon pollution.

Furthermore, ads highlighting future plans or promises to reduce emissions and transition to low-carbon business models are misleading, the report says, especially considering that the companies are now rolling back their green commitments.

“In 2024, less than four years after advertising plans to change their business plans to support a shift towards net zero emissions, BP and Shell both abandoned goals to significantly reduce emissions and lower the carbon intensity of their businesses,” the report says.

Some other ads from these companies published since 2000 depict them embracing renewable energy like wind and solar, but as the report says, this obscures the reality that oil companies’ actual investments in renewables are miniscule: “One analysis found that between 2010 and 2018, BP spent only 2.3 percent of its total capital expenditure on renewables, Shell spent 1.3 percent, Chevron spent 0.23 percent, and ExxonMobil spent 0.22 percent.”

In some cases, oil companies are also abandoning renewable energy projects and cutting back on their low carbon portfolio spending. BP and Shell, for example, are scrapping wind energy development, and earlier this year Shell announced plans to slash investments in low-carbon energy from 20 percent to 10 percent of its total capital expenditure by 2030. This week, ExxonMobil revealed its updated corporate plan that includes reducing its spending on low-carbon investments by one-third.

Another category of oil company ads the report identifies as deceptive is one in which responsibility for reducing emissions is shifted onto individual consumers. BP, through its advertising and PR, for example, popularized the concept of the individual’s carbon footprint, the report says. These types of ads deflect from the role that the oil and gas industry has played in locking society into dependency on its products, the report contends.

Big oil company advertisements touting natural gas as clean or climate-friendly or as an essential partner to renewable energy ignore the reality that gas still contributes substantially to climate change, especially considering methane venting and leakage, the report says. Natural gas is composed almost entirely of methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is 84 times more powerful than CO2 over a 20-year timeframe.

In addition to promoting what the report calls the false solution of natural gas, oil companies have used advertising to highlight and push false promises about carbon capture and storage and about hydrogen, claiming these technologies are key to a low-carbon future.

Carbon capture technologies have existed for decades and have failed to sequester more than a miniscule amount of global emissions. Most carbon capture and storage operations also end up using the captured CO2 to extract more oil—a process known as enhanced oil recovery—which critics say cancels out much of the supposed climate benefit and serves to further prolong the fossil fuel era.

Hydrogen, meanwhile, is conventionally produced using fossil fuels, and so-called green hydrogen made from water does not yet exist on any large scale. Despite company advertisements touting hydrogen’s promise, it remains decades away from wide-scale deployment, and almost all hydrogen production today is based on fossil fuels, contrary to its depictions in company ads as a clean fuel, the report says.

The report also discusses advertisements by ExxonMobil around algae biofuels, arguing the company deceptively portrayed these fuels as a climate solution when in reality it was never seriously committed to investing and scaling the technology. “While Exxon poured millions of dollars into algae advertisements, the company never built a commercial-scale algae biofuels facility—which would have cost around $5 billion—and ended its funding for algae research entirely in late-2022,” the report said.

Hundreds of ads across these categories from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell over the last 25 years collectively “feed a larger false narrative that oil and gas companies are part of the solution to climate change,” the report concludes, which allows them to sustain their social license to operate while they continue expanding production and fueling the climate crisis.

The report comes as the industry faces dozens of climate accountability lawsuits aiming to hold companies accountable for deceptive conduct, including ongoing greenwashing and false or misleading advertising. Some of the cases are already in pre-trial discovery and are closer than ever to getting to the stage of a public trial.

CCI says its analysis is intended to support these efforts.

“Any business that floods consumers with such brazenly deceptive advertising must be held accountable,” Wiles said.

Affordability. A total hoax.

 By Kevin Necessary

Climate obstruction bingo

From CommsDeclare 

The nine principles of propaganda

 

All you need is a sharpie

 By Jonathan Brown

Lies

 By Pat Bagley

Was that baby a neo-nazi?

 

By Pedro Molina

Polar ice keeps on plunging

 From Rick Thoman

Arctic-wide sea ice extent is the lowest in 47-year NSIDC satellite record for February 7, and it's the lowest by a lot: 430,000 km² of "lost ice" compared to the previous lowest (2017) and about 2.2 million km² less than was typical on February 7 in the early 1980s. #Arctic #SeaIce #ClimateChange

From Professor Eliot Jacobson

Breaking News! Code UFB!!! Global sea-ice extent is now at an all-time record low in recorded history, with global sea-ice extent now 2.14 million square kilometers below the 1991-2020 average. Images of the current Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extent are in the following posts in this thread.

Yet companies, politicians and techbros continue to pretend they are doing something and they care.  They really, really do.

Canada has a far superior health system to the USA's

 Trump just tells lies.

How big meat lies

lies and disinformation about plant-based meat

From DeSmog

This article by Sentient is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.


The meat industry and its proponents worked hard in 2024 — not only to increase sales, but also to rebrand and remain relevant. While overwhelming climate science continues to point out the harmful impacts of animal agriculture, and plant-based competitors continue to challenge the status quo, meat promoters stepped up this year, crafting and perpetuating clever narratives to keep consumers hooked.

“Amidst a climate crisis driven in no small part by agriculture, there is a growing interest in healthy, sustainable food,” Jennifer Molidor, senior food campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, tells Sentient. “The industry has responded by flooding climate conferences with lobbyists promoting meat and dairy — in full force.”

And that’s not all. From promoting “beneficial” regenerative meat, to criticizing “ultra processed” plants, to promoting cow fat for skin care, to manipulating data, Big Meat sidestepped accountability to keep consumers coming back in 2024. 

Disinformation Trend #1: Meat Is ‘Natural’

One of the more popular PR messages regarding meat in 2024 was that animal products are healthier and more “natural” compared to “ultra processed” plant-based meat alternatives.

This messaging is not new. It’s years in the making, with full-page ads in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal back in 2021, and a $5 million Super Bowl commercial in 2020. Backed by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), the ads vilified newly popular “fake meats” as full of “real chemicals,” highlighting “scary” ingredients like methylcellulose — a generally harmless compound used in many foods.

CCF is led by former tobacco lobbyist Richard Berman, and is supported by “restaurants, food companies and thousands of individual consumers,” according to its website. Forbes once described it as a front group for meat, tobacco and alcohol companies.

The narrative of “natural” meat versus “processed” plants persisted into 2024. The marketing tactic conveniently ignores the fact that 99 percent of animals raised for food in the U.S. are factory farmed in inherently unnatural conditions, and undergo much processing to become meat, dairy and eggs.

But this natural meat fantasy didn’t stop at food in 2024, spreading into lifestyle content, and feeding into a growing anti-technology, off-the-grid (though often still on YouTube), homesteading, carnivore and tradwife trend. Raw milk surged in popularity in 2024, as did eating raw meat, and using cow fat for skin care.

The FDA, CDC and New York State Department of Health put out statements this year warning of the health risks of consuming raw milk, and experts have taken to the media to warn of the risks associated with the carnivore diet, and with eating uncooked meat. Dermatology experts also told Sentient that the benefits of beef fat for the skin are minimal.

Though plant-based meat alternatives vary greatly when it comes to nutritional profiles, they are generally considered healthy. In fact, a 2024 review published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology found that risk factors for heart disease, such as LDL cholesterol and body weight, showed improvement when animal-based meats were substituted with plant-based meat alternatives. 

Disinformation Trend #2: Meat Is ‘Eco-Friendly’

Another pervasive meat message in 2024 was that beef — the highest-emitting meat — can somehow be good for the environment so long as raised on a farm that is regenerative, eco-friendly, carbon neutral or some other variation of such terms.

Regenerative agriculture, particularly holistic grazing, promises an alternative to our current food system that incorporates livestock in a way that can regenerate depleted soils. Such promises, however, fall short when it comes to actually curbing climate pollution.

Though regenerative agriculture aims to “bring back bovines,” as described in the 2023 documentary Common Ground, this grouping of grass-fed cattle with wild ruminants like bison is not accurate — at least as far as the environment is concerned. “That’s like comparing apples to oranges,” Molidor told Sentient earlier this year. While there is some debate about this, bison tend to graze over further distances in ways that cause less damage to plants and waterways. Cattle, on the other hand, tend to stick close together and eat just one type of plant until it’s gone.

The regenerative movement — which does offer some benefits for soil health — has also since been co-opted by the industrialized meat industry. A 2024 study by New Climate Institute found that 24 of the world’s top 30 food and beverage producers, including Cargill, Danone and Fonterra, refer to regenerative agriculture in their sustainability communication.

That said, 2024 also saw a possible win in the fight against misleading claims about climate-friendly meat, with Tyson Food’s Brazen Beef brand potentially no longer available for sale. After the U.S. Department of Agriculture rolled out a new “climate-friendly” beef label last year, Tyson soon rolled out its own version: Brazen Beef. Journalists and academics were quick to note serious issues with the claims on the product’s label, particularly the claim (with no data in support) of a 10 percent reduction in emissions.

“In order to claim a 10 percent reduction, you need to establish scientifically a baseline that everyone agrees is the common amount that beef produces,” New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek told Corporate Knights Magazine. “There doesn’t seem to be any data that the company itself, or the government who it created that certification in conjunction with, is able to provide.”

Tyson was subsequently sued in 2024 by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) for misleading consumers about its efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The suit asked the Superior Court of the District of Columbia to ban Tyson from making “false or misleading marketing claims.” It remains before the court.

At the time this story was published, the webpage for Brazen Meats was not functioning, and the product appeared unavailable for sale, raising questions about the future of the brand. Sentient contacted Tyson about the status of the Brazen line, but did not receive a response by email. We also called Tyson’s consumer relations hotline, and were told by the representative, “I don’t see anything active with that name.” It also appears that a New Jersey meat packer that sold Brazen Beef no longer lists the product on its website.

Caroline Leary, chief operating officer and general counsel for EWG tells Sentient that despite the Brazen Meats webpage being down, the group “remains committed to holding Tyson accountable, by demanding transparency to ensure that consumers are not deceived by false promises of sustainability,” which still exist elsewhere on its site. 

Disinformation Trend #3: Meat Feeds the World

Inflation and food insecurity were also pressing issues in 2024. Meat, dairy and egg industries were there to capitalize, particularly at climate conferences held throughout the year.

At COP28 last spring for example, the Guardian reports that meat lobbyists “celebrated the cut-through of their message that industrial animal agriculture has an important role to play in addressing global hunger.” It adds that U.S. Pork Board representative Jamie Burr also stated that COPs provide an opportunity for U.S. agriculture groups to show how they “feed the world.”

At COP29 last month, the strategy was the same, according to a report by DeSmog. Documents produced by the industry-funded Global Meat Alliance, obtained by DeSmog, encouraged members “to stick to key comms messages, including the idea that meat is beneficial to the environment and will help to ‘feed the world.’”

A spokesperson for the Global Alliance for the Future of Food told the Guardian in April that the idea that industrial agriculture is “critical to address hunger” is one of the greatest myths used by the industry to fend off criticism. Animal agriculture in fact contributes to world hunger, due to the inefficient use of arable land and resources to grow crops for animals, instead of people. Not only that, but the industry’s framing around food insecurity ignores how many climate researchers limit “eat less meat” recommendations to global north populations like the U.S., who consume far more than the global average. Studies suggest that food insecurity could actually be addressed, in-part, by transitioning to a more plant-based food system. Reducing the massive amount of land needed to grow food to feed livestock could lead to more crops being fed directly to people. One study theorizes that if everyone in the U.S. went vegan, an additional 350 million people could be fed. 

Disinformation Trend #4: Trustworthy Academic Research Supports Meat

The year 2024 also saw the meat sector lean even further into academia as a means to appear credible and sustainable.

As environmental scientist Jonathan Foley writes for Project Drawdown: “The livestock industry has spent enormous sums telling us fictitious stories of ‘environmentally-friendly’ beef,” including, he notes, “documentaries, think tanks, university labs, and social media influencer campaigns touting so-called ‘solutions’ to beef’s environmental footprint.”

In 2023, the Guardian exposed The Master of Beef Advocacy, or “MBA” program, created by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, to help meat promoters influence and educate the public on the “sustainability” of beef. That same year, the National Pork Board funded a nearly $8.5 million program with researchers from a variety of U.S. universities, to research and improve the industry’s reputation by boosting public “trust” in pork factory farms. And the year prior, The New York Times exposed how the UC Davis Clear Center did not disclose just how much industry funding it received to promote the environmental friendliness of meat and dairy, under the guise of public sector science.

In 2024, the meat industry took this method of information manipulation a step further, targeting another major competitor: cultivated meat. Once again backed by Richard Berman, another “think tank” was created, the ironically named Center for the Environment and Welfare, this time under the guise of helping “consumers, companies, and stakeholders navigate issues related to sustainability and animal welfare.” In 2024, the group conducted “research” and published media op-eds to thwart the progress of cultivated meat.

The Bottom Line

In 2024, the meat industry’s aggressive rebranding efforts, fueled by clever messaging and industry-backed research, sought to counteract competition from more sustainable plant-based alternatives.

As the inevitable impacts of climate change — along with other issues like bird flu — usher us into 2025, “it’s going to be increasingly difficult,” Molidor says, “for the meat and dairy lobby to rebrand their way out of these serious environmental and human harms.”

I became a vegetarian because I thought eating meat and fish was cruel, not for health or climate change reasons.  I thought it might be bad for my health.  In fact, it was the opposite.  I lost 15 kilos, my blood pressure is normal, my cholesterol is low, my blood sugar is normal, etc, etc.  

 

We care about the price of eggs

 By Matt Davies

Oil and gas companies lying about their methane emissions

Hat tip to Justin Mikulka

We have always relied on the oil and gas industry to self-report methane emissions. Now we have independent ways to of measuring those emissions and it turns out they were lying about the emissions. By a lot. The blue lines are actual measurements. The pink are industry numbers. 

(Source: MethaneSat)

How amazing!  Oil and gas companies lying about their emissions!  I simply can't believe it!

It certainly explains why methane levels in the atmosphere have been rising so rapidly.  And possibly why global temperatures are now rising by 0.33 degrees C per decade instead of 0.17 degrees, since over 10 years, methane is 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.

See also:

1,000 super-emitting methane sources

Methane emissions vastly underestimated

Giant Exxon methane leak

Focus far more on methane

They made 1000 times more plastic than they cleaned up

Companies such as ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips have only diverted 0.1% of the plastic they produced since 2019 away from the environment, according to data. Photograph: Larina Marina/Shutterstock

From The Guardian

Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips, some of the world’s biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15m tonnes of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.

Documents from a PR company that have been seen by the Guardian suggest that a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” which were being proposed across the world in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health.

Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15m tonnes of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as “just too ambitious”.

New analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian, looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW’s chairmanship, the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66.


The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132m tonnes of two types of plastic; polyethylene (PE) and PP (polypropylene) in five years – more than 1,000 times the weight of the 118,500 tonnes of waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.

The amount of plastic produced is likely to be an underestimate as it only covers two of the most widely used polymers; polyethylene which is used for plastic bottles and bags, and polypropylene, used for food packaging. It does not include other major plastics such as polystyrene.

The new data were revealed as delegates prepared to meet in Busan, South Korea, to hammer out the world’s first treaty to cut plastic pollution. The treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding global agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle.

But the talks, which have been subject to heavy lobbying by the alliance and fossil fuel companies, are on a knife-edge in a row over whether caps to global plastic production will be included in the final treaty.

Will McCallum, a co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, said the revelations had stripped off the thin layer of greenwash hiding the growing mountain of plastic waste oil companies were producing.

“The recycling schemes they’re promoting can barely make a dent in all the plastic these companies are pumping out,” he said. “They’re letting the running tap flood the house while trying to scoop up the water with a teaspoon. The only solution is to cut the amount of plastic produced in the first place.”

Bill McKibben, a US environmentalist, said: “It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry – which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry – has been at this for decades.”

ProfSteve Fletcher, from the Revolution Plastics Institute at the University of Portsmouth, said recently there was now compelling evidence that only a reduction in primary plastic polymer production, or virgin plastic, would deliver a substantive cut in plastic pollution.

Documents from the PR company Weber Shandwick outline how the AEPW was created in 2019 after they were approached by the American Chemical Council seeking ways to counter the “demonisation” of plastic and the growing calls for bans on plastic items.

The alliance paid Weber Shandwick $5.6m for its work in 2019, according to US tax returns.

The documents state the alliance was intended to change the conversation away from “short-term simplistic bans of plastic” and create “real, long-term solutions” for managing waste, like recycling.

But documents filed in California in September, where the attorney general, Rob Bonta, is suing ExxonMobil, argue the company has deceived the public for 50 years, with misleading public statements and slick marketing, about the recyclability of plastic.

The UN treaty talks start as plastic production continues to soar. Between 2000 and 2019 the global annual production of plastics doubled, reaching 460m tonnes. Plastic waste has more than doubled, from 156m tonnes in 2000 to 353m tonnes in 2019, only 9% of which was ultimately recycled, according to an OECD report.

Fossil fuel giants using influencers to greenwash

Credit: Feodora Chiosea / Alamy Stock Vector

Oil majors are no longer denying that global warming is happening, though no doubt some are still funding denialist stinktanks.  Instead, they're pretending they are doing something to cut emissions, and using influencers to spread their lies. 

From DeSmog

Oil and gas supermajors including Shell and BP are using UK influencers to push false solutions to the climate crisis and manufacture a more family friendly image, DeSmog can reveal.

The influencers have included a popular former BBC presenter, a polar explorer, and an exasperated father of five who needs a break and finds it in the form of BP’s rewards app.

The campaigns have been deployed across a number of social media platforms and are part of a global effort to give “millennials a reason to connect emotionally” with oil and gas firms, and to tackle their perception as “the bad guys”.

DeSmog analysed examples of more than 100 influencers being paid to promote fossil fuel firms worldwide since 2017, from the US to Malaysia, in campaigns that have reached billions of people.

Our analysis uncovered promotional material from two PR firms representing Shell, boasting of the success of their online advertising. One of the PR companies claimed that content fronted by UK inventor Colin Furze reached nearly a billion people, while another claimed that a campaign with explorer Robert Swan OBE made Shell’s audience “31 percent more likely to believe” that the oil company is “committed to cleaner fuels”.

This comes as major polluters are increasingly deploying digital tactics to detract from negative headlines about their record profits and decades-long contribution to climate change.

In 2020, leaked internal documents from BP showed how the firm sought to “reach influencers” in order to become “more relatable, passionate, and authentic” and “win the trust of the younger generation” – admitting that the company is “seen as one of the bad guys”.

Shell last year advertised for a new staff member to manage its TikTok campaigns, while oil and gas giant ExxonMobil has been the highest advertising spender on Facebook and Instagram in the last five years, shelling out $23.1 million since June 2018.

“There’s an endless supply” of greenwashing adverts on social media, environmental content creator Jacob Simon told DeSmog. “While there’s more knowledge in general around climate change and the harms of fossil fuels, I think that people have a lot of trust in creators. When influencers that people know and respect talk about something, they’re likely to believe them.”
‘We Needed Them to Think Differently About Shell’

Shell appears to have been the most prominent employer of influencer advertising over the last seven years.

In April, for example, the fossil fuel giant released a five-part YouTube series hosted by ex-BBC presenter Dallas Campbell, which touted the net zero benefits of hydrogen and featured one-on-one interviews with two Shell executives.

Oil and gas companies have been heavily promoting hydrogen as a green fuel, despite the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimating that hydrogen will represent at best 2.1 percent of total energy consumption in 2050.

“Shell has the ambition to make enough hydrogen from renewable power to kick-start this energy revolution,” Campbell said in the first video of the series, which has gained nearly 30,000 views.

The former BBC presenter has also promoted the series on his personal social media channels. On Instagram, Campbell encouraged his followers to watch his “Hydrogen powered adventure!” but did not tag Shell, nor mention his commercial relationship with the brand.

This was also not the first time that Campbell had partnered with Shell. In 2016, he presented the social media coverage of the company’s Make the Future London festival. “Dallas was fantastic,” Shell said in a testimonial following the event, adding that the social media campaign had fetched over a million views, which the company described as “absolutely huge!”

In 2022, a Harvard University paper found that a “green innovation” narrative was one of the key social media tactics deployed by fossil fuel companies. Analysing 2,325 social media posts from 22 major European polluters, the report found that 72 percent of posts from oil and gas firms tried to emphasise their spending on green technology.

As the study also pointed out, however, these firms invested just 1.7 percent of their annual capital expenditures in low carbon technologies between 2010 and 2018.

It also appears that major polluters have been using influential environmentalists to bolster their social media campaigns.

This includes Robert Swan, a popular advocate for the protection of Antarctica who received an OBE in 1995 after becoming the first person to walk both poles.

In late 2017, Shell sponsored Swan and his son, Barney, to travel to the South Pole and promote its “renewable” biofuels, with Shell distributing the campaign widely on social media.

Behind the publicity stunt was one of Shell’s principal PR agencies, Edelman. The PR firm boasts on its website that the expedition organically reached 600 million people on social media and was so successful that it increased “positive attitudes towards [Shell]” by 12 percent, and made Shell’s audience “31 percent more likely to believe” that the oil company is “committed to cleaner fuels”.

“The company [Shell] tasked Edelman with the job of giving millennials a reason to connect emotionally with Shell’s commitment to a sustainable future,” the Edelman website says. “We needed them to forget their prejudices about ‘big oil’ and think differently about Shell.”

Robert Swan told DeSmog that he is not a celebrity or an influencer but an “explorer” and that Shell helped in their “effort to support biofuel”.

“We needed a backup fuel because the sun doesn’t always shine,” he said.

This was echoed by his son Barney, who advises businesses on “reducing their environmental impact” and runs an environmental charity. He told DeSmog that to make meaningful progress towards the energy transition “you have to work with big industry,” adding that Shell’s biofuels are part of that solution.

“I’ve definitely copped a lot of criticism for it [working with Shell],” he said, yet adding that Shell offered him, “a younger person”, the opportunity to “feel represented” and “build more trust” in their so-called “nature based solutions”.

Ultimately, he said the expedition “was not a Shell story – it was a father and son story, having a good go of it.”
‘The Wrong Side of History’

British inventor Colin Furze, who has 12.5 million followers on YouTube, has also worked with Shell on its social media output. In a campaign produced for the fossil fuel giant by advertising agency EssenceMediacom, Furze co-hosted a six week virtual competition “challenging students to solve real life energy challenges”.

The campaign was co-hosted by US-based science influencer Astronaut Abby and won World Media Group’s 2021 Corporate Influencer Award. According to the award submission, the competition generated 127 million views and nearly one billion impressions, with EssenceMediacom boasting that Shell-branded content “actually outperformed Colin [Furze’s] own organic content benchmarks, achieving 59 percent more interactions than the norm for posts on Colin’s owned channels”.

EssenceMediacom, which belongs to multinational communications company WPP, has previously claimed to help clients “integrate sustainability into their advertising and marketing strategies”.

Environmental content creator Jacob Simon told DeSmog that, “Any agency with fossil fuel clients is on the wrong side of history. Agencies have a responsibility to use their talent and skills for good, to connect and make ads that benefit society and make the world a better place instead of harming us and contributing to global pollution and destruction.”

YouTube also appears to have been a target for Shell. In December 2021, the popular motoring channel Seen Through Glass was paid to host a collaboration with Shell, during which its host Sam Fane was shown around Finali Mondiali, the World Finals of the Scuderia Ferrari Challenge Series. Seen Through Glass has 600,000 YouTube subscribers and was named as one of the Sunday Times’s top 50 UK influencers in 2019.

In 2021, Shell also sponsored GadgetsBoy – a consumer tech channel with 73,000 YouTube subscribers – to test the firm’s new e-scooter.

“These public messaging efforts form part and parcel of a broader greenwashing strategy of which the objective is to portray Shell as a global champion in the energy transition,” Gregory Trencher, an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, told DeSmog.

“Yet this is far from the reality, as despite having a goal in place to reach net zero emissions, Shell has abandoned its plan to reduce its production of oil by 1-2 percent each year up to 2030 and has reaffirmed its plans to grow its gas production.”

A Shell spokesperson said that, “People are well aware that Shell produces the oil and gas they depend on today. However, what many don’t know is that we are also investing billions of dollars in low- and zero-carbon solutions globally as part of our efforts to support the energy transition.

“No energy transition can be successful if people are not aware of the alternatives available to them. Making our customers aware – through advertising or social media – of the low-carbon solutions we offer now or are developing is an important and valid part of our marketing activities.”
Global Reach

Fossil fuel companies have also relied on family lifestyle influencers to promote their products and improve their reputations.

In June 2019, oil and gas supermajor BP used Alex Galbally, a UK-based “dad influencer”, to promote its reward app, “BPme”.

Galbally, who boasts over 100,000 followers on Instagram, posed outside a petrol station along with four of his kids and told his followers that the BP app “really is gonna make my life!”.

Galbally deleted this post after being contacted for comment by DeSmog.

This post was part of a concerted effort to promote the BPme app via lifestyle and cultural influencers across the English-speaking world, with at least 17 influencers posting content that gained at least 675,000 likes and five million views.

DeSmog also identified influencer campaigns promoting fossil fuel companies in other countries including India, Chile, Germany, and Indonesia. The total combined following of all the influencers who have posted fossil fuel partnerships since 2017, in posts analysed by DeSmog, is nearly 60 million.

These campaigns often took advantage of lax restrictions on the labelling of social media sponsorships. In the UK, influencers are required to clearly label when they have been paid to promote a brand – rules that are absent in many other countries.

In 2021, a number of Instagram influencers in India promoted a Shell advertising campaign, racking up millions of video views.

Few of the posts flagged that they were paid adverts (something that wasn’t required under Indian law until this year), though they all used a similar format and included Shell corporate hashtags.

One of the few labelled campaigns was from Indian actress Radhika Apte, who posted a paid video partnership with Shell on Instagram that received 3.6 million views.

“I think that fossil fuel companies are very good at shape shifting to maintain their social licence,” environmental activist and influencer Francesca Willow told DeSmog. “They have smart people working there who have realised that social media is where they can focus their attention, or where they should focus their attention, because other strategies have started to fail them.”

Major polluters also appear to have used influencers to exaggerate the green credentials of their products. In Indonesia, Shell paid popular travel photographer Felgra Yogatama to promote its lubricant Shell Helix Ultra, which he described in an Instagram post as “The world’s first carbon neutral oil, made from natural gas,” claiming that it is used to “ensure high performance and low emissions”.

“The claim of ‘carbon neutral’ engine oil is ludicrous,” said Professor Trencher.

Yogatama, who is followed by over 400,000 people, confirmed to DeSmog that Shell had approached him “to do a project just like any other brand”, but this fact was neither stated in the body of the post nor in the label, giving the impression of an organic post.

“Greenwashing attempts have been rampant with the big oil and gas companies for a long time,” said Arild Wæraas, an Associate Professor at Oslomet Business School, who has studied corporate attempts to exaggerate their social and environmental work.

Ultimately, though, Wæraas doesn’t believe that social media campaigns will measurably shift public perceptions of big polluters. “I don’t think Shell and others will be able to improve their reputation much until they transition fully to producing green energy,” he said.

Meanwhile, environmental groups are determined to expose the tactics of fossil fuel giants and to persuade influencers not to work with them.

“We need to educate people more on what these companies are actually doing so that when you are approached as a creator, you don’t fall for it,” Tolmeia Gregory, associate creative director at Clean Creatives, told DeSmog.

This was echoed by James Turner, founder of the creative collective Glimpse. “The fossil fuel industry is using the glossy sheen of influencers to stop it looking like a creaking dinosaur,” he said. That’s why we need young creators of all stripes to avoid the likes of Shell and BP and use their talent to promote brands that are actually serious about climate change. This influencer stuff is just getting started, and we need to nip it in the bud while we still can.”

All the individuals and firms named in this article were approached for comment.

Australia's dodgy carbon offsets

From The New Daily.

July 5 was a big day. As well as being the planet’s hottest day ever, it was when the Bureau of Meteorology put the chance of an El Niño at 70 per cent this year, so it’s going to get worse, soon, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated that it will cost the world US$196 trillion to achieve net zero by 2050.

As you contemplate that trio of troubles, you might want to make yourself even more miserable with a website called the Carbon Integrity Explorer, as I’ve been doing.

It lets you examine in detail the regeneration projects in Australia that are behind the Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) issued by the Clean Energy Regulator (CER). These native forest regeneration projects are the largest project in the scheme, accounting for around 30 per cent of all ACCUs issued to date.

Buying ACCUs allows companies to offset their carbon emissions to meet emission reduction obligations under the Labor government’s new carbon pricing scheme without reducing their emissions.

I spent an absorbing, increasingly dismal few hours over the weekend clicking on random abatement projects, trying to find any in which the tree cover had materially increased, and is therefore responsible for removing some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of these projects were registered in 2015-16 but a large proportion of them claim they started in 2010-2012, so plenty of time for trees to have grown.

I found one, and only one, on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. It’s called the Arbon-Tooligie Human Induced Regeneration project, and covers 7863 hectares, which is very small. Tree cover has increased, and 148,397 ACCUs have been issued to its promoters, currently worth $29.75 apiece, or a total of about $4.5 million.

For every other project I clicked on, the tree cover had either decreased, or the increase was “negligible”. Yet they had all also been issued with ACCUs, hundreds of thousands of them, worth millions of dollars.

A group of academics at Australian National University led by Professor Andrew Macintosh has gone through all the projects on the Carbon Integrity Explorer so you and I don’t have to.

Here are their results:

To summarise: 27.5 million ACCUs, worth $825 million at today’s spot market price, have been issued for projects where the tree cover has decreased, or the increase has been negligible.

And to qualify as an “increase”, the trend in tree cover only has to be an increase of 0.25 per cent per year, which is hardly going to save the planet.

Two questions arise: First, what happens when the regulator eventually gets around to inspecting the projects to see whether they genuinely reduced atmospheric carbon? And second, what the hell is going on?

As to the first question: The rules require that by the 15th year of the project, 90 per cent of area that has been credited must have regenerated and have forest cover. If the credited area doesn’t have forest cover by then, proponents might have to hand back the ACCUs they have received.

To choose one at random – the 24,806 ha Wapweelah Regeneration Project near Bourke in New South Wales, which was registered in August 2015 and has produced a healthy crop of 441,526 ACCUs for its promoters, currently worth $13.2 million.

Yet its tree cover has decreased, and its integrity is assessed as “high risk” by the Explorer because most of the credited area has never been comprehensively cleared, its tree cover has gone backwards and the trends in tree cover in the credited areas are worse than those in the area surrounding the property.

Most of these projects are owned by farmers who have been persuaded by ACCU brokers like the firm called Climate Friendly to supplement their income by regenerating native forests in areas that have never been comprehensively cleared by reducing grazing pressure from livestock or feral animals like goats. They call it carbon farming.

According to the CER website, the “contractor” for the Wapweelah project is Phillip Ridge, who I learn from Google is the owner of the “iconic” Jandra Station near Bourke with his wife Di and four kids.

Phil and Di Ridge have until 2030 to get forest cover on this project from its current levels, of around 22 per cent, up to 90 per cent, even though it has been essentially static since the project was first registered. If they can’t, they might have to hand back their ACCUs.

The Ridges would be just one of dozens of farming families in a state of extreme “regulatory risk”. The CER doesn’t have to demand the return of ACCUs if the abatement of a project doesn’t measure up, but it can, and the farmers have no way of knowing whether they will.

In any case, the carbon abatement that was supposed to have happened largely doesn’t appear to exist. This means the steel manufacturer (or other emitter) who bought the ACCUs has been allowed to continue to emit but there has been no offsetting reduction in emissions elsewhere.

Meanwhile the brokers who organised the deal for the farmers and took their cut are long gone.

As for the bigger question of what the hell is going on here, I really have no idea, but I suspect it’s called politics.

Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen happily promotes the government’s emissions reduction credentials but given the amount of offsets that are being doled out for regenerating native forests in the desert that either aren’t regenerating or would have regenerated anyway without the projects, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the appearance of doing something is a lot more important than actually doing something.

And with an El Niño on the way, a lot of the trees that have been counted up to now will either die when Australia burns or die in the drought we’re about to have.

Apart from anything else, the CER, and therefore the government, is going to have some tough decisions over the next few years – either demand that drought-stricken farmers like the Ridges spend millions on ACCUs so they can hand them back or let the non-existent abatement stand.

Meanwhile, the government is facing a very awkward shortfall in its emissions reduction target.

The chairman of the new Net Zero Authority, Greg Combet, has the task of making net zero happen by 2050 by cajoling, bullying or paying the companies in the safeguard mechanism to cut their emissions by 4.9 per cent per year, as promised by the Prime Minister.

For airlines, cement and steel manufacturers and other big emitters still waiting for a technology breakthrough to rescue them, it will be all about buying ACCUs to offset their emissions rather than actually reducing them, because they can’t. And of course they’ll be passing on the cost of the ACCUs to their customers.

But what if the offsets don’t offset?

According to Carbon Integrity Explorer, 27.5 million – or about half of the ACCUs issued so far – don’t offset.

This is going to be one of those train crashes that everybody involved can see coming, but they are hiding their eyes, hoping to make it through till tomorrow.

Everybody --- almost everybody --- now pretends to believe that we need to slash emissions by 2030.   Yet, as the Ozzie offsets furphy shows, they don't really care, and they're not in fact going to introduce policies or take actions which will achieve this.  The ALP (Labor Party) is supposed to be a progressive party, "committed" to cutting emissions and reaching net-zero by 2050.  But Labor is still authorising new coal mines and gas fields, whose emissions, even in Australia, will dwarf existing emissions from all other sources.  Meanwhile, the purported fall in emissions as a result of offsets is in fact not happening.  

Greenwashing.  Lies.  Hypocrisy.

Wannabe dictator

 Fox "News" does it again --- lies.  

Oh, the irony.

By Fiona Katauskas

I want my lawyer

 

Greenwashing

Pakistan floods, 2022

It's perfectly obvious to everybody except a few nutters and half-wits that we are facing a climate emergency right now. We don't have to wait until 2030 or 2040; we are already seeing record droughts, record bushfires, record heatwaves, and record floods. The extraordinary floods in Pakistan, after an equally extraordinary heatwave, are just the latest manifestation of a climate spiralling out of control. It is abundantly obvious that the climate emergency isn't in 2030 or 2040. It's now: record heatwaves and droughts in Europe, China, the USA, record floods in Pakistan. After similar records last year ... and the year before ....

But despite claims about how 'concerned' and 'committed' everybody all is, emissions keep on rising.  And rising.  And rising. 

For example, the ALP (Australian Labor Party) says it wants to cut emissions by 43% from 2005 (which is a measly 23% from now). It won an election on this policy.  But it will continue to allow expansions in oil and gas exploration, the emissions of which will vastly exceed the planned 23% cut.

Westpac (an Ozzie bank) has touchy-feely ads on its home page about buying an EV. But has still lent ±$2 billion to fossil fuel projects recently. Macquarie Bank, another Ozzie bank, has been running ads for EVs  (how good are we?) while still lending to fossil fuel companies.  Ampol (one of Oz's largest petrol retailers) has introduced a 'carbon-neutral' fuel. But it's going to 'achieve' that by using dodgy offsets, not by actually producing carbon-neutral petrol. Powershop (a major Ozzie electricity utility, owned by Shell), is allegedly 100% carbon-neutral, but achieves this by using offsets.  

And these are just a few examples.  Companies and governments know we are frightened and respond by pretending to care, and pretending to cut emissions.  But actually nothing effective is being done.

But it's not just companies, alas.  When I suggest to someone that they can cut their personal emissions by 25% by becoming vegetarian, because they’ve just told me how concerned they are about climate change, they say 'I'm not interested in that vegetarian rubbish'.  We all pretend we care, but we're not actually prepared to take the steps need to slash emissions.  (For the record, I'm vegetarian, I have solar panels on my roof, and I buy my electricity from a genuine green utility which does not use offsets to 'reduce' its carbon footprint.  My next car will be a hybrid or an EV)

Meanwhile, emissions keep on rising. And temperatures keep in rising. And the climate emergency keeps on getting worse. Nothing *effective* has been done. But ppl in power pretend they care, and proudly point to their 'plans'. Greenwashing. Lies. Hypocrisy. As we race towards catastrophe.

Alex Jones, crisis actor

 By Michael de Adder

Roe is settled law

By Pat Bagley