Welcome back to COP, Look, Listen. It may feel like we’ve entered an upside-down world when ExxonMobil’s (henceforth Exxon) CEO Darren Woods calls on US president-elect Donald Trump not to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. But upon the smallest bit of scrutiny, such a request makes sense - for Exxon’s bottom line, of course.

Before we get to that, though, let’s look at the actions of Exxon, which speak louder than its words.

FINDINGS OF THE DAY

Exxon’s advertising in a nutshell 

Past studies of ExxonMobil’s advertisements have identified their misleading nature. But that has not stopped the company from framing fossil-fuel driven approaches such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) as the solution to decarbonisation.

Exxon’s most-viewed and most-recent Meta ads suggest a focus on promoting CCS to specific geographies, with suspiciously hyped claims of financial windfalls where the carbon is stored. Not mentioned in any ads is the significant risk involved with living anywhere near a carbon dioxide pipeline or storage facility. This is colloquially known as the “CO2 pipeline kill zone” due to the terrifying consequences when stored CO2 leaks - as Exxon’s carbon storage already has.

These three ads are broadly indicative of the types of content CAAD found on the Meta ads library, with additional Meta ads covering CCS, hydrogen, and local promises of economic benefits in Texas and Arkansas.

Tip of the iceberg

Those ads, with millions of impressions across platforms, are merely those directly attributable to the company and disclosed via social media ad databases. 

Once you account for TV, radio, billboards, sponsorships, and so on, the global advertising budgets of fossil fuel giants can be in the hundreds of millions - meaning billions of impressions.

And that’s not accounting for separate entities that are funded by ExxonMobil. For example, in 2021, ExxonMobil disclosed that the American Petroleum Institute is “the largest individual recipient of ExxonMobil lobbying funds.” API, in turn, is also running advertisements on at least LinkedIn, Meta and Google – some on behalf of its front group, Energy Citizens

Through these layers of funded entity pass-throughs, ExxonMobil can preserve its corporate brand image through greenwashing, while letting its lobbyists like API and its astroturf operations like Energy Citizens serve as its attack dogs.

Back to Paris. What’s in it for Exxon? 

Let’s dig a little deeper into that Woods quote. He said that Trump should stay in the Paris agreement, specifically so the US could “participate .. to drive a similar level of common sense … that balances emissions reductions with the need for affordable energy”.

Inspiring. Indeed, in US policy making and at COPs, ExxonMobil and others in the oil industry deploy a strategy of maintaining seats at negotiating tables to weaken action, greenwash, and maximise profit even in a carbon-constrained world.

Exxon likely wants to use international climate financing to continue developing partnerships and investments in - you guessed it - carbon capture and storage in more places across the world. Here, past may be prologue. In the United States, Exxon lobbied for CCS provisions in the US Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, even while it lobbied against other parts of the bill. Given Exxon’s record of doing one thing and saying another, this was hardly surprising. It contributed to the bill being “deeply compromised” with the implementation described as co-opted. 

Kathy Mulvey, the Fossil Fuel Accountability Campaign Director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told us from Baku, “Perhaps the fossil fuel lobby isn’t trying to roll back last year’s COP decision to transition away from fossil fuels. Instead, they may be trying to co-opt it–and swoop in to steal the climate finance desperately needed by Global South countries”.

What can we do?

The climate community has no hope of competing, dollar for dollar, with the advertising budget of ExxonMobil, much less the rest of the fossil fuel industry. And clearly Exxon isn’t slowing down its public relations efforts, even, or especially, in light of the many, many lawsuits against the company for its decades of misleading public relations efforts. 

That’s why some CAAD members across the globe are pushing for a ban on fossil fuel ads, modelled after the ban on tobacco ads. The climate science is clear that we can’t keep drilling for oil and digging up coal, so why let them continue advertising it? 

Big Tech’s not proving particularly eager to give up the fossil fuel industry’s money though, which is why nearly 100 organisations and experts have just issued an open letter calling on governments to encourage companies to acknowledge, define, and act to stop the spread of climate disinformation on their platforms.

GOOD TO KNOW

Trump? Oh yeah, about that... We mentioned in Friday's edition that while the UK continues to churn out misleading climate content as like last year, the US (and Canada) is sharing comparatively less. We have been seeing narratives in North America. For example, COP got a mention on the US’s version of GB News a couple of times, once citing Trump as a reason not to pay attention to the conference. The opening days saw the usual cries of hypocrisy - albeit far fewer than previous year - including mentions of the attendance of the Taliban. But nothing’s breaking through. As we’ve said before, interest in COP from issue stacking online disinformation networks tends to be inversely correlated with the amount of other interesting things they could write about.

Fossil fuel lobbyists are partying hard at COP29 in Baku! At least 1,773 of them registered to get down on the Baku hosted climate dancefloor – that's a bigger party than the ones from the countries actually exposed to the lived experience of the climate crisis. Some even managed to shimmy in with official country delegations. It seems Big Oil is still playing DJ, taking actual, effective climate policy off the playlist with its direct access to negotiators and policy makers.

Fossil fuel misinformation? There’s a tracker for that. InfluenceMap launched a Fossil Fuel Misinformation Tracker featuring analysis of mis- and disinformation PR campaigns from more than 100 fossil fuel companies and industry associations since COP28. 2,400 is the number of examples of misleading climate arguments the tracker has clocked. Read the analysis to learn more about the most common, misaligned scientific narratives: solution scepticism, policy neutrality, affordability and energy security.

Another report just dropped...it’s also about fossil fuels. “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling” shows how the fossil fuel and the plastics industry have conned the public by promoting recycling as a viable solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years. They’ve carried on this deception half a century despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is neither technically or economically viable at scale.

GREENWASHING TRACKER

Welcome back to our regular feature, the greenwashing tracker! The abundance of deceptive promotions by the fossil fuel industry, especially during COP, is a lot to get your head around. We’ve got you covered. 

Found something particularly interesting? Send it our way at contact@caad.info

If you have any investigative leads CAAD should explore, or want to find out more about our research and intel during COP, please email contact@caad.info. We also have team members on the ground in Azerbaijan who are available for interviews and side-events. 

Click here to unsubscribe | Sent to: philip.newell@gsccnetwork.org

CAAD, caad.network ,, , Brussels, Belgium