October 5, 2021
Green Washing Ads Can't Remove 🦕 Oil Stain from 😈 Fossil Fuel Investors
A
new analysis covered at DeSmog looked at over 3,000 social media ads and posts from six major European fossil fuel companies between December of 2019 through April of 2021, and found
63% painted the climate-destroying company as climate-friendly.
“Half of the companies analysed,” wrote Rachel Sherrington, “dedicated over
80 percent of their posts to highlighting their
involvement in green and climate-friendly work such as
building up more renewable energy capacity. Green investments, however, make up just
12 percent of
these companies’ portfolios on average based on publicly available figures."
The biggest discrepancy was found at Preem, where 81% of their promos are green, while 98% of their business is dirty fuels. Shell was next, with 90% of its investments going into fossil fuels, while 81% of its promotional materials focusing on its “green” energy generally and
13% on renewables specifically, which comprise
just 1% of its energy investments.
One of the 😈 newest strategies, borne out in the ads, is to paint itself as what disinfo expert Geoffrey Supran has termed a “fossil fuel savior” framing, that “helps defend the status quo” with “silver-bullet techno-fixes that aren’t yet commercially viable.”
Overall, 20% of the ads were about the companies' climate plans, and another 10% about sustainable transportation. Only 13% of ads were about conventional gas and oil products, and only 3% touted the benefits of fossil fuels. The rest were a mix of ads about renewable energy generally, solar, or gas as a green fuel (4% each), a circular economy, bioenergy, hydrogen, efficiency (3% each), climate policy, wind, and carbon capture (2%), and hydro and nature-based climate solutions (1% each).
Having moved from questioning the reality of climate change to championing itself as the solution, the industry is “positioning itself, astoundingly, as a climate leader,” Loyola University professor Karen Sokol told DeSmog. Sokol believes the phrase “'greenwashing’ tends to minimize the wrongful nature of the industry’s messaging. It is a systematic deceptive marketing campaign designed to interfere with the solution that is necessary to respond to the climate emergency: stopping fossil fuel production.”
By promoting things like hydrogen or carbon capture from power plants, they’re not just promoting false solutions that wouldn’t address the problem, Sokol said, but instead “would
accelerate the climate crisis, perpetuate existing and create new harms that disproportionately impact communities who have long been on the frontlines of fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Sokol also told DeSmog that “the industry’s ‘climate and society friendly’
messaging is nothing new”
it is instead “just the latest instantiation of its disinformation campaign designed to allow it to continue profiting from deadly and planet-destroying fossil fuel products.”
There’s that discrepancy, and then there’s the fact that only 16% of the ads focused on fossil fuels at all, a small figure given that
the companies are still investing 70-98% their resources into 🦕 fossil fuels. Most of the posts weren’t even ads though, technically they were just organic content. Only 18 percent were designated as ads in Facebook, so while the YouTube and Twitter disclosures might increase that percentage, the reality is that there is little to no difference between a company’s advertisements and their social media posts.
In other words, while
deniers love to cast themselves as free speech martyrs, the reality is that there’s already a
well-known term for climate denial, disinformation, and greenwashing, whether in content they pay for or post regularly to the platforms: false advertising.