How fossil fuel companies are turning to influencers

Images of rolling fields, happy families and winning athletes, plastered with buzzwords like “eco-friendly,” “sustainable” and “green.”

This is how fossil fuel companies want to be seen – and they’re spending millions on social media to make it happen.

That’s right: those same coal, oil and gas companies that are by far the most significant contributors to the climate crisis, accounting for 94 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2023.

The tactics they use are known as greenwashing – a deceptive strategy that aims to portray their activities as environmentally friendly.

Their goal? To delay climate action so that they can continue pumping fossil fuels out of the ground for decades to come.

How fossil fuel greenwashing works

Climate disinformation is nothing new: for more than 40 years, fossil fuel companies have known that their actions are warming the climate – and they’ve been working to bury the evidence ever since.

Today, that deception has found a new home on social media, powered by new tactics, according to a 2022 Harvard University report commissioned by Greenpeace.

“We specifically looked at what we call organic posts and advertisements on social media,” says Cameron Hickey, CEO of the National Conference on Citizenship, who contributed to the report.

“What we saw was that different kinds of companies use social media in different ways.”

The researchers found that fossil fuel companies often linked themselves to sports and social causes. A report by the New Weather Institute found that major oil and gas companies are currently spending USD 5.6 billion on sports sponsorship – a tactic known as sportswashing.

This ‘misdirection’ focuses the audience’s attention on engaging topics unrelated to the companies’ main business operations, say the authors of the Harvard report.

Similarly, Hickey points to a style of communication termed ‘wokewashing,’ in which fossil fuel companies talk about social justice issues like youth empowerment and LGBTQIA+ issues.

“They will post content on Pride Day or International Women’s Day. They are attaching their brand to issues that, while not specifically about green content and sustainability, are about improving the public’s perspective of the brand.”

But that doesn’t mean fossil fuel companies are turning the spotlight away from themselves, Hickey points out.

“Although the energy companies do, in some cases, use social media to essentially advertise their products, the majority – like Exxon, BP and TotalEnergies – communicate about their activities,” he says.

This often includes their corporate sustainability efforts, either overtly or indirectly by partnering with other companies with a more public face.

“The reach of a post from, say, Mercedes about their electric cars is potentially going to reach a lot more people than a post from an energy company who no one is particularly interested in following,” Hickey explains.

The X factor

For decades, the fossil fuel industry outright denied the impact fossil fuel companies have on the climate, but that has changed as the evidence has become irrefutable.

A 2023 study conducted by academics at Northeastern University looked at the climate communication strategies used by fossil fuel companies, specifically on X/Twitter.

After analyzing more than 25,000 tweets over three years, the researchers noticed a distinct shift away from outright climate denial to a more subtle ‘discourse of delay.’

This includes publicly supporting and endorsing climate action but doing little in practice and strategically delaying real change.

“Nobody is actually denying climate change anymore – they’re just trying to adapt to reality,” says researcher Yutong Si.

One example is how these companies are now touting natural gas as a ‘sustainable’ fuel and promoting it to delay the energy transition and obstruct climate action.

“A tweet from Shell, for example, shows how natural gas is portrayed as a key fuel of the future alongside wind and solar and how natural gas can contribute to meeting our future energy demands and also reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Si.

“What they are actually doing is trying to delay the change, and by linking these energy sources together, they can keep drilling for natural gas.”

The ability of social media to rapidly spread information and foster viral movements is reshaping the landscape of engagement and, in turn, public opinion.

“People who look at the tweets might think, ‘oh, natural gas is good’ and keep using it in their daily lives,” Si warns.

The influencer tactic

Beyond greenwashing, sportswashing and wokewashing, the industry has another trick up its sleeve: paying social media influencers to get their message across.

BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies are among the oil companies now partnering with influencers worldwide, from India to South Africa to the U.S., according to an investigation by AFP.

Likewise, an analysis by DeSmog identified more than 100 U.K. influencers with fossil fuel connections, which it says forms part of a global effort to give young people “a reason to connect emotionally” with oil and gas companies.

It’s no secret that young people are more concerned about the climate crisis than their parents: a global study published in The Lancet in 2021 found that 70 per cent of people aged 16 to 25 were very or extremely worried about the climate – a phenomenon referred to as eco-anxiety.

So, how are fossil fuel companies tackling this one?

“Lots of fossil fuel companies are now turning to TikTok, which has a younger audience,” says Si.

Chevron, for example, spent some USD 1.8 million on TikTok ads promoting carbon capture and storage, “efficient” fossil fuel extraction and its “renewable gasoline blend,” which it markets as an eco-friendly fuel.

And during COP29 last month, TikTok’s moderators turned a blind eye to climate denialism even though the platform’s guidelines explicitly prohibit it.

Fighting back

Even as climate disasters rack up, the barrage of climate disinformation has shown no signs of slowing down.

Now, the United Nations is stepping in to tackle the issue, announcing a new initiative with UNESCO and the Brazilian government during last month’s G20 summit.

And at the Bonn Climate Change Conference in June, Secretary-General António Guterres called on countries to ban fossil fuel advertising in the same way that they had previously banned advertising by the tobacco industry.

“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action – with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns,” he said.

“They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies fueling the madness. I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.”

Until that happens, one of the most effective ways to hold fossil fuel companies accountable is climate litigation, which is growing increasingly popular.

In fact, the number of climate-related cases filed each year has nearly tripled since the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to a report by Oil Change International. The most successful lawsuits involved allegations of greenwashing or misleading advertising, it said.

One example is a case brought by ClientEarth that argued BP’s advertising campaigns were misleading the public because they gave a false impression of the size of the company’s renewable and low-carbon energy investments. BP eventually withdrew the ads.

Last year, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority banned a Shell campaign promoting its green initiatives, while California is suing five major oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute and going after profits they allegedly gained through false advertising.

But Hickey believes that real change will only come when there is much more transparency in the industry and more research into whether companies are actually living up to their green claims.

“For example, Greenpeace Italy sued the Italian energy company ENI in part based on the findings of our report,” he says.

That Greenpeace case, a joint civil suit with the NGO ReCommon and 12 Italian citizens, will be heard by the Italian Supreme Court in early 2025.