The rejection was the second time this year that the Supreme Court refused to wade into the lawsuits, which accuse oil companies of deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels. “It’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court is not going to get involved until there’s a final judgment in one of these cases, and that’ll be after trial,” said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School.

While Big Oil companies recently won some lower-court battles in lawsuits brought against them by state and local governments, experts say the Supreme Court’s actions, along with positive rulings for communities in other cases, make it increasingly likely that fossil fuel companies will eventually stand trial in multiple courtrooms across the country.

Now that the Supreme Court has denied repeated attempts by the companies and their red state allies to have the cases tossed out of court, the day of reckoning is fast approaching.

– Pat Parenteau, Senior Fellow, Vermont Law School

The fossil fuel industry has itself admitted it could face “massive monetary liability” from the lawsuits. After another failed effort by industry allies to stop those cases at the Supreme Court, supporters of the cases are sounding alarms about the possibility that oil companies will turn to a Republican-controlled federal government to gift them a political escape hatch.

Minnesota lawsuit targeting ‘campaign of deception’ moves forward

One of the lawsuits the Republican attorneys general had targeted was brought by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison against ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and Koch Industries. Last month, in a victory for Minnesota, Judge Reynaldo Aligada upheld nearly all of the state’s claims accusing the companies and trade group of violating state laws through a “campaign of deception” about their products’ harm to the climate.

The lawsuit seeks to make Exxon, Koch and the API fund a corrective public education campaign about the link between fossil fuels and climate change, publish all the research they conducted on the subject, and disgorge the profits they made through false advertising, among other remedies.

Minnesota’s win followed a series of dismissals of climate-deception lawsuits in New Jersey and Maryland, where state court judges sided with oil companies in their characterizations of the cases as efforts to reduce global emissions, and determined that the states’ claims were preempted by federal law.

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Aligada called that argument “unpersuasive,” concluding that federal laws “would not preempt the State’s claims because those claims do not aim to restrain pollution or regulate emissions,” and that Minnesota’s complaint is about “state law consumer deception and failure-to-warn claims that have never been subject to federal common law.”

The ruling added Minnesota to a list of climate accountability plaintiffs – including Massachusetts, Honolulu, Vermont and Boulder – that have prevailed over fossil fuel defendants’ motions to dismiss their cases, some of which dealt with the same question of preemption and what the cases seek to achieve.

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a ruling from the Hawai‘i Supreme Court that rejected Big Oil’s federal preemption arguments against Honolulu’s case. The Colorado Supreme Court will soon decide whether to uphold a similar ruling that allowed Boulder’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to proceed toward trial.

Puerto Rico takes a page from court victories against Big Tobacco

In Puerto Rico, a newer legal theory for climate-deception cases is poised to get a green light to move forward in federal court.

Puerto Rico municipalities were the first to charge fossil fuel companies with violating the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, arguing in their lawsuit that oil majors engaged in a “multi-year, multi-million-dollar, multi-organization propaganda deception campaign designed explicitly to undermine climate science.” Those RICO charges have now “survived the first test,” Parenteau said, after a magistrate judge recommended in February that the 37 municipalities’ racketeering and antitrust claims be upheld.

Racketeering and antitrust charges may be new for climate litigation, but they were leveraged by the U.S. Department of Justice against major tobacco corporations, which in 2006 were found guilty of coordinating to deceive the public about the link between smoking and cancer. State-level racketeering claims have also been added to the complaint filed against fossil fuel companies by Hoboken, New Jersey.

In his recommendations to the federal district court judge on how the case should proceed, Magistrate Judge Héctor Ramos-Vega in San Juan said he would grant oil companies’ motions to dismiss Puerto Rico law-based claims including fraud, public nuisance and failure to warn, finding that they were inadequately laid out in the complaint. Yet he joined Aligada and other state court judges in rejecting the companies’ arguments that the lawsuits are aimed at reducing emissions and should be tossed out.

Local officials involved in the case are seeking to make Big Oil help pay for their communities to recover from a series of fatal hurricanes in 2017, including Hurricane Maria, and to adapt to future threats. Those disasters were in part the result of the companies’ campaigns “to convince consumers that their fossil fuel-based products did not – and would not – alter the climate, knowing full well the consequences of their combined carbon pollution on Puerto Rico,” according to the complaint.

“At the heart of Plaintiffs’ claims for relief is a purported decades-long misinformation and propaganda campaign,” Ramos-Vega wrote. “Thus, the culprit is Defendants’ words, not their emissions.”

Oil industry allies reach for Republican support

There are growing signs that industry allies are not resting on their laurels as cases against Big Oil continue to inch forward.

Last month, an industry front group called American Energy Institute launched a new campaign bemoaning “coordinated lawfare from radical climate groups” as “the biggest risk” to President Trump’s energy agenda. In The Guardian, Dharna Noor reported that a truck parked outside a major conference of oil and gas executives in Houston was broadcasting that “lawfare and anti-energy laws are threatening America’s pro-consumer energy dominance” and linking to an op-ed by another front group, Alliance for Consumers.

The groups have ties to conservative billionaire Leonard Leo, who was also linked to allied interest groups that unsuccessfully pushed Supreme Court justices to take up the cases. In response to the justices’ latest denial, Minnesota Attorney General Ellison also drew a connection: “The Republican Attorneys General Association takes its marching orders from its largest donors: fossil fuel interests and Leonard Leo.”

Advocates now fear that this same network and others, having failed to persuade the justices to step in, could turn to Congress to provide immunity to the industry. Last week, nearly 200 advocacy groups urged Senate Minority LeaderChuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to preemptively oppose any liability waiver for fossil fuel companies.

Tom Pyle, president of the industry-aligned think tank Institute for Energy Research, told E&E News that advocates’ concerns were “complete and total paranoia.” But there’s a well-documented history to back them up. An immunity provision for Big Oil has twice made its way into other proposed pieces of legislation, in 2017 and 2020.

With more cases poised to reach trial, Parenteau said, the industry might not pass up the opportunity to “seek protection from the Republican-controlled Congress.”

“Now that the Supreme Court has denied repeated attempts by the companies and their red state allies to have the cases tossed out of court, the day of reckoning is fast approaching,” he said.

This article by ExxonKnews is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. You can read the original here. 

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At least 39 fossil fuel companies and 12 industry-linked organizations – including Shell, TC Energy, and the Pathways Alliance – have supplied classroom resources that downplay the sector’s role in driving global heating, states a new report. The materials emphasize consumer responsibility and technological solutions, while largely omitting the need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.

The post How Big Oil promotes climate change misinformation in Canadian schools appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Adfree Cities and the New Weather Institute filed the complaint this week with the U.K. branch of the OECD. They charge that WPP’s work for major fossil fuel polluters like BP, Saudi Aramco and Shell, along with its work for other heavily polluting industries such as carmakers, airlines and plastics, makes the company accountable for enabling pollution as well as human rights violations. According to DeSmog’s research, WPP – the world’s largest advertising agency by revenue – also works with TotalEnergies, as well as a number of other oil and gas clients.

“The complaint significantly raises the legal risks for advertising firms,” said Harj Narulla, a barrister representing the climate campaign groups and co-author of the complaint. “By continuing to work for polluting clients, WPP is failing to meet its own environmental commitments and contributing to harm on a global scale.”

The groups filed the complaint at the OECD’s “National Contact Point” in the United Kingdom, where WPP is headquartered. The campaigners say this is the first time the OECD has received a complaint against an advertising company.

“While claiming to take the climate crisis seriously, WPP has become the chief propagandist for some of the most polluting corporations on the planet – many of whom are shredding their own, already limited, green pledges,” Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute, told DeSmog. “This complaint is designed to compel WPP and its subsidiaries to comply with international rules it has signed up to, and the promises and claims it has made.”

Simms and his co-complainants say that WPP must disclose the emissions generated by its work for high-polluting clients, also known as “advertised emissions”; conduct due diligence to prevent damage to the environment and human rights as a result of its business operations; and drop clients not aligned with climate goals. “All this would just bring WPP into line with what it already claims to live up to,” Simms said.

As of 2024, WPP had more fossil fuel industry contracts – at least 79 – than its major ad industry rivals, according to research by campaign group Clean Creatives.

The complaint referenced two DeSmog investigations that had highlighted WPP’s work for big polluters.

Last July, DeSmog revealed that oil and gas companies had run more than 240 ad campaigns on the London public transport network since the mayor pledged to make the city “carbon zero” by 2030. Freedom-of-information requests sent by DeSmog showed that BP and Shell – serviced at the time by WPP ad agencies including VML, EssenceMediacom, Grey, Landor and Mindshare – had specifically targeted Westminster station with ads containing political messaging.

In October, DeSmog found that a WPP agency headquartered in South Africa called MetropolitanRepublic had enlisted social media influencers to promote TotalEnergies’ controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline, even as anti-pipeline campaigners suffered beatings and arrests by Ugandan police.

The complaint also referenced two profiles of WPP agencies, content marketing agency SJR, and media buying agency EssenceMediacom, featured in DeSmog’s Advertising and Public Relations Database – a freely accessible resource that profiles more than three dozen agencies working to promote oil and gas companies.

WPP did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Enablers to planetary destruction’

In a June 2024 address, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on nations to ban fossil fuel advertising and urged the advertising and PR industry “to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones.”

In 2022, WPP CEO Mark Read justified such work as supporting oil and gas companies to transition their business models from fossil fuels to clean energy, the trade publication Ad Week reported. In its 2023 annual report, WPP said that its “purpose” was to “use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients and communities.” The company also stated that taking on client work “designed to frustrate the objectives of the Paris [climate] Agreement” went against its internal policy.

U.K. ad regulators have banned several ads produced by WPP-owned agencies in recent years for making misleading green claims. In 2023, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned  Shell’s “Cleaner Energy” ad, created by Wunderman Thompson (now VML), for giving the impression that it was invested significantly in producing energy from low-carbon sources, which actually made up only a very small portion of Shell’s business.

In 2022, the ASA banned an ad created for U.K. bank HSBC, a leading financier of fossil fuels, by Ogilvy, for misleadingly portraying the company as doing a lot to fight climate change, while “omitt[ing] significant information about HSBC’s contribution to carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions.” WPP agencies also work with major plastics polluters, including Coca-Cola, Danone and Nestlé, which together are responsible for 17% of branded plastic pollution globally. Experts warn that plastic pollution is creating a global crisis for environmental and human health.

Reporting a company to the OECD triggers a five-stage process, beginning with an initial assessment to determine whether the OECD can accept the complaint. If it does, the OECD may then mediate a discussion between the complainants and the company to reach an agreement.

In 2019, BP stopped running a series of ads after the environmental legal group ClientEarth filed an OECD complaint charging that the ads misled the public by focusing on BP’s low-carbon products, and not the extent of its annual spend on oil and gas.

While OECD guidelines are not legally binding, they are backed by the countries that are OECD members. If WPP were found to be in breach of the guidelines, it could have reputational repercussions.

Paris-based advertising giant Havas acknowledged that its work with fossil fuel clients could harm its reputation in a recent prospectus for its listing on the Dutch stock exchange. The company had faced a backlash since September 2023, when it won a major account with Shell, and four of its agencies lost their B Corp ethical business certification as a result of the deal.

This article by DeSmog is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. 

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How did the fossil fuel industry manage to raise a generation of climate change deniers? A research group has just identified a big component of that attitude shift: the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign to bury the truth by cozying up to universities and discrediting climate science.

The researchers, from Canada, the United States and Ireland, just published the first comprehensive review of academic and private research into the oil industry’s attempts to stymie and stifle climate science. “In an era of widespread concern about corporatization and declining public funding of higher education, and a worsening climate crisis met by limited government action,” their report says, “fossil fuel companies have embedded themselves in universities across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and beyond.”

(By the way, that’s not just language bias at work here. The researchers note that these four nations lead the world in per capita carbon-dioxide emissions and rank among the countries most responsible “for holding back international climate negotiations.”)

The evidence indicates that the oil lobbyists fund research, sit on governing boards (especially at the University of Alberta), host recruitment events and seek opportunities to influence academic curricula. As Jennie Stephens, a study co-author who is a professor at Ireland’s Maynooth University, told the climate news service DeSmog, “When you pull it all together, you realize how pervasive a strategy this has been.”

A few examples of the sort of skullduggery the researchers collected: BP sponsors Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, which aims to “lead the way to a compelling and sustainable solution to the carbon and climate change problem.” A recent peer-reviewed article funded by the American Gas Association concluded that existing research “does not provide sufficient evidence regarding causal relationships between gas cooking or indoor nitrogen dioxide and asthma or wheeze,” despite growing research to the contrary. Oil firms helped develop climate programs at Oxford, Edinburgh and University College London. And two studies, in 2012 and 2022, found that fossil-fuel-funded research came to conclusions more favourable to the industry than did unsponsored research.

Particularly noteworthy was a 2018 study of energy giant Enbridge’s influence on the University of Calgary. Enbridge endowed the “Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability” in the university’s business school, and the university’s then-president served on Enbridge’s board. CBC News found that Enbridge had the right to stop funding the centre at any time, sought influence over staffing and student awards, and negotiated opportunities for its executives and clients to meet university researchers. When UC faculty objected, administrators defended the company’s right “to use this investment as a way to make amends and possibly receive some positive PR.”

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The researchers also surfaced confidential documents that prove that businesses work deliberately to alter academic outcomes. One study quoted a 1978 lobbying manual for industries under pressure: “Regulatory policy is increasingly made with the participation of experts, especially academics. A regulated firm or industry should be prepared whenever possible to co-opt these experts. This is most effectively done by identifying the leading experts in each relevant field and hiring them as consultants or advisors, or giving them research grants and the like.” A leaked 1998 memo from the American Petroleum Institute advised its members to “build a case against precipitous action on climate change” by establishing “cooperative relationships with all major scientists whose research in this field supports our position.”

Worst of all, the paper says that many researchers over the years have asked universities to release data on private sponsorship of their energy-related research centres. Nearly all refused, hindering attempts to track these conflicts of interest.

These trends are particularly troubling given universities’ key role in studying complex societal challenges in the public interest. If universities, with their tenured professors and idealistic grad students, aren’t holding industry’s feet to the fire, who will?

To overcome these problems, the authors urge scholars to “engage urgently” in research into the prevalence of fossil fuel–university partnerships and the consequences of such partnerships. And they call on universities around the world to fully disclose their financial and contractual ties with fossil fuel companies. The authors say that “it is critical to better understand how pervasive industry involvement is in higher education, and how it is changing over time.”

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The bill has finally wound its way through the legislature, backed by tremendous support in both chambers. It now heads to Republican Governor Phil Scott for his signature, which he has suggested he will not provide. But with two-thirds of the House of Representatives and 26 of 30 Senators supporting the law, the Vermont General Assembly could achieve an easy override should the governor choose to exercise his right to veto. Once the bill takes effect, Vermont will be the first state to make Big Oil pay for the impacts of climate disasters.

The post Vermont is on the cusp of making Big Oil pay for climate disasters appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But then a man with bushy black eyebrows and a heavy Eastern European accent took the stage. Speaking in measured terms, the nuclear physicist Edward Teller – known for his central role on the Manhattan Project – rained on the entire parade. Fossil fuels, he explained, could not be relied on for the energy of the future. Not only was their supply finite, but they were also “contaminating the atmosphere.” The carbon dioxide released in their combustion was causing a “greenhouse effect” that threatened to melt ice caps and submerge coastal cities. 

“I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe,” Teller warned. 

Big Oil listened. And carried on. 

Doing so, however, has required promulgating the fiction that fossil fuels are an instrumental force for good, amidst mounting evidence to the contrary. Today the PR industry propping up the sector is considered one of the biggest obstructions to climate change mitigation. As the medium goes digital and the message becomes more subtle and diffuse, pro-oil marketing is being baked into our social media feeds and infiltrating climate conferences. But efforts are ramping up to shut it down.

From Kyoto to TikTok

Over the last half-century, Big Oil’s spin doctors have used every trick in the book to keep the public on side. Initially the mood was oddly boastful. Three years after Teller’s warning, Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil) trumpeted in its ads, “Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier!” As climate science advanced, oil companies and trade associations went to every length to undermine it, from running full-page advertorials in The New York Times by front groups like the Informed Citizens for the Environment in the 1980s, to using climate-branded lobby groups to stop the U.S. from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. 

But as catastrophic wildfires, floods, droughts and hurricanes began to capture the headlines, climate denialism waned. A twofold strategy replaced it: virtue-signal green in public, lobby black in private. British Petroleum paved the way. Rebranded as Beyond Petroleum in 2001, the company went on to run a campaign, devised by Ogilvy & Mather, that introduced the notion of the “carbon footprint” (not yet in common parlance) and encouraged individuals to reduce their own, even providing a calculator on its website for the purpose. Subtly, the onus of carbon reduction was shifted from the company onto the consumer. 

As climate awareness grew, Big Oil’s advertising budgets exploded. Between 2008 and 2016, the five  biggest oil companies (ExxonMobil, BP-Amoco, Chevron-Texaco, Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips) collectively spent an average of US$217 million on advertising annually, a sixfold increase from two decades earlier, according to a 2019 paper in the journal Climatic Change. 

In the last decade, the PR push has moved deeper online, engaging all the tools of social media and cyberculture to persuade today’s youth that fossil fuels are cool, fun and virtuous. Oil companies are working with gamers to integrate their logos into virtual racecourses and hiring digital marketing managers to run TikTok and Instagram channels that spool video reels featuring young people interacting with their brands. 

But it’s a tough sell to a climate-conscious generation that is more committed to reducing its environmental impact than any before it. “We’re seen as one of the bad guys,” BP admitted in a leaked presentation that it made to a group of PR companies in 2020, asking the marketing minds how best to make the company seem more “relatable, passionate and authentic” to the next generation, “the people with the biggest voice.” 

Their answer has been to rely heavily on the tactic of misdirection, training attention away from the product and onto nicer things: nature imagery and lifestyle motifs like sports and fashion. Shell in particular has made good use of influencers: online personalities who attract large followings on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, X and, most recently, Twitch.

“When I was younger, I struggled with self-belief,” U.S. Open surfing champion Sage Erickson tells her 308,000 followers on Instagram. Saturated shots of the blonde beauty riding turquoise waves suggest that she has gotten over it. In the accompanying text, Erickson thanks Shell for allowing her to tell her story as part of its “Performance Unbound” series, which features short videos of young athletes achieving greatness in various ways. There is no evident connection to Shell or its products, beyond the little scallop-shell icon and the influencer’s gratitude. 

Shell has also sent British celebrities on global adventures to highlight the company’s investment in renewables. For a five-episode YouTube series launched in the lead-up to Earth Day 2023, former BBC presenter Dallas Campbell travelled the world to tout, in actorly British tones, the “exciting potential of hydrogen.” In 2017, Shell sponsored polar explorer Robert Swan and his son on an expedition to the South Pole to promote biofuel. Photos of the journey were beamed out on Shell’s Twitter account. American PR giant Edelman, which was behind the stunt, boasted on its website that the publicity reached 600 million people and made viewers “31% more likely to believe” that Shell is “committed to cleaner fuels.” 

Belief is what matters here; advertising aims to win hearts, not minds. By its own account, Shell invested some 14% of its total expenditure in 2022 in “renewables and energy solutions” – a figure that environmental groups say is vastly inflated. Either way, the amount is a marginal fraction of its total business.  A 2022 analysis by Harvard University and the Algorithmic Transparency Institute found that almost three-quarters of the social media posts by 22 leading oil and gas companies promoted green technologies – on which those same companies had, on average, invested less than 2% of their total expenditure in the decade previous. 

Cancelling oil industry greenwash

There’s a growing consensus that the PR companies involved in greenwashed campaigns need to be held to account. Addressing the UN General Assembly in 2022, Secretary-General António Guterres took aim at the “massive PR machine raking in billions to shield the fossil fuel industry from scrutiny.” Clean Creatives, an initiative founded in 2020 to break the PR industry’s support of fossil fuels, publishes an annual “F-list” detailing which agencies are working for which fossil fuel companies. This year’s worst offender, with 55 fossil fuel contracts, is the British holding company WPP, which, in a gross contradiction, has pledged to achieve net-zero emissions in its operations by 2025.

For companies in the business of image management, naming and shaming can be effective. More than 700 agencies in 38 countries have signed Clean Creatives’ pledge not to work with fossil fuel clients. But for many, oil and gas is their bread and butter. Founded in 1952, Edelman built its brand with clients like ExxonMobil, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute. More recently, it was instrumental in greening up the image of the United Arab Emirates (UAE); the campaign, launched in 2007, laid the groundwork for the petroleum-exporting country’s successful bid to host COP28 last December. 

 Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier!

 

– Humble Oil (Now ExxonMobile) advertisement in Life magazine, June 1962

Edelman remains intransigent. It dismissed a petition that circulated at COP26, asking it to cut ties with the fossil fuel industry. CEO Richard Edelman argued that oil companies need PR support through the energy transition and added that, since 2015, Edelman has refused to work with outright climate deniers.

“They claim, ‘We’re good corporate actors. We don’t need regulation,’” said Christine Arena, one of six executives who quit Edelman in 2015 after learning of the company’s deep involvement with the fossil fuel industry. She went on to testify before a 2022 U.S. congressional hearing into the role of PR companies in climate misinformation and obstruction. In conversation with Drilled podcaster Amy Westervelt, Arena calls the factual distortions, greenwashing and omissions that characterize fossil fuel advertising “uniquely harmful.” 

But they’re not without precedent. The tobacco industry used much the same tactics – and many of the same agencies – to promote its products. This parallel has served as inspiration for the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), a coalition of medical doctors and concerned citizens that has petitioned  Ottawa to ban advertisements for fossil fuels, gas utilities and gas vehicles. Echoing the reasoning that led to Canada’s near-complete ban on tobacco advertising, CAPE cited, in an open letter in 2022, the impact of air pollution from fossil fuels: an annual death toll of somewhere between 15,000 and 34,000 Canadians, according to Health Canada. 

The coalition has also filed a greenwashing complaint with the federal Competition Bureau against the Canadian Gas Association’s promotion of gas as an affordable, sustainable and clean energy source, arguing that the production of natural gas in fact causes air and water pollution, while gas stoves have been shown to increase the risk of asthma in children. 

Marc Bishai, a lawyer with the Centre québécois du droit de l’environnement, a Montreal-based organization that offers legal expertise on environmental and climate-related issues, says CAPE’s medical tack is smart from a legal standpoint. But overall, he feels that Canada is profoundly ill-equipped to tackle the problems of green- and climate-washing. “It’s an exercise in Whac-a-Mole,” he says of a system that relies on complaints, rather than proactively monitoring the marketplace. Furthermore, he argues that Canada has to refine its standards for corporate claims, much as it has financial disclosure standards. There is still no regulatory consensus, for instance, on what conditions have to be met to label something “climate-neutral” or “net-zero.”

They claim, ‘We’re good corporate actors. We don’t need regulation.’

 

– Christine Arena, one of six executives who quit Edelman in 2015

In the last two years, at least three climate-washing complaints have been filed with the Competition Bureau. One was lodged against Shell Canada’s “Drive Carbon Neutral” campaign of 2020, which encouraged drivers to purchase carbon credits for nature protection projects as they tanked up. Greenpeace, which launched the complaint, challenged Shell’s emissions mathematics. In December, the Bureau said it was closing its investigation because Shell had pulled the advertising from its Canadian website and app, a move that Greenpeace celebrated. 

Meanwhile, jurisdictions with more specific standards have been decisive. In 2021, the Dutch Advertising Code Committee – which draws on a Sustainable Advertising Code – ordered Shell to discontinue the Dutch version of its “Drive Carbon Neutral” campaign, arguing that the neutrality claim could not be proven. 

The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority, which expanded its guidance on green claims last summer, recently banned a Shell ad campaign promoting the company’s green activities on the basis that it “misrepresented the contribution that lower-carbon initiatives played . . . as part of the overall balance of a company’s activities.” The ruling was significant because it challenged the campaign not for what it said, but for what it failed to say. 

This is the kind of rigour needed to combat Big Oil’s powers of persuasion. The industry is on a roll. With its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has served the fossil fuel industry a silver tablet of record profits and heightened concerns about energy security, which it has used to justify prioritizing hydrocarbons over renewables. 

Climate Action Against Disinformation, a global coalition of organizations opposed to climate obfuscation, analyzed oil companies’ Facebook ads in the 10 months leading up to COP28. It found millions of dollars in ads steeped in “delayism,” implying that global energy insecurity and the high cost of living justified an expanded role for fossil fuels. 

In the last year, amid soaring oil and gas returns, Shell, ExxonMobil and BP all reduced their commitments to renewables. BP announced a US$1-billion annual increase in its investment in oil and gas for the rest of the decade, jettisoning its ambition of cutting oil production by 40% in that time period. In all, the International Energy Agency has forecast that 2023 will see global investment in fossil fuels increase by 11%, reaching its highest level since 2015. 

Many consider the UAE’s hosting of COP28, under the aegis of oil titan Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, proof that the fossil fuel industry and its marketing agencies have fully co-opted the climate conversation. Now more than ever, governments and regulators have to ensure that the conversation is shaped by transparency and facts and not profit-driven bluff.  

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer. 

The post How Big Oil’s spin doctors are influencing influencers appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This fall, California moved even further out in front. It may be one of 50 states, but its US$3.6-trillion gross domestic product makes it the world’s fifth-largest economy. So when the California State Assembly approved the call for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty on September 1, it became the largest economic entity to commit to ending the destructive reign of coal, oil and gas. A glaring improvement on the 2015 Paris Agreement, which didn’t mention fossil fuels, the treaty resolution proposes a global plan to halt the expansion of hydrocarbon production and then phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

To date, the treaty’s signatories have included cities and some smaller nations, particularly in the Pacific Islands threatened by rising sea levels. As America’s third-largest oil-producing state, California faced tough opposition from its oil sector and 40 industry groups.

Climate scientist Aradhna Tripati said she hopes California’s resolution “will send a resounding message that prioritizes the preservation of our planet and our communities over short-term gains.” The first step for that message: the resolution urges President Joe Biden to support opening negotiations on an international fossil fuel treaty.

The green transition requires accurate, timely information on polluters’ activities. So California grabbed the spotlight again mid-September when legislators approved two bills mandating that large companies disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks. Senate Bill 253 faced particularly heavily opposition for compelling companies to disclose Scope 3 emissions, indirect upstream and downstream emissions that can account for up to 90% of a company’s carbon footprint.

While the bills were opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce and others, they were praised by a number of major companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Ikea and Google, for levelling the playing field.

“[Bill] 253 does not dictate how [companies] should reduce their carbon emissions,” said Senator Scott Wiener, who sponsored the bills. “But by making clear that within a couple of years these emissions are going to become public, the corporations have a huge incentive to innovate to reduce those emissions.”

And then the hammer dropped. Four days after passing the watershed climate-disclosure legislation, California filed suit against five major oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute, claiming that they deliberately downplayed the risks posed by fossil fuels and that that activity has caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. The New York Times called it “the latest and most significant lawsuit to target oil, gas and coal companies over their role in causing climate change.”

This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis . . . we need to call that out. For decades and decades, the oil industry has been playing each and every one of us in this room for fools.

–California Governor Gavin Newsom

“Enough is enough,” said the state. California’s 135-page complaint claims that “oil and gas company executives have known for decades that reliance on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they suppressed that information from the public and policymakers by actively pushing out disinformation on the topic.” The suit seeks creation of a mitigation fund to cover future climate-related disasters.

“California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for billions of dollars in damages – wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

The oil majors were generally reluctant to respond, but Shell summed up their position: “We do not believe the courtroom is the right venue to address climate change.”

California is not the first government in the country to sue the oil majors. Since 2017, seven states and 35 municipalities, including New York City and the District of Columbia, have launched similar suits. But Cali’s status as a top oil producer makes this a watershed moment.

As Newsom told the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September, “This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis . . . we need to call that out. For decades and decades, the oil industry has been playing each and every one of us in this room for fools.”

In a world plagued by disinformation and denial, California’s courage to name names and set new standards should inspire more timid jurisdictions.

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That goal may no longer be obtainable, as scientists say we will likely blow past the 1.5°C mark in at least one of the next five years. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a report in May that said there is a 50–50 chance the planet’s annual temperature will exceed a 1.5°C rise between now and 2026. Seven years ago, the probability of this happening was close to zero.

“A single year of exceedance above 1.5°C does not mean we have breached the iconic threshold of the Paris Agreement, but it does reveal that we are edging ever closer to a situation where 1.5°C could be exceeded for an extended period,” WMO researcher Leon Hermanson said in a statement on May 9.

That same week, two more climate revelations emerged. One, that a record number of companies collectively worth more than US$38 trillion have now committed to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) aligned with limiting warming to 1.5°C. Two: the 12 largest oil companies in the world continue to bet against a climate-safe future. According to an investigation by The Guardian, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and nine other oil majors are planning to invest US$103 million a day for the rest of the decade on new fossil fuel extraction, including 195 “carbon bombs” – enormous oil and gas projects that will each emit more than a billion tonnes of CO2.

The Guardian found that the United States is the “leading source of potential emissions,” with 22 new projects planned. Canada came in sixth. Some of Canada’s largest banks, including the Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank, more than doubled their financing of the oil sands in 2021 to $16.8 billion, according to data from the Rainforest Action Network, despite signing on to the UN’s Net-Zero Banking Alliance.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has complicated the global energy picture, sending oil prices soaring and provoking some politicians in Western nations to call for increased domestic fossil fuel production in the name of energy security. The European Union has pledged to speed up its energy transition to renewables while weaning itself off Russian gas and oil. Meanwhile, Russia has pivoted to sell its oil to Asian countries at a discount.

“I understand some countries may look at new fossil fuels, but they should remember it takes many years to start production,” said Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency. “[Such projects] are not the solution to our urgent energy security needs, and they will lock in fossil fuel use.”

At the launch of the WMO’s alarming State of the Global Climate report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a new roadmap to jump-start the energy transition, which he called the “peace project of the 21st century.”

The plan would clear the way for more wind and solar projects, remove intellectual-property restraints on renewable technologies, end fossil fuel subsidies and triple global spending on green energy to US$4 trillion per year.

“Renewable energy technologies, such as battery storage, must be treated as essential and freely available global public goods,” Guterres said at the press conference.

“Removing obstacles to knowledge-sharing and technological transfer – including intellectual-property constraints – is crucial for a rapid and fair renewable energy transition.”

While a handful of companies like Tesla do have an open-patent philosophy, there has been some pushback against the idea from some who suggest it will be a barrier for small innovators.

The bottom line, according to Guterres: “We must end fossil fuel pollution and accelerate the renewable energy transition before we incinerate our only home.”

Five ways UN chief António Guterres wants to jump-start the energy transition

A roadmap from the UN Secretary-General to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

1. Make green technologies “global public goods”

   United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres wants more knowledge-sharing (and less intellectual property constraints) when it comes to renewable innovations – particularly those that involve battery storage. He calls for a global coalition of governments and tech companies focused on fast-tracking better battery storage.

2. Secure and scale up minerals

   The energy transition needs minerals, such as cobalt and lithium, for electric vehicle batteries. The problem is that many of these necessary minerals are concentrated in a handful of countries. Guterres says that renewable energy won’t be able to flourish without international cooperation and government incentives to build supply chains.

3. Cut red tape for renewable projects

Governments must streamline their approvals processes for solar and wind projects in order to decarbonize electricity grids at a faster pace. For Guterres, policies that support renewable energy development are “fundamental to reduce market risk and drive investment into the sector.”

4. Stop subsidizing fossil fuels

Every minute, oil, gas and coal companies around the world collectively receive around US$11 million in subsidies, according to the UN. “While people suffer from high prices at the pump, the oil and gas industry is raking in billions from a distorted market. This scandal must stop,” Guterres says.

5. Triple investments in renewable energy

The world needs to boost private and public investment in renewable energy to US$4 trillion per year. This would include a dramatic scale-up in investments from commercial banks.

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While rising concentrations of human-generated carbon in the atmosphere will continue to heat up the earth, we can still avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change by rapidly moving away from carbon-based energy, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report released Monday.

The IPCC report provides ammunition to critics who dispute industry’s claim that natural gas is an environmentally acceptable choice that, when combined with carbon capture and storage technology, will remain viable for years.

“For existing natural gas, we do need much stronger regulations to make sure industry deals with methane leakage,” says Julia Levin, senior program manager at Toronto-based Environmental Defence. “But the problems with natural gas go well beyond methane leaks. As the IPCC report shows, there is no room for new natural gas projects in the global carbon budget.” She specifically targets liquefied natural gas projects that are being built and others that are proposed in British Columbia.

The industry is pushing back, however, arguing that natural gas will remain a major energy source in Canada and around the world for decades to come and that this country should aim to be a global supplier of the fuel.

“We don’t see natural gas as a bridge fuel or a transition fuel; we think it’s a foundational fuel,” says Tim Egan, president of the Canadian Gas Association.

The carbon budget measures how much more greenhouse gas can be emitted before the planet reaches the point where the target for holding average temperature increases to 1.5°C is essentially out of reach. At the rate of emissions seen in 2020, the world would exhaust its carbon budget within 11.5 years, based on a 1.5°C target.

Meeting the climate targets will require a net-zero energy system, combined with urgent reductions of short-lived climate pollutants such as methane and the scaling-up of efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the air, the IPCC report concluded.

The authors of the report – which was approved by 195 governments – based their conclusions on some 14,000 research studies from climate scientists around the world. They note the world has already experienced roughly 1°C of warming, which is responsible for extreme weather events such as the droughts and heat waves that are plaguing western North America.

The report places an increased emphasis on the importance of the short-lived carbon pollutants, such as methane, which is 80 times more powerful as a heat-trapped gas than is carbon dioxide.

“Drastic cuts in CO2, and eventually net-zero CO2 emissions, will be critical to limiting the maximum extent of future warming,” Ilissa Ocko, senior scientist with the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund, said Monday. “But cutting methane emissions is the single fastest, most effective way there is to slow the rate of warming right now.”

Methane emissions currently account for a quarter of average global temperature increases, a percentage that is second only to carbon dioxide. Targeting methane emissions is “the leading opportunity to slow the rate” of global warming over the short-term, Ocko said.

She said the world needs a two-tracked approach: focus on longer-term decarbonization by transitioning off fossil fuels while tackling the short-lived pollutants in the near-term.

Canada and the United States agreed in 2016 to aim for a 40% to 45% reduction in methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 2025, though former president Donald Trump backed away from that commitment. The federal government passed regulations aimed at achieving that target, though environmental groups argue the rules will not achieve their stated aim.

The Biden administration is now determined to not only meet, but exceed that commitment, said Rick Duke, White House liaison for the special presidential envoy for climate change, during a conference call on Monday.

Duke said the U.S. government is working with like-minded nations, including Canada, to accelerate the reduction of methane emissions from industry, agriculture and landfills. The most economical measures exist in the oil and gas sector, where captured methane represents added fuel supply that can be sold to customers.

The Calgary-based Pembina Institute has urged Ottawa to require the oil and gas industry to reduce its methane emissions by 75% from 2012 levels by 2030 and to invest in greater efforts to detect fugitive emissions.

The Gas Association’s Egan says companies are already spending on technology to reduce their methane emissions, driven both by regulation and the economics of capturing more of their fuel.

As to the staying power of natural gas, Egan says the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) notes that natural gas accounts for 35% of Canada’s end-use energy and forecasts that it will rise to 40% over the next 20 years. (The CER forecast is not consistent with Canada’s commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, however.)

“Natural gas is our most affordable and most reliable energy source,” Egan says. “We think natural gas is here for the duration.”

Shawn McCarthy is an Ottawa-based writer who focuses on climate change and the low-carbon energy economy.

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To limit the long-term rise in global temperatures to 1.5°C, it said governments and industry must wean themselves off fossil fuels ASAP, push for energy efficiency in all walks of life, and invest trillions in renewable energy.

Coming from the Paris-based IEA, an intergovernmental body founded in the wake of the 1973/74 OPEC oil embargo to assure global energy supply, the report turned heads. Overseen by the energy ministers of 30 major economies, the IEA has generally defended fossil-fuel interests. But with most countries missing their emission-reduction targets and catastrophe looming, the IEA finally picked a side.

“This gap between rhetoric and action needs to close,” said IEA executive director Fatih Birol. “Doing so requires nothing short of a total transformation of the energy systems that underpin our economies.”

Nine days later, on May 26, calls to close that gap came fast and furious. Chevron shareholders voted 61% in favour of an activist proposal asking the oil company to cut its total greenhouse gas emissions, including those coming out of customers’ tailpipes, emissions known as Scope 3.

That same day, at least two ExxonMobil board members were unseated in a bid to, as Reuters put it, “force the company’s leadership to reckon with the risk of failing to adjust its business strategy to match global efforts to combat climate change.”

Eli Kasargod-Staub, the executive director of Majority Action, a shareholder group, told The Guardian, “For the first time in history, responsible shareholders have breached the walls protecting recalcitrant boards of directors.”

Also that day, a Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce its GHGs by 45% by 2030, based on 2019 levels, after determining that Shell’s climate plans were inadequate. Pundits began calling it Black Wednesday and ‘a day of reckoning’ for Big Oil as courtrooms and boardrooms turned on industry.

“For the first time in history, responsible shareholders have breached the walls protecting recalcitrant boards of directors.”

-Eli Kasargod-Staub, executive director of Majority Action

“This is a monumental victory for our planet, for our children and a big leap towards a livable future for everyone,” said Donald Pols, director of Friends of the Earth Netherlands.

Though Royal Dutch Shell said it will appeal the ruling, more good news was announced May 26: Canada’s largest oil company, Suncor, committed to going net-zero by 2050, adding it would slash emissions across its value chain by a third by 2030.

Luckily, the IEA’s report, Net Zero by 2050, “shows that there are still pathways to reach net-zero by 2050,” said Birol. He called the IEA’s prescribed course “the most technically feasible, cost‐effective and socially acceptable. Even so, that pathway remains narrow and extremely challenging, requiring all stakeholders – governments, businesses, investors and citizens – to take action this year and every year after.”

The report sets out 400 milestones necessary to achieve net-zero by 2050. Most important: ensuring that developing economies receive financing and technological aid to build their energy systems equitably and sustainably. Birol insists that a world powered by clean electricity means huge opportunities, “with the potential to create millions of new jobs and boost economic growth.”

“Big Oil and Gas has just lost a very powerful shield,” summed up David Tong, a senior campaigner with Washington, D.C.’s Oil Change International.

But the IEA’s shift doesn’t mean the path to 2050 will be smooth. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers dismissed the report as “unrealistic.” Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage predicted Alberta’s fossil-fuel sector “will continue to grow and thrive.” Large emitting countries such as Japan, Australia and the Philippines bucked the proposed ban on new development, claiming natural gas, oil and in some cases even coal still have roles to play.

It doesn’t help that the IEA has been sending out mixed messages. Weeks after the release, as OilPrice.com pointed out, “the agency called on OPEC+ to increase production as demand for oil rebounded faster and stronger than the agency had apparently expected.” By July, benchmark crude oil prices had surged to multi-year highs after a breakdown in negotiations with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

In its July oil market report, the IEA cautioned  that “while prices at these levels could increase the pace of electrification of the transport sector and help accelerate energy transitions, they could also put a drag on the economic recovery.” It added, “Volatility does not help ensure orderly and secure energy transitions.”

Meanwhile, back in Canada, oil industry advocates continue to suggest that the sector should be positioning itself to capitalize on the next oil boom. However, in a report released last month, Jeffrey Craig of Veritas Investment Research said, “Given the pressure to both cut emissions and invest in renewable energy, we expect the super majors to shed mostly upstream oil and gas assets [in the oil sands] to fund investments into renewables.”

Right on cue, when BP slashed its long-term oil price outlook in late June, the company’s oil sands investments were rendered “worthless,” Reuters reports. The fate of those stranded assets remains to be seen.

South of the border, oil majors are feeling the heat this week as Democratic senators proposed a climate pollution tax that could cost Exxon, Chevron and other big emitters billions annually while establishing a “Polluters Pay Climate Fund.” The draft bill could see US$500 billion raised over 10 years to be used toward investments in communities facing fossil-fuel-driven climate impacts, including extreme flooding, rising sea levels and a more severe wildfire season.

Corporate Knights director of research Ralph Torrie points out that “the smart money and long-game investors” have been pivoting from fossils to renewables for years. “If the IEA can get out in front of that parade, it can only help.” Torrie suggests that the right question to be asking is not “What will happen?” but “What must happen?” if we are to avert truly dangerous climate change.

While new technologies may help power the transition, he credits the agency for seeing energy efficiency as a resource: “We must thread the eye of a needle here, and there is only time now for one attempt at it.”

A version of this story appeared in the Summer Issue of Corporate Knights magazine.

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