Thirteen years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report detailing the millions of dollars ExxonMobil pumped into climate denial groups, and in response, it pledged to discontinue, as of 2008, its contributions “to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion…” about environmentally responsible energy.
And that year, they did indeed cut off some of the biggest groups, like Cato, CEI and Heartland. But, as Elliott Negin recounted a couple years ago, they never actually stopped funding disinformation, even after coming under fire for it when investigators revealed the depth of their understanding of the issue that prompted these disinformation campaigns. (And they’re still at it, as Negin recently showed, with hundreds of thousands given to at least eight climate denial groups in 2019.)
One of the groups ExxonMobil continued paying to oppose climate action is FTI Consulting, a PR group whose shady efforts have been brought further into the light by Hiroko Tabuchi in the New York Times.
Through an investigation of filings, archived websites and registration info, and interviews with a dozen former employees, Tabuchi reports that “FTI has been involved in the operations of at least 15 current and past influence campaigns promoting fossil-fuel interests in addition to its direct work for oil and gas clients.”
Among them is ExxonMobil. It’s a key backer of Energy in Depth, and although it discloses that it’s a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, it doesn’t disclose that, Tabuchi reports, “the site’s content had direction from Exxon Mobil, one of the major clients of the FTI division that worked on these oil and gas campaigns.” Now the difference between Exxon Mobil and IPAA may seem arbitrary, but given that one of Energy in Depth’s most consistent topics is defending Exxon Mobil against the allegations that it funded front groups to spread disinformation, it’s actually kind of important!
Similarly, anyone who might have seen something from the Arctic Energy Center might have wanted to know that the information there was funded by Exxon, who was paying FTI to run a social-media campaign around the now-offline website.
And that’s the sort of thing that recurs throughout Tabuchi’s reporting. Time and again, FTI set up self-proclaimed “grass-roots” groups, circulated petitions, wrote misleading reports, placed op-eds in local papers, and created other messaging products. Despite charging top dollar, it seems they often include sloppy give-aways, like using stock photos to accompany "testimonials" that, even now, they insist are totally real.
Tabuchi's breakdown of TCI's online sockpuppet accounts is particularly enlightening for anyone who’s been confused about the belligerence often on display in online conversations about energy. In essence, FTI strategically pollutes comment sections and floods otherwise productive conversations about climate and energy with messages designed to make people disengage.
Because not only did they set up fake accounts to spy on Dakota Access protesters, feeding pipeline clients information as granular as how much food and supplies protesters were gathering as a way to infer the size of their camp, but they also “studied and developed strategies designed to influence public discourse,” as seen in a 2015 document obtained and published by the Times.
It includes eight archetypes of comment-clutterers, from “the drunken conspiracy theorist uncle” who “agrees with the Negative Commenter but conflates other unrelated and offensive issues into it, lumping it all together into an unpalatable whole.”
Or there’s the “semantic nitpicker” who “asks an endless series of questions,” the “patronizing voice of reason,” and “The concern hipster (new archetype!)” who “says that the issue raised by Negative Commenter is not as important as another issue they feel very passionately about.”
So if you ever notice a pattern of these sorts of accounts talking to each other, complete with “Dog typing on a keyboard” user who “chimes in with very poor grammar, spelling and punctuation and posts frequently to clutter up the thread and make it hard to read,” just remember: It’s definitely not some ExxonMobil-hired FTI flack deliberately trying to distract people from climate solutions, because ExxonMobil totally promised it’d stop doing that way back in 2007.