Yesterday we talked about how climate denial boils down to just a handful of messages trying to convince people you can’t trust climate scientists or activists, because the crisis isn’t real, or all that bad, or worth making the effort to stop. But increasingly, the fossil fuel industry is looking to spice it up with something new, tacitly recognizing they’ve lost on all five of those denial points, and pivoting to greenwashing that suggests they’re actually part of the solution.
That’s a big takeaway from yesterday’s feature in the Guardian by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes. They lay out four decades of Big Oil’s advertisements, showing how the companies causing climate change, and their coalitions and front groups, tried to convince everyone climate change wasn’t happening by casting doubt on the science. When that didn’t quite work and climate action became a possibility, they scaremongered about the potential solutions and shifted blame onto consumers. But now that the momentum for climate action is as much economic and cultural as it is legislative, they pivoted to greenwashing themselves as the answer (to the problem they’re causing).
While Supran and Oreskes cover the industry’s various national-level ad campaigns trading on the credibility of outlets like the New York Times, which is an ongoing issue undercutting the paper’s excellent climate reporting. It’s also happening at the local level.
For example, yesterday Politico’s ExxonMobil-sponsored Morning Energy pointed us to a great story by Zi-Ann Lum and Ben Lefebvre about how Canadian energy company Enbridge is “trying to scuttle Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s reelection bid.”
Why is a foreign company meddling in Michigan state politics? Because Whitmer wants to protect the largest freshwater lake system in the world from the environmental cataclysm that would result from an extremely-conceivable pipeline leak in the Straits of Mackinac … and that's pretty inconvenient for the Canadian pipeline company Enbridge, whose Line 5 pipeline runs (very precariously) along the bottom of that exact waterway.
“With six-figure ad buys and free fish giveaways,” Lum and Lefebvre write, “the firm is going all out to sway Michigan voters with safety pledges and warnings about propane shortages.”
Not only are they greenwashing, but they’re also wokewashing, with an ad featuring an Enbridge employee in a kayak who introduces himself as “growing up Anishinaabe and belonging to a tribal community,” before delivering the standard pipeline propaganda about how it’s “safer with less emissions” than other forms of shipping, and that “we need the energy”.
But the employee hardly speaks for the Anishinaabe peoples, as hard as the script may suggest it. The Anishinabek Nation leadership opposes the pipeline, their opposition has forced the acknowledgement of long-denied treaty rights, and Indigenous peoples are leading the call to get President Biden to intervene.
Enbridge knows all this, of course, which is likely why, back in 2019, it persuaded Desmond Berry to leave his position as the director at the Natural Resources Department of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, from which he was an opponent of the pipeline, and start a consultancy with Enbridge as his first client.
Bryan Newland, chair of the Bay Mills Indian Community, told Kaye LaFond of Michigan Public Radio that Enbridge hiring Berry is “the oldest trick in the book, get the Indians fighting amongst themselves, and then they’re too busy doing that to fight us.” (The piece ends with an editor’s note that “Enbridge Energy is one of Michigan Radio's many corporate sponsors.”)
Old tricks aside, the industry is no old dog, and knows some newer tricks. As Elizabeth Culliford reported for Reuters, researchers at InfluenceMap found that fossil fuel companies and their lobby groups spent at least a half million dollars on Facebook ads, just during the two weeks of COP26. This buy netted them at least 22 million impressions — “including content that promoted their environmental efforts in what InfluenceMap described as ‘greenwashing.’”
When pressed on it at an event recently, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said “obviously, there’s been concern about people sharing misinformation about climate on Facebook.”
Obviously!
He continued by saying that he’s “not going to say we have it right at any moment in time,” which is an understatement if there ever were one, before giving the PR spiel about “free expression” and “intervening when there are harms happening that we can prevent.” When asked about banning climate misinformation ads, he claimed they “didn't want people to profit over misinformation.”
But the continued prevalence of oil industry ads on Facebook shows that they’re just as responsible for profiting from disinformation as Big Oil is in spreading it.