A new study published yesterday by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard found ExxonMobil used a frame of climate “risk” to make it sound uncertain, and emphasized “demand” to deflect blame for their pollution off themselves and onto the public. Just like how Big Oil would come to hire and embrace Big Tobacco’s “scientists” and organizations, ExxonMobil, the study says, appears to “mimic the tobacco industry's documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations — which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms — and onto consumers.”
Supran and Oreskes examined 40 years worth of ExxonMobil’s climate materials, putting them through a machine learning program which surfaced recurring words in the body of 180 different examples of the company's climate communications. Using a quantitative approach, they were able to show, for example, that the sophisticated internal documents and peer-reviewed studies stuck to the science, with words and phrases like “models” and “global temperature increase” showing up often, whereas their public-facing documents were all about “consumers” and, most frequently, “risk.” So climate change is just a maybe thing we’re risking happening, and the industry is helpless in its inability to refrain from meeting consumer demand for its dangerous product — It’s not our fault! The people simply demand fossil fuels!
The fact that the research is “actually demonstrating a quantifiable discrepancy is powerful,” Supran told InsideClimate News, “because the company often accuses its critics of cherry-picking arguments, cherry-picking data. And our approach with all of this work is to look at the whole cherry tree. And when you do, the trends you observe are profound and systematic.”
They found, Supran told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in a lengthy interview chronicling the young academic’s dual-wielding of science and advocacy, that ExxonMobil’s language has undergone a “gradual shift … from explicit climate denial to disinformation to subtler forms of propaganda, such as false advertising and greenwashing and trying to co-opt things like Earth Day. There’s been this necessary evolution of their tactics and rhetoric to account for the fact that at this point in time, they just sound too ludicrous when they blatantly deny basic science.”
So while the framing of climate as merely a “risk” is a way Exxon has made uncertainty central to their engagement with climate issues, they've also downplayed the reality that they’re responsible for their pollution by talking about consumer demand, instead. By making their product seem like it’s something we all chose to use, instead of a feature of a system that needs to change, ExxonMobil has “encouraged this dangerous acceleration in individualization of responsibility,” Supran told TIME, which “grooms us to see ourselves as consumers first and citizens second.”
Rebecca Leber at Vox explained that this sort of “climate shame” is problematic, because it “can be a distraction that lets key perpetrators of climate change off the hook.” The climate challenge is so immense because it requires our energy system to change — we can’t do it individually. So this sort of shaming that appears to embrace climate concerns represents “cutting-edge propaganda coming from an industry with 100 years of experience” in shaping public opinion. And they’re not acting alone.
It’s the same approach BP took when it popularized the “carbon footprint” concept that individualizes a problem only a handful of companies are causing, something Supran mentioned to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and isn’t exactly new. Because there’s “a track record for this kind of approach” with tobacco, beverage and similar companies being “behind the coining of terms like ‘litterbug,’” because the PR and ad industry served as a central hub for these various industry campaigns.
Specifically, the tobacco industry’s efforts to reframe the issue of their knowingly selling a cancerous product that kills its customers into one of the consumer’s choice, Supran explained “and the exact language that ExxonMobil has been using—concepts of risk, of demand, of consumer responsibility—these are all terms co-opted from the tobacco industry discourse.”
The initial wave of coverage critically linking the famously-sued tobacco industry’s propaganda with their own appears to have caught the company off-guard, as ExxonMobil didn’t provide a comment yet, at least that we’ve seen. No doubt they’re just trying to figure out a way to write a press release that blames customers for ever reading ExxonMobil’s advertorials in the first place.
