Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)

By G. Supran, Naomi Oreskes. 2017

361 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past misled the general public about climate change. We present an empirical document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and paid, editorial-style advertisements (‘advertorials’) in The New York Times. We examine whether these communications sent consistent messages about the state of climate science and its implications—specifically, we compare their positions on climate change as real, human-caused, serious, and solvable. In all four cases, we find that as documents become more publicly accessible, they increasingly communicate doubt. This discrepancy is most pronounced between advertorials and all other documents. For example, accounting for expressions of reasonable doubt, 83% of peer-reviewed papers and 80% of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81% instead expressing doubt. We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science—by way of its scientists’ academic publications—but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public. Our content analysis also examines ExxonMobil’s discussion of the risks of stranded fossil fuel assets. We find the topic discussed and sometimes quantified in 24 documents of various types, but absent from advertorials. Finally, based on the available documents, we outline ExxonMobil’s strategic approach to climate change research and communication, which helps to contextualize our findings.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a452c842f6e7abbf2d68ad03f51953b91e45f80a

Citations in the corpus

• The Green New Deal in the United States: What it is and how to pay for it (2020, neutral): “Rather, large fi rms with proportionately high CO2 emissions often use their excess wealth to wield power in the political process to obstruct legislative and regulatory restrictions on their activities and to propagate public discourse to soften and stave o ff objections [24,75].”
• An Economist’s Guide to Climate Change Science (2018, neutral): “For example, a textual analysis of ExxonMobil documents from 1977–2014 indicates that internal documents generally acknowledged that climate change is real and human caused while public-facing documents did not (Supran and Oreskes 2017).”